AA’s 12 steps are a spiritual program of recovery but at the heart of that spirituality is the role of sponsoring. Bill Wilson had got this idea of abnormal, or allergic reaction to alcohol, from a physician, Dr Silkworth, spiritual malady who had treated him at Towns Hospital. Hence when I came into recovery I had hundreds and hundreds of resentments swirling around my mind, poisoning my thoughts and sending constant emotional daggers into my heart.

What are the 4 components of spirituality?

The basic characteristics of spiritual health are as follows: proper lifestyle, connection with others, asking about the meaning and purpose of life, and transcendence (4).

The spiritual malady is the result of my being out of order with my higher power who I choose to call God. I was the director in the drama of life and managing the world so I could get what I thought I needed to feel ok.

What is the 3 Fold Disease of Alcoholism & Addiction

Whether you seek to engage in formal prayer, informal mental conversations, or merely by doing good and putting positive energy into the universe, there is no right or wrong way to pray to your higher power. 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. Sometimes others expel the same negative emotions on to us. I have found this a fairly common trait among male alcoholics in recovery settings and meetings.

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Review: Understanding Pope Francis’ teaching about the spiritual value of time.

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The worried or rebellious anticipation of the future is a cue to bring the focus back to seeking physical abstinence and motivations for doing so. We can also see this as years of not being able to regulate our negative emotions properly, if you wish to see them as sins.

Spiritual Malady

I would add to this that I also get distress via fears of rejection from others, I suffer from fear based shame to a chronic extent. If we start by trying to recover from alcoholism and addiction and find we still have other issues then obviously address these with outside professional and specialist help. In fact our first “spiritual” wakening was probably the result of drinking as it transformed how we felt about ourselves and the world in which we lived.

It is through emotions and thoughts about them that the addict creates isolation from their relationships. This isolation sets the stage for return to emotional escapism through addiction. These emotion processing deficits also appear to make us more impulsive, and to choose lesser short term gain over greater long term gain in decision making. It can lead to a distress feeling state that can make us fear based, perfectionist, have catastrophic thoughts, intolerance of uncertainty, low frustration and distress tolerance, be reactionary, moody, and immature in our emotional responding. The disease of alcohol and drug addiction is not just mental and physical but also spiritual.

The Power of Obsession in Alcoholism and Addiction

I am assailed externally by fear of what other’s think about me and internally about what I think of me – when these two line up it can have a powerful and damaging effect on my psyche. I have found over the last decade in recovery that when I turn my Will over to the care of the God of my understanding that I am restored to sanity and my thoughts are sound, they are on a higher plane as the Big Book tells me. I have seen in myself how fear and shame seem to drive most of my maladaptive behaviour. Some of us have this knawing feeling of not being good enough, have a hole in the soul which we are/were kinda always unconsciously trying to protect, shield from the world. Some of us are “people pleasers”, some of us are dismissive towards others.

Hence I believe we should appreciate that this definition of our condition has been updated by research into emotions especially in the last 20 years. My inventory showed me also that I did not seem to have the facility previously to emotionally respond to the world in a mature way. It is strange paradox, the more you focus on helping others, the more you discover how much you matter. I struggled with this myself in the early days of my recovery.

The Alcoholics Guide to Alcoholism

Today I look further at the disease of alcoholism focusing on it as a spiritual malady. Racticing prayer and meditation helps us be mindful of our surroundings and gain consciousness of our spirituality by bringing us closer to our higher power. Strengthening this relationship with a spiritual being brought us hope that we can recover from the mental and physical suffering of alcoholism.

  • The mature way to to access, identfiy and label how one is feeling and use this information to reasonably express how one is feeling.
  • While I could go on forever on the differences between these two ideas, I’ll keep it as simple as possible.
  • We have to show love and tolerance for each other as we suffer the same illness/malady.
  • And unless this malady is recognized, and a course of action is taken to enable God to remove it, the root of our alcoholic illness can lie dormant and burn us when we least expect it.
  • All of my academic research in the last 6 years has explored the possibility that this “maladjustment to life” is more than a spiritual malady, i.e. it is not simply the consequence of Sin but the result of abnormal responding, emotionally to life.