Have you ever wondered why you feel so alone in your drug or alcohol addiction? The truth is you will likely never get the answer to that question. It probably has something to do with you choosing to isolate yourself away from others to prevent them from seeing what you are doing.
No matter how lonely you feel in your addiction, you won’t have to feel that way when you decide to get help. When you are ready to admit defeat and ask for help, you will be surprised at how many people there are that are willing to help you.
Here is the strange thing about getting treatment. There will be a lot of people around to help you recover. The list of people includes;
- Your family and friends
- Rehab’s administrative staff
- Your therapists
- Other clients and addiction sufferers
They will be on board to help but the spirituality that goes into recovery is an individual concept. It would be up to you to find the spirituality you are going to need to get across the recovery finish line.
As a word of caution, spirituality might not necessarily mean what you think it means. In the addiction treatment community, the word spiritual doesn’t refer to religion although religion could be part of it. A spiritual person is someone who believes in and relies on a “higher power.”
Within the addiction treatment community, a person’s higher power might well be a religious icon like God, Buddha, or Allah. It could be a family member or an inanimate object. Basically, it can be anyone or anything in which someone wants to put their faith.
This is a very important distinction because we all need someone or something outside of ourselves that we can turn to for help. Help might not be anything more than peace of mind, but we all need to get that from somewhere. When it comes to addiction treatment, this is a very personal and individual part of the recovery process.
In case you are wondering, this idea of recovery spirituality derives from the 12 Steps of Recovery. The 12 Steps serve as the base premise for 12 Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). We’ll discuss that in the next section.
Spirituality and the 12 Steps of Recovery
After participating in a few 12 Steps meetings, you would soon come to realize that 12 Step programs are geared towards one addiction sufferer helping another addiction sufferer. As part of the program, 12 Steppers, as they call themselves, are taught to turn themselves over to their higher power as they know them. “As they know them” refers to anyone or anything they might view as being above themselves and worthy of faith.
If there are any doubts about the higher power concept used by 12 Step programs, we will remove those doubts by listing the 6 of 12 steps that specifically mention a higher power. They include:
- Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Yes, the 12 Steps use the word God. In a politically correct world, most 12 Steps programs substitute the word God with the words higher power. Either way, you can see it’s a very personal and individual part of the recovery process.
Regardless of where you want to put your faith, we ask you to put your faith in us to help you find the road to recovery. We support whatever notion it is that you have about your higher power. We just want the opportunity to help you recover from your addiction illness. What we need from you to get started is one phone call to us at 833-610-1174. From that signal phone call, we’ll tell you about our treatment services and invite you to come in for help.