Can you answer voodooprankster’s question about Addiction?:

“Defining drug abuse ass a disease ensures humane treatment and removes the moral implidcation and the guilt that surrounds it.” - Disability Handbook, Department of Rehabilitation Education & Research, University of Arkansas, Two Thousand Four Edition, Ed. Jason D. Andrew.

Defining, instead of proving? Where is the choice supposed to be in the equation of addiction? Isn’t the disease a cop out?

Inpatient Drug Rehabilitation

spirituality or being spiritual have to do with having an addiction? Are addictions really a spiritual manifestation outside of our control, or are they a free choice made by ego in our physical life?

A trip to my step son’s treatment facility has opened my eyes to a program that treats addictions spiritually. It’s called the ConRoy Treatment Program. It’s a holistic treatment program for addictions which treats the addicts holistically-mind, body, and spirit. The ConRoy Program is not a religious based program, but a spiritual one, and uses the natural resources of the human body and psyche to treat addictions.

Any dependency on a physical object or event can be regarded as an addiction. Addictions are not totally uncontrollable; if they were, no one would ever overcome them. If they are controllable, then that means there is intelligence behind it. Intelligence is the ability to reason and all things physical are reasoned at some level of consciousness. All human experience is created or manifested as a thought first.

Illness and accidents happen through reason and they are not random events executed by chance or by an act of God or the Devil-if they exist in your thoughts-they are created by you. Illness is a direct physical response to something that is not working in your life-this one or a previous one. Just as good health is a physical response to living a life that is working for you. Illness is invited into your life by you at some level of your consciousness. The illness is cured in part or in whole with the awareness of why you got the illness in the first place. Terminal cancer is cured when you discover the reason for it. Cancer is a thought manifested into your experience by your own mind. The permanent cure for cancer will come when the reason for it has been addressed by your thoughts. This may sound cruel, but nothing in the physical world can exist without first being preceded by a thought.

Addiction is an illness and it is manifested by a thought whether it is hereditary or a byproduct of your own conscious choices. The ConRoy program brings this awareness to its clients. It is successful because it treats the roots of illness not its symptoms.

Lying on a basement floor very near death, my step son was rescued and put into treatment. He not only recovered but bounced back and used his experience to help others. His lectures, interviews and job related experiences led him to start his own program and treatment centre for men. His passion for the ConRoy Program and Holistic treatments has benefited many. Life’s greatest experiences come from personal knowledge and the willingness to share those with others. For those with addictions there is a greater need to find themselves; to discover their spirituality. They are driven to discover their purpose-to rediscover life and their connections to others even at the risk of their own life. If the addiction doesn’t kill them, many become models for others and move on to greater experiences. Many will look back to their addictions and the experience and are grateful for where it has brought them. They view life differently and from a unique perspective that is alien to most of us and fortunately never experienced.

Ever human being suffers from some form of addiction. In fact the number one addiction in the world today is television according to some researchers. Addictions are desired by the ego. Ego will hang onto anything that reinforces its identity. Ego always fears for its own survival, so addiction is a natural for it, because it identifies so closely with it. Addiction is a bond ego will fight to maintain.

Permanent recover from addiction really comes from the will of spirit to move to its natural state of existence, which is freedom. Addiction is an end to life, and the natural state of spirit is to move on-to experience life in all its aspects. Life is movement-addiction is a small box; a pine box. Addiction leads its victim in an endless circle disguised as life. Addiction programs often fail because they do not address the true nature of spirit. Addiction programs which are religious based just lead the addicted into another addiction-this is not true recovery. Programs which are feared based are just as destructive to the relationship between ego and spirit. Spirit is the power behind all things which we experience or manifest in the physical world. It makes sense to use that knowledge to lead the body into a more natural state of physical being without religious penance or redemption, suffering, fear or dependency on others drugs or programs or beliefs.

No one can judge accurately the root causes for the addictions of another. The individual most likely will not know the reasons

themselves. But once they have let go of ego, the answer comes to them automatically and without prejudice.

