There’s nothing soft about the damage “soft pornography” does to those not aware of its dangers. And few people are. If you use pornography or know somebody who does, here are fifteen common lies whispered to us by the purveyors of sex trash in magazines, movies, and websites.
I can control myself. I will be able to keep my porn use from growing.
Reality: What satisfies now won’t satisfy later. Porn demands increasingly degrading stimulation.
If not, my firewall will hold up. No one else will ever know what I’m doing here.
Reality: Porn sites are very wealthy, and so they have pioneered the technology for recording what you want and how to get you aroused. They recognize you as a unique customer, and at your most vulnerable moments, they present you with images selected for you personally. Private porn (just like actual cheating with a lover on the side) craves the thrill of increasing the risk of detection.
I won’t masturbate to this stuff.
Reality: It will arouse you, and it will glamorize masturbation. If you give it enough opportunities, porn will talk you into it.
Even if I did, it would be harmless.
Reality: Just as the sound of the bell became an appetizing turn-on to Pavlov’s dogs just because it came right before the food, whatever you’re looking at or thinking about right before an orgasm will become irresistible in real life. You will be training yourself not only to want promiscuous partners, but become unable to resist them.
I’m single—I’ll quit if I marry a prude, and let’s hope I don’t.
Reality: By training yourself to want promiscuous partners, you’re preparing any exclusive relationship to get ruined, by cheating, and guaranteeing it will be messed up by possessive jealousy. Most of the insights below about marriage will apply to most single adult love relationships as well.
Porn is harmless to marriage. In fact, it will spice up a marriage.
Reality: Private porn stimulates the mindsets that trigger its use: self-pity and self-centeredness, entitlement and resentment, insecurity and impatience, lust and loneliness. All these attitudes ruin a marriage.
What they don't know won't hurt them.
Reality: Whatever you do to yourself, you do to your spouse too (you’re a one-flesh team). Even if you don’t get caught. When you deceive your spouse, life always goes out of the marriage, and both of you can feel it. When you do get caught, you’ll soon realize that the cover-up actually hurts the spouse worse than the pornography or the promiscuous sex it will eventually lead to.
Porn prevents adultery. If I can enjoy porn privately, it will drain off the desire to cheat.
Reality: By portraying sex apart from responsibilities like marriage, porn glamorizes cheating, stimulates the desire for it, and weakens the resolve to avoid it.
I can have it both ways. I can change my mental gears to fit into whatever setting I’m in.
Reality: Memories, pictures, feelings and desires from the porn world will spill over into a marriage, and vice-versa. Each will mess up the other.
The purpose of sex is just pleasure and relaxation, so porn is pretty much perfect sex.
Reality: The best purpose of sex is for the enjoyment and bonding together of husband and wife, and that’s where all the perfect sex lies.
Marriage? Fidelity and Monogamy are gone with the wind. Virtually no one is faithful anymore, and those who try to be are tragicomic figures who surely would cheat if only they could get away with it.
Reality: Some people who could seemingly get away with it choose not to cheat because they want genuine intimacy at home. They are the free ones, free to cheat or to be faithful, free to be natural, passionate, tender, and completely close all at the same time. The tragic figures here those who stray. They are not free, because they are slaves to their desires or to others' temptations—they can’t always say no.
Deep down all women want to get off. Every woman is steaming hot underneath, and wants orgasms above all. They can and should come to a man preheated, ready to get sexy without any need for love, tenderness, or fidelity, which are all just a waste of time.
Reality: Women heat up slow like a crock-pot. They need appreciation, conversation, then affection. Those who train themselves to discount these things and be aroused like men at just the touch or the sight of certain body parts are very unhappy down inside. They long for a committed, caring relationship, and in time they will try to turn any extra-marital affair into a marriage for themselves. Historically, these women make horrible wives, and dangerous friends.
Sex comes easy for men. Men are passive and privileged, able to just wait until a woman presents herself. They don't need to approach her, love her, understand her, listen to her, be true to her, or partner with her. Men don’t need a woman to do any of this in order for him to get aroused. They just need a fresh supply of raunchy stuff.
Reality: As the years go by, love gets more and more sexually arousing to men, and lust, less and less. Sure, nearly all men like to be playful and creative with their lovemaking, and want their wives to be the same. But men like to take the initiative, and to be admired for their character, and for what they do in life. No one’s approval or disapproval means more to him than his family’s, and that requires fidelity.
