An Interview with Brad Hambrick, Author of Overcoming Addiction

 

​An Interview with Brad Hambrick, Author of Overcoming Addiction The road to change is a difficult, whether your circumstances were caused by your own choices or instead are a result of the actions and decisions of others. While nothing makes the journey “easy,” walking it out one step at a time with the support of your peers and a biblical community makes it achievable.​ In the support group curriculum Overcoming Addiction: 9 Steps toward Freedom, counselor Brad Hambrick provides participants with a safe and stable place to name what’s happening and turn to God. For those who are ready to admit that the use of alcohol and/or drugs has taken over their life in a significant way, Overcoming Addiction provides a 9-step framework to help readers reclaim their life and experience the freedom God wants for them. Hambrick helps those struggling with addiction find hope as they learn to be honest with God, themselves, and others.   Q: In what setting was Overcoming Addiction designed to be used? How is it different from typical counseling resources?  Overcoming Addiction and Navigating Destructive Relationships (which released at the same time) were written as a counseling curriculum, meaning they were written to facilitate a journey rather than educate on a subject. When a book is written for education purposes, it starts with definitions and the history of the subject, then concepts related to the main subject are addressed one chapter at a time. However, when you approach a subject as a counseling curriculum, you start at the beginning of an individual’s journey and incrementally address what is necessary to take the next step. For Overcoming Addiction, that means I started with helping the reader garner the motivation and commitment to change. Commitment to change is foundational to overcoming addiction, so as the reader is invited to assess their life and devise a plan to address their addiction, a continual effort is made to maintain motivation. As curriculum, both books are designed so that people who complete their journey can use these books to lead a group-based counseling ministry at their church. We call this model G4 (learn more at summitchurch.com/G4). While these books can be used as a structure for personal growth or individual counseling, they provide a counselee the opportunity, when he or she is ready, to use their growth to help others in their church and community find comparable freedom. Q: What is a G4 peer support and recovery group ministry and how does it differ from other support groups such as Celebrate Recovery or AA?    In developing G4, my goal was to draw from the best of AA and Celebrate Recovery, while tailoring G4 to allow for broader ministry within a local church. AA and Celebrate Recovery focus primarily on addiction. When they care for other struggles, they do so within an addiction paradigm. While their success rate indicates this can be effective, the fit between addiction and other life struggles can, at times, be strained.   The biggest difference between G4 and AA or Celebrate Recovery, is that instead of using one 12-step model we use two 9-step models; one model for responsibility-based struggles and another for suffering-based struggles. Both theologically and therapeutically, this is a significant difference. It means when your struggle doesn’t emerge from your choices and values, that you aren’t made to feel responsible for it in order to find freedom from it.   Curriculum-based group counseling is highly effective, and an excellent way maximize lay-helpers’ ability to use their life experience to help others. Having a large group time before breaking into subject specific groups allows people to acclimate to the helping environment and provides a context to communicate the core values of the ministry.   My hope is that those who have benefited from AA and Celebrate Recovery will find that G4 honors what they found helpful while seeing how G4 is more tailored to the local church. For those who have concerns about the theological differences that exist with 12 step programs, I think they will find G4 curriculum to be Bible-based and gospel-centered in a way that alleviates these concerns.   Q: Does Overcoming Addiction address all types of addiction, or does it focus on certain kinds of addiction?   Overcoming Addiction focuses on substance-related addictions: alcohol, misused prescription meds, and drugs. It does not focus on more behavioral addictions like pornography (a future release, False Love, will address sexual addiction and pornography) and gambling.   While many of the practical steps of pursuing freedom are the same, the early steps of assessing how the addiction is impacting your life and the lives of your loved ones are different. This is an example of how G4 curriculum strive to be subject-specific, so that less pressure is on the lay group facilitator to transfer general principles to specific life struggles.   Q: Each of the curriculum-based books is based on a 9-step program. Are there any steps that may not be traditionally covered in biblical counseling literature? Can you give us examples specifically related to Overcoming Addictions?   Absolutely. The difference in Overcoming Addiction and other biblical counseling literature is in design, not content. The unique part of Overcoming Addiction is how it’s laid out. Overcoming Addiction starts where recovery begins, helping the reader decide if change is “worth it.” It is highly interactive, inviting readers to grow in a sober self-awareness that perpetually nurtures their commitment to change.   Overcoming Addiction is also designed to facilitate a group-based counseling experience so that even if the reader initially goes through the material with an individual counselor, that person can (if they choose) start a ministry at their church with what helped change their life.   The major themes of taking responsibility for our choices, what our choices reveal about our heart, the centrality of repentance toward God, the need for confession toward those our choices harmed, practical steps toward change rooted in community, and a call to live a life on mission are central to Overcoming Addiction.

