Overcoming Addiction – A Multifaceted Christian Approach
June 2, 2009
Addictions: A Multifaceted Christian Approach
By: Mark R. Laaser & George Ohlschlager
…addicts can’t change their behaviors without help from God and wise counsel. None of us can find sufficient relief from pain without help. To expect something different from the… addict is to heap more shame on [them] and encourage Christians to respond to tough issues with simplistic solutions… We learn that we can make it if we just try harder and believe that those who haven’t made it didn’t try hard enough. But believing in ourselves and the fruit of our efforts works against the fact that we are sinful and can escape sinful behaviors only with God’s help. – Harry Schaumburg
Howard Hillman was a well-off executive consultant living with his second wife and her children in a tony suburb on the north Chicago shore. He was also an alcoholic who lived in denial of it due to his fairly competent functioning (which he grossly exaggerated).
His wholesome and successful veneer started to crack, however, after his second DUI in which he lost his license and had to hire his step-son to chauffer him around. He also had to engage in counseling in order to clear his record and get his license back, and was required to take a routine drug screen following his counseling intake. It was then that Howard’s even more secret addictions to oxycontin—which he had taken two years previous due to a severe back sprain—and to internet sexual pornography was discovered.
Now it all made sense to his wife. Howard had been cutting back on his drinking—she knew that as they had been fighting about it—but she didn’t understand why he slept in a stuporous state so much, had so many ‘minor’ accidents around the house, and no longer seemed to be interested in having sex with her. He was mixing alcohol with narcotics and internet sex! Worst of all, he had become a very accomplished liar.
It was then that it came out that Howard had been in a drunken car accident six months earlier, and had just paid cash to ‘persuade’ the other party to get their car fixed and keep quiet. His finances weren’t in good shape either, as he was buying his oxycontin on the black market, paying huge credit card bills for internet sex, and his consulting business was starting to slip.
For weeks Howard vacillated between anger at being found out, fear of losing his marriage, depression at facing reality, and shedding both real and crocodile tears as he promised over and over to “get sober” and turn his life around. The addictions group he was part of would hear none of it, as they confronted his lies, denial, and avoidance of the truth for weeks.
His counselor knew he was finally ready to get serious about change when he came to group one night and admitted to everyone there that he couldn’t change, that he really didn’t want to, but that he knew he had to if he was going to live.
Addictions are a very common scourge, the desperate expression of life in a sin-sick world. When addictions are piled on top of one another, or are mixed with mental illness, the suffering is multiplied and the cure is complex, difficult to accurately assess and easily achieve. Medicating the pain and symptoms of psychopathology—whether done under a doctor’s treatment or illicitly—is a primary pathway to addiction for many dual-disordered patients.
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