Photo by Jem Sahagun on Unsplash
Volunteering and Recovery
A primary practice of process theology is volunteering in your local community.
Such practices are the nitty-gritty of just and compassionate communities, the building blocks of ecological civilizations. They are also fun.
Volunteering can be especially helpful for people who struggle with substance abuse and are in a recovery process. Studies show that helping others, in combination with support groups and mindfulness practices, help people in recovery enjoy the multiple pleasures of emotional sobriety: not being controlled by addictive emotions, having a sense of positive self-worth, enjoying rich bonds with others, and adding goodness to the world. Truth be told, very few of us are emotionally sober. If not addicted to alcohol or drugs, we are addicted to greed, hatred, jealousy or control. As volunteering functions for people in recovery, so it can function for us all.
- Jay McDaniel, 12/2/22
- Planting trees and creating awareness about the benefits of a green environment
- Cooking and serving food at community halls
- Tutoring students
- Visiting the elderly
- Help in the animal shelter
- Offering help with children
- Taking part in relief projects
Such practices are the nitty-gritty of just and compassionate communities, the building blocks of ecological civilizations. They are also fun.
Volunteering can be especially helpful for people who struggle with substance abuse and are in a recovery process. Studies show that helping others, in combination with support groups and mindfulness practices, help people in recovery enjoy the multiple pleasures of emotional sobriety: not being controlled by addictive emotions, having a sense of positive self-worth, enjoying rich bonds with others, and adding goodness to the world. Truth be told, very few of us are emotionally sober. If not addicted to alcohol or drugs, we are addicted to greed, hatred, jealousy or control. As volunteering functions for people in recovery, so it can function for us all.
- Jay McDaniel, 12/2/22
Janice's Three Step Process
"I was physically sober but not emotionally sober."
So a friend - I'll call her Janice - was saying to me the other day while we were volunteering at a local nursing home. About forty years old, she was describing a period in her twenties when she had stopped using drugs but was emotionally controlled by anger, anxiety, and self-doubt. She explained that emotional sobriety is freedom from being controlled by addictive emotions and freedom for being spiritually alive and productive in daily life. "It's a lifelong project," she said, "but you can make progress. I'm still on my way."
Janice had made progress. She had an inner peace about her, a spontaneous joy, and a gladness of heart. She was fun to be around and a very positive spirit in the lives of those in the nursing home. She was, to my mind, well on her way to emotionally sobriety and a good example for me. I want to be more like her.
I asked her how she had grown in sobriety and she noted three things:
- joining a 12-step support group (she is still part of it)
- undertaking a daily practice of breathing meditation (she still does it)
- volunteering in nursing homes three days a week (twenty years now)
She called it her three-step process.
I asked her why volunteering was important to her and she pulled a quote from Stephen Post's The Hidden Gifts of Helping from her purse:
“When you are involved in helping others, it blocks off destructive emotions and impulses,. You can’t be ruminating or feel hostile and bitter if you’re feeling moved by helping someone else.”
"He's right," she said. "The volunteering freed me from thinking that my life was the center of things. I felt connected with others and had a sense of purpose. I think I found God in the volunteering."
As she said this, I thought of open and relational (process) theology and its approach to recovery. Along with Janice, open and relational (process) theology recognizes:
- Addiction: the power of addictive emotions in human life and the way they can control us through (to use the technical terminology) experience in the mode of causal efficacy.
- Hope: the possibility of living in the multiple freedoms of sobriety: freedom from being controlled by addictive emotions, freedom to enjoy life, freedom to help others.
- Spirituality: emotional sobriety as a form of spirituality in its own right, a way of being connected with others and with God.
- God: the power of God as an inwardly felt lure toward physical and emotional sobriety, adjusted to each person's circumstance.
- Transformation: God as the power of creative transformation: a power which requires our cooperation for its fulfillment.
- Relationships: the importance of 12-step and other support groups; all life is relational.
