FAITH BASED REHAB FOR ADDICTION RECOVERY
Faith Based Treatment
Discover peace of mind and lasting recovery through faith and spirituality in our faith-based substance abuse and recovery program.
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If you’re a person of faith and you struggle with addiction, it’s okay. There is hope and healing available to you. Maybe you’ve been serious about your faith for a long time, or maybe you’ve let your faith slide for too long. Whatever the case, you’re no longer in control of your body now that you have an addiction.
The Bible says your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and that you are to honor God with your body (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). You wish you could just pray the addiction away, but you’ve tried, which doesn’t work. You want to integrate your belief system into your recovery, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s a space for that in traditional therapy.
What is Faith-Based Rehab?
Faith-based rehab integrates your faith and belief system into your addiction treatment to unlock the healing power of spirituality.
Faith-based rehab can be used to treat:
- Mental health disorders
- Eating disorders
- Substance abuse disorders
- Alcoholism
- Sexual addictions
- Gambling addictions
For those who are serious about integrating their faith with treatment, their faith is utterly foundational to who they are as a person today and who they want to be in the future.
By nature, faith recognizes the existence of a higher power. We know there is a God, and we know we aren’t it. One way we can enter into a relationship with that higher power is through prayer, meditation, or group chanting.
Prayer is vulnerable. It’s an act of intimate disclosure to the highest power in the universe. By praying, we are admitting our powerlessness over our addictions and believing that God can give us the strength to walk in sobriety.
Meditation is mindful. It’s putting all of our anxieties on hold while we focus on the present moment we inhabit. While anxiety sometimes can trigger an addiction relapse, in which the connection between spirit and body is broken, practices like yoga can heal the connection.
Faith-Based Substance Abuse Programs at Recovery Unplugged
Recovery Unplugged wants to tend to your emotional, physical, and spiritual needs. They use evidence-based treatments combined with innovative musical practices to promote healing from addiction.
For spiritual recovery, they use licensed therapists who will use Scripture recitation, group sessions, individual sessions, prayer, and engagement with spiritual music to empower your recovery.
Virtual sessions last 6-10 weeks and they accept most major insurance providers. You can connect from wherever you are.
How (and Why) Faith Based Recovery Programs Work
Far from being unproven, faith-based rehab is an evidence-based therapy that is associated with high levels of post-treatment abstinence.[1] Rather than existing as a standalone treatment therapy, faith-based rehab is powerful when combined with different treatment modalities such as medication-assisted treatment and psychotherapy.
In one comprehensive literature assessment, 84% of scientific studies concluded that faith is a positive factor in addiction recovery.[2] This same assessment found that the proliferation of volunteer faith-based support groups for addiction recovery saved US taxpayers $316.6 billion annually.[3]
Faith is a source of strength for many of us. Sometimes, when life is hard, all we have to cling to is our faith in something more powerful and more significant than ourselves. A full 33% of all Americans identify as “spiritual” rather than “religious” compared with just 18.5% .[4]
Traditional Therapy vs. Faith-Based Therapy
The difference between traditional behavioral therapy, Christian therapy, and faith-based therapy is nuanced:
Traditional Therapy
For traditional behavioral rehab therapy like CBT, the primary focus of the therapist is to teach the client to identify, challenge, and replace unhealthy thought patterns and coping strategies with healthier ones.
The tools used in traditional CBT can include Socratic Q&A, session homework, collaboration, clear agenda-setting, requesting and responding to client feedback, affirming the client’s feelings, guided discovery, and identifying difficulties in the client/therapist relationship.[5]
The relationship between patient and therapist is secondary to the purpose of the therapy: Identifying, challenging, and replacing unhealthy thought patterns and behavior with healthier ones.
Faith-Based Therapy
Compared to traditional therapy, faith-based therapy uses the client’s own spirituality as both the major foundation and justification to identify, challenge, and replace unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.[6]
For instance, in Christian faith-based therapy, the Christian therapist models to the patient the relationship God wants with his people: Full disclosure, vulnerability, and intimacy. Once the model relationship has been established, the therapist can begin to work on building healthier thought patterns and coping strategies to change behavior.
Faith-based therapy clients reported more frequent positive experiences than their secular counterparts when the therapist assumed a strong role-model role.[7] The relationship between the therapist and client plays a more primary role than in secular therapy.
Bible Studies
Bible studies are when groups of Christians gather to read and recite the Word of God.
The purpose of a Bible study is to enrich the lives of others and, in turn, to be enriched. This enrichment should manifest itself in a life displaying the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
Bible stories and characters will be brought to life, and comparisons drawn between similar situations we face today.
Group and Individual Prayer
Prayer is how we connect with God–the highest, most significant power in the universe. Just like talking with your therapist, prayer involves vulnerable disclosure. It necessitates being honest and humble about our shortcomings.
Prayer can also help turn your mind off the beaten tracks it can get stuck on and instead contemplate the person of God. Rather than engaging in unhealthy thought patterns, a posture of prayer removes the focus of your thoughts from who you are and redirects it to who God is.
You may intercede on behalf of others, thank God for what He’s already done in your life, or praise God.
