Spiritual Malady The e-AA Group

Our spiritual malady causes us to be restless, irritable, and discontented. Often people like us have some of the strongest will power that exists. The three must be addressed to find healing, recovery, and to live life sober. 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. The 12 steps were influenced by the Oxford Group who said sins cut a person off from God, and that there was such a thing as sin disease. Everyone in recovery has secrets they would rather not disclose, but there are not many “original” sins as one suspects and that haven’t been shared in 12 step recovery. Referred to in several of the twelve steps is therefore unrelated to religion; it refers to the potentially healing power inherent in interpersonal relationships based on reciprocity and equality.

And the solution for me is not psychoanalysis or a chemical intervention, although those have worked in regards to a mental illness I had. The solution has been following the suggestions and giving it over to my understanding of God, which is a gift to those of us not convinced we are right all the time.

The Mind is also Abnormal

However, this gentle repurposing may often make the difference for those who are unable to see past certain terms and have trouble relating. For if they can relate to and recognize the disease, hopefully they will be able to relate to the solution and recognize that it can work for them. I treat the spiritual malady with a combination of recovery, unity, and service as well as other spiritual practices outside of alcoholics spiritual malady anonymous. Step 12 if you will Practice these principles in all our affairs. If it were just the mental obsession I had to worry about, then once that was removed one could opine that my head would function as good as any normal drinker’s. I have specific maladies in my thought processes, which I have been able to address using the steps. They still bother me from time to time but at least I know what’s going on.

“… unacknowledged thoughts and feelings become repressed and surface later through substitute emotions and dysfunctional behavior. Other emotions are substituted to hide the shame and maintain self esteem. Anger, exaggerated pride, anxiety and helplessness are substituted to keep from feeling the total blackness of being bad. The buried shame is expressed through defense mechanisms that shield negative unconscious material from surfacing.

The Full Spectrum of Spirituality

I have sought refuge from my negative emotions in alcohol, drugs and other addictive behaviours. It is this that propelled my addictions, this inability to deal with my negative emotions. I dealt with them externally via addictive behaviours, not internally via emotion processing. 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. 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.

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. Fear and resentment dominated my thoughts and I made decisions based on self which caused me harm and harmed others. If we do not get spiritually connected with meditation or prayer with a power greater than us it will bring us closer and closer to that drink or drug. In sobriety, if we are self-reliant we usually end up using anything that will make us feel good externally excessively. Anxiousness, depression, and boredom are a few other factors that contribute to being spiritually maladapted. We would use drugs and alcohol to deal with these issues.

The Power of Obsession in Alcoholism and Addiction

It is a strange feeling of not wanting to be found out of being less than, not good enough. “If people realise what the real me is like, they will reject me! ” type thinking although a lot of this is unconscious and does not pop in to our minds as thoughts but is an unconscious self schema that shapes our behaviours. Most of my distress and emotional pain in recovery comes from https://ecosoberhouse.com/ wanting stuff, and not getting my way or not accepting things as they are. It is emotionally healthy to be altruistic – to help others without question or expectation. The list of emotional difficulties continues throughout the Big book’s first 164 pages. For me this maladjustment to life is not exactly the same as the spiritual disease mentioned in the Oxford Group pamphlet.

It can also look more like a soul-sickness or defeated spirit. 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. My “loss of control” over drinking is also linked to emotion processing difficulties as it prompted impulsive, uninhibited drinking. To conclude, it’s not my body — my allergic reaction to alcohol — that’s going to take me back to drinking. It’s really not my mind — the mental obsession — that is the underlying root of what will take me back to drinking. It’s the “spiritual malady”, as manifested by my EGO (selfishness-self-centeredness), that can eventually lead me back to drinking or sometimes even suicide.