Spiritual Recovery

Spirituality, Fellowship and the "Program"

Spirituality, fellowship and the program (the twelve steps) are the essential ingredients to recovery.  They are independent but connected concepts.  I'm certain that a person needs all three to really recover and be happy.

I have been spending decades developing my spirituality.  Even before I became addicted, I considered myself to be a very spiritual person.  I did not like organized religions much.  They all seem to be too exclusive for me.  I spent time as an agnostic without a clear idea of what or who God was.  I even did my time as an atheist -- usually when something pretty bad had happened and I lost faith.   I spent time as Lutheran as a child, abandoned Christianity later in life, studied Buddhism for quite some time and married it to Wicca and my personal hodgepodge of Native American beliefs.  I ran into some rastifarians along the way and when I was 25 I started smoking pot cause I thought it could make me higher.  They seemed to know something!  I wanted it too.

I thought I had fellowship with these people and other addicts I was hanging around with!  But they all abandoned me eventually.  The only ones who stuck around seemed really predatory to me.

Pot seemed to be the solution to all my problems when I started.  I have clinical depression, paranoid schizophrenia (I started hallucinating around the time I became addicted), and PTSD.  I blew off the hallucinations, delusions and paranoia as being part of the high.  I really thought I needed marijuana for the depression which I'd been suffering incessantly from for 20+ years with lots of suicidal ideation.  It did help for the first hour or so of being high and it was "natural," after all.  If my rastifarian friends saw it as sacred -- that must be so....  And I was sure it was helping with the anger and intrusive thoughts of the PTSD I had from sexual abuse both as a child and an adult.  I was sure that God wanted me to smoke weed.  I did not trust doctors and had tried every "solution" but the medical one for my problems.  I could not drink -- had no tolerance to alcohol -- made me sick all the time.

I was forced to quit smoking marijuana.  I was locked up in jail for trying to burn down one of my abusers houses because I thought God told me to.

I was in jail for a year and a half.  Then I was put in an institution for three years.  I did not have the program until I was released.  I did a few of the steps out of order and it was not all the steps.  However even doing that it helped me a great deal.  The last year of being locked up I was put in the treatment unit of the institution.  Lo and behold my obsession with marijuana disappeared during that time.  It was during my incarceration that I received a bookmark which said "God is love."

I really believe that nowadays.  I think if I love myself and others I will be doing God's will.   Love will see me through as it has been over the years.  In July I will have seven years clean and sober!