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Substance Use Disorder Research Paper

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It is said that pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth. Oftentimes it takes intense emotional trauma to cause a person to discover a spirituality of rare depth. Many past and present recovering alcoholics and junkies can attest that they first had to be reduced to a state of hopelessness by their addiction, forced to look into the maw of the Beast, before becoming desperately willing to latch onto a spiritual way of life that solved their problems. Even after abstinence is achieved, periodic episodes of emotional suffering met by renewed faith in a Higher Power is necessary to fuel spiritual progress. Following here is a discussion of how substance-use disorder (SUD) can serve as the spiritual crisis that precipitates recovery, including …show more content…

It is referred to as “hitting bottom” within 12-Step support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). The crisis could be brought by the stress of various SUD-related problems such as job loss, divorce or estrangement from loved ones, homelessness, legal problems or criminal charges, debt and bankruptcy, or physical and mental illness, to name a few. These situations cause increasing amounts of emotional stress, guilt, and grief that builds and culminates in a perfect storm of complete hopelessness. As it is described in the “Big Book” of AA, “having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001, p. xxviii) until the only two remaining options are “to go on the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of [their] intolerable situation as best [they] could” (p. 25) or “to accept spiritual help” (p. 25). This is the turning point that occurs in the early stages of change, the pre-contemplation/contemplation and preparation stages in which something must overcome the addict’s denial of problems and resistance to change before real recovery can commence. When the efforts of a counselor fail to motivate a client to change, the increasing emotional turmoil provided by the addiction …show more content…

At the turn of the 20th-century, physician and psychologist William James (1842-1910) included an anonymous account of his own spiritual crisis in his volume Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) in which he relates being paralyzed by fear of his own mortality shortly after being confronted with the haunting visage of an epileptic patient. He described the fear as being so intense and invasive that had he not clung to and internalized certain Scriptures he had learned in his youth he would most assuredly have lost his will to continue practicing medicine. As it turned out, after he had resolved the fear with spiritual strength provided by God, he was left with the gifts of sympathy and ability to relate to his patients’ fears of death as never before. May (1988) broadens the role of addiction in a spiritual crisis well beyond that of SUD with the bold claim that every person, in some way or another, whether he or she realizes it or not, is an addict. That is, everyone has a tendency to consciously or unconsciously develop a misplaced dependence on things other than God, to substitute an artificial sense of well-being for real peace that only He can provide. He writes, “To be alive is to be addicted” (p. 11), whether it be to substances, sex, gambling, work, food, hobbies, or anything else. While chemical addiction may be more tragic than some other addictions, any of them can carry

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