Facing Addiction and Not Losing Faith
Facing Addiction and Not Losing Faith
Is there an upside to being an addict?
Listen in: Facing Addiction and Not Losing Faith
As we come to the end of our series, Facing Reality and Not Losing Faith, we are talking about one of the most difficult topics to face: addiction. Joining us is Michael John Cusick, a licensed professional counselor, spiritual director, speaker, and author.
Michael and his wife run an intensive counseling ministry in Colorado, working with both individuals and couples. In addition, Michael offers a yearly extended men's intensive weekend for those seeking restoration from sexual addiction and trauma. He has a podcast called Restoring the Soul, and he is the author of Surfing for God.
In this interview with John and Austin, Michael explains what addiction is and how it works, shares his own story of addiction and recovery, and outlines the redeeming work God can do in our lives even in the midst of our darkest struggles.
Michael in His Own Words
I've been a licensed therapist for 30 years. Prior to that, I had about five years of experience in the mental health world, working in inpatient settings. Our ministry in Colorado is called Restoring the Soul. We are celebrating our 22nd year as a nonprofit organization that provides intensive counseling programs. When folks have gone to counseling for months and years already and they're not where they want to be, or if people want to jumpstart or accelerate the counseling process, they come to Colorado.
Our program is two weeks long, three hours a day, Monday through Friday for two weeks. In two weeks, you can do nine to 12 months of therapy in a way that is transformational. I absolutely love doing intensive counseling, because rather than working with 30 people at a time, I get to work with one or two and go really, really deep. That work has helped me develop a lot of the thinking that I've done around counseling and how that integrates with faith and theology and the spiritual life.
Defining and Understanding Addiction
My favorite definition of addiction is by an author named John Bradshaw who passed away just a few years ago. He defined addiction as an unhealthy mood-altering relationship with a person, a behavior, or a substance. Relationally, it can be an addiction to a relationship, a person, to love, or sex. Behaviors can include compulsive overeating, shopping, spending, gambling, and acting out sexually. Substance addictions include food, alcohol, smoking, or drugs.
At its core, every addiction is a relationship. Why? Because we are created in the image of God and God is a relational being, three persons, one substance, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We mirror that relational image which means we're built for attachment and connection. Essentially we move our heart and our body toward this person, substance, or behavior. We actually have a relationship with it.
The payoff of that addictive relationship is that it alters our mood. It lifts us up. It brings us comfort. It brings us a sense of pseudo-connection. It gives us a sense of significance, of purpose. But it’s important to remember that the addictive relationship is unhealthy, maladaptive, counterproductive, and a poor stand-in for real intimacy and connection.
Every type of addiction comes up and puts its arm around you and looks you in the eyes and smiles and says that it's your best friend and it's here to help, and the whole time it's stealing your wallet. It overpromises and underdelivers. The hard truth is that in some sense, everyone is an addict. That's because we all worship something, and addiction is a form of worship where we give ourselves over to that which promises some sense of security and being seen and known.
My Story of Addiction
Everything I know about addiction starts with my own personal foundation. I'm the youngest of five Irish Catholic kids. That alone set me up for addictions. My dad died with 46 years of continuous sobriety and many years off and on before that. He was the youngest of seven Irish Catholic kids and six were alcoholics.
I went to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with my dad when I was five years old. That was the “church” that I grew up in – the 12-step church. When I was nine years old, my family moved across the country to be part of a family rehab addiction program for my brother who was six years older than me. Eventually substances took his life a little over 10 years ago.
I promised that I would never be an addict. I told myself I would never have a drinking problem. But I did. I ended up being a sex addict starting around the age of 16, compulsive masturbation, pornography in college. I developed a behavioral sex addiction that was my double life for a long, long time. In July of 1994, 30 years ago this month, God set me free when all my secrets came out and blew up my marriage. 30 years later, we're still married - thanks be to God.
For the last 30 years as a sober man, I have been thinking about addiction and I've been living out recovery. About two years ago, I went back to the 12-step groups and got involved in Overeaters Anonymous because I had gained weight during the pandemic and even with all the healing that I’ve had, there was still work to be done in my soul in relation to food.
Addiction and Salvation
Addiction involves your whole self. It may start as emotional, but it spills into behavior. If you're someone who has an addiction, or is working or living with an addict, you're not surprised to hear this. When I work with addicts, they struggle, they relapse. When their willpower caves in, they become disillusioned. I have clients that say, “I'm trying really hard, but it's like something came over me. I had no ability to say no; I didn’t want to do it, but I did.”
Even serious followers of Jesus experience this dynamic; they face defeat and failure and struggle with guilt, shame, and condemnation. Over and over again, they ask me questions like, “Am I going to end up in heaven? Can addicts be in heaven?”
Dallas Willard once said that the kingdom is open to anyone who wants the God that looks like Jesus because that’s who will be in heaven. The kingdom of God is for addicts; the gospel is for the broken, the needy, the impoverished, the poor in spirit.
The Importance of Surrender in Recovery
If there's an upside to addiction, it’s the fact that addiction is the great leveler. It takes you to a place like the first step in a 12-step program where you say, “I am powerless over ___”. Powerless over porn, over food, over alcohol, over opioids, over any addiction.
When you realize that your life is unmanageable, you have to surrender to a God who is for you, a God who has power that you don’t. Many times churches tell you to just flex your spiritual muscles, pray more, read your Bible more, and that will give you willpower. But you don't need more strength to overcome your addictions. You need more practice at surrender. Surrender is the process of being attuned to your own body and your feelings and then deciding to give up that which you have relied upon for comfort.
Surrender is the process of being attuned to your own body and your feelings and then deciding to give up that which you have relied upon for comfort.
If you're struggling with an addiction, whether it's a process addiction or substance, and you want really to get through this and learn how to manage it, you cannot do it by yourself. Recovery from any addiction has to happen in a relationship. And notice that I said recovery from addiction. Sometimes, at first, people are simply able to stop. But then the recovery process stalls. The purpose of recovering from an addiction is to get your life back so that you become free, so that you can actually live the life that you were meant to live.
Your Longing for Connection
You cannot grow and become the spiritual, emotional, psychologically mature individual that you need to be when you are an addict. Scripture refers so often to growing up into something, ultimately to be more like Christ. Addiction keeps you in a regressed state, arrested and stuck emotionally. Freedom from addiction means you have the ability to connect, and to do what you most deeply want.
It's been said that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but the opposite of addiction is connection. We're all looking for connection, and addiction is a form of false connection, which is why it can feel like a hug at the end of the day. We all want that embrace.
Psychiatrists have identified four S's that provide security from an attachment perspective: the need to be seen, to be soothed, to be safe, and to feel secure. Those are the four basic psychological needs you have in order to be able to form healthy relationships that are reciprocal: where you can depend upon others to be there for you, and they can depend upon you to be there for them.
The deepest longing in your heart is to be very connected to God and others. People that go to addiction recovery or 12-step groups will often say, “I went to this group, or I got into this program so that I would stop with my addiction, which was X, Y, or Z, and what I discovered was a whole new way of living”.
God’s Love in Jesus
There's one thing that God wants from us more than anything else, and it is like a superpower in the spiritual life, and that is humility. Humility is trusting God and at least one other person with who you really are. Instead of, well, I know that God is for me, and that Jesus died on the cross and I trust Him for salvation, but I'm not going to trust Him enough to share my addiction or my secrets or my darkness with other people because I know I'll be rejected or abandoned.
If the gospel is anything, what it means is that what God says to Jesus is what He says to us, and what He would say to us is what He would say to His son. That's what it means to be in Christ and in particular, hidden in Him. God’s love has us and we are securely attached to God in Christ. Nothing, as Romans 8 tells us, can break that bond. Not the gates of hell, demons, angels, or anything in all creation.
Closing Thoughts
God is far more concerned with our wholeness than He is with us stopping a certain behavior, unless it’s harmful to others. Wholeness, W-H-O-L-E-N-E-S-S, is the absence of a H-O-L-E, a hole. All addiction is about a hole in the heart that we are trying to fill, but it can't possibly be filled because our hearts can only be made whole by love itself. It's love that brings the broken heart together, and Jesus embodies that. That's amazing.
At the end of the day, I get out of bed in the morning to help heal people's image of God. And the best way to do that is by talking about our brokenness, because only a God who chooses to be broken and to suffer with us and for us, only that kind of God is who most people want to follow. Our sensibilities, as well as the spirit within us, leap when we hear about that kind of good news.
Michael shares even more helpful info about addiction and recovery in the full interview - be sure to listen in: Facing Addiction and Not Losing Faith
We appreciate Michael taking time to be part of WYITW! You can find his resources and ministries here: