The Role of Spirituality in Recovery
What role does spirituality play in overcoming addiction?
Photo by HaPe_Gera
Regardless of how you manage to find recovery, you do so via spiritual means. This doesn’t necessarily indicate a religious conversion.
A more accurate description would be a personality conversion. Some addicts might get clean through a 12 step program, others might find help in counseling, therapy, religion, or through long term programs. The means and methods by which addicts get clean and stay clean over the long run might vary, but they all share a common thread: they change an addict from the inside out.
As mentioned previously on Reading Addiction, the terms “spiritual” and “spirituality” are vague and fairly useless by themselves. They might bring to mind images of prayer, meditation, nature, and so on. But in terms of overcoming addiction, the spiritual experience is defined by a complete change in personality.
Defining the spiritual experience
A drug addict or alcoholic who is still using has a strong tendency towards self-centeredness. Their goal is to self-medicate, and they continue to justify and rationalize their need to do so. It is all about them.
In recovery, if an addict is to find long term sobriety, a shift will be made. They go from this self-centered, obsessive thinking, to genuine concern for other people. Relationships become meaningful again.
It is not so much that “spirituality plays a role in overcoming addiction.” Instead, overcoming addiction leads to a spiritual life. Another way of saying this is “bring your body and your mind will follow.” A similar saying heard in 12 step meetings is: “You can’t think your way into good living, you have to live your way into good thinking.”
So the question “What role does spirituality play in overcoming addiction?” is somewhat flawed to begin with. The real question is: how does one go from being a self-centered drug addict or alcoholic to living a spiritual life in recovery? You might also want to ask yourself:
1) Can an addict choose to have a spiritual experience?
2) How can an addict transform their life?
3) How can I live a more spiritual life?
4) How can I manage my life?
Bill Urell Says:
I find it interesting that the authors of AA’s Big Book feared they misrepresented the idea of a spiritual experience to be a burning bush, bolt of lightening event.
In the appendix ‘The Spiritual Experience’, they pretty clearly said that it is usually more of the educational variety and is ‘the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery.
In other words there is no recovery without change. If addiction is about isolation, recovery (spiritualty) is about connection…with self, Higher Power, family and community.
Bill
Patrick Says:
It is interesting that you bring up the “educational variety” of the spiritual experience, Bill. Thank you so much for your comment.
I have been pondering this idea for some time now and I’m about to write a post exploring the concept of recovery as a learning experience. This might sound cliche and rather obvious, but so often it is viewed in a different manner than that of learning: such as a spiritual awakening, or as a surrender, or as a leap of faith. Really, a lot of the “program-speak” points to faith and spiritual growth instead of a personal learning process.
nichole Says:
I recently came across this link researching a paper. I also am in recovery and know the importance that spirituality has played in my recovery. This was very interesting reading and I enjoyed what I heard others say about the self-centerdness that addiction causes and how true it is that the only way I found out of this was through discovering spirituality and a relationship w/my higher power. thanx for the site.