- Helping others: the importance of volunteering in recovery and, for that matter, in life as a whole. We find ourselves in helping others.
I began to research the role of volunteering in the recovery movement and realized that there is an increasing amount of scholarly evidence that it is helpful. Janice's three step process makes good sense scientifically as well as theologically.
Moreover, Janice helped me realize that we all need emotional sobriety, whatever the circumstances of our lives, and that volunteering is a path toward that sobriety. People who move past addictions and find their way into emotional sobriety through volunteering are guides for us all. We rightly thank them.
- Jay McDaniel, 12/2/22
Staying Sober Through Service
Two Helpful Essays by Jill Suttie
from Greater Good: Science-Based Insights for a Meaningful Life
Excerpt from "Can Helping Others Keep you Sober"
Victor M. was only 13 years old when his troubles with alcohol began. He stole bottles of hard liquor from his neighbor’s garage, enjoying how alcohol made him feel. Soon, he was drinking every day and using drugs, too.
Shortly after turning 21, he crashed a car during an alcohol-induced blackout. A judge ordered him to attend Alcohol Anonymous (AA) meetings, where recovering alcoholics encourage each other to become (and stay) sober by sharing personal stories and following AA’s famous 12-step model.
When Victor attended his first AA meeting, he was terrified. “I didn’t say anything,” he says. “I just stared at the floor the whole time and left as soon as it was over.”
After completing his sentence, he soon returned to drinking. But two years later, when his girlfriend threatened to kick him out of their house and he realized he was about to become homeless, he came back to AA, this time as a full participant. He began signing up to do AA meeting chores, like making coffee or collecting books at the end of the meetings.
Five years later, he is still sober and reaching out to other addicts who are trying to kick their addiction. “It keeps me accountable and plugged in,” says Victor, now 26. “It gives me a sense of purpose.”
Maria Pagano, an addiction researcher at Case Western University, thinks Victor’s service to others might be the key to his staying sober. In recent years, a growing body of research has found that helping others brings measurable physical and psychological benefits to the helper. Building on this work, Pagano is exploring the particular and sometimes surprising benefits of altruism for people battling alcoholism and drug addiction. Her studies have shown that addicts who help others, even in small ways—such as calling other AA members to remind them about meetings or making coffee like Victor did—can significantly improve their chances of staying sober and avoiding relapse, among adults and adolescents alike.
Pagano’s research could not be more timely. Surveys and studies say that abuse of alcohol and narcotics is rising among young people like Victor, and at a time when social service budgets are being slashed, many addicts who enter expensive treatment programs relapse within 90 days of being discharged, leaving patients and their clinicians yearning for more effective treatment strategies. If getting addicts involved in helping their fellow sufferers is key to their recovery, as Pagano believes, it could revolutionize the treatment of alcohol and drug addictions...more
- Jill Suttie
Shortly after turning 21, he crashed a car during an alcohol-induced blackout. A judge ordered him to attend Alcohol Anonymous (AA) meetings, where recovering alcoholics encourage each other to become (and stay) sober by sharing personal stories and following AA’s famous 12-step model.
When Victor attended his first AA meeting, he was terrified. “I didn’t say anything,” he says. “I just stared at the floor the whole time and left as soon as it was over.”
After completing his sentence, he soon returned to drinking. But two years later, when his girlfriend threatened to kick him out of their house and he realized he was about to become homeless, he came back to AA, this time as a full participant. He began signing up to do AA meeting chores, like making coffee or collecting books at the end of the meetings.
Five years later, he is still sober and reaching out to other addicts who are trying to kick their addiction. “It keeps me accountable and plugged in,” says Victor, now 26. “It gives me a sense of purpose.”
