age and can become more like him" (Koteskey, 1983, pp. 54, 56).
ALCOHOLISM AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE CHRISTIAN COUNSELING APPROACH
The traditional approach to alcoholism was in the past based on a number of complete or partial misperceptions, all based on the view that the alcoholic was impaired psychologically, physically and/or morally. The alcoholic was a weak person who simply could not stop drinking, even if he wanted to, and the chronic alcoholic was seen as lost and hopeless as a victim of cancer in the last stages of that disease.
The more enlightened approach to alcoholism is the view that it is a disease, an "allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind," as it is put in Alcoholics Anonymous. There is no "cure" for alcoholism even in this enlightened approach, but there is a means to arrest the disease and keep it arrested through the total abstinence of the recovering alcoholic, and through the application of the "spiritual" aspects of the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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