Thoughts of Recovery No 17 The Spiritual Malady Step 1

Whether it involves prayer, meditation, or simply a belief in something greater, maintaining conscious contact with this higher power is essential for fostering spiritual growth and overcoming addiction. So, what is the cure for physical, mental, emotional, shadow, social and spiritual illness, and disease? It is simply to move people away from threat and towards safety.

Why is professional help important for addressing spiritual malady and addiction?

Engaging in acts of service is a powerful way to foster empathy, strengthen spiritual foundations, and counteract feelings of isolation. Caring for others and acting for the welfare of the community are signs of spiritual wellness. Volunteering time and resources to help those in need can build empathy and provide a sense of belonging and purpose, while also helping us understand our emotional natures. Enhancing spiritual life on a daily basis encompasses practices like meditation, mindfulness, gratitude, and acts of service. Spiritual wellness involves developing a purpose in life and having a clear sense of right and wrong. Connecting to inner and outer worlds and living by one’s values and purpose are also vital.

• When we are threatened, we also have two defensive phenotypes.
• In the 12-Step Program, integrating a higher power into our lives is a cornerstone of combating addiction.
• So the key here is to find a person or group of people in which you feel safe around.
• This total surrender of one’s ego is essential for finding relief from the burdens of addiction.
• These are our thought suppressions and emotional repressions that also bias the system towards threat physiology.

Complex Grief and Being a Highly Sensitive Person

• In these times personal threat load is extremely high and is being reflected in systemic dysfunction.
• But at the same time, it’s also essential to do some Soul-searching and work with yourself on a spiritual level.
• But complicated grief is not solely to do with the mind and heart, as those in the psychotherapeutic field would have you believe.
• The threatened given safety will see, understand, connect, bond, and thrive.
• In the 12-Step Program, this surrender is crucial for acknowledging our inability to overcome addiction on our own.

Unlike normal people (whatever that means) alcoholics are unsettled to the core. After reading ‘The Doctor’s Opinion,’ ‘Bill’s Story,’ and ‘There is a Solution,’ in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous,we came to an understanding that we have no control whatsoever over alcohol or drugs. 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.

• When things get tough, take a moment to pray, meditate, or just sit quietly and think about your Higher Power and what it means to you.
• This spiritual malady, or spiritual disconnection, is the driving force behind our addiction and self-destructive behaviors.
• But there is more to our threat load than the physical and spiritual.
• Thankfully, the “spiritual malady” is no longer a “missing piece” of Step One for me.
• 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.

Stages of the Journey

• I had been practicing meditation for almost 20 years and had read countless books on Eastern religion and thought.
• This spiritual disconnection often results in emotional and mental turmoil, exacerbating the compulsion to use alcohol or drugs.
• For a while, that seemed to work for us but once we stopped using substances the discontentedness came back to the surface in sobriety.
• If you have a complicated relationship with those in your life, you might feel unsafe with them, which may be preventing you from reaching out.
• If you think you might be an empath or highly sensitive person (or both), I’ll share some ways of moving through complex grief soon.
• However, given the times we are in, I find myself compelled to vault forward to the spiritual.

If you’re struggling with the concept of God, try to find a sponsor who shares your views. That way, they’ll be able to relate to your experience and offer advice from a place of understanding. For example, AA rooms offer fellowship and support and provide a structure that can help keep you sober. These are all positive things that can help you on your journey to recovery, regardless of your beliefs. How to know that you are going through dark night of soul and not mentally depressed. If you have anything to share about your experience with complicated grief, please comment below.

Does screaming into/punching a pillow, crying, laughing, or doing intense and intentional exercise appeal to you? Perhaps you feel driven to roll around howling and clawing at the ground. Whatever way you wish to process your grief is totally fine and important to honor. (Just make sure that you don’t hurt yourself.) If you are emotionally numb and struggle to feel anything, start little each day.

What is spiritual malady in Alcoholics Anonymous?

Living by the principles of AA helps maintain spiritual fitness and reduces the influence of spiritual maladies. Daily practice of these principles can lead to sustained sobriety spiritual malady and spiritual development. Our angels live in safety and our devils live in threat—and we all have both. It is therefore imperative that we evaluate and understand threat well.

Why is it so dangerous to be self-reliant when suffering from an addiction?

Also, they cannot fathom how other people manage to deal with crises in life – even when they have it worse. This is due to the fact that addiction is really a spiritual disorder. Although the disease has biological, behavioral, and psychological roots, treating those aspects, without including the spiritual component,  is like sticking a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. If you wish to contact a specific medical detox center then find a specific treatment center using our addiction treatment locator tool. Conveniently, I overlooked the words ‘God as you understand Him (or Her’) ingeniously included in the steps.

Surrendering to a higher power enables us to tackle the deep-rooted https://ecosoberhouse.com/ that drives our addiction. But there is more to our threat load than the physical and spiritual. We have the subawareness shadow part of our physiology that tends towards a defense bias and trigger. Our brains are constantly searching to see if we are safe or threatened and this subaware mechanism fine tunes the system based on the incoming information. Some predictive codes are inborn, instincts, but humans actually have very few instincts. Prejudice comes from the predictive codes in the shadows of the brain.

Understanding the Spiritual Malady in AA and its Impact on Recovery

This spiritual disconnection often results in emotional and mental turmoil, exacerbating the compulsion to use alcohol or drugs. The sense of emptiness and unrest that accompanies spiritual malady can lead us to seek solace in substances, perpetuating the cycle of addiction. Understanding spiritual malady is pivotal for anyone on the path to recovery. It is a call to address not just the physical and mental aspects of addiction but the spiritual disconnection that lies at its core. By recognizing and confronting this spiritual disease, we can begin to heal and reclaim our lives from the grip of addiction.