Apart from dissecting the Big Book so as to have a firmer grasp on the 12 Steps and program and in general, it also is designed to help us decipher the intricate language and wording used from a different time period. Old timers and recovering people with more experience can explain in layman’s terms just what the author Bill W. Was trying to relay in a far more easily digestible fashion.
- It is a reality of my powerlessness and unmanageability and enables me to see why I so desperately need to seek a Power Greater than myself.
- In threat, we can be mobilized towards aggressive or reactive defenses or we can be immobilized into passive or submissive defenses.
- Once you open up to this idea and implement that spiritual connection, you will experience your long-awaited spiritual awakening, the answer to that pesky spiritual malady we suffer from as alcoholics.
- This also includes creating addiction relapse prevention plans so that the first drink is never taken, and thus, the physical allergy is never triggered.
The good news is that spirituality and religion do not have to overlap in recovery. For example, a concept in 12-Step recovery is that spirituality can be faith in anything that is not oneself. That is why they say “Higher Power of your understanding” rather than God. Spiritual awakenings occur when we see glimpses of the much bigger picture around us and find humility in the moment.
What Does It Mean to Suffer from a Spiritual Malady?
And although not everyone has a problem with drugs or alcohol, every person reading this right now is touched in varying degrees by some form of obsessiveness affecting them in very negative ways. It is disturbing their lives and holding them back from full peace and security. 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. I can manage my spiritual malady or emotional dysfunction, I have the tools to do so. In Grace we can still experience negative emotions but God allows us to see them for what they are and not react.
There are a lot of physical threats that can flip our physiology into a defense state. One is a mobilization response where we approach, bond, empathize, love, reproduce, seek resources, share resources, problem-solve, discover, create, sing, dance, play, laugh, and experience interpersonal connections. This is frequently referred to as ‘breed and feed” physiology, although it is clearly much more than just that. The other safety phenotype is one of relative immobilization where we relax, repair, recovery, digest, defecate, contemplate, daydream, sleep, dream, and experience spiritual connections. This is frequently referred to as “digest and rest” physiology although it too is much more than that.
Examples of malady
While the absence of spirituality in no way causes addiction, it is generally accepted that addiction has a spiritual component. This acknolwedgement led to the incorporation of spirituality as an important ingredient in the process of recovery, and provides an important intersection between Western psychology and psychotherapy and twelve-step recovery. Carl Jung viewed addiction as a spiritual malady and addicts as frustrated spiritual seekers. He believed the craving for altered states of consciousness reflected a spiritual thirst for wholeness, and that only those who have a spiritual awakening could successfully overcome addiction. Jung’s position was ultimately incorporated into twelve-step recovery, specifically Step Twelve. Thankfully, the “spiritual malady” is no longer a “missing piece” of Step One for me.
- One of the core characteristics that makes people vulnerable to addiction (and is also amplified as a consequence of active addiction) is a sense of internal emptiness—a pervasive feeling of being hollow, empty, of something missing.
- The huge burden that humans bear is the ability to contemplate our own annihilation—death.
- We are inherently a spiritual species, and yet, we fill the world with so many aspiritual and anti-spiritual constructs and behaviors.
- However, this does not mean, necessarily, they’ve abandoned their faith.
- Was trying to relay in a far more easily digestible fashion.
Prejudice comes from the predictive codes in the shadows of the brain. We accumulate threat and trauma codes throughout a lifetime that bias the system towards threat and trigger threat physiology easily. It is important that when we embark upon this quest to alleviate our spiritual malady that we are not too harsh on ourselves. No one is perfect at first when attempting to live a spiritual life, especially when we are coming back from a long spiritual hiatus.
Design Solutions
They were spawned eighty years ago among a bunch of awakened, God-conscious, ex-problem drinkers who discovered a way to recover from what they termed as spiritual disease, subsequently losing their obsession with alcohol. Sponsees typically do their Fifth Step, review their moral inventory written as part of the Fourth Step, with their sponsor. The Fifth Step, as well as the Ninth Step, have been compared to confession and penitence. Michel https://ecosoberhouse.com/ Foucault, a French philosopher, noted such practices produce intrinsic modifications in the person—exonerating, redeeming and purifying them; relieves them of their burden of wrong, liberating them and promising salvation.
Chronic threat brings about maladaptive chronic physiology and behaviors that over time increase our illness and disease burden. Spiritual threats can come in the form of emotional threat or injury. We can experience emotional attacks, assaults, accidents, or abuse that affect our physiology similar to a physical threat or injury. Social threat and injury are other forms of spiritual threat and injury that are particularly toxic to humans. Things like isolation, disenfranchisement, discrimination, and injustice not only influence our mental health but our physical health, as well.
British Dictionary definitions for malady
The great psychiatrist Carl Jung called this a ‘low level thirst for wholeness – for union with God’. In our addictions, we tried to quench our soul-thirst with fleeting pleasures. The pursuit of them dominated our lives, destroyed relationships, and caused greater desperation than we ever thought possible.