Lust has a lovely luster. People who crave sex and can't get enough of it live a beautiful, carefree, pleasure-filled life, played out in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Reality: No, these people are sex addicts, and unless they get into recovery or die young, they are destined to lose everything. A sexual addiction can be satisfied with nothing less than destroying your family, friends, health, faith, money and even your ability to orgasm. Truth is, "Anything you put before your recovery you will lose."
If it feels good do it.
Reality: If it feels good, first think through the long-term, widespread harm. Do a cost-benefit analysis. Remember that relationships are way more fulfilling than orgasms. No one wants to live and die alone.
Four concentric circles represent three important lists of behaviors, and one list of warning signs. These lists will be fluid, and you will need to add and subtract new items on a regular basis, at least from the boundaries list and the recovery behaviors below. Use these lists to structure and summarize your reports to people of how you have been doing, in the order below: red, then green, then yellow, and finally orange. They are often an excellent way to give account of yourself on a regular basis, in your marriage, with your sponsor, me, and with same-sex accountability partners. Each behavior needs to be very specific, to minimize confusion about whether you have done something, and whether it is useful as listed.
Sobriety definition (the red inner circle). Here you describe any behavior that you believe you are called to completely avoid. Examples of behaviors that are often placed on this list for married sex addicts are: adultery, pornography (be very specific), masturbation, and giving or receiving solicitations, money, time, charming talk or touch with an opposite-sex person. Spouses usually need to be told all details here within 24 hours, including your inventory of which of your character defects were involved, who you hurt, amends proposed.
Recovery behaviors (the green outer circle): if you are married, include positive approaches to your mate that you need to make regularly until they have become habits. Include all of your regular recovery behaviors, and state the frequency (say daily, or weekly) you are led to do each one: meetings, devotionals, phone calls, workbook pages, reading certain books, going to church, attending counseling, daily prayers, accountability check-ins with spouse, buddy and/or sponsor, whatever. (Some examples can be found below.) Include other behaviors that are to be done often and whenever appropriate, but not on a daily or weekly schedule (such as making amends and maintaining progress in step work and tasks for recovery). Also include behaviors your spouse wants and needs to see for closeness to occur (e.g., sharing your feelings, calling/texting during the day, coming home on time, spending time with the kids, praying together, sitting together on the couch, gentle touch that is not foreplay, speaking the spouse’s love language, whatever).
Troublesome attitudes (the yellow inner circle): Between the outer circle and the middle circle, many people are finding it helpful to add a fourth circle as a warning. Here you can list the mindsets and situations that tend to trigger your slips. Common ones are: resentment, shame, insecurity, boredom, loneliness, horniness, exhaustion, self-pity, discouragement, failure, success, rejection, entitlement, egomania, etc. Watch for emotions that spike intensely as over-reactions to a situation, and for those that linger after the trigger incident, looking for other situations that justify their existence. If you call these attitudes instead of triggers, you will take more responsibility for them, and for your choices when you experiencing them. (Your addiction wants you call them triggers so you can say something just set you off.) These attitudes will often need to be on your list of character defects when you do/did step 5. Like dashboard warning lights, they help warn you when to walk out of trouble before you go in too far.
Boundaries list (the orange circle, next to the red, things that would be a slip but not a relapse): This should include all behaviors that might come before a relapse, and that might incite some temptation to relapse, such as: lying or covering up, eyeball slips (allowing your eyes to look too long at something), foot slips (allowing yourself to go somewhere unnecessary that is tempting), fantasy slips (allowing your mind to imagine future misbehaviors), euphoric recall (dwelling too long on the pleasures of past addictive escapees), online slips (misuse of the internet), argument slips (avoiding or prolonging a conflict which gives you resentment), or flirting slips (any violation of agreed guidelines for contact with the opposite sex (see my list for starters) that would not constitute a relapse. Spouses usually need to be told about slips more vaguely (like just the number and type of slip), with fewer details and not as quickly (within a week is OK), but your inventory and your proposed amends do need to be included at this time.
Possible Recovery Behaviors
(Use some of this menu of options to customize your own list.)
A 30-second prayer for a day of sobriety in early AM,
and another for thanksgiving at bedtime
A 2-minute meditation on how God might want you to help with your prayers being answered
Initiate successfully live phone call with sponsor, to include 4-circle report, including also:
10+ minutes for you (2+ for slips, temptations, and pressures, 8+ for your recovery)
Initiate phone calls with recovering buddies until you get one live on the phone:
5+ minutes for each of you (1+ for slips, temptations, and pressures, 4+ for your recovery)
20 min. of phone time buddies initiate (or 10 from you leaving two VM’s using format above)
15 min. of Bible study, leaving time to meditate on personal application for your life/recovery
15 min. of recovery reading, highlighting, meditating on personal application for your recovery
Attend a 12-step or recovery meeting
Chart the day’s activities, and on a log, record brief but specific answers to these questions:
Of what I did, what helped the most today, and why? What helped the least, and why?
Read and complete the writing assignments for one chapter per week of Facing the Shadow
(or Faithful and True)
Read and highlight/underline one chapter per week of a recovery-oriented book
What exactly is a 12-step program? It is the people, principles, prayers, and lifestyle practices of recovery from addiction that was started by Alcoholics Anonymous back in the 1930’s. To work a program successfully, you need all four—the people, principles, prayers, and practices. You can’t just read and learn at home, just go to meetings and call your sponsor, just ask God to take away the desire to act out, or just change your ways with willpower or healthy thinking. To recover you need to do it all.
12-step programs are being used by many to recover from addictions to substances like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and addictions to behaviors like gambling, internet pornography, overworking and overeating.
You start new recovery behaviors in order to change the thoughts, feelings and situations that used to trigger relapse. To insure change, much repetition is built into “the program.” Certain things are repeated verbatim at each meeting, like reading the 12 steps of recommended problem-solving tools. What are the 12 steps? Here’s the gist of them in six pieces:
How does recovery work? Meetings sometimes begin by reading also the 12 traditions of how groups manage their affairs. The 12 traditions keep groups from owning property, competing with each other, making public statements, or taking stands on divisive and controversial issues like politics and religion. To make sure they keep the focus on principles not personalities, they emphasize protecting the anonymity of its members. They have “no leaders, just trusted servants.”
The program grows “by attraction, not promotion,” so 12-steppers don’t make public statements about whether they are in a program like AA or not, or how much good it’s doing them. They don’t try to talk others into sobriety or joining the group. It grows only by people noticing changed lives, and deciding to come try 12-stepping for themselves, because “I want what you have.”
All this makes 12-stepping different from religion, which encourages its churches to own property, and encourages its members to testify, evangelize, and do public witnessing. AA encourages worship and bible study, but it endorses no particular “sect or denomination.” Like the self-help movement, people are encouraged to be in charge of their own program, and grow at their own pace. They decide for themselves if they are an alcoholic or gambling addict or whatever, and they choose their own home group, sponsor, etc. A home group is the one you go to most regularly, usually every week, and it’s usually where your sponsor goes.
To find the right sponsor for you, try to pick out one or two people that you like at each meeting you attend, especially meetings that your schedule allows you to make on a regular basis. Try to pull those folks aside after the meeting, and tell them you liked what they said. Be specific about how it relates to you, and then wait for them to say more. If you like what they have to say again, ask if you could have their phone numbers. (Nearly everyone will give this to you, because that's how they stay sober and serene – if they don't give it away, they know they will lose it.) Use the phone numbers two or three times, and if those phone calls go well, ask if you could talk with them about possibly sponsoring you. Ask how they like to structure their relationships and contacts with their sponsees, and try it their way. Talk out frankly with them any problems you ever have with what they say. It helps to “do what you're told,” but if it works out badly for you, tell your sponsor about it straight up. You don't have to tell your sponsor everything, but you would be a fool to lie or misrepresent things to your sponsor. The frequency and format of meetings with a sponsor is worked out between the sponsor and sponsee. You can’t work a fourth and fifth step without a sponsor, and you can’t stay sober or get serene without taking those steps. It is important to make this relationship a priority, because it has very important purposes.
There are three main jobs of a sponsor. One is to make your meetings work for you, to make sure that going to meetings is a constructive experience for you, and for others. Your sponsor is always your same gender, but here I will talk as if he is male. He gives you feedback on what you say and how you interact. He troubleshoots any relationship issues you have with others in the group, and in the program as a whole. He cannot do this very well if you don’t both go to the same meeting on a regular basis.