Maria Pagano, an addiction researcher at Case Western University, thinks Victor’s service to others might be the key to his staying sober. In recent years, a growing body of research has found that helping others brings measurable physical and psychological benefits to the helper. Building on this work, Pagano is exploring the particular and sometimes surprising benefits of altruism for people battling alcoholism and drug addiction. Her studies have shown that addicts who help others, even in small ways—such as calling other AA members to remind them about meetings or making coffee like Victor did—can significantly improve their chances of staying sober and avoiding relapse, among adults and adolescents alike.
Pagano’s research could not be more timely. Surveys and studies say that abuse of alcohol and narcotics is rising among young people like Victor, and at a time when social service budgets are being slashed, many addicts who enter expensive treatment programs relapse within 90 days of being discharged, leaving patients and their clinicians yearning for more effective treatment strategies. If getting addicts involved in helping their fellow sufferers is key to their recovery, as Pagano believes, it could revolutionize the treatment of alcohol and drug addictions...more
- Jill Suttie
Excerpt from "Can Helping Others Keep You Sober?"
That’s an insight backed up by Pagano’s other studies. In one 2013 study, she and her colleagues recruited 226 recovering alcoholics from nine outpatient treatment programs, and they followed these patients for 10 years while measuring alcohol consumption, AA participation levels, and self-rated thoughtfulness towards other people at different points in time. They also measured whether or not participants helped others by becoming a sponsor or by completing step 12 in AA.
By using statistical analyses, Pagano and colleagues showed that those who’d attended more AA meetings and engaged in helping stayed sober longer and reported higher interest in others up to 10 years later. Helping others had a unique effect on the outcome, suggesting that helping has a special role in recovery—and should receive more attention.
“We’re doing a disservice to patients if we don’t encourage their involvement in service when we know that service is linked to good things,” says Pagano.
Helping others may have a unique impact on maintaining long-term sobriety, she says, because it appears to decrease some of the psychological markers of the disease—high levels of narcissism and entitlement—that make one prone to addiction and less likely to enter recovery in the first place. Having a chance to “get over yourself” through helping others can also lead to better interpersonal interactions, in particular with other recovering addicts, she says.
“Helping others can help you affiliate and get to know a sober network,” says Pagano. “It’s a natural way to introduce yourself and get to know people; it’s also helpful as a distraction from inner angst that’s often a part of recovery.”
When Pagano says “angst,” she’s referring to the pain caused by a sense of not belonging or of being a social misfit. Researchers measure this feeling through a construct she calls “social estrangement,” which is less about how much time people spend with others and more about how much people feel they don’t belong within a group, even if they have lots of “friends.”
“It’s the kind of isolation where nobody knows who you really are—the parts of you that are hard to access: your hopes, dreams, goals, disappointments,” she says....more
- Jill Suttie
The Helper Therapy Principle
"The purpose of this paper is to increase awareness of a free, proven method for improving addiction recovery outcomes that courts and treatment professionals can access with minimal implementation costs. The method is grounded in the Helper Therapy Principle (“HTP”). Part I reviews the long tradition of helping others as a means to save oneself. Part II provides a brief history of the role of service in addiction recovery. Part III sets forth recent findings providing empirical support for the proposition that involving recovering addicts in service work increases the odds of them staying clean and sober. Part IV describes how courts can implement HTP. Part V looks ahead to future related research opportunities. Part VI provides responses to various related criticisms of HTP, and Part VII provides concluding remarks."
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“Stephen Post has long championed the simple but sublime truth that by helping others we help ourselves. He has documented this cardinal principle of positive psychology in a long series of authoritative volumes and research projects, including a major project on happiness that he helped lead over the past five years at Emory. In this engaging new volume, Post combines touching [auto]biography, philosophical reflection, and scientific findings into a compelling attachments. They do so with the help of inspiring recollections and encounters with heroes present and past who themselves have found the healing grace of loving others. Dr. Post has given us a heartfelt gift—a modern adventure story steeped in the old wisdom of what it takes to lead a good and healthy life.” --
Gregory L. Fricchione, MD, professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital |