A big part of the recovery process is teaching clients to have faith in something other than themselves. There is this need to help addiction sufferers understand that they are part of something that is bigger and more important than the little world they have created surrounding their addiction.
You will find there are a number of Christian addiction treatment centers out there that focus on faith-based healing. Clients are asked to put their faith in a higher power, that being God in a Christian facility. The hope is the synergy between therapy and bringing clients back to their Christian values will be enough to lift them from the depths of their addiction illnesses.
As an addiction sufferer who likely identifies themselves as a Christion, there was likely a time in your life when you believed you were walking through life with God by your side. At some point along the way, your faith got put aside in favor of something very insidious, that being the disease of drug or alcohol addiction. A faith-based rehab center or program will focus on reconnecting you with your faith.
No matter what took place because of your addictive behaviors, Christians are always taught about forgiveness and redemption. You can redeem yourself simply by getting the help you need. That is what a Christian environment uses as a focus for treatment. It also focuses on the fact that everyone in treatment is Christian brothers and sisters of faith. Together, every single person has the potential of walking out of the rehab facility with their heart, soul, and faith intact.
It is not surprising to find that a large number of Christian-based rehab facilities and programs rely heavily on the 12 Steps of Recovery as set forth by 12 Step programs like Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). In the following section, we will focus on how the 12 Steps of Recovery focus so much on faith.
Christian Values Find a Home in 12 Step Programs
As we get into this discussion, you will see that the actual 12 Steps of Recovery in AA specifically mention God on six different occasions. That is intentional because the original founders of AA and even NA fully believed that renewed faith in God would lead them back to sanity.
As a point of clarification, the reference to God has a counterpart other programs simply refer to as a “higher power.” A higher power can be anyone or anything in which people have faith. The term higher power is used to remove the religious connotations in an effort to make 12 Step programs more accessible to people who identify as something other than Christian. That is an important distinction because the illness of addiction doesn’t really care about that in which people believe. It claims its victims from all walks of life.
By the way, a higher power can literally be another religious icon, person, or even an inanimate object like a rock. The use of a higher power is intended to serve as a way to ground addiction sufferers to something they have more faith in than themselves.
As for the 12 Steps of recovery, the following steps of AA directly mention God or “power of our understanding”:
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity (STEP 2)
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him (STEP 3)
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs (STEP 5)
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character (STEP 6)
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings (STEP 7)
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out (STEP 11)
In each of these steps, addiction suffers are asked to heal themselves through the power of their faith.
If you are interested in getting treatment in a Christian environment, we can help you. Much of the work we do in our rehab facility focuses on recovery through therapy and a reconnection to faith. If you would like to know more about what we have to offer you, you should immediately pick up your phone and gives us a call at 833-846-5669.