The Spiritual Platform

The first pillar is choice. Choice is the very foundation of an individual’s personal potency and provides individuals with the opportunity to reclaim their internalized sense of competence that alcohol or drug abuse or dependency has taken away. The importance of choosing is more important than the consequences of choosing. Our awareness of the choices that we are making is important as it affirms our aliveness and our potency as human beings, as well as challenges shame.

We all know that we make choices, and in fact we make hundreds if not thousands of choices each day.  Of interest, however, is the energy that we put into denying the reality of these choices.  How often during each day, do we find ourselves blaming our behavioral decisions or our emotional choices on other people or situations? Phrases such as “he made me do it, “she makes me angry,” that pushes my button” are all too common examples of our denials of choice. Choice is the cornerstone of our freedom and personal power. While situations or people may seem to limit our choices, we always have alternative responses to any given event. The recognition that we are choosing gives our lives greater energy. Even if our choices are less than productive, we can at least celebrate the process of making them and our own ownership of that process.  Such an ownership of the process of choosing fills the individual with a personalized sense of power that directly challenges the too often accepted notion that we ae merely pawns pushed around by the whims of chance. It is the sensitivity to the process of choice that is the first pillar of spirituality.

The second pillar of the Spiritual Platform™ is risk. In order to grow intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually clients take growth-producing risks. They intentionally move beyond their own self-limiting messages and the chemical bonds that cloud their growth and compromise the future. 

 The Spiritual Platform™ helps one with a substance use disorder do what they are already good at doing: growing through risk. Each time one takes the risk, whether it is in a 12 Step group, managing a child’s behavior, or engaging in an altruistic task, they expand their personal horizons and engage with the change process. It is through this consistent practicing of risk that one in treatment can define their own personal expansion and growth. Carefully consider risk taking is essential growth producing. Personal growth occurs when we make the conscious make the conscious choice to open themselves up to change and become vulnerable.

The third pillar of the Spiritual Platform™ is relationships. Clients are given the opportunity to redefine personal boundaries, which opens up the capacity for the development of more healthy relationships and, as needed, re-learn their early assumptions about attachment relationships. Clients learn to define and experience relationship through the interdependency between two well-defined separate individuals, whether these are friends or family. The relating is connecting and life-sustaining and the ultimate outcome of heh relationship.

The final supportive pillar of spirituality is expressed through our encounter with wonder and awe.  As a species, we place fair stock in our ability to make sense of our world.  When faced with realities beyond our understanding, we as individuals and collectively as communities invent myths to help explain the unexplainable.  Even given these artificial constructs, life in its variety often provides us with events or coincidences, which stretch beyond our understanding.  During these times of cognitive expansion we encounter awe and experience wonder.