If at Time 2 a participant endorsed only an event on the CSLES, or endorsed an event on the TLEQ but reported no fear, helplessness, or horror in response, he or she was categorized into the non-trauma group. Baseline PTSD symptoms were assessed at Time 1 in response to a prior traumatic or stressful event. Interim traumatic and stressful events were assessed at Time 2, followed by subsequent spiritual struggle and PTSD symptoms. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) characterizes the reexperiencing, avoidance, hyperarousal, and emotional numbing symptoms that may persist in response to traumatic events. At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day.
McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality – Psychotherapy.net
This is how a mental health disorder manifests itself as distorted fear based thinking which appear, if acted upon, to make one’s situation a whole lot worse. These illustrate how the 12 step programme can help with an emotion dysregulation disorder. Undoubtedly, the shadow network is reflected in our threat physiology—from our DNA to our predictive codes to our traumatic memories to our suppressions and repressions—and plays a large part in behavior, illness, disease, and aging.
Futures Recovery
Scientific research provides evidence that the experience of compassion toward a single individual facilitates compassion toward others. Empirical data also demonstrates that our sense of compassion increases measurably when we can find commonality and connection with others. Compassion radiates whenever we can connect with another through shared experience.
Why Gratitude Matters and How It Can Transform Recovery
In our addictions, we tried to quench our soul-thirst with fleeting pleasures. The pursuit of them dominated our lives, destroyed relationships, and caused spiritual malady greater desperation than we ever thought possible. We became selfish and self-seeking, ever thirsting for more, and this lust warped us on every level.
Genuine Leather Big Book Covers
One of the best ways to overcome this spiritual malady is to practice gratitude. And while it may not come easily at first, just like negative thinking is a habit for some, being grateful can become a habit too. For anyone who is in recovery, these thoughts can be detrimental. Many times people with an alcohol use disorder (AUD) or substance use disorder (SUD) can quickly go down this path of negative thinking. And, for those in recovery, this can lead to the development of resentments.
This is frequently referred to as ‘breed and feed” physiology, although it is clearly much more than just that. The other safety phenotype is one of relative immobilization where we relax, repair, recovery, digest, defecate, contemplate, daydream, sleep, dream, and experience spiritual connections. This is frequently referred to as “digest and rest” physiology although it too is much more than that. Thankfully, the “spiritual malady” is no longer a “missing piece” of Step One for me.
Does spirituality have a place in recovery?
- Alcoholics Anonymous bases the 12-step program on 12 affirmations, or what they call 12 traditions.
- In this study, reports of trauma exposure had a small relationship with PTSD symptoms, a finding also reported in other college student samples (e.g., Frazier et al., 2009).
- Some predictive codes are inborn, instincts, but humans actually have very few instincts.
- Giving a threatened person safety instead of reason, rationalization, or punishment, is the equivalent of giving a blind person sight.
Given the impact of spiritual struggle on PTSD symptoms, future research should investigate how religious and secular belief systems interact with spiritual struggle in response to trauma. For example, positive religious coping in the presence of struggle may moderate the impact of struggle on PTSD symptoms (e.g., Bjorck & Thurman, 2007), but in the absence of positive religious coping, may reflect a true absence of spiritual supports. Other cognitions that may predict spiritual struggle include pre-trauma self-appraisals (R. A. Bryant & Guthrie, 2007), attributional style (Gray et al., 2007), and coping self-efficacy beliefs (Benight & Bandura, 2004). Many theories of PTSD share the premise that PTSD symptoms are caused and maintained by a person’s cognitive efforts to cope with the traumatic event (Keane, Fisher, Krinsley, & Niles, 1994). For example, information processing theories implicate faulty processing of and cognitions about the trauma memory in the development and maintenance of PTSD (Foa & Kozak, 1986; Resick & Calhoun, 2001). But there is more to our threat load than the physical and spiritual.