Spiritual discontent (Pargament et al., 2000) involves anger with God, questioning God’s love, or wondering whether one has been abandoned by God. Trauma victims may feel let down or betrayed and experience a sense of mistrust (for a summary, see Brewin & Holmes, 2003) or anger (e.g., Andrews, Brewin, Rose, & Kirk, 2000), and some individuals may direct these beliefs and resulting feelings toward God. Spiritual discontent has been related to higher levels of depression, suicidality, and PTSD symptoms in a variety of trauma samples (e.g., Exline, Yali, & Lobel, 1999; Harris et al., 2008). Social-cognitive theorists postulate that PTSD symptoms result from trauma that shatters one’s basic assumptions about the invulnerability of the self and the safety of the world (Janoff-Bulman, 1989) or reinforces preexisting negative beliefs (Resick, Monson, & Chard, 2008).
- Self-reliance can also be dangerous because it can lead to pride.
- No one is perfect at first when attempting to live a spiritual life, especially when we are coming back from a long spiritual hiatus.
- Compassion evokes an interest in offering support, understanding, and kindness to others when they struggle, make mistakes, or fail.
- It is a reality of my powerlessness and unmanageability and enables me to see why I so desperately need to seek a Power Greater than myself.
Strengthening this relationship with a spiritual being brought us hope that we can recover from the mental and physical suffering of alcoholism. Although we are not physically compelled to that first drink or drug if we give in to the obsession we find ourselves waking up in jail cells or our loved ones are upset with us or left with no money in our bank accounts and have no idea what had happened the night before. The spiritual malady is the result of my being out of order with my higher power who I choose to call God. I was the director in the drama of life and managing the world so I could get what I thought I needed to feel ok. Fear and resentment dominated my thoughts and I made decisions based on self which caused me harm and harmed others.
Cultivating Connections in Recovery: Fellowship and a Higher Power
And only when our eyes, ears, mind, and heart are fully open, are we positioned to discern, receive, and appreciate them. One way to address the spirituality and healing in Glenwood Springs is to connect to all of the amazing natural surroundings that it has to offer. This includes finding a sense of spirituality in the majesty of the Rocky Mountains. 1It is important to note that some negative cognitions may reflect objective appraisals of a negative situation, such as likelihood of recurrent exposure.
It may be that attributing the event to evil forces provides an unsettling but satisfactory explanation for some trauma survivors, perhaps because it distributes blame away from self or God to a being already understood as malevolent (e.g., Pargament et al., 2004). This finding suggests that aspects of spiritual struggle are related but distinct constructs that should be assessed separately in future research. The present study aims to advance understanding of how spiritual struggle relates to PTSD symptoms. The prospective design illuminates how spiritual struggle in response to a trauma, as compared to a non-traumatic stressful event, relates to the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms.
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Independent samples t-tests were performed to compare the group that appraised at least one event as a trauma to the group that did not on demographic and the normally-transformed study variables. The trauma and non-trauma groups did not significantly differ in age, gender, or racial/ethnic identification. The trauma group scored higher than the non-trauma group on PTSD symptoms at both time points and on spiritual struggle at Time 2. There was a trend toward a significant difference between the groups for the subscales of spiritual struggle. Most often, religious meaning systems provide a helpful vehicle for making sense of seemingly random, nonsensical, or tragic events, by seeing them as part of a larger, more benign plan (Frazier et al., 2004; Pargament, 1997).
The development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms have been shown to relate to particular negative cognitions after trauma exposure, including negative appraisals of the trauma and its implications (Dunmore, Clark, & Ehlers, 2001; Ehlers, Mayou, & Bryant, 1998). These negative cognitions have been shown to predict PTSD symptom severity better than other risk factors (Ehring, Ehlers, & Glucksman, 2006) and to predict the persistence of PTSD symptoms (Fairbrother & Rachman, 2006; Halligan, Michael, Clark, & Ehlers, 2003). Anyone can be spiritually maladapted, but as an alcoholic, we use alcohol to deal with having a spiritual malady.
Participants and Procedures
We can experience emotional attacks, assaults, accidents, or abuse that affect our physiology similar to a physical threat or injury. Social threat and injury are other forms of spiritual threat and injury that are particularly toxic to humans. Things like isolation, disenfranchisement, discrimination, and injustice not only influence our mental health but our physical health, as well.
- Although the disease has biological, behavioral, and psychological roots, treating those aspects, without including the spiritual component, is like sticking a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
- After participants identified the most stressful life event that had occurred to them since Time 1, they were asked to report how they coped with this event and their symptoms of distress (see following sections).
- Spiritual malady can trigger feelings of irritability, restlessness, and discontentedness.