Spirituality in addiction recovery, or in finding a way to live a healthier life, can be very helpful. Spirituality can mean many things, but at its core, it involves grappling with deep, age-old questions that everyone, whether they’re aware of it or not, struggles with: Who am I beyond my body and my name? Why am I here? What’s the purpose of life?
These are questions we generally never find clear answers to, but that doesn’t mean we don’t spend a lot of thought and energy trying to figure them out.
You might feel stuck or confused spiritually if you’ve had a rough life and wonder how a higher power could let that happen, or what the point is if things keep going wrong.
People can also get spiritually stuck if they’ve been overly comfortable or if life has been too easy. Life can feel really empty and purposeless when you don’t really have to do anything to get by.
While I can’t, and shouldn’t, begin to answer these age-old questions for you, some guidance on how to think about them in healthy ways can be really helpful.
Spirituality in Addiction Recovery: A Secular, Psychological Approach
Even without great clarity, finding at least a bit more understanding can help you discover your true self more fully and figure out your best guess as to why and how to live.
We’re going to go through these spiritual questions from a secular, nonreligious perspective that’s purely psychological. Spirituality in recovery can be vast and deeply practiced with or without religion, and they can be independent of each other. You don’t necessarily need a higher power, or the culture and traditions of a religion, to address the questions of existence or to find meaning and connection.
If anything we go over conflicts with your religious views, simply read it as a psychological perspective, and do with the information what you choose.
There are four key areas that can help guide spiritual growth:
- Finding connection
- Finding a way to live
- Finding meaning and purpose
- Finding yourself
In this post, we’ll dive into the first two – finding connection and finding a way to live. We’ll save the other two – finding meaning and purpose and finding yourself – for the next post.
Spirituality in Addiction Recovery: Finding Connection
We always want to feel like we matter – that the decisions we make and the things we say mean something. Connection is about recognizing how everything in the world interacts and matters to everything else.
We’re all part of the world ecosystem, not fully separate from each other, ever.
We want to believe we can build a house on a piece of land and it won’t affect the animals that lived there. That we can grow a business without taking business away from others. That we can isolate ourselves and it won’t let anyone down. You can see how the mind wants to believe we can do what we please without affecting others. Why does the mind want to believe this?
Reason 1: We Want to Avoid Guilt or Blame
Let’s look at the first reason. If we believe there’s no connection between ourselves and the world around us, it gives us a free pass to behave selfishly, since it supposedly doesn’t affect anyone else. Of course, a small child knows this isn’t true. Everything we do affects the world around us.
Don’t be afraid to recognize all the ways you’re connected. Yes, you might feel some guilt, but you’ll also find intense and profound connection in beautiful ways too.
Reason 2: We Never Learned About Connections
Now let’s look at the second reason our minds believe we aren’t connected to our surroundings: because we never learned it.
This happens often when we’re growing up – at a young stage when we’re trying to figure out how much we affect the people around us. If you were a child who got into trouble but no one noticed, or you did well but didn’t get recognized, or maybe you were never disciplined, you begin to learn that your actions don’t really matter.
You learn that whether you do good or bad, it goes unnoticed, and the world goes on as if nothing happened. This teaches you to disconnect from your surroundings and feel isolated in your efforts.
The reality is that you were affecting the world around you all that time. You can be the greatest person in the world, but if you don’t feel like it matters to the world, then forget it. Humans don’t function well in a vacuum.
Reclaiming Our Connection
Connection is something we never need to force, because it’s already there, all the time. We just have to open our eyes and recognize what’s already present.
A breath of fresh air comes from plants and gets swirled around by the wind. A bite of an apple comes from a tree grown by farmers and machines, sold by a cashier you help support. That apple is full of juice made from water from oceans and lakes.
The fact is, connection is much simpler to find and understand than we make it out to be. Sure, you can get as deep as you want with the idea of connection. But start with what you already know to be true. We already know that our things and our actions are connected in some way to everything on the planet. Appreciate what’s right in front of you before searching for connections you’re unsure about.
Please connect with a higher power if you wish – but also look around at the people praying with you, and appreciate the connections you have with them. Notice all the ways you might be connected: rooting for the same sports team, sharing the same values, helping each other, living in the same city, or driving on the same roads.
We need to always be open to connection, not force it. If you’re open to it, connection will find you, because it’s everywhere.
Spirituality in Addiction Recovery: Finding a Way to Live
We can only find our own best ways to live when we don’t have a set idea that there’s just one way. The way you live today may be very different from how you live and what you value in 10 years. If we decide how to live based on some forced expectation or rule, that’s when we ironically don’t find a way to live.