Faith-Based 12-Step Programs
12-step programs are grounded in spirituality.
Invented in the 1930s after a chance meeting between recovering alcoholics, 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous still very much rely on faith in a higher power to work. Millions of people have been through all 12 steps to manage their addiction.
They are volunteer-based and exist all across the United States in both large and small cities. These programs provide a good structure to outpatient and aftercare addiction recovery programs.
Engagement With Spiritual Music
Music can open up newer, healthier ways of thinking and inspire us to hope for a better future.
Certain neurons in your brain only respond to the sound of music with singing. For hundreds of years, spiritual music such as hymns has helped people through all sorts of personal dilemmas, disasters, and horrible situations.[8]
We can be so encouraged by hymns because the people writing the hymns often experienced similar hardships or tragedies as we have.
Yoga
While yoga has numerous physical benefits, such as stress management, better mental health, weight loss, and even analgesia, it is also an exercise of mindfulness. Mindfulness helps repair the connection between spirit and body broken by addiction.[9] Yogic breathing even affects your cerebrospinal fluid dynamics.[10]
What a Faith-Based Rehab Offers:
A faith-based rehab offers the potential to integrate your faith into every aspect of your treatment. Oftentimes, the most powerful part of integrating your faith into addiction recovery is benefitting from the presence of a tight-knit, supportive community.
Getting embedded inside a group of faithful people all pursuing addiction recovery is both inspiring and encouraging. Some different treatment programs that might be offered when looking for “faith-based rehab near me” include:
- Detox With Medication-Assisted Treatment
- Residential Treatment
- Intensive Outpatient
- Outpatient
- Partial Hospitalization Program
- Music-Assisted Treatment
- Family Program
Types of Spiritual Recovery Options:
Many different organizations exist to aid in addiction recovery. There are many different kinds of faith-based recovery programs out there that can tend to your emotional, physical, and spiritual needs. Some are targeted at Christians, while others are targeted at other religions. Here are several:
Celebrate Recovery (CR)
“Celebrate Recovery” is an incredibly popular ministry addiction recovery program that has been hosted at over 37,000 churches worldwide since 1991. Millions of people have graduated from the program, and the founding church reported that over 70% of Celebrate Recovery participants came from outside the church.
Hosting churches provides community and a biblically balanced way to pursue sustainable recovery.
Adult & Teen Challenge USA (ATC)
This non-profit program equips churches with bible study and discipleship curriculums to help their members navigate and recover from addictions.
There are nearly 250 centers in 48 different states and 1000 centers in 95 different countries.
Jewish Addiction Awareness Network (JAAN)
This program connects and refers Jewish communities, congregations, organizations, individuals, and families across the United States to high-quality information about addiction recovery.
The main purpose of JAAN is to increase awareness of substance abuse and addiction in the Jewish community. They use workshops, educational events, and creative Shabbat services to raise awareness of the dangers of addiction.
Catholics in Recovery
This is a 12-step program targeted at Catholics experiencing addiction. While 12-step programs were invented by Protestants, this program takes a distinctly sacramental approach to addiction recovery. They offer both in-person and virtual meetings.
Refuge Recovery
Founded by a Buddhist teacher, this program takes a non-theistic approach to spiritual recovery. While the existence of the spiritual is foundational, no one is asked to believe in anything particular but to trust the recovery process and put in the hard work.
Sources
[1] Yeung, J. W. K. (2022). Faith-based intervention, change of religiosity, and abstinence of substance addicts. Revista brasileira de psiquiatria (Sao Paulo, Brazil : 1999). //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8827378/
[2][3] Grim, B. J., & Grim, M. E. (2019, October). Belief, behavior, and belonging: How faith is indispensable in preventing and recovering from substance abuse. Journal of religion and health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6759672/
[4] Americans Turning Backs on Organized Religion. More Americans Turn Their Backs on Organized Religion | NORC at the University of Chicago. (n.d.). https://www.norc.org/research/library/more-americans-turn-their-backs-on-organized-religion.html/p>
[5][6] Pearce, M. J., Koenig, H. G., Robins, C. J., Nelson, B., Shaw, S. F., Cohen, H. J., & King, M. B. (2015b, March). Religiously integrated cognitive behavioral therapy: A new method of treatment for major depression in patients with chronic medical illness. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457450/
[7] Cook, L., Humphreys, B., & Stallard, J. (n.d.). The effects of faith-based therapy versus secular therapy. Cedarville University School of Nursing. https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1284&context=research_scholarship_symposium
[8] Norman-Haignere SV;Feather J;Boebinger D;Brunner P;Ritaccio A;McDermott JH;Schalk G;Kanwisher N; (n.d.). A neural population selective for song in human auditory cortex. CB. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35196507/
[9] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2022a, July 21). Yoga for Health. National Institutes of Health. https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2019/11/yoga-health
[10] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Yogic Breathing Affects Cerebrospinal Fluid Dynamics During Breathing Practice. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. https://www.nccih.nih.gov/research/research-results/yogic-breathing-affects-cerebrospinal-fluid-dynamics-during-breathing-practice