Content
No matter what the consequences were in the past, our mind will be obsessed with the thought of drinking. We should be able to just put the plug in the jug and move on with our lives.
We tend to show up with a truckload of old ideas in this area and a lot of us consider ourselves to be atheists. I’ll give you an even simpler explanation of spirituality. If you are reading this, you probably know what it’s like to experience “the obsession of self,” even if you wouldn’t call it that. While it is a long stretch from that to “AA is the only way to get sober,” it does happen.
The Unselfish Spirit
The 12 steps are a process with which we can recover from this emotional unmanageability. We no longer experience spiritual malady life from this state of being and then, therefore, our need to use alcohol to cope, leaves us.
- What I am saying is that they do not have the emotion dysregulation or fear based responding that I seem to have which often prompts “sin”.
- Our spiritual malady never just goes away and stays away on its own, it requires a constant spiritual connectivity and effort on our parts in our programs to keep it and the subsequent alcohol and drug abuse at bay.
- Dr Bob, it is aid, went on to help over 5,000 alcoholics achieve sobriety and died sober.
- So the key here is to find a person or group of people in which you feel safe around.
- They are suppose the tell the fronts of our brains to find words for our feelings.
I am also starting to be creative again in hopes that will help. There are a few other resources I am looking into that will help too, thank you so much for this article, it will help me so much in the future. If you are a deep feeler who has always been sensitive, you might be an empath and/or HSP. Consequently, you feel pain to a greater degree than others.
Struggling with addiction?
I have known for about a year now that I had not grieved properly when I was seven after my mom died. I was told that was when I stopped doing anything creative, which is something I did a lot as a child with my mom. I am also an empath and HSP so that makes things harder, but I know now that loving myself, working through emotions and sitting with them and just letting them go will help me heal.
We rely on others in terms of how we feel about ourselves. A decade of therapy also showed Bill Wilson he has two default settings in his relationship to other human beings – he either tried to dominate them or he became dependent on them for his sense of self and emotional well being. In other words, he became dependent on others, on external means for approval and elevating his self esteem. As Bill Wilson noted, we seem to get distressed when we don’t get what we want or feel people or trying to take away what we have. We begin to obsess and buy the lie because we want to feel the ease and comfort of the first drink. We drink and set off the craving and the cycle of addiction starts all over again. The reason we cannot just quit is that our mind constantly has us believe that we can control and enjoy our drinking.
The Missing Piece: The Spiritual Malady
We pick up exactly where we left off and ultimately find that we can’t control the amount or frequency of our use. This is why Alcoholics Anonymous and the Big Book exist. These spiritual principles and this need that humans have for them are universal. The Big Book (yes, with old-fashioned language) exists to lay out these principles in a way that alcoholics will respond to. I fear that the solution this program offers is being buried under misinformation both inside and outside the rooms. A common complaint about AA is that it doesn’t address trauma or other mental health conditions.
Therapy Was Never Secular – Jewish Currents
Therapy Was Never Secular.
Posted: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
I can get out of the distress of wanting/needing stuff by asking God to remove those negative emotions which block me off from Him. I can manage my spiritual malady or emotional dysfunction, I have the tools to do so. This allows me to do a quick inventory of my negative emotions and a prayer to God to have them removed. My experience is that they are always removed and that we are immediately restored to sanity.
All about the Heart
They still bother me from time to time but at least I know what’s going on. And the solution for me is not psychoanalysis or a chemical intervention, although those have worked in regards to a mental illness I had. The solution has been following the suggestions and giving it over to my understanding of God, which is a gift to those of us not convinced we are right all the time.
I’ve just learned to spot early warning signs of it by taking inventory as step 10 suggests and effecting a relationship with a HP as step 11 suggests. It stays gone in my life for the most part with the tools I’ve adopted and the grace of a HP which give me power https://ecosoberhouse.com/ for living happy joyous and free. In fact they were all interlinking in a pattern of emotional reacting, one activating the other. It was like a emotion web that ensnared one in increasingly frustrating states of emotional distress and inappropriate responding.