Don’t worry about pressuring yourself to immediately find your rules for living, because the more you force that, the less likely those ways of living are to be a true reflection of yourself. Also, don’t fall into the trap of gravitating toward people who are comfortable and overly confident in telling you how to live.
Don’t confuse that person’s confidence with knowledge. Probably some of what they say is great for you, but we all need to learn our own lessons and come to our own conclusions. We all have a tendency to want certainty and follow people who seem certain.
But When We Live by Other People’s Rules, We Lose a Bit of Ourselves in the Process
Plenty of great leaders have suggested that the right way to live is to be ambitious and get the most out of every opportunity. And other leaders have said just the opposite – that we should be content with very little, focus on family and friends, and not distract ourselves with ego-driven ambitions.
- Do you stay in the same city as family, or do you live in the city you enjoy more?
- Do you spend money on something that will make your life easier, or do you save it for your child’s education?
- Do you go to work if you’re a bit sick, or do you take a day off? There’s no best way!
So where does that leave the average person trying to figure out the best way to live? Obviously, all the suggestions we get aren’t going to be the same, so we can’t do all of them. In the end, we need to work on our own comfort in believing that whatever our best guess is on any given day is good enough.
Be Okay With How You Want to Live
Sometimes you might be ambitious; sometimes you might scale back to the basics in life. The secret isn’t finding the best way to live, but being okay with how you want to live. There’s no best way, so don’t wait for it, and don’t give yourself a hard time for not figuring it out. You’ll be waiting in life until you realize that your best guess at how to live is valid and as good as anyone else’s guess.
Don’t confuse that with actions. Your actions may have been unhealthy and far from the best. We’re talking about intent. If you get high every day, I’d agree that’s not the best way to live. But that doesn’t mean you don’t already know a better way. You just haven’t acted on it yet. Don’t doubt that you already know a healthy way to be.
- If you’re at the point where you don’t care what happens, then why not go for the career you want, even if you fail?
- Why not let someone know you love them, even though they might make you feel embarrassed?
- Why not stand up for yourself when someone takes advantage of you?
Not caring is a great way to start grabbing the life you want, knowing you don’t care whether it works out or not.
Reflecting On The Best Way to Live
While I won’t pretend to know the best way to live, and don’t want my advice to be taken as a truth that’s best for you, I’ll share a core way of being that I find helpful. It’s not the only way to live, it’s just what I’ve personally found helpful and true to my beliefs and experience of the world.
For me, the best way to live is to simply be content with who I am at any moment. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to get better or notice what I want to work on. It only means what it means: just be content with who I am at any moment.
If I’m aware of something I need to work on, I try to recognize that it’s not a failing but simply something I haven’t set myself up to do well enough with yet, or don’t have the capacity to do, and that’s OK. I can want more or try to get more, but recognize that I have to be okay with what I have right now. Who I am right now has to be OK with me, because all I can be right now is the me I am right now.
Focusing On The Present Moment
Another way I like to live is to be present in whatever I do, simply for the purpose of what I’m doing at that moment. A trick I use to do this is just to tell myself that if I’m doing “X,” I’m doing it so that “X.” So instead of hanging out with a friend so that something happens, I simply hang out so that I can hang out. Or instead of thinking about driving so that I can get home, I simply drive so that I can drive.
It’s almost too ridiculously simple for most people to even do, including myself sometimes. I catch myself trying to do things like clean my place so that everything’s clean, or work out so that I’m healthy. But instead, we can enjoy moments so much more when we change that to: I clean my place to clean my place. Or I work out so that I can work out. I trust that the more I can allow myself to be present in every moment, the more my authentic self can come out.
If, for you, that sounds too nice or simple, then perhaps that’s not a good way for you to live. Maybe you like being hard on yourself, or else you feel like you won’t do anything to improve. It’s common not to trust yourself without being really harsh on yourself. That’s fine too, so long as you’re aware that you’re using irritation with yourself as an energy source. I hope for you that you can find your ways of being that feel right for you.
Next Steps in Spiritual Growth
Keep exploring spirituality in addiction recovery, and take a deeper look at what it means to find purpose and truly discover yourself.
You might also be interested in learning more about life after addiction as you begin writing your next chapter.
And if you’re looking for structured, flexible support, consider the Self Recovery program. This is a comprehensive, private approach to healing that fits your life and helps guide long-term growth, inside and out.
