The Spirituality of Recovery

1. The Spirituality of Recovery An interpretation of the 12 Steps as written in Alcoholics Anonymous Narcotics Anonymous Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

2. This PowerPoint is located at my website, drleemd.org, under “Lectures”. The Twelve Steps

3. "The spiritual part of our disease is our total self-centeredness." (page 20, Narcotics Anonymous) An addict spends the day focused on their addiction. • This requires minimizing time around the family. • Concern for others is minimal - the addiction’s needs always taking priorityover the sober needs of themselves and others. • Addicts allow people to be in their life for what they can do for them. • Healthy friends leave because they are tired of being used.

4. Spirituality • Latin word for breath, "espirit", means the essence of life • when you think of the welfare of someone other than yourself • is about forgiveness and the tolerance of imperfection in ourselves and others.

5. “Spirits” is synonymous with alcohol. • Being intoxicated is considered a “spiritual experience” especially by an addict. • Religion versus spirituality • Awareness of something greater than just you. • People helping other people - Based on addiction – using buddies - Based on love – 12 steppers - Based on anger - gangs

6. The Ego • Your ego is part of your “self” and is only concerned about you as separate from others. • Your addiction relies on your ego to be in total control of you in order to stay alive and “well”. • Righteous indignation, lust, greed, envy, pride, and other “sins” (character defects) are traits of the ego and keep you separate from being able to love others.

7. “Spiritual Experience" An addictnot in recovery considers a “spiritual experience” as anything that gives pleasure or relief from the stresses of life. Getting high (pleasure or “relief”) is the most important experience in an addict’s life. Even if an addict believes in God, their addiction is what they worship. Their addiction is their god which is a false idol.

8. Pleasure • The result of the activation of your “brain’sreward system” by the release of dopamine, endorphins, and other substances such that you feel good, safe, happy, and do not worry. • It’s purpose is the reinforcement of adaptive healthy behaviors. • Drugs of abuse, alcohol, and some compulsive behaviors activate this reward system without performing an adaptive, healthy behavior.

9. Pleasure vs. Spirituality • Pleasure is not synonymous with spirituality. • Having a loving, intimate relationship, feeling whole, and knowing that God is in your heart is an eternal growth process. • You always develop a tolerance to the amount of pleasure you can feel– each time it is less.

10. Bill W.

11. Step OneAdmit Powerlessness and unmanageable • An addict may intellectually know that the continued use of his substance is not good for him. • Through denial, rationalization, and minimization he believes he can manage his use such that it will not cause unmanageability in his life. • One day he realizes his powerlessness in terms of his inability to use his substance in moderation because of the unmanageability that this substance is causeing in his life. • He then realizes he is helpless by himself to stop his compulsive use of his substance.

12. Admitting Helplessness • Admitting “helplessness” is the first step in having a personal, intimate relationship with anyone. It shows you need that person. • Admitting helplessness is a statement of fact; not a statement of weakness or inadequacy. • Honesty (with yourself and others) is essential in order to have an intimate relationship (to feel needed, loved, and to be able to love). • Those who cannot admit helplessness are not in truth and end up alone.

13. Step 2 – Higher PowerBelief in a Power greater than ourselves • Awareness of a Power greater than our self is the essence of spiritual experience. • Asking for help and letting people help you is to “walk the walk” of Step 2 • Understanding this Power requires (WHO) willingness, honesty and open mindedness which are the essentials of recovery. • Being honest with others requires being honest with yourself.

14. A Power Greater than Ourselves.

15. “Power greater than ourselves…” • Recognizing that there is a power greater than our self need not be a complicated concept. • If you are not able to do something such as move a heavy object, you ask for help (admitting helplessness). • Once the job is done, you realize that this act of asking and receiving help was a power greater than you.

16. "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." (Step 2) Spiritual growth in recovery: • Occurs when you: - are concerned about the welfare of others and help them - ask people to help you - allow people to help you • Requires that you practice your spirituality. (in the same way as practicing a musical instrument, football practice, and learning to speak a foreign language) - attending at least 90 meetings in first 90 days of your recovery - working actively with your sponsor

17. Why is this Important? • Recovery from the active phase of an addictive disease does not occur without spiritual growth. • The spiritual part of recovery begins when an addict lives life in community with others. • Living in community means: - You care about the welfare of others and help them when you can. - You ask others for help in your pursuit of recovery. - You let people help you to find recovery.

