Content
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.
We will try to fill this god-sized hole with anything we can. When I accepted that the ‘spiritual malady’ was about my beliefs, thoughts, and emotions, I came to see that many of my own beliefs and thoughts on this subject were contributing to my disease. I had many old ideas and prejudices that had to be examined and released. Many of us felt that there was something wrong with us or something missing—in short, we felt different from other people. We couldn’t understand why the people surrounding us could feel happiness or contentment, so we turned to drugs and alcohol as a means of self-medicating our perceived shortcomings. From our time spent feeding our addictions, we feel that the opposite begins to happen.
What is the 3 Fold Disease of Alcoholism & Addiction
Often people like us have some of the strongest will power that exists. 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. “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can and the wisdom spiritual malady to know the difference” is the Serenity Prayer used at every AA meeting. The Serenity Prayer is the greatest exercise in prioritisation. I believe we can unwittingly complicate our treatment of alcoholism by believing we have other conditions we see as distinct from alcoholism but which are in fact part of this condition called alcoholism.
What does the big book say about the spiritual malady?
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous refers to the symptoms of the spiritual malady as “bedevilments,” explaining that “we were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn't control our emotional natures, we were prey to misery and depression, we couldn't make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we …
The 12-Steps focus on addressing and fixing the spiritual problems that led us into our addiction, and by doing so, we find that they allow us to positively change our mental and physical issues. For many struggling with alcohol use disorder or alcohol addiction, the only way to overcome these feelings is to embark upon a spiritual program of action fearlessly. It is important that when we embark upon this quest to alleviate our spiritual malady that we are not too harsh on ourselves. No one is perfect at first when attempting to live a spiritual life, especially when we are coming back from a long spiritual hiatus. What is important though is that we strive to be a little better every single day and never give up on our spiritual journey in recovery. Our spiritual malady never just goes away and stays away on its own, it requires a constant spiritual connectivity and effort on our parts in our programs to keep it and the subsequent alcohol and drug abuse at bay. So long as we make an active effort to address our spiritual malady every day, we will find relief from it, one day at a time.
Inside The Alcoholic Brain
Otherwise we have not really completely treated our alcoholism. We have a sea change in how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. We often take them to grave sooner rather than later unless we decide to be open and share our secrets with another person.
For me this section is saying our emotion dysregulation leads to feelings of being “restless, irritable and discontented” which prompt a return to drinking. 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.