Shifting your Perspective

 

Addiction to any substance (food, drugs, alcohol, people, money, etc.) has a way of reorganizing your life's priorities so quickly that you don’t even realize it, until it’s too late. (See the "hitting bottom" section below for more on that subject.) Addiction causes stress and because your stress is unwanted and uncomfortable, you will react to it. Natural reactions to the stress of addiction are to remain stuck (freeze) and/or to fight through it, depending on how you perceive the threat of addiction. If you remain stuck in stress, you'll try to self-medicate which perpetuates the problem - it drives and sustains your addiction. Any kind of addiction alters all aspects of your being; your mind (gives direction to), your soul (gives the energy to), and body (reacts to physiological and hormonal changes sparked by your senses). You have trained your senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) to begin the steps to put the addictive activity into motion. Once that activity is repeated and becomes incorporated into your routine, the addictive activity becomes normalized and birth's an imbalance in your psycho-social lifestyle which causes dysfunction. When you become aware that you are living a dysfunctional lifestyle and you are ready to quit the addiction, you can see that there is more going on than just a mind-body connection. Trying to defeat unhealthy addiction by depending on your will power (your ability to control your sensory triggers through abstinence) will leave you defeated and exhausted. 

 

Maintaining your sobriety as you live out life "one day at a time" is easier to do when your attitude aligns with your behavior and your values align with your persistent hope. While Alcoholics Anonymous relies on your ability to shift your perspective enough to realize you can't tackle the addiction problem on your own, it falls short in that it doesn't address the root cause of why you became addicted in the first place. What may have started as a fun social activity, grew out of proportion, and became a central part of your life, like a windy day that gives way to a hurricane that tears away at your house. When you get to the point where you want to get out of the addiction, you find yourself trapped in the house surrounded by dark clouds. In the end, addiction leaves you in a weakened emotional and physical state. You come out of the storm shaken, with a shaky, fragile, self-concept and in great need of refreshment. When the difference between your self-concept and a true identity becomes apparent, you realize why it is that you need "a Power greater than" yourself to fully recover.

• It is necessary to see your recovery from this humbled perspective. This is the first major shift in perspective.  Your self-concept is a collection of personal beliefs, perceptions, and evaluations you have about yourself. These beliefs may be true or not and are influenced greatly by your family upbringing and what you were taught about living life. Identity is different. The Bible teaches that when you turn to the Christian God, you take on a new identity (1 Peter 2:9, Hebrews 6:19). When you are "in Christ" you have a spiritual component that boosts your resolve. It’s identity, not self-concept, that will pull you out of an addictive life style. Your new identity in Christ, the Holy Spirit in you, enables you to approach situations from God's perspective which steers your problem-solving, decision-making and resulting actions into a determined, functional personality that sustains balance throughout their life.

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If you can visualize God as the base that holds your psycho-social balance together, you’ll gain the power to not only control these reactions to your senses, but as a Christian, you’ll be able to maintain peace as you work through the circumstances that threaten your balance. By turning to God, you become equipped with the faith (part of the fruit of the Spirit) to make lifestyle changes. This is an oversimplified statement, but think of yourself as the recipient of God's empowering gift, Christ's Spirit. He is the force inside you that is activated by your faith (Ephesians 2:8-9). God waits until you make a decision to invite Him into your life so He can do this for you and while at the same time, honor your free will (Revelation 3:20, John 3:16). Once you align yourself with God, you can make other decisions that can overcome anything that is not of God (1 Thessalonians 5:8). With your faith steadied in a confident hope, you can muster the energy it will take to stabilize and march forward to capture and change your unproductive behavior, be it in thoughts, words, or patterns of behavior (Hebrews 6:19-20). This is depicted in the Bible as a Christian who puts on the armor of God to win the fight(s) that are meant to sway you away from achieving victory and freedom in Christ (Ephesians 6:10-18). 
 

Humility isn't just a word that's used periodically in the 12 Step Method of recovery, it's a trait that is essential to forming a relationship with the Christian God. Your humility and God's sovereignty working together brings you a new identity. When your realize that the God you are turning to loves you and wants to lead you to victory, then you'll be confident in the recommendation to seek Him as your Higher(est) Authority because you are "grounded in a self-view that something greater than the self exists" (Nielsen, R., & Marrone, J. A. (2018) p 807). Humility is what brought you to enter rehab and is the attitude needed to maintain your sobriety when you leave.​ If you exit rehab with an unaltered self-concept, you'll be leaving with the same defense mechanisms that brought you into a recovery program in the first place. This lack of awareness is a pride problem that is hard to recognize in yourself and is one that will sabotage your success because long-term change is not be sustainable without a new identity in Christ and a social lifestyle that supports it.

 

Humility is a personalized trait. That is the amount of intimacy and communication you have with God, determines the quality or depth of each one of the 12 steps recommended Alcoholics Anonymous. ​Possessing the character trait of humility makes you open to trying the direction advised by your Higher Authority. It also leaves you open to identifying possible defenses that surround your self-concept that you might not otherwise be willing to address on your own. When you are going through recovery, a relapse is one way that lets you know that something is still awry; shedding light on the importance of tackling your identity issue and alerting you to this  "psycho-social" imbalance. The process of finding a new sidewalk to go down, therefore, is darkened and may take many attempts before you see the essential need for an identity in Christ. This is life altering decision that enables you to change so you take a new sidewalk that leads to a new neighborhood. 

• Review the poem in the Introduction tab. ​

• Read about how why humility is essential to personal change below in “Yes, Your Free Will is Bounded Because Something Greater than Yourself Exists”.