18. Step 3Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

19. First action step of the 12 Steps. (First 2 Steps are preparatory steps.) • An Addict has to make an informed decision (or all he saying is just words). • Having God-consciousness is not enough. • Making this decision requires that he knows how to communicate with God, and he is in the process of developing a personal relationship with God (Atman). • He knows his obstacles to being inGod.

20. Obstacles

21. How can we describe God? • God is not describable but our minds put God in a human image. • The ultimate authority figure. • Your relationships with those in authority is affected by a transference of your relationship with your parents. • You relate to God in the same way that you relate to your parents.

22. Obstacles to the Higher Power People relapse because of the lack of an intimate relationship with a Higher Power. • An addict cannot abstain from using his substance if he does not replace that substance with something better. • A “belief in God” is not enough. Most addicts believed in God before their addiction. • You must have a personal relationship with God before you will turn your will and your life over to the care of God.

23. Relapse Risk Factors 1 - Problems in your relationship with God caused by forming false images of who we are. • Worthlessness – You are not worth God’s love. If you prove you are worthless then it does not matter if you get high because you are worthless. • Shame and Guilt – You do not deserve God because you are so bad. • Trauma - You cannot trust anyone including God.

24. 2 - Proving God does not exist: • Self-esteem – You need to prove you can do it by yourself. • Narcissism and Grandiosity -Inability to be humble (Step 8 - shortcomings). You deal with the stresses of life by using the fabricated defense mechanisms that you are more capable than others and do not need their help or the help of a mystical god. • Atheism – God does not exist.

25. Trauma • History of emotional, physical, or sexual trauma • Abuse by neglect • Trauma caused by Parents from the perspective of a child. - Actual trauma - Perceived trauma • This trauma causes: anger, mistrust, feelings of worthlessness, isolation, lack of ability to be intimate.

26. Transference • We transfer our images and conflicts with our parents onto our relationship with God. • We make conclusions about God and our perception of how God sees us based on this transference. • We weave stories around how God views us based on these images and conclusions. • These conclusions and the stories are based on our past experiences with our parents (not on how God loves us).

27. When bad things happen • You finally begin to trust that God is on your side and you “surrendered” your will and your life. • When something bad happens such as the death of a spouse in a car accident, you will then see if you truly trust God. • If you have a transference with God around your father, who always let you down, it is going to be hard to turn your will and your life over to a God “who” allowed your spouse to die.

28. Atheism • When someone first has a God-consciousness, he may need to have an authority who thinks for him and is responsive for him. • He clings to God to be relieved of self-responsibility out of his fears of his imperfections. • As his needs become more urgent, he wants God to take care of things. • He is not able to see God as anything other than a projection of himself.

29. The Fear of God • His relationship with God becomes more based on personal needs, wishful thinking, and on fear. • He is afraid that God will punish him because of his imperfections. • His relationship with God will become a superstition with less truth and more dogma. • He cannot feel the love of God; then feels that God is not truth; and then concludes that God must not exist. • God does not exist in the way he sees God. .

30. God Does not Exist • Man’s concludes that a God who punishes and who does not prevent tragedy must not exist. • Without the existence of an all powerful God, man learns to assume self-responsibility, then does not fear being punished. • He can now cultivate true “awareness” by facing the reality within himself.

31. Awakening • First stage of awakening is a genuine God experience and relationship. • Based on an awareness and a contemplation of “What is the meaning of life?” resulting in perceiving nature and her laws. • Who or what made all of this? The first state of awakening. • Since he “now” does not fear his imperfection then he does not fear punishment from God for his imperfection.

32. “I Am” • This former atheist can now have a personal relationship with God and live in the now. • This genuine God experience is being; God is. • Only realized when you face what is in you now – imperfect as it may be – but truth. • God is not perceived as acting (punishment or reward or guidance) to take away the effort of man. Man realizes that God just is. • The “Serenity Prayer” now makes sense.