His second and most important job is to walk you through the 12 steps. This is a master-apprentice system: recovering people need to be ushered through the 12 steps one at a time by somebody that has himself been ushered through the 12 steps the same way. To make it a good learning experience, your job is to do as you are told. If you don’t think it is good for you, check it out with somebody else, and then talk it out with your sponsor. Think of the steps as problem-solving tools that are dangerous in the hands of a novice. Just as you would need to have somebody show you and oversee you as you learned how to use a gun, a power tool, or take care of a baby, each step is meant to be learned by first listening to instruction, hearing what others have experienced to be safe and effective, and finally letting others watch you do it. The spirit of the law is as important as the letter of the law: the purpose and attitude of a behavior is as important as the exact action that you decide to take.
The last purpose of a sponsor is to help you live a better life, by giving you encouragement and advice on the practical problems of living in recovery. The thing is, he won’t know very well how to do this if you don’t let him do the first two things as well. People often ask, “How long do I have to go to meetings?” The best answer is, “Until you want to go, because you like the better living, laughing, and loving you find in those rooms, and later, you find coming out of your heart.”
Recovery is like the medical model. It teaches that your addiction is a disease. Alcoholism for example is portrayed as a physical allergy and a mental obsession, and medical treatment and hospitalization is encouraged as an adjunct to any recovery that needs it. We aren’t responsible for having the illness or addiction, but we are responsible for whether we get treatment, by working the program of recovery that gets us well.
In conclusion, as I understand it, 12-step recovery teaches that “anything you put before your recovery you will lose,” including your job, your health, your family, and your faith. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you follow the 12-step way of life, it is free, and it makes everything else in your life better. You get not only sobriety, but serenity. As they say, “it works if you work it.” For a more elaborate cost-benefit analysis of recovery, ask me for my outline by that title.
Have you ever wondered why vampires and zombies have become so popular in American culture? I believe it is caused by the huge rise of addictions in America, and by so many parents over-protecting and over-indulging their children. Both of these trends have produced people whose lives resemble vampires and zombies on the inside, because they love in dependent ways.
When children see their parents overly involved with each other, or with a child, these children don’t grow up looking for intimacy and bonding in a life partnership of strong, equally yoked adults. Rather they look for intimate connections where they have seen them at home – in relationships between mutually dependent people.
To me, a psychological vampire is a seductive, lively-looking person who actually needs to steal real liveliness from other people. Such a person is thus a cross between a vamp and a pirate, so to me, what they do is vampiracy. They prey on dependent people who seem like zombies, because they are enthralled with those they love. Vampires are so preoccupied with their own feelings and needs that they neglect their partners and caretakers.
Caretaking people have the opposite problem: they are so preoccupied with the needs and feelings of other people that they neglect their own. When anyone points this out to them, they are likely to tell you they feel that they do not have the power, the right, the desire, or the freedom to love themselves as much as they are loving another person (or group). An awful lot of caretaking people are burning out and becoming zombies, because they don’t take good enough care of themselves as caretakers.
So what happens when adults (who were often spoiled as children) develop some sort of addiction, and then expect to be taken care of by a lifeless zombie? And what happens when zombie caretakers (who may have grown up identifying with a martyr-type parent) over-protect or over-indulge a loved one? Vampiracy happens, that’s what. Both the over-protected, over-indulged vampire and the lifelessly bitten zombie have been rendered ineligible for life partnering with a normal person.
When people try to suck the pain and problems out of another person (or a group of people), they are really sucking the lifeblood out of them. Their healthier loved ones tell them to “get a life,” but they are too over-extended and exhausted to enjoy living life through their own bodies. They can’t really die, because they aren’t really living, except vicariously through those they have bitten, and through their addictions. Addicts bite into their partners and caretakers (their vampire lovers), and then for rest, they crawl back into their addictions, the coffin-like retreats they keep taking from their responsibilities and relationships.
Dependent relationships illustrate an increasingly common condition – people loving in ways that interfere with the personal growth and welfare of their lovers, and with their own. Dependency involves too much loving and too little respect or understanding. It is loving your neighbor instead of yourself, or the opposite, loving yourself at the expense of your neighbor. Either way prevents living by the standard Jesus gave us, loving your neighbor just as you are loving yourself.