Q: If the entire journey of overcoming addiction could be reduced to a single step, what would it be and why?   The one-step model of overcoming addition is, “Be honest with God, self, and others.” We spend an entire section of Step 1 unpacking the point, “You can’t be a good addict without being a good liar.” If you’ve never experienced addiction, that statement might sound offensive. If you have, you smirk knowing how true it is and that someone with the courage to say it has enough grit to help you on the hard journey ahead.   As you get deeper into addiction, you get better and better at covering your tracks and deceiving other people. You believe your own lie that, “Things aren’t that bad.” You learn to hide your actions from family and healthy friends. You avoid God and the thought of God in every way you can.   Honesty may sound simple and not complicated, but it may be the hardest part of recovery. It requires courage, facing your sense of shame, and admitting who you’ve hurt and who you’ve lied to. When we are willing to be honest, it lays the foundation for genuine repentance and change.   Q: What can churches do to address life-dominating struggles such as addiction in a way that is effective and lay-based but at the same time helps a struggler avoid viewing their struggle as their identity?   There is an adage of AA that reveals why many churches are skittish toward recovery ministries: “Once an addict, always an addict.” Christians believe that change is more possible than this phrase implies. We don’t think “addict” should be a believer’s primary or permanent identity.   Before we explore the alternative, let’s explain why this phrase emerged in AA. AA groups are independent of any larger institution or community, so when someone graduates from AA, they move from supported to isolated. For all of us, not just addicts, when we go from supported to isolated, life gets worse. AA members got tired of seeing their friends relapse after graduating from AA, so the saying, “Once an addict, always an addict,” was coined to encourage members to remain in a context of support.   Overcoming Addiction and other G4 curriculum address this concern by emphasizing how people graduate. In Step 8 and Step 9, participants are instructed to begin building community in the standard discipleship structures of their church. The baton is passed from G4 to small groups (or whatever a church calls its discipleship context).   At G4, we often say, “G4 needs the church, and the church needs G4.” What we mean is that without the church, G4 would create a struggle-based identity, but without G4, the life-dominating struggles addressed there can overwhelm a small group. We encourage G4 graduates to take the level of authenticity they learned at G4 and “raise the temperature” of discipleship throughout the church.   Q: Why is it so important to have a group of Christians supporting you on your journey to overcome addiction?   Why is it important to have a friend to work out with at the gym? Why is it important to have a cohort of students to go through a Ph.D. program with? When you’re doing something hard, the benefits of having people working toward the same goal—who know what you’re facing—is immensely beneficial.   This is also true for addiction, maybe even more so than the examples I just mentioned. Addicts often feel immense shame. They know they’ve hurt and let down many people. They know the “answer” seems painfully obvious to everyone: just stop it. They don’t feel like anyone understands how hard that is.   That’s why a group is so helpful for overcoming addiction. In group, people find others who they know “get it.” They can identify with each other’s struggle to do is essential and obvious. When a sense of community emerges, they don’t want to let each other down. On days when they might not continue for their own good, they persevere for their brothers and sisters they don’t want to let down. That’s powerful.   Q: Is there a timeline for completing the curriculum or is being part of a G4 group an ongoing process for an individual in order to not fall back into addictive patterns?   When Overcoming Addiction is implemented as part of a G4 ministry, it is an open group model. That means anyone can join at any time and each person in the group may be at a different point on their journey.   A G4 participant can take the time they need to complete their journey. Nine steps don’t equate to nine weeks or nine months. The goal of Overcoming Addiction isn’t primarily understanding, but implementation. Participants are not encouraged to move to the next step until they have achieved the objectives of that step. That is a better measure of progress than the ability to “pass a quiz” on that step’s content.

About the Author

Brad Hambrick, ThM, EdD, serves as the Pastor of Counseling at The Summit Church in Durham, NC. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Biblical Counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a council member of the Biblical Counseling Coalition   He has authored several books, including God's Attributes: Rest for Life Struggles, Making Sense of Forgiveness, Angry with God, and the Church Based-Counseling series. Hambrick also served as general editor for the Becoming a Church that Cares Well for the Abused curriculum.   Hambrick, his wife, Sallie, and their two sons live in Raleigh, NC.   Learn more about Brad Hambrick and follow his blog and podcasts at bradhambrick.com. He can also be found on Facebook (brad.hambrick.5), X (@bradhambrick) and Instagram (@bradhambrick)