This is a Judea-Christian belief structure of bad versus good and I believe that I did not join AA to become good but well. AA may have started within the Oxford Group but has gradually moved away from their tenets. To conclude, it’s not my body — my allergic reaction to alcohol — that’s going to take me back to drinking. It’s really not my mind — the mental obsession — that is the underlying root of what will take me back to drinking.

It was one more thing that my disease used to separate me from other folks in the rooms of recovery, another way to feel unique. For many folks, including myself, ‘the spiritual’ aspects of recovery can be a challenge. We tend to show up with a truckload of old ideas in this area and a lot of us consider ourselves to be atheists.

What About God?

It simply means we are spiritually blocked off from the Power of God, which enables us to remain sober, happy, joyous, and free. This spiritual malady, or spiritual disconnection, is the driving force behind our addiction and self-destructive behaviors. Without addressing this spiritual malady, we have absolutely no hope for intrinsic change or recovery. It is this notion that the fellowship of AA was founded upon, and how millions of recovered alcoholics equate their success in overcoming a seemingly hopeless situation. The only solution to a spiritual malady is a spiritual awakening. Only once we open the spiritual channels and begin to accept a Higher Power into our lives can we hope to find a solution to our alcoholic condition. I have sought refuge from my negative emotions in alcohol, drugs and other addictive behaviours.

Desire obviously runs contrary to the idea of being in God’s will, in fact it is being in Self Will that seems to create distress in many people with addictive behaviours. It is a strange feeling of not wanting to be found out of being less than, not good enough. “If people realise what the real me is like, they will reject me! ” type thinking although a lot of this is unconscious and does not pop in to our minds as thoughts but is an unconscious self schema that shapes our behaviours. Since AA began, I’ve taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually”. The bottom line, a true alcoholic or addict has no power to stop, avoid, or control their drinking. Often people like us have some of the strongest will power that exists.

Why Trusting God is (Most Likely) the Most Brilliant Thing You Could Ever Do

Anger, exaggerated pride, anxiety and helplessness are substituted to keep from feeling the total blackness of being bad. The buried shame is expressed through defense mechanisms that shield negative unconscious material from surfacing. It was a list of the negative emotions which appear always when I felt anger and resentment against someone for hurting me and my feelings. Finding out what is really going on with us emotionally is at the heart of recovery. That is why we have to constantly share how we are feeling with others so that we can find out what we are feeling. So we have two main ailments, distressed based wanting which results in the same negative emotions as being in a shame- based fear of rejection. He “had to” react with arrogance, dismissiveness, impatience and intolerance, because his shame, which is a fear based emotion, made him fearful of his own recovery and fear makes one strangely dishonest , This is my experience.

It is all manipulating our interaction with others to our selfish ends. What Power https://ecosoberhouse.com/ is it that drives a man to act sinfully, even unwillingly, as if powerlessly.

What is the 3 Fold Disease of Alcoholism & Addiction

The anger response is more comfortable than feeling the shame for some individuals. Families where coercive and humiliating methods of discipline are used develop children who are shame prone. Behavior become spiritual malady driven by defenses that function to keep from feeling bad. Reality becomes distorted to further protect the self from poor self esteem. The transfer of blame to someone else is an indicator of internal shame.

• This is one of the reasons that Big Book study groups have become so popular among recovering alcoholics.
• High sponsor involvement over time has been found to predict longer recovery .
• Once turning to substances many of these people struggle to maintain the same focus on the other priorities they had.
• We have to forgive ourselves and each other for being ill.

Unless, we let Go and Let God and ask God to remove these negative emotions/sins/defects of character we end up in a futile increasingly distressed spiral of negative emotions. In Grace we can still experience negative emotions but God allows us to see them for what they are and not react. His Grace takes the distress out of thee negative emotions. I would have found this threatening to my sense of self so I would have reacted via defense mechanisms.

December 21, 2020 by Burning Tree Programs in

This means those things that are not solid- such as our thoughts, our beliefs, our emotions- are what is spiritual. When we say that alcoholism or drug addiction is ‘a spiritual malady’, it means that our disease in centered in these things . You are merely instructed to be open to the idea that you are not the end all be all, that there exists out in the universe something that is greater or more powerful than yourself. However, you choose to interact with that higher power is also up to you. Whether you seek to engage in formal prayer, informal mental conversations, or merely by doing good and putting positive energy into the universe, there is no right or wrong way to pray to your higher power.

The spiritual illness that we faced acted as a catalyst for our addiction, and every attempt to self-medicate our spiritual malady pushed us deeper and deeper into the disease. These few examples barely scratch the surface of the many ways that the 12-Step program of recovery can benefit sufferers of alcoholism and addiction. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the growth and improvement we can experience in recovery — personally, professionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually.