"RE-Aligned Self"?
Patrick Rea wrote:
>The spiritual dimension is very interesting: it underpins AA to a degree
>that very few appreciate. (What are the Steps, other than Biblical
>Commandments? And the meetings, the Catholic Confessional... and even the
>ritual, incense... the cigarette fug?)
Just to add a further comment, like the Catholic Church, AA tends to be very absolute. Devout members will tell any who ask that there is only one way to stay sober and that is by working the steps "by the book". It's very disempowering long term to live in a perpetual state of powerlessness and unmanageability -- a permanent crisis mode. Powerlessness is especially destructive to women alcoholics/addicts who frequently have issues around emotional/physical/sexual abuse and need to be empowered to deal with those issues and situations rather than believe that they are powerless.
Although they tell you they won't kick you out, if you don't toe the party line you will get "jumped on" by the "recovery police". Orthodoxy is king!
AA doesn't encourage "informed consumers" it supresses discussion of other paths to recovery. Despite lousy results, AA and the 12-step model have a stranglehold on the US "Substance Abuse Industry" to the exclusion of discussion of other methods and modalities.
>Jung said he was delighted at the progress of AA (to his credit)
>and stated that the following had occurred to him: perhaps alcoholism was
>a spiritual disorder and that alcoholics were people with a greater
>thrust for the spiritual dimension than others...
Definitely for me, it was the loss of my spiritual life that propelled me into recovery more than anything else.
HOWEVER -- and I shall repeat this caveat until people start listening and agreeing with me.:)
The human mind and human soul are extremely complex. I believe that addiction is a symptom of one of a number of underlying spiritual and/or biochemical diseases. Just as many things can cause a heart attack, addiction can have more than one cause. As well as the spiritual pain, other things that need to be considered (and which probably require different treatment modalities) are
* a genetic predisposition to addiction,
* flawed/poor alcohol metabolism (this may be genetic in origin and so may account for the racial groups that have higher levels of alcoholism such as Native Americans),
* faulty serotonin metabolism (large numbers of alcoholics suffer from depression and use alcohol as a medication)
We have in NLP a very powerful tool to help a large number of people. However, it should be one of a number of tools, not our only one. There is a tendency when all one has is a hammer, to think of all problems as soluble by hitting them harder. We need to have hammers (AA), screwdrivers (NLP), wrenches (talk therapy) and all the other tools at our disposal. When we aren't very expert with the best tool for a particular client, we should refer them to one who is.
Sothat's my 5cents worth for today.
Blessings to all,
Jenni