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 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
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 taken a deep dive look inside yourself to
figure out maybe what are those underlying things that are going on
maybe they're insecurities maybe they're anxieties maybe they're 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
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 and 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 definitely don't want to pretend I do but from what I know about
it it usually have 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 funding a higher sense of meaning and
purpose I mean what better way to do that then 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 on those 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 the
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
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