Beating Alcohol Addiction Demands Creation
Alcohol addiction is a condition that disrupts every area of a person’s life. Drinking heavily affects the alcoholic more than just physically….they also are suffering from a mental, social, and spiritual handicap at this point. Their entire life is adversely affected by the disease. Jobs are lost and people get fired. Relationships are screwed up. People drop out of school, lose touch with their good friends, and so on. In short, alcoholism affects everything.
In most of these cases, the disease is stripping things away, right out of a person’s life. Any sense of spiritual growth or progress is removed and replaced with the drinking. Whatever used to provide entertainment and genuine value for the alcoholic was eventually replaced with drinking. In short, alcoholism becomes the answer for every event in the alcoholic’s life, and it is the cure for any ailment. It becomes the path of the enlightenment and a way to keep emotional balance in check.
So when someone tries to stop drinking, the task at hand is so much more than just quitting drinking. The task at hand is to completely recreate the entire life that was once ruled by drinking. Not only this, but also in seeking out a new way to live that can give us purpose that the booze used to provide for us, such as by how we dealt with our emotions.
The whole key to this is in creative energy.
In normal recovery circles, such as in AA or NA, there is actually a push for creative growth. The alcoholic is encouraged to progress through 12 steps in order to create a spiritual connection with a higher power and thus overcome their drinking. This is an act of creation, though I would argue that is too narrow of a focus. The reason for this is because the disease is more than just spiritual….it is also physical, emotional, social, and so on. Therefore the solution needs to be holistic in that it should address all of these areas, not just the spiritual.
So the answer for achieving sobriety is in making a purposeful life for yourself in these different areas. This is the holistic path to sobriety and if you try to follow it to the best of your ability then you will start actively creating a new life for yourself. This is the secret to beating alcoholism.