SWYC 2017: Surrender - Moment by Moment

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GYC Southwest

Workshop: Surrendering Our Addictions

Angeline D. Brauer

Understanding Addictions

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we have come to you after a very powerful morning.

We feel so challenged by the messages that were shared today.

And Lord, it's the afternoon, it's a warm room.

We just had a wonderful lunch and we'd love to take a nap, but Lord you have a special message for us this afternoon and so we really need your spirit to give us strength.

We need your angels, whether human or otherwise, to nudge us if we're falling asleep.

But Lord we really need good clear perception because I believe that there are people in this room who are hurting and who need freedom from addictions and Lord we need to be able to share that hope with everyone that we meet.

Thank you for leading and blessing in this time together.

Vivek Murthy, he was the US Surgeon General last year.

He was challenged by 1 of his nurses when he switched from being a physician in a hospital to working for the US government.

And his challenge from the nurse was, if there is 1 thing that you do, if there is 1 thing that you do, please talk about addictions.

Please, please, please do something about addictions.

And so last year in November, he and his office came out with this report, Facing Addiction in America, the Surgeon General's Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health.

Now, they focused on those major substance addictions that we're all familiar with.

But some of the principles that he shares are applicable across to all addictions.

But this really underscores the importance of this issue in our world today and in our in our own neighborhoods, certainly, perhaps even in our own churches and our own homes.

Here's something of what the report says.

Substance use disorders represent 1 of the most pressing public health crises of our time.

It's an event or a time or a period of just absolute chaos, right?

Where there's desperation to some extent, to a great extent.

We must help everyone see that addiction is not what?

Chronic illness is something that basically you're dealing with for a lifetime when we're talking from a clinical perspective.

Some of the chronic illnesses we hear about are diabetes, heart disease, hypertension.

So they are equating addiction with all of these other health problems.

And we'll see some data that's very interesting as we compare them.

It is a chronic illness that we must approach with the same skill and compassion with which we approach, there we go, heart disease, diabetes, cancer.

When you learn, I'm sure everybody in this room has been touched in some way by cancer.

Someone you know, a friend, a co-worker, a friend's friend, somebody you know has been diagnosed with cancer.

What does your heart do when you hear that?

But why is it when we find out that someone has an addiction, we say, well, why can't they just stop?

Why can't they just get themselves together?

Why do we have this duplicity in our emotional response to individuals facing this chronic illness?

Going on, the report says, recovery has many pathways that should be tailored to the unique cultural values and psychological and behavioral health needs of each individual.

So here they're saying that this problem of addiction, there are cultural issues, there are psychological issues, and behavioral health issues, and that these are specific to each individual.

And these involve a combination of medication, counseling, and social support.

We're going to see social support come up over and over again.

Not because I intentionally did that, but simply that's just what the data shows.

That's what we are seeing is that addiction really to a large extent is a social issue.

Above all, we can never forget that the faces of substance use disorders are real people.

We sometimes look past the person, and we get more concerned about the behavior or what they're doing or not doing.

But we have to remember that these are real people.

They are a beloved family member, a friend, a colleague, and even ourselves.

How we respond to this crisis is a moral test for America.

So he is saying that this is a moral issue for our nation.

So, this is a research study that was published in 2011, so it's a few years ago.

So, you have to think, well, is the problem better?

Right now Intuition will probably tell you that it it's not better.

It is worse So in this research what they did was They looked at 11 different types of addictions and here's another key point for us to look at here.

Now the first few we're going to say, oh yeah, of course you're going to look at that.

We don't have internet here where we are today.

Praise the Lord, we're breaking our addictions.

Anybody testifying of some conviction going on?

So these 11 addictions that they looked at, and what they did was they took a lot of different studies that had been published.

And what they wanted to see is, well, how many people are actually struggling with these addictions in the US?

They found that within a 1 year period, within any given 1 year period, 47% of adults have signs of 1 of these addictions or maybe more.

To make that real, I'm just going to ask everybody from this chair over, if you could all stand up.

That is how many people would be suffering from an addiction.

Now extrapolate this to your church, to your community, to your state, to the country, to the world.

So we mentioned briefly that there are different types of addictions, let's look at this a little bit more.

We do have the substance abuse addictions, and these are again the typical ones that we think of, the tobacco, alcohol, illegal drugs.

By the way, did you know that the Seventh-day Adventist church was premier in promoting the temperance movement?

In fact, we have a passage from Ellen White where she says that we, she even made a political statement.

Now we know we don't mix politics and religion, right?

But she said that if there is a government official running for office who does not promote temperance, you should vote against them.

And she goes on to say this, You should go vote even if it's the Sabbath.

