Beating Alcohol Addiction Demands Creation

Alcoholism is a disease that affects an entire person. The alcoholic suffers more than just physically due to their drinking….they also suffer mentally, socially, spiritually, and so on. Their whole lives are affected by the disease. Jobs are lost and people get fired. Relationships are out of whack. People drop out of college, lose contact with old friends, and so on. So basically, alcoholism affects it all.

In many of these instances, alcoholism is taking things away from the individual. Any sense of spirituality is stripped away and replaced by the booze. Whatever used to be “fun” for the alcoholic is replaced by the booze. In short, drinking becomes the solution for everything, the remedy for any event in the alcoholic’s life. It becomes the path of the enlightenment and a way to keep emotional balance in check.

So when someone tries to stop drinking, the task at hand is so much more than just quitting drinking. The task is to replace an entire life that was dominated by alcohol. Not only that, but to find a way of living that works to replace all of those things that alcohol used to do for us, such as providing us with “fun” or with a way to deal with things emotionally.

The key to doing this is in creation.

In traditional recovery, such as with a 12 step program, there is a focus on creative efforts. The alcoholic is encouraged to progress through 12 steps in order to create a spiritual connection with a higher power and thus overcome their drinking. This is an act of creation, though I would argue that is too narrow of a focus. The reason for this is because the disease is more than just spiritual….it is also physical, emotional, social, and so on. Therefore the solution needs to be holistic in that it should address all of these areas, not just the spiritual.

So the answer for achieving sobriety is in making a purposeful life for yourself in these different areas. This is the holistic path to sobriety and if you try to follow it to the best of your ability then you will start actively creating a new life for yourself. This then is the ultimate secret of overcoming alcohol addiction.