The Credo movement, like many other flourishing movements that have sprung from the Cursillo root, is based on the teachings of Jesus from the New Testament. Credo Recovery focuses on seeking intimate friendship with God to break unhealthy attachments and addictions.
The Credo program is designed to assist recovery from addictive behaviors and to maintain sobriety through Biblical principals of the Christian Faith and through support from continued follow-up and the fellowship of believers. Credo’s goals are similar to those of other communities, which are formed around the same flourishing world-wide Cursillo Method. Credo, like the other movements which have grown out of the Cursillo method is designed to offer redemption, teach spiritual disciplines for developing personal devotion to God, through Jesus Christ and encourage love of self and others through Christian community.
Credo Recovery is founded on the idea that everyone suffers from addictions. This belief does not belittle the meaning of addiction, as we believe addictions are at work within every human being. In Credo, we believe psychologically, neurologically and spiritually that the same processes that are responsible for addiction to substances such as alcohol and narcotics, are also responsible for addictions to ideas, power, work, moods, gambling, pornography, relationships, fantasies and a host of other things. Our addictions are a self-defeating force that robs us of our freedom and makes us do things we really do not want to. Addictions cause us to give ourselves over to things that, if we are honest with ourselves, we really do not want. All of us can identify with the Apostle Paul when he said, “I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate … the good thing that I want to do, I never do, the evil thing which I do not want, that is what I do.”
We all suffer from addictions, when we are internally compelled to give our thoughts, resources and our energies to them, binding them to us and attaching themselves to certain behaviors, things or people. Addictions drive us with preoccupation to compel, obsess, attache and nail our desires to specific objects or people that come to rule our lives. The word attachment comes from the French word ‘attache’ which means ‘nailed to.’ Attachments ‘nail’ us to specific objects or people creating addictions.
For thousands of years in all of the great spiritual traditions the word attachment has been used to describe addictions. Six hundred years before Jesus, the Greek Heraclitus said of attachments, “Whatever one wishes to get, one purchases at the cost of one’s soul.” In India a thousand years before Jesus, the Upanishads poetically help us understand how clinging to objects or people bind us in compulsion and obsession. One of these, said it this way, “When all desires that cling to the heart are surrendered it is then that a mortal becomes immortal.” Solomon, the wise king of the Jews and writer of Ecclesiastes wrote near the end of his life, “I denied my eyes nothing that they desired, refused my heart no pleasure … and found it all meaningless, it was chasing after the wind.” And the Buddha taught us that there are Four Noble Truths: (1) that all people suffer (2) all suffering comes from attachments (3) freedom comes only from letting go of our attachments (4) deep spirituality comes from our effort to detach in all aspects of our life. According to Meister Eckhart, an early Christian apologetic, when we detach, we “enkindle the heart, awaken the spirit, overcome our longings and we are able see God …”