Recovery and Religion

Last night at our Families Anonymous meeting a newcomer whose husband is addicted to prescription painkillers asked how she, as a Christian, was to reconcile our FA approach to this illness with her belief in the importance of helping others. It is an excellent question and one that many Christians and other "religious" people struggle with initially because of the appearance that FA and other 12-step groups promote a cold, uncaring attitude towards those who are abusing drugs, alcohol, and their loved ones. This is actually not the case as anyone who has worked a co-dependency recovery program for a while will tell you. What we gradually discover is that our understanding of what being helpful is changes as we start to address the ways that the disease has affected our thinking and behaving. In co-dependent relationships the boundaries between individuals almost always get blurred and we find it hard to know where we end and the drug-abusing person begins. This is often expressed in the funny but painfully true statement: you know that you are co-dependent when you say, "I'm cold. Would you please put a sweater on?"

One of the things I struggled with when I first started working on my own recovery was my misperceptions about my own Christian faith. I believe that in some respects, too much emphasis on behaving "nicely" or being "helpful" happens at the expense of honest and healthy communication. Often, in Christian and other religious groups this emphasis on good behavior can get in the way of the real work of personal transformation that is the real stuff of religion and of 12-step groups. The genius of 12-step programs is that our work is done in an anonymous setting where the often sordid details of our lives remain confidential and we gradually overcome the fears that most of us have of others seeing us as we truly are. Unfortunately the opposite often happens in religious groups. Even if we start a faith life well it is easy to fall into the habit of wanting to be seen or perceived a certain way by those around us. In the process we can become dishonest or at the very least lack a certain kind of transparency to those we live or worship with. Sadly I have seen this happen too often, most recently with a Christian man I knew for years, a social worker, whose "secret" life of sexually abusing his patients came to light and landed him in prison. Obviously many of his family members and friends were shocked when this was exposed on the front page of the Ann Arbor News earlier this year.

Ron Harrison, a local recovery specialist, says that parents and other family members have to unlearn or learn to stop doing the things that we most naturally do for our loved ones when it comes to dealing with a drug-abusing family member. Because of the nature of this disease and the way it affects us, those helpful or protective things that we most naturally do are almost always the very things that get in the way of an abuser's recovery because they enable that person to continue to abuse the people who love him or her the most. Getting some healthy distance from the abuser is essential for family members who often forget their own needs and get caught in the downward spiral of someone else's disease. The belief that this is somehow a worthy or expected or noble sacrifice on the part of a parent, a spouse, a sibling, or of a Christian in particular couldn't be further from the truth in my opinion. Real sacrificial love never disregards or minimizes our own value as a person but chooses to act in a way that tangibly expresses our appreciation for being part of a community and that there is more to life than living just for ourselves. It also challenges those we love to grow up, to take responsibility for their own lives, and to see that they have something of value to contribute to the commonwealth. We often say that to be of real help to others we must first help ourselves and that we simply cannot give away what we do not have. May God help us all to understand and to do this a little bit more today.