Although I am not an advocate of any addiction treatment; the ConRoy program falls within my own knowledge of why people get sick and have accidents. I believe that all of us have the ability to make ourselves sick and experience accidents. It is only natural that we also have the power to correct the thinking that brings them to us. If you accept the responsibility for your illness then you also retain the power to change it. If you do not; you automatically become a victim and have disempowered yourself and have little chance for complete recovery. Either way the choice comes from the unconditional love that is our experience; that was a promise before we came into the physical world. You will always survive, and you will always have freedom of choice.

Thanks to Roy E. Klienwachter for contributing this article to our Addiction blog:

Alcohol Detoxification

Most of us think about drugs when we think about addiction. Gambling and sex have been included as potential addictions. Addiction to food is pretty well known. Addiction is not a thing that people aspire to be. No one thinks they will be an addict. In fact I doubt that anyone but addicts, or addiction specialists, spend a lot of time thinking about addiction at all. The only time it comes up is when it’s unavoidable. Like you are confronted with it in the workplace, with family or friends. Then it is always an unwanted ordeal and most will walk away from the situation if they can. It’s not hard to figure out why. It’s uncomfortable dealing with a problem like addiction. It’s very confusing and frustrating. It seems so obvious to the person who doesn’t share the addiction that the answer is simple. Just stop doing what you’re doing. It’s that simple right?

Let’s look at a nuance of addiction that has recently come to the awareness of at least a few. There was a study done in which a person with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was given a certain drug. This drug would have little or no effect on the person without the disorder but to the person with the disorder it set off a PTSD type episode. What does this mean? That the PTSD brain is different from the non PTSD brain. What does that tell us? What is PTSD? A syndrome brought about by traumatic stress. The significance is in the brain itself. The usual trigger of the traumatic event was not present. But the episode took place. Why? The brain chemistry has been altered by traumatic stress. So how would we, now, define traumatic stress? Any traumatic event that caused an alteration in brain chemistry? We’d pretty much have to - knowing what we now know. So what does this mean to the world population. What does this new knowledge tell us about our brains?

Good Doctors will tell you that stress is the number one factor in health problems. Trauma alters brain chemistry. This is significant if we understand that the brain is a electro-chemical machine. That’s really all we know about the brain. When the machine is altered what can we expect?

That’s gonna take a while. But lets say, for sure, any number of processes will be affected. What I want to talk about here is how this plays out in the world of addiction. Dr. M. Scott Peck has long said that all addicted people suffer from the real or imagined effects of abandonment. There are what appears to be abandonment issues present in addicts. However many have never experienced what we would commonly classify as abandonment. If one were to classify abandonment where would we place it? What column would it be in? How about trauma? That’s what it is a isn’t it? A form of trauma. A child who has been abandoned, faced with abandonment, has a stress induced episode. The thought of further trauma sets off the chemical event that results in fear. This is exactly the same process that occurs in the brain with PTSD. Trauma is always associated with fear. Likewise, stress is always associated with fear.

Fear could be considered the opposite of happiness. Security is a quality of happiness for a child. It doesn’t really change as the child grows. Ideas about security change but not the need for security. One can realize that “we will live out our lives amidst a host of nutty people and their nutty ideas and then we grow old and die and move on to different worlds” and feel secure in the knowledge that this small span of time isn’t all that important. One could. How many do? How many don’t? Long term insecurity is traumatic. One of the main factors in insecurity is confusion. Being confused brings on the fear type event. Staying confused for a long time, living in the fear that insecurity brings, must alter the brains chemistry. It has to - since it is traumatic. We already know that trauma changes brain chemistry. What we aren’t settled on is the definition of trauma. I am suggesting that there is enough constant underlying stress in our everyday lives to induce a PTSD type condition in an ever increasing percent of the population of, at least, the United States.