For something so prevalent, it’s amazing we haven’t had a name for vampiracy yet. And it’s tragic, because it’s hard to recover from a sick habit when nobody knows how to call you out on it. Well, nobody now except you. You won’t be looking out for fangs, capes and hickeys anymore. By challenging others to love both themselves and others in healthy ways, by disengaging from them when they don’t, and by calling vampiracy what it is, you now have some stakes you might be able to drive through the hearts of their lifeless little dances.
People trying to save or help their addicted loved ones are in a similar position to a pastor trying to save his congregation from sin. They often use similar tactics. After a time of this helping, the addict comes to resent the reforming efforts of the loved one, who is after all supposed to be his parent or spouse, not his counselor, sponsor, or pastor. The helping loved one begins to sense this resentment deep down, and to feel that if the addict recovers, he will probably leave, and the relationship will probably be severed. To avoid feeling this fear, the enabler keeps playing the helping games that in strengthen the addict’s dependency on the enabler. This makes things worse.
The really good pastors remain in their minds rather independent of their churches. They know who they would be, how they would live when they move on. There is an old English term for a pastor who is dependent on his congregation. The wordvicarious comes from the old English word vicar, referring to a rector (pastor or priest) who wasn't paid enough money to buy his own food and shelter, so he depended on his congregation to feed and house him. He couldn't work anywhere else until they or the bishop released him to. He was taking care of his flock, but he was also depending on them for everything, and he had lost touch with who he would be without them.
Vicars therefore live for and through the congregation, to the neglect of their own personal life. Some are afraid to offend their congregation, and so they tell them whatever they think the people want to hear. Often they feel they have to raise the congregation up spiritually or financially before they have a right to live their own lives. Other vicars are tyrants, controlling their flock through preaching that lays down the law in stone, with fire and brimstone. The controlling types we therapist call active-dependent, and the comforting approach we call passive-dependent. Whether active or passive, controlling or comforting, vicars live vicariously for and through those they help. So if you want another word for this process of codependency or enabling, you could call it vicarity.
Now as addictions progress and take more and more of the addict’s freedom and life, addictions go through stages. Likewise, as the loved ones keep trying to help by pouring in more and more love, they are also losing their freedom, their strength, and their life. In the later stages, like the addict, they find they have suffered great losses – finances, freedom, self-respect, health, faith, and relationships with family and friends. At these later stages, the exhausted codependent enabler is like a vampire. Trying to suck the poison out of the addict as if he had a snake bite, she is in effect joining the addiction as she sucks more life, freedom, and self-respect out of the addict. She feels most alive, not when she is living for God through her body, but when she lives for her addict, through his body. A key sign the enabler is out of control is a loss of good lifestyle balance between work, rest, and play. Toward the end, burned-out enablers need a sabbatical rest.
The Bible gives in rich detail how life unfolds for people who fall into sexual sin. It was pure visual seduction for David when he laid eyes on his neighbor’s wife Bathsheba (2Sam 11). His heart followed his eyes in violating the 10th commandment, and in short order that act stimulated violations of the 9th (lying), 8th (stealing), 7th (adultery), and when these couldn’t be covered up, he went on and broke the 6th by murdering her husband. Previously a man of great virtue, he quickly broke half the ten commandments, and it all started with his eyes. For her infidelity, Bathsheba may have gotten a palatial upgrade on her residence, but she had to endure her lover’s murder of her dear husband, feel his remorse expressed publicly in the hit song of its day (Psalm 51), and then like so many adulterers in therapy afterwards, watch helplessly as her children and step-children lived out the generational after-effects over the years to come: rape, incest, violence, job loss, family disintegration, etc. What does David’s story tell you about yourself? About God?
In Genesis 39, we see a strong example of Joseph resisting seduction by Potiphar’s wife, going to jail for it, and then having a wonderful life restored to him because of his obedience. Read the story carefully, and ask the Joseph in you to teach you some lessons.
Hosea gives us a compassionate look into the forgiving heart of God through a broken-hearted victim of his wife Gomer’s infidelity and chronic bondage to sex. The father of the prodigal son is another (Luke 15). If you believed God has already forgiven sin before it happens, that asking just accesses what’s already there waiting for us, how would it change your prayer life, and your life?
We see many successful lives turned around through repentance, confession, and obedient forsaking of sexual sin. David shows us the way in Psalm 51, and several women in Jesus’ life followed it -- the one at the well in John 4, the one weeping for the joy of her forgiveness and cleansing at the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7), and the one caught in the act of adultery, about to be stoned for it (John 8). Paul Tournier in Guilt and Grace teaches both perpetrators and victims that we all need a healthy amount of guilt about our sin, not too much like the woman had, and not too little like the Pharisees had. Godly sorrow for sin is shown in 2Cor 7: 8-11, which joins Psalm 51 as excellent roadmaps to repentance and restoration for the sexual sinner. Brokenness will show in a full confession, a broken open heart, and behavior change. What do these passages teach you about how to repent, and how to forgive yourself?
To prevent or to break bondage to sexual sin, it is necessary to guard what comes into the mind (Phil 4:8) and heart (Pr 4:23), through the eyes (Mt 5:28-9), through what we touch (v.30), so that unclean acts do not come out from our bodies (Mt 15:18-19), so that we and others are not perverted and ruined by the words coming out of our mouths (James 5:5-6), or what we join our souls to as we unite in a sexual embrace (1Cor 6:15-20). You check the doors of your house every night to keep your family safe. What good would it do to check every day your mind gate, heart gate, eye gate, ear gate, skin gate, mouth gate, and groin gate?
Computer porn and cheat chat smells badly of “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (1Jo2:16). We find the strength to avoid all this from our God, embodied in the Holy Spirit (John 14-16) poured out through the church/fellowship of believers (Eph 2:18-21, 4:4-6), the word of God (Heb 4:12-13, 2Tim 3:16-17), friends (John 15:15), people we help (Mt 25:37-40), and small support groups (Mt 18:20). Is your God able to come to you through all these channels, or have you tired some of God’s blessing arms behind him?
At most big family gatherings, there will be an alcoholic, a nicotine user, or a drug abuser present. The table likely plays host as well to a few non-chemical bad habits that also threaten the family. Nearly every family has folks who have an eating, work, video game, pornography, sex, gambling, hoarding, or spending disorder. Some may also have abusive or violent tempers, infidelity or love addiction, or online screen addictions to their electronic devices.
As damaging as all these chemical and behavioral addictions are, they don’t mess a family up nearly as much as their strongly different views of the addictive behavior. When the house is divided by different narrow-minded solutions, the addict can divide and conquer, and the addiction has free reign. When the family agrees on the causes and cures, they can all grow stronger with each relapsing misbehavior of the addict. Let’s look at six different views one could take about what is wrong and what is needed.
The first view is usually the first approach loved ones take: denial. They look the other way and pretend nothing is really wrong. He just had a rough night. She’s a victim of circumstances. It’s just a phase he’ll outgrow someday. At least she’s not pregnant, and she’s still in school. He’s still got a job. This is the view addicts take of their own misdeeds, and they are good at charming others into agreeing with them. The problem is that this view and this behavior almost always fuel the addiction, and help the addict slide further into gradually more outrageous misbehavior.
Don’t be in denial. A behavior is an addiction if it does most of the following: it hurts people, wastes time and money, becomes an obsession, produces sudden shifts in mood, takes more and more to satisfy over time, and defies the addict’s efforts to quit entirely, or even to set and keep her behavior within limits for a given episode. Most forms of love, encouragement, and support given to an addict just serve to feed his addiction, not his recovery, and this naïve way of loving is called enabling. (If you don’t know how to tell the difference between this and healthy love, ask me for my article on “How Loved Ones Enable Addicts.”)
A second view is that addicts have personal problems they need to solve. Maybe the problem is emotional, mental, or relational, but whatever, they should get better with counseling, because it’s just a bad habit. This is the view of my profession, but our cure rate for addicts who do psychotherapy alone is embarrassingly low.
A third approach is the self- help movement. Its gurus are celebrities with books, CD’s, DVDs, and seminars. Each one has new angles to sell, and new stories to tell. This method is by far the most popular one to combat over-eating. This approach’s Achilles heel is also its curb appeal, that it requires no submission to help from a professional, institution, or organization. Like a good American, you get yourself over your own addiction. The benefits of these cures do not usually hold up well over time.
A fourth view is the medical model: addicts have a disease. They need medicine and the structured environments of first a hospital, and then usually an intensive outpatient treatment program. Doctors and hospital staff bring healing through medicines that reduce the cravings, and treatment programs that are mostly educational. Addictions are like diseases in that they make us sick and can kill us, but they are not diseases. The disease model can excuse addicts by allowing them to blame relapses on a faulty diagnosis or treatment plan. The disease model may hold addicts somewhat responsible for their recovery and compliance with the treatment plan. But it cannot hold them accountable for the selfish and deceitful behavior that invited and grew the addiction, for the effects their behavior has had on others, or for their relapses back into addictive behavior.
A fifth approach comes from religion: addicts are lost children, and like all sinners, they need to give their lives over to God. The medicines they need are prayer, Bible study, worship, forgiveness, and good morals. The healing institution is the church, and its pastors are its healers. The Bible’s favorite models of sin are idolatry, adultery (cheating on God), and foolishness. These metaphors do show how the sin of addictive behavior betrays God, the one-flesh life partner of a spouse, and the addict’s own holistic health and wellbeing. But if the addict’s church is close-minded, if his God is too small and cannot be embodied in other fellowships and traditions, if her faith is too small and immature to use the other four approaches, when life turns up the pressure down the road, my training, research and experience all agree that relapse to the old habit or to a new addiction is likely.
The best approach is twelve-step recovery. It holds the addict fully responsible for his recovery. It educates and heals both her spirit and her flesh (the ego-kingdom, old nature, heart, brain, natural instincts). Going both to church and recovery groups gives both advanced prevention and on-the-spot cure. 12-step recovery is the most effective approach for overcoming denial, and it is the most friendly to all the other views, encouraging the addict to get counseling, education, religion, and when needed, medication that isn’t addictive. Research has shown 12-stepping alone to be clearly the most effective of the five approaches at producing long-term abstinence, bringing serenity, and avoiding new addictions to replace the old one. It is even more effective when it includes the other four approaches, and back to the family, when they also are working a 12-step model for their own recovery from the traumas, losses, and betrayals they have experienced from the addict’s behavior. Elsewhere, I have outlined how to work a good program, and how to tell if a loved one seems to be doing it right (ask me for “How to Work a Good 12-step Program”).
Like religion’s teaching about sin, recovery teaches that addiction is a progressive and fatal disease, and that whatever you put before your recovery you will lose. That’s the bad news, but the good news is that recovery is free, and it will absolutely make everything else in your life go better than you ever could have imagined. When you are delivered from denial of your character flaws and bondage to your bad habits, you are delivered from the fear that anyone can ever again take your sobriety and your serenity away from you. When your higher power is the author of freedom, you have at last found the one healthy dependency.
With any addiction to chemicals or to a habit, loved ones trying to help addicts need to realize and continually remind themselves of three things: “I didn’t cause the addiction, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it either.” But you can make it easier for addicts to keep their addiction going. How? The counterproductive efforts people make to help and reform their addicted loved ones are called enabling behaviors. Those who do them are calledcodependents, because these behaviors make them just as dependent or hooked on helping the addict as the addicts are hooked on their addictions. This over-protection and over-indulgence just stimulates the shame and irresponsibility that fuel the addict’s habit.
Because addictions work on people like hypnosis does. I have studied and seen how skilled hypnotists can hypnotize virtually anyone, especially people trying the hardest to resist. Their secret is that they know how to make your efforts to resist hypnosis work in reverse to stimulate the trance. Hypnotists wear out those who resist them, by getting them to push against themselves to the point of exhaustion. Those trying to resist hypnosis surrender to the trance in any manner much like addicts slipping into their mindless habit. So when loved ones try to straighten out addicts, this enables even more addictive behavior, excuses and cover-ups, which wears the loved ones out to the point of exhaustion and surrender. And like hypnosis, this all works out under the cover of denial, subconsciously, with loved ones thinking they’re helping when they’re actually playing right into the hands of the addiction.
Here are twelve of the most common enabling behaviors to avoid:
So what does work to help loved ones recover from an addiction?
Tell the truth. Say that their addictions, excuses, and lies disgust you, and make you want to leave them alone. Tell others the truth about the addict too—stop covering up for them.
Withhold whatever they abuse. Take away the money, housing, vehicles, jobs, privileges, responsibilities, and loved ones you can’t trust them with. They all fuel the addiction anyway.
Show love by giving only your self to the addict, not the things in the previous paragraph. You talk on the phone or meet them for a meal, but you don't hang out for long. If they have stolen, meet in a restaurant, not in your home.
Ask about their recovery, what they are learning, what responsible things they are doing.
Discipline lies with doubt. “I would like to believe you, but you know you have lied about this kind of thing before. Time will tell. Actions speak louder than words.”
Leave them alone. Stop paying attention to them. Don’t spend time with them. Don’t let them see that they tick you off, just that they turn you off. If necessary, kick them out or separate from them. This may require that you "get a life," or at least live a life full enough for you to let go of the addict.
Take better care of yourself. Most enablers don’t know how, or don’t care enough about themselves to do it. Those who do care would benefit from counseling.
Join a support group, a recovering community of friends and family. Sharing your "experience, strength, and hope" with others in your situation will give you the strength you can't find elsewhere, and can't do without. This happens in the 12-step program for enablers, Al-Anon (www.al-anon.alateen.org).
Conduct an intervention. When you’re tired of doing everything else, you might do well to gather loved ones and let a professional teach you whether and how to present an offer the addict can’t afford to refuse. For details on this and other suggestions for codependents, see www.interventioninfo.org/research/family.php. From what I know, the best local treatment available for addicts is at the nationally acclaimed Healing Place, in Louisville.
Last week on Thanksgiving Day driving to visit relatives, it took my wife and me an hour and a half to finish thanking God for all the blessings in our life. One of the biggest gratitudes for me was that that day was my 30th “birthday” of my new life in sobriety and recovery. It was not until my third year of recovery that I could see that its blessings were going to far outweigh the pleasures and comforts I had gotten from my two addictive habits.
What were my addictions? People can be addicted to a chemical, a person, a behavior, or even to avoiding something (eating, sex, leaving home, throwing things away, for example). I have learned that not being specific about my particular addiction protects my anonymity. This keeps my focus on the solution, not the problem. So let’s just say that I have regularly attended two different 12-step fellowships. I’ve also attended Celebrate Recovery meetings where people in bondage to any bad habit are welcome to come.
We addicts who have completed the 12 steps to the satisfaction of our sponsor I will refer to here as “recovering.” (For more information about this, including a user-friendly summary of the 12 steps, see the tab for Recovery on my website below, and read the article there, “How to Work a 12-step Program.”) We recovering addicts have most often received some major blessings, and here are my favorite features of our recovering life:
These all make up quite the benefit package. I have found many advantages and much wisdom from my studies in psychology, and from my Christian faith as learned through the church and the Bible. But most psychologists I know, and most active churchgoers, haven’t received very many of the blessings I have found in recovery. I doubt I would have found more than a couple of them without my addiction that made me seek recovery. No wonder I’m so thankful I’m an addict.
__________
Dr. Paul Schmidt is a psychologist life coach with offices in Middletown, Lexington and Shelbyville,
502 633 2860 mynewlife.com.
I have never really had a position or opinion on marijuana, and in recent weeks I have grown weary of this ignorance. To prepare my thoughts on this subject, I have done three things. First, I have obtained professional training as a certified addictions specialist from the International Institute for Addiction and Trauma Professionals. Secondly I have spent several hours looking through the research on the effects of cannabis use (news flash: it is profoundly inconclusive). Finally, I have discussed the positive and negative effects of marijuana with over 100 people who have used it, and with almost as many of their loved ones who had their own opinions about how pot had affected these people for better or for worse. I have also spoken with other mental health practitioners about what they have read, and what they have observed with the folks they have treated.
The main active ingredient in cannabis is THC, which is short for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, found and the leaves and flowers of the marijuana plant. The concentrated form of this substance is a more addictive drug, hashish.
Depending on the situation and the person using it, any effect of marijuana may be considered positive or negative, beneficial or harmful. Therefore I will just list the effects without judgment, starting with generally the most widely acknowledged, and proceeding to the less:
Physical addiction in the form of dependence does not often occur, but it is always useful to look at 10 signs of any addiction. Licensed addictionologists such as myself know that research often defines an addiction as the presence of three or more of 10 signs. The following are ten hallmarks for any addiction:
___ impulse control (recurrent failure to resist impulses to use/act out),
___ broken plans (frequency/duration of use keeps