What is a Spiritual Malady?

Lacking the tools to manage pain, disappointment, and resentment in a healthy way, the mind obsessively seeks the only solution to the problem that has yet worked, which is a mind or mood-altering substance. This same obsessive nature causes those with a substance use disorder to instinctively seek other things for relief from their thoughts. Often, before ever using a substance, they were bright students, picked up hobbies that they were able to develop into amazing talents or ambitious employees that were able to vertically ascend with ease.

My spiritual malady 4 and then 5 showed me that I did not have the natural ability to deal with my negative emotions. The mature way to to access, identfiy and label how one is feeling and use this information to reasonably express how one is feeling. This way we do not retaliate, fight, flee or freeze. Instead our emotions do what they are supposed to do. 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 can get out of the distress of wanting/needing stuff by asking God to remove those negative emotions which block me off from Him.

Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, First Edition.

To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. Therefore, we started upon a personal inventory. A business which takes no regular inventory usually goes broke. Taking commercial inventory is a fact-finding and a fact-facing process.

For me he was seeing the root of this https://ecosoberhouse.com/ malady, this emotional disease. These illustrate how the 12 step programme can help with an emotion dysregulation disorder. I have suggested clearly in previous blogs how I think AA’s 12 recovery programme helps specifically with problems of emotion dysregulation. 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. I sin so naturally, effortlessly and usually without even trying. I believe my so-called defects of character are linked to my underlying emotional disorder of alcoholism. Alcoholics and children of alcoholics have a tendency to avoid emotions in fact and to use emotional reasoning when arguing a point.

Big Book ASL – Chapter 6 – Into Action

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.

Through our spiritual connection, we finally are given the power to overcome the disease and live happy, joyous, and free lives in sobriety. Of Alcoholics Anonymous, “we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.

Re: Doctors Opinion & the spiritual malady

It chains us to the past and endangers recovery because we drank on shame and guilt. The spirituality of AA is exemplified in helping others, it creates a feeling of wholeness and connectedness with others. High sponsor involvement over time has been found to predict longer recovery . Most active ingredients accounting for AA’s benefit are social in nature, such as attending meetings, and the 12 steps mention “we” 6 times but not “I” once. Millions of lives have been saved not to mention the lasting benefits it has brought to families, and societies once harmed by alcoholism. The basic tenet of this, is that it takes one alcoholic to help another alcoholic achieve sobriety.

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. For a while, that seemed to work for us but once we stopped using substances the discontentedness came back to the surface in sobriety. In the first list, we listed all the negative higher powers in our lives. These negative higher powers condemned us to keep living in our problems In the second list we had to write down, all the positive higher powers. These positive higher powers were all the new ideas and suggestions we received that taught us how to live in the solution. The negative powers were defined as behaviours that were harmful to others as well as ourselves.