The first thing you should do in your addiction recovery is receive professional help. Your loved ones are there to support you and you will critically need them as you recover, but when your recovery is in its infancy, it needs to be nurtured by a professional. Do not hesitate to reach out to the services of a professional detoxification center for substance abuse, and a residential rehabilitation center to begin an addiction treatment plan. Addiction counselors and mental health professionals will help you discover the underlying reasons for your addiction problems so that you can overcome them, but you have to be a willing participant in order for it to work.

It is very common of an addict to be in denial of their addiction. Admitting that one has an addiction means admitting that they have a weakness, and people do not like to do this. People also do not like to ask for help, which is another integral part of admitting to addiction. In order to recover from addiction, the addict needs to learn how to receive help from an addiction specialist and from their personal support system. Recovery is not meant to be something you do alone.

Once you have received the help of addiction professionals in getting through the most critical parts of your addiction, you need to learn to receive help from the support systems in your life. This is typically your family and friends. In a majority of cases, it was the addict’s family and friends that wanted them to enter addiction treatment, and they will be very responsive to the addict’s needs for support and adjustment to their lifestyles. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a good support system though. Sometimes addiction or negative reinforcement comes from within the support system, in which case, the addict needs to find a new support system. Overtime, the addict will learn how to trust, care for and respect themselves, while still accepting love and help from their support system.

The term “false idol worship” comes from the biblical book of Exodus. Moses had lead the Israelites out of Egypt, and instead of worshiping God, they erected golden statues such as that of a calf and bowed down before them. This excerpt from the bible came to epitomize the worship of anything that is not God, which is surprisingly still very relevant in modern times. Spirituality is at an all time low in our society and many choose not to believe in any kind of spiritual realm, so what was once called worship is now called addiction: when you are focused on something to the point of serving it. Scripture says that serving anything but the one true God will only end in destruction and desolation.

When you compare worship to addiction, the similarities add up quickly. Both create reverence, adoration, obsession and devotion within a person. The real question is, what is the object of worship? Worshiping a perfect, loving God can only result in reward to the life of the spirit, where as worship of anything else is detrimental. We were created to worship God, so anything else in His place, even things that are neutral and have no intelligence such as trees and the sky, can take on a toxic role in our lives if we worship them. However, if we turn our devotion to something that can truly be dangerous, such as drugs or alcohol, not only will the life of our spirits be ruined but our physical health will deteriorate as well, eventually resulting in death if the obsession is allowed to become extreme enough.

Replacing God with anything else will result in pain and destruction. There is nothing that can satisfy our spiritual needs except God. This is true even for those who do not believe in Him. Everyone has a God-shaped hole in their hearts and their subconscious searches for him, even if their conscious mind does not.