I am grateful for all the relationships I have had with alcoholics.

They’ve often been painful but… always, the connection has left me with an appreciation for the complexities of human character, and an awareness of the fear some sensitive people feel. It’s as though they think life isn’t good enough undistorted. Life is raw and frightening or lousy. Or even too beautiful. So they get high to tone it up or down.

Among the best experts on why motivated addicts sometimes still relapse is a man named Terence Gorski. I heard him lecture on codependent relationships many years ago, and in hopes of connecting you to his work, I located a gorgeous paper online on the subject of spirituality and relapse. This paper is (to use an old hippie term) mind-blowing. Filled with fresh thinking, it’s another goodie to print out and study in bed tonight with your highlighting pen and hot water bottle. You’ll come away with an enhanced understanding of why addiction is a spiritual quandary.

Some excerpts:

Many recovering people have a mixed spiritual system. In the mystical sense, they seek to develop a personal relationship with the God of their understanding and pray to discover what God’s will is for them. In a non-mystical sense, they actively work at psychological growth. They believe this mixture of the mystical and non-mystical captures the principle of “turning it over, but doing the leg work…”

Extreme and rigid views of spirituality can result in relapse. Many people relapse because they believe that the mystical god of their understanding will somehow magically save them from their problems. They abdicate personal responsibility and expect God to take care of everything. When God doesn’t, they sink into a deep existential depression and say, “Since God won’t fix my life, I might as well get drunk.”

…An example of this is the man who turned $60,000 worth of debt incurred from his cocaine addiction over to his higher power. He was absolutely shocked when his higher power turned his debts over to a collection agency.

…This is the paradox of recovery. We cannot do it alone, but yet we must do it by ourselves. We cannot expect God or a higher power to do what we are able to do for ourselves, but yet we cannot do it for ourselves without somehow touching a source of courage and strength that exceeds our own abilities. And here seems to be the ultimate spiritual principle that allows alcoholics to avoid relapse and move ahead in recovery. It is a philosophy of balance.