Healing from Addiction

Dear Heavenly Father, we know that you are the great physician.

Lord, we know that you have power to create and to recreate and to renew our lives.

And Lord, as we talk about the process of healing from addictions, we know, Lord, that it may take a lot of surrender, but Father we're willing.

If we're not willing, we ask that you make us willing.

Lord help us to cling to you because you are our life.

We pray that you will continue to be with us and guide our presentation, our thoughts.

Lord may everything come to to have a higher and dearer, more dear understanding of who you are.

I wanna start by sharing a little bit about why this is important to us as a church.

This is from Councils on Health, page 30.

The world is a vast laser house, in other words, a sick house.

But Christ came to heal the sick, to proclaim deliverance to the captives of Satan.

And he turned away none who came to receive his healing power.

He knew that those who petitioned him for help had brought disease upon themselves.

They brought it upon themselves, yet he did not refuse to heal them.

And when virtue from Christ entered into these poor souls, listen what happened.

They were convicted of sin and many were healed of their spiritual disease as well as of their physical maladies.

Did we just learn that addictions has a spiritual illness component to it?

There is a spiritual component to the problem of addictions.

Going on, the gospel still possesses the same power and why should we not today witness the same results?

If Christ could heal 2, 000 years ago why can he not heal today?

Now, he may not heal in the same way or in the same time frame, But he heals.

Finally, Christ feels the woes of every sufferer, and he is just as willing to heal the sick now as when he was personally on earth.

Christ's servants are his representatives, the channels for his working.

He desires through them to exercise his healing power.

That doesn't mean we're just gonna lay our hands on someone and you know, or make clay out of mud and put it on their eyes and they'll be healed.

But it is telling us that if we claim to be his servants, then we have a responsibility to be his representatives and to share his healing with others.

So, let's talk about healing from addictions.

Let's look at again at the consequences of addiction.

We talked about what are the areas that addiction is involved.

They are physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual.

If you were to go to the General Conference Health Ministries website, you will see that we in Health Ministries define health in those 4 domains.

Physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual.

So let's look at these a little bit more closely, because we really want to understand what people are suffering with.

So the cognitive consequence of addiction, preoccupation with substance use.

Now When someone is preoccupied with something, are they able to put thought and effort into other things?

Just think back to when you were a teenager and you saw that person and you just couldn't think about anything else and why even stay in school because right preoccupation hopefully we've all grown out of that phase preoccupation it absolutely it immobilizes from accomplishing the things that are important and necessary in our lives.

So there's also an altered evaluation of the relative benefits and detriments or the pros and cons associated with that substance or that behavior.

So they're not able to actually recognize again that this is a good thing or a bad thing.

They're not able to see the distinction between good and evil.

And also, they may have inaccurate belief about the problems experienced in their life are due to other things, not as a consequence of the behavior of the addiction.

Well, it's because they just don't understand.

When really the problem is that addictive addiction, whatever it is, has altered our thinking.

We're not able to see and understand clearly.

Anxiety, emotional pain, dysphoria, increased sensitivity to stress.

How many of us need to be more sensitive to stress?

I mean, don't we have enough stress in this world that we need to be more prone to it?

So increased sensitivity to stressors associated with the recruitment of brain stress systems, such that things seem more stressful.

So we may actually have this misconception that it's worse than it really is.

And what does that do to our behavior When we think that a situation is worse than it really is, what does it do to our thoughts?

Things may seem futile and it may lead to just giving up which may lead to a cycle of more addictive behavior.

Difficulty in identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal, and difficulty in describing the feelings to other people.

You know, we're actually supposed to have a healthy grasp of what our feelings are telling us.

We really should have an understanding of why we feel certain ways.

You know, 1 of the most important conversations we could have with young children, when they're angry or when they're sad, why are you feeling that way?

Because we don't want people to hide from the emotions.

That leads us to again, suppressing the emotions, right?

We internalize and that can lead to more stress, certainly those addictive patterns as we've been talking about.

So being able to actually rationalize the feelings is an important way of us to actually take a hold and control the feelings so that they don't overpower us.

Relationships suffer and difficulty maintaining healthy relationships.

I mean, you know, you just have to think about alcohol, how it affects families, families that are driven apart.

But what about gambling, excessive gambling?

The financial burden that places on families, doesn't that drive them apart as well?

Or what about, you know, shopping, let's talk about that again.

I mean, you know, you're spending all this money and your spouse is wondering, how are we gonna pay these bills?

And someone brought up to me during the break, the addiction to hoard things.

And so we accumulate and accumulate simply because we can.

And so then we need a bigger house because we have so much stuff.

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Workshop: Surrendering Our Addictions

Healing from Addiction

Transcript

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