For many years, people struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction were often viewed primarily as weak, irresponsible, or lacking in character. The answer was supposed to be simple: stop drinking, stop using, exercise more willpower, and straighten up your life.
If it were that simple, addiction treatment would hardly be necessary.
After more than four decades of working with addicted people and their families, I have learned that addiction is far more complicated. It affects the brain, the body, emotions, relationships, judgment, and spiritual life. It can take hold of people who desperately want to stop and yet find themselves returning again and again to the very substance that is destroying them.
Modern medicine recognizes addiction as a chronic, treatable condition involving significant changes in brain function and behavior.
Understanding addiction this way does not remove personal responsibility.
That distinction is important.
A person remains responsible for choices, for honesty, for participating in treatment, for making amends where possible, and for doing the work recovery requires. But responsibility is very different from condemnation.
We can take addiction seriously as a medical and psychological disorder while still calling the person toward responsibility, change, and a different way of living.
What gives his life meaning?
And what will recovery require when he leaves treatment and goes home?
The addiction is enormously important.
But the person is larger than the addiction.
Withdrawal Is Real
Physical dependence provides one of the clearest examples that addiction is not merely a matter of attitude.
When a person becomes physically dependent upon certain substances and suddenly stops, the body reacts.
Opioid withdrawal can involve severe discomfort, nausea, diarrhea, insomnia, restlessness, muscle aches, anxiety, and intense craving.
Withdrawal from alcohol or benzodiazepines can sometimes become medically dangerous and may require supervised detoxification.
These symptoms are not evidence of weak character.
They are physiological responses.
Fortunately, modern addiction medicine has greatly improved our ability to manage withdrawal and, in some cases, to support continuing recovery. Medications such as buprenorphine may be appropriate for some people with opioid use disorder. Other medications are available for alcohol and opioid problems as well.
Those decisions belong in the hands of qualified medical professionals.
Christian faith and competent medicine do not have to compete with one another.
I have always believed there is room for both.
Addiction and Other Psychiatric Problems
Another reality deserves attention.
Addiction does not always travel alone.
Depression, anxiety, trauma-related problems, attention disorders, bipolar illness, and other psychiatric conditions may exist alongside alcoholism or drug addiction.
Sometimes these problems existed before the substance use became severe. Sometimes prolonged alcohol or drug use creates symptoms that look psychiatric. Often the relationship is complicated.
That is why careful assessment matters.
Treating the addiction while ignoring significant underlying psychiatric or emotional problems can leave an important part of the person untreated.
At Eternal Awakenings, we have long been sensitive to these co-occurring problems. We believe good treatment must be willing to look beneath the surface rather than assuming every difficulty will disappear simply because the alcohol or drugs are gone.
Treatment Must Address the Whole Person
Addiction affects the whole person.
Treatment should do the same.
At Eternal Awakenings, our approach brings together Christian faith, group and individual counseling, recovery education, community support, family involvement, physical activity, and access to medical and psychiatric care when needed.
We are interested not only in whether someone stops drinking or using drugs.
We are interested in what kind of life begins taking shape afterward.
Recovery may involve healing old wounds.
It may mean treating depression or trauma.
It may require rebuilding a marriage or learning to become trustworthy again.
It may mean discovering how to live with uncomfortable emotions instead of escaping them.
It may involve making peace with a past that cannot be changed.
And for many of the people who come to us, recovery also involves rediscovering a relationship with God that addiction had pushed far into the background.
Disease Does Not Mean Hopelessness
There is one final point that may be the most important.
Calling addiction a disease should never become another way of saying that someone is permanently damaged or powerless to change.
People recover.
I have watched it happen for decades.
I have seen people arrive frightened, ashamed, physically sick, estranged from their families, and convinced that they had destroyed everything worth saving.
Then something begins to change.
Their thinking clears.
Their bodies grow stronger.
They begin telling the truth.
Relationships slowly mend.
Someone believes in them before they are quite capable of believing in themselves.
Faith sometimes begins to awaken again.
Recovery does not erase the past.
But the past does not have to dictate the future.
The addicted person is still a person—with dignity, responsibility, possibilities, and a life that may yet be restored.
That is why we treat addiction seriously.
And that is why we continue to believe in recovery.