33. Serenity Prayer Accept the things I cannot change, Change the things I can, and Have the wisdom to know the difference.

34. Consciousness • Awareness of what is at this moment. • Our mind can only be aware of several things at one time. • Anything that draws our attention will shift our consciousness such as a loud noise, hunger, physical pain when you step on glass, seeing someone that looks like a past lover. • Time, TV, IPhones, driving a car, music distract.

35. God-consciousness "Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it "God-consciousness." (page 568, AlcoholicsAnonymous) You have to be in your present confusion, errors, and pains; facing and understanding them to be in God.

36. God-consciousness is a spiritual transformation from an egocentric consciousness to a concern for others. It is a consciousness expanding experience which requires: - Admitting you are powerless (acceptance) - A willingness to seek out this Higher Power - Asking for help - Accepting God's direction (surrender).

37. Thought and the Ego • Our “normal” state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect; our insanity. • We are identified with thought (mind) which we claim to be truth but this is an unconscious attempt to protect our identity. • Thought versus being can cause an entrenchment and intensification of the ego. • Ego is the identification with form – primarily thought forms.

38. Liberation • The realization that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. The ego is not who you are. • I am - the one who sees that. • The realization that once I transcend the physical forms, thought forms, and emotional forms, I realize my connectedness with “the whole”.

39. You • Your ego is your personality based on your past experiences, your culture, your family, thought and emotions. • Your soul is the immortal essence of youand is somehow connected to God. • As you develop God-consciousness and feel the presence of God (that has always been there), you realize that God loves you in the same way that he loves everyone else. • When you recognize that this Higher Power is the same for you as it is for others, then you realize that we are all one in God.

40. SinStep 6 – “defects of character” • From the Greek, “miss the mark”. • To sin means to miss the point of human existence. • Not acknowledging the good and the bad that is already in you is “sin”. • This results in suffering and causing suffering. • This is the dysfunction inherent in the human condition (Buddhism).

41. Love • To love is to recognize yourself in another. • The Presence that you are, the timeless “I Am”, recognizes itself in another, and the other feels loved, that is to say recognized. • The most important thing that you can do for someone is to be present with that person. • The longing for love is the longing to be recognized on the level of Being.

42. “I Am” • “Being” is formlessness; not an identification with your mind or your body. • The consciousness that says, ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks. (Jean-Paul Sartre) • After a tragic loss you either resist or you yield. • Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.

43. Serenity Prayer Accept the things I cannot change, Change the things I can, and Have the wisdom to know the difference

44. A belief in a Higher Power, admitting helplessness, and asking for help is the beginning but more is required. • You have to change the things that you can change which includes how you are dealing with your past. • The Fourth Step requires looking at all the traumas that have happened in your life which may be obstacles to finding and becoming a part of a Power greater than yourself.

45. Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. First, do a timeline of your life: • events from birth • things you did - bad and good • how you felt about all of this • You are beginning the process of realizing the hurts of the past so that you do not allow them to affect you in the present in relationships with others and with God.

47. Masks • Having God in your heart means finding your real self. • Each living being has a higher self or “divine spark”. • The lower self is the higher self shrouded by common faults, common weaknesses, ignorance, laziness, pride, selfishness, ect. Pathwork

48. The mask self is the self you present to the world and to yourself to avoid the unpleasantness or disadvantages of what would happen if you give into your lower self. • You convince yourself that you are not i.e. selfish, but this selfishness/self-will becomes part of your unconscious. • You become emotionally sick because you cannot acknowledge your faults. • The three major faults are self-will, pride and fear.

49. Image • A child forms impressions of people (parents, police, etc.) due to environmental influences or from their own specific experiences. • These impressions or images are based on conclusions formed by the personality which most of the time are wrong conclusions. • These conclusions sink into our unconscious and mold the life of the developing child. • These images are then applied to people and situations other than the original person.

50. Signs of Images • Inability to overcome certain faults. • Repetition of certain incidents. • Attracting a pattern of outer occurrences without you doing anything to produce them. The only remedy : • Find out what the image is; • on what basis it was formed; • and what were the wrong conclusions.