The result of this doesn’t produce a majority of well known addictions. But what is an addiction? Don’t people become addicted to acts or substances that relieve there unwanted conditions (feelings)? The biggest addiction people suffer from today is not drugs or sex or gambling. It’s an addiction to things. Most people are addicted to things. Peoples brains have been altered from the stress and confusion of everyday life in a nutty society. Insecurity messes with the chemical balance of the brain. Constant strain, pressure, stress and fear of failure permanently alters the brain. The most dire result being the inability to think clearly. Add to this a severe case of nation wide malnutrition and you wind up with a population of stressed out, scatterbrained, frightened, addicted people. There is a lot of evidence that says this - stressed out malnourished society - has been intentionally created. But that’s another topic.

When the average person suffers from this trauma induced syndrome most of them seek solace in some level of societal success. They do this because they are told to. By priests and teachers and congressman. Parents, Pastors and professors. Gurus, Life coaches and Motivational speakers. All saying we just need to understand how to manifest wealth and success from our society. Take what society has to offer and make happiness from it. Make something of yourself. That’s just a lie. Anyone who says this is just as delusional as the person seeking answers. The teachers are traumatized, same as the, would be, student. You cannot make something out of nothing. You can not whip up a batch of happiness out of insanity. First we must understand and recognize happiness and sanity. Is society, our society, sane? Is it happy? Is happiness something you can find? That would mean it is a thing that is in a place. Right? Then what does the pursuit of happiness mean? Is it even a sane statement?

The answer to all this addiction and unhappiness is to remove trauma. For all of us over the age of four or five it’s to late to undo the memories. The resulting ideas are racing through our heads all the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn to be different. Like a drug addict we have at our disposal ways of changing ourselves. But, like the drug addict we must recognize the problem. We have to admit we have a problem and the chances of fixing it ourselves, with our current understanding, is pretty much non existent. We also need to accept that if we don’t fess up and become willing to “go to any length” to get better, our lives will only get worse.

So where is all this trauma coming from? People. There are only two places that things come from on this planet: nature and people. Nature does not induce the type of trauma that drives us crazy. People and their ideas cause the conditions for trauma. People think up war, society, god, creation stories, right and wrong, rules, laws, all the “isms” one can imagine. Traumatized brains create traumatic environments and it just keeps growing and getting weirder and the trauma gets embedded in the psyche of the society and passed on through generations until we wind up in what we see today. A traumatic environment. Throw in the overall toxicity of the food and drug companies and no one is not effected. The healthiest happiest people on the planet have nothing to do with us. They have had little or no contact with us and don’t pay any attention to us. To them we are a kind of sickness. If we decide to get healthy we must become their students. We can not pretend to be OK any longer. We cannot pretend to be sane people. At this stage pretending is also traumatizing. When you start to look closely at us and our society it’s all traumatizing. We have little in our lives that is not traumatizing. Children are sent to school and told to be still. That’s traumatizing. Usually not enough to destroy the brains ability to function but that’s just the beginning. If they don’t obey orders they are drugged. For they’re own good. That is a move into the deeper waters of insanity. They are forced to participate in the continuance of a insane society. To find “happiness” through achievement. By this time the stage is set for a complete breakdown of the mental system. The break is complete when subservience is accomplished. There is at this point no person left. A program has been installed and that’s what most people operate on. To get off the program is to get outside the machine and there isn’t anything left out there. The machine has encompassed the globe. It has rid itself of most indigenous people and there ideas. It has buried, destroyed and hidden the history of the world. It has criminalized words and ideas like conspiracy, rebellion and independence. All natural occurrences are being eliminated. We have become trauma. We are fear. There is nothing to do but stop.

The first thing all addicts do on the road to sanity, and the restoration of their minds and lives, is stop. The symptom is arrested. What is the symptom of our global addiction? Stuff. Smiles, acceptance, medals, money, houses, cars, fame, people…Just a long list of things. An addiction to things is the result of an excellently executed campaign to control the minds of the masses. We live in pursuit of these things because we are conditioned to associate happiness with them. Even if we deny it, and quote from other books, we obsess. Even in our dreams we strive for the things we don’t have or can’t get. What don’t we have? The road out of the woods may be long. But the first step is simple. Stop. Know that we are being lied to - and Stop.



Thanks to Doug Wilson for contributing this article to our Addiction blog:

Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment