Taking into consideration a person’s body or physical condition is very important when considering the nature and treatment of an alcoholic, or a drug addict. While a solution will be gotten through the spiritual plane, it is absolutely necessary for an individual’s brain to be free or clear from alcohol. A person will have a better chance of understanding the conversation of recovery if his or her brain is free from alcohol. Detoxing from alcohol is one of the initial steps for the space for recovery to be created.
After the process of detoxing from alcohol is completed, a solution can begin to be created. This solution will require that if the individual’s life is to be recreated that he or she must have their ideals “grounded in a power greater than themselves.” This power greater than themselves is God.
Part of the solution involves altruistic effort on the part of the individual, a difficult tast to say the least. Doing for others with no thought or hope of getting anything back in return is fundamental to the process of recovery.
It is important to take a look at the sober state. Sober an alcoholic feels restless, irritable and discontented. To feel normal again, that individual believes that he or she must drink. Drinking lets the alcoholic feel a sense of ease and comfort, something that was missing in the sober state.
Once an alcoholic starts to drink and the cravings develop the individual passes through the “stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again.” This process will be repeated over and over again unless the individual can have or experience what the Big Book refers to as an “entire psychic change.” If the later does not happen the individual will probably continue to drink and there will be “little hope of his recovery.”
Ultimately this psychic change can not be gotten through human power, through the efforts of another human being. In addition, change can not be created by the individual himself, through mental control. Something more is needed inorder to create that which is necessary to transform or change the alcoholic’s life. This something more is God.
While an individual is working on having or creating an “entire psychic change,” his or her drinking alcohol must stop completely. “The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.”
It appears that there is a connection between alcoholism and depression.
