Learn What Spiritual Malady Is And The Role It Plays In Your Recovery

You’re not alone – there are plenty of people in AA who don’t believe in God, or who have trouble with the concept of a higher power. Spiritually, we have adifficult time connectingto a higher power. It is common to find yourself being angry at God or saying things like “if God was real this wouldn’t have happened to me” or not understanding why things are the way they are.

• It’s also important to remember that your understanding of a Higher Power can change and evolve over time.
• It can also lead to other problems, such as alcohol abuse or other addictions.
• Addiction and alcoholism are both a 3 fold disease, meaning there are three distinct areas that alcoholism affects and the reason you cannot stop drinking and using.
• It is treated through dual diagnosis, which looks to address both the physical addiction and mental health issues affecting the individual.

These defects are related to me being an alcoholic, they are intrinsic to my condition. The magic of the the steps is that they seem to reveal  the patterns of behaviour that our actions have prompted over the course of our lives. It helps us see ourselves and our condition of alcoholism and how it effects us and others. Keep in mind that this is separate from the physical craving.

Thoughts of Recovery – No.17 – The Spiritual Malady – Step 1

A spiritual malady can manifest itself in many different ways. For some, it may manifest as a feeling of being disconnected from others or as a sense of emptiness. For others, it may manifest as anger, anxiety, or depression.

The guy was probably in guilt too as he could been working on his recovery more. If we leave self pity to fester long enough it becomes depression, that is my experience anyway. This seems compounded by not always being able to read our emotions or somatic states. 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.

Addiction Categories

We are on the fast track and there seems to be so many problems and situations that we have to fix them right now. A Spiritual Malady on its most basic level, is spiritual unmanageability. Without higher guidance or wisdom, we’re just making life decisions like water poring out of the spout! Thoughts are spouting out of our mouths without any self-care as to the consequences!

For me we engage futilely and distressingly in resentment because we have an inability to process and control our emotions, they overwhelm us and we often react by people pleasing (shame) or react via various defense mechanisms (also shame based). One of the earliest studies on AA members concluded that  they were linked in commonality by two variables, emotional immaturity and grandiosity! I would contend that grandiosity is a part of emotional immaturity. I also contend that our “maladjustment to life” is based on emotional immaturity which is in itself a function of emotion regulation and processing deficits. Unlike other diseases, addiction contains a spiritual component referred to by 12 Step recovery fellowships as a “spiritual malady.” The spiritual component of the disease is of major importance, and requires spiritual treatment to be overcome.

In Modern Terms, What is the “Spiritual Malady” of AA?

These are all positive things that can help you on your journey to recovery, regardless of your beliefs. One of the great things about AA is that it’s flexible – you can make it work for you, even if you don’t believe in God. So, instead of fixating on the parts of the program that don’t work for you, focus on the things that do. Finding a Higher Power is an essential part of Alcoholics Anonymous, but what if you don’t believe in God?

The way humans think is on a spectrum of self-centeredness and god-centeredness. When dealing with the disease of alcoholism we are selfish and self-centered beings. We use everything and everyone, even when we stop using alcohol and drugs to cope with thesefeelings of being unsatisfied and uncomfortable in life. The more we focus less on ourselves we allow a god of our understanding to enter our minds and work in our lives. In fact they were all interlinking in a pattern of emotional reacting, one activating the other. It was like a emotion web that ensnared one in increasingly frustrating states of emotional distress and inappropriate responding.

Understanding What a Spiritual Malady Is

The only solution to a https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/alcohol-vs-drugs-comparison-of-addictions/ is a spiritual awakening. Only once we open the spiritual channels and begin to accept a Higher Power into our lives can we hope to find a solution to our alcoholic condition. This mesh of negative emotions can link up fairly instantaneously I find. I would suggest in relation to the issue of co-morbidities that one try to deal with these alcoholism related issues and then see if there are any other to deal with afterwards. For me, as someone who has been treated for anxiety and depression prior to recovery the 12 steps appear to have treated these as emotional consequences of my underlying condition of emotion dysregulation which I call alcoholism.

Since this additional narrative often consist of perspectives that causes the addict to feel separate, this is where the spiritual malady lives. It is through the daily cleansing of perception through the process of the steps and the sharing with another addict that the addict is able to return to living as an integrated part of the whole of life. Thankfully, the “spiritual malady” is no longer a “missing piece” of Step One for me. 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.

When I was doing my step four inventory as part of my 12 step programme of recovery  I did it pretty much as suggested in the Big Book. The mature way to to access, identfiy and label how one is feeling and use this information to reasonably express how one is feeling. They are suppose the tell the fronts of our brains to find words for our feelings. Not to tell the bottom of our brains to fight back or run or freeze.

• I contend that alcoholism is an emotional disorder which results in chemical dependency on the substance of alcohol.
• The newcomer gave me an example of a resentment he was experiencing after this guy at a meeting said “get off your pink cloud” a phrase that refers to the sometimes  mildly ecstatic feelings of early recovery.
• The “spiritual malady” of the Oxford group seems enhanced in me, I believe I sin more than normal people because of my emotional immaturity and reactivity.
• I never say I am upset because it also seems to be an undifferentiated emotion that I have trouble accessing, mentalising and expressing.
• There are no individualistic programs or people simply doing their own thing, it is a collective program of action.