RSS FeedAt Transitions Recovery, we believe long term recovery requires a commitment to self — body, mind, and spirit. Because of that, we treat not only the physical and mental aspects of addiction, but the underlying spiritual issues as well.
This is found most directly in the application of the 12-Step philosophy, which plays a vital role in all aspects of a patient’s recovery at Transitions Recovery Drug Treatment Center. The components and philosophies of the 12-Step programs, such as mutual support, honesty, accountability, acceptance, and spirituality, have been shown to significantly enhance the quality of recovery from all addictive and mental health disorders.
In the book The Thirst for Wholeness: Attachment, Addiction, and the Spiritual Path, the author, Christina Grof, says in her introduction that early in her recovery from alcoholism, she came across part of a letter from the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung to Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Referring to one of his former patients, Jung wrote, “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent [to] the spiritual thirst…for wholeness…”
She says that she realized that Jung was describing a nonspecific craving that many experience. One that is “different from and more far-reaching than the physical craving for alcohol. A trip to the mall, a piece of cake, a cuddle: none of these momentary solutions quenches the deep thirst.”
In speaking with many people, she found that both non-addicts and recovering addicts describe the same underlying longing in their lives, but for many, it has been “misread, misunderstood and acted upon in mistaken ways, some of them deadly.” Grof suggests many people adopt addictive behaviors, which only further parch the soul. The thirst can be quelled, she advises, only by moving through the emptiness on a contemporary quest for wholeness, which often includes addiction, existential alienation, and further isolation through abuse, before discovering healthy ways to satisfy spiritual longing and gaining spiritual understanding.
Her conclusion: “The only way we successfully satisfy this elemental craving for wholeness or for God is through an ongoing relationship with a vast inner spiritual resource.”
At Transitions Recovery, our whole-person approach to drug and alcohol treatment programs is designed to instill a sense of hope and positive anticipation for the future so that they may understand what Grof calls “the divine experience of being human.”
