The Way Things Are Today
In today’s world, if you have a friend who struggles with drug addiction, you may be asking yourself how to help a drug addict. The drug addict in question might be someone whose faith was quite strong before everything went so wrong. They could have been someone who went to church every morning prior to work and found God in daily life. When introduced to drugs, they may have not been able to avoid the temptations that they brought. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found over 80 percent of Americans hold strong beliefs in God or a higher power.
How Religion Can Help Prevent Drug Addiction
Furthermore, religious service attendees were discovered to be a great deal less susceptible to drug abuse than those who did not attend such services. Teenagers who did not go to religious services were found to be four times more likely to use drugs. Additionally, they were three times likelier to binge drink if they did not go to religious services regularly. For adults who did not go normally to religious services, they were five times likelier to use drugs. They were also seven times more likelier to binge drink, or consume many drinks in a short span of time. Such facts might come in handy if you are wondering how to help a drug addict.
When you help drug addicts who are religious, you may begin to see how lost they have become. They may have seen a complete loss of their faith in God. They may feel that God has abandoned them and there is no way to turn back. This could be your chance to remind them God loves them. By abusing drugs, they may have felt that they gave into Satan’s temptations. Yet, you can assist your friends in recognizing there are ways out. And God can be with them every step of the way.
Helping People Who Have Lost Their Faith in God
Your loved ones might feel lost without the presence of God or a higher power in their lives. The loss of faith may have left voids in their hearts and souls, voids that they are not sure they can fill. If they want to reclaim spiritual and sober lives, recognizing how faith can guide a person’s life could help you lead your friends back to lives that are centered around religion and good health. If you believe in God or have spiritual convictions yourself, this can make the process of assisting those people in recognizing God in their lives all the easier. Once you and your friends have decided that treatment centers may be the best places for them to heal their broken souls, the intake process of finding the best rehab centers can begin. You will find out here that there are different ways to help people in need.
Many Christian addiction treatment programs exist throughout the United States and around the world. These programs emphasize a return to the importance of religion within a believer’s life. Such aspects might include an admission of sins and wrongdoing to God and Jesus Christ. This is where people can turn over the burdens of their addiction troubles to God and allow Him to forgive them for their mistakes. What can help during these programs is discussing these sins with others in their treatment programs. A forum discussion with other recovering addicts might give participants the chance to find meaning in the suffering they endured. Discussing the desperation and other aspects of the experience of addiction could be the first step towards learning from everything that happened. It may be the best answer to how to help a drug addict.
Remember That Others Have Lost Their Faith Too
Look no further than someone who was able to understand the hidden meaning behind suffering. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist before he was taken by the Nazis. He was sent to four different concentration camps from 1942 until 1945. When he was finally able to live his life again, he wondered how to find meaning in everything that had happened to him. He mentioned in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that there were three ways to find meaning in suffering. The last one might be the most pertinent to how to help a drug addict. “The third way of finding a meaning in life is by suffering,” Frankl wrote.
Frankl is saying that everyone suffers but God will never stop loving you. If you help people accept what has happened to them, they might believe that God was there for them all along. They might believe that God felt the pain of their drug abuse and their relief during their recovery. They could also believe that God was always there and ready to answer their questions of how to help with drug addiction or other problems.
About the author: Tommy Zimmer is a writer whose work has appeared online and in print. His work covers a variety of topics, including politics, economics, health and wellness, addiction and recovery and the entertainment industry.