Amber Hollingsworth (Put the Shovel Down) argues that recovery from drug or alcohol addiction can be achieved through church or religious participation for some people. She lists five essential recovery elements — community/fellowship; self-reflection; living with integrity; mending relationships; and finding meaning/purpose — and explains how church can provide each, while noting early-recovery medical needs (detox), the need for accountability systems, and the role of mental-health treatment when necessary.
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Can you get sober by going to church? I mean, really, don't you have to go to treatment to get sober or at least work the 12 steps? Well, I'm going to be answering all those questions for you coming up in this video. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and This is a YouTube channel dedicated to helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you can beat it, stay five steps ahead of it, and get your life back on track. If that sounds good to you, consider subscribing and I'll make sure you always have the tools, resources, and information you need to get that done. Okay, back to our topic. Okay, so some of you that have been watching my videos for a while, you probably already know that I'm a multiple pathways kind of gal. In fact, I like to consider myself like a non denominational recovery kind of person. I like all the ways to recovery. My goal is just to help people find the pathway that suits them best. And guess what? Sometimes that pathway is finding recovery through church or through religion. So the simple answer to the question, can you get recovery just from going to church? Is yes, you absolutely can. And hang in there, because at the end, I'm going to tell you a couple of little bonus tips that you're really going to need to understand if this is the pathway that you or your loved one wants to make work. Okay, guys, here's the deal. There are lots of ways to get recovery. You can work the 12 steps. You can go to treatment, you can go to counseling, you can pray about it, and you can get sober for someone else, which is a whole other video coming your way soon. The key here is to find out what are the essential elements, what's the pattern that is pretty much involved in every different pathway that you choose? Maybe some of you have seen my video about reframing the 12 steps or. Or you've seen my video about getting sober in three steps. If you've seen either one of those, then you already know a little bit about my thought process about the essential key elements to recovery. Now, I'm not going to explain each one of those in detail here, but I am going to give you that list so that you can understand and see pretty clearly how you could easily get that from going to church. Okay? Essential element number one is community and fellowship. Guess what? They have that at church. Essential element number two is self reflection. It's taking a deep dive. Look inside yourself to figure out maybe what are those underlying Things that are going on, maybe their insecurities, maybe their anxieties, maybe their irrational beliefs, whatever those are, you've got to identify those and confront those. Now that can happen through counseling. They have a whole process for that in the 12 steps. Or guess what? You know what, when you're sitting in church and you're listening to the preacher preach and they start hitting on something, you're like, oh, yeah, I think that way, or I feel that way, or that's an issue I have that counts. I bet you do a lot of self reflection. At least if you're listening, you're probably getting a lot of self reflection going on. So, yes, you can get that component through going to church. Okay, the next essential element of recovery is learning to live your life with integrity. And the reason why that's so important to recovery and staying sober is because when you live your life in alignment with your value system, you like yourself. And when you like yourself, then your brain chemistry gets better and all of those things become a shield to make you a lot less vulnerable to addiction. Okay, number four essential component here is mending of your relationships. In pretty much every religion, I know there's some guidelines around how you treat people and how you interact with people. And of course, I don't know everything about every religion, but definitely don't want to pretend I do. But from what I know about it, it usually involved treating people nicely. So if you can live like that, most of your relationships are going to naturally fall into place. And lastly, that last key element to finding recovery that yes, you can get in church is finding a higher sense of meaning and purpose. I mean, what better way to do that than finding that in church, that sense of higher meaning and purpose to your life? Because it's really that that's going to keep you solid. Really hard days where you just want to use where everything is going wrong. If you've got something more important than yourself that you're striving for, that is going to hold you solid. Here are some little caveats to what I just told you. In early recovery, when you're dealing especially with the biological processes, meaning actually getting clean and sober, like the detox part, sometimes you might need a little help with that. So especially if you're addicted to alcohol or benzos or something like that, you may have to get some medical help to actually stop using the drug safely. So that may be something that you have to add into your recovery program at the very beginning, just to get stabilized and get your feet underneath you. And a second thing that people in very early recovery often need is some kind of system of accountability. So you may have to work to set that up for yourself. Especially if you're not going to treatment where you're being regularly drug tested or breathalyzed. You may have to create a system like that for yourself, but that definitely can be done between you, your family, your friends, your church supports. You can definitely set those systems of accountability up. And the last little bonus thing that I really want you to think about here is if there is some sort of serious underlying mental health issue, you're probably going to need a little additional support to work through that. That may mean counseling or medications to keep that mental health issue stabilized, which is going to help you, of course, stay clean and sober. But can you find recovery at church? You absolutely can. You just need to make sure you get all those key components that we talked about lined up. And wherever you can do that, you can find recovery. Okay, good. Now that we got that issue all straightened out, I want you to watch this video next. It's all about challenging the irrational beliefs that could be keeping you stuck or causing you to relapse. I'm going to put it right up here so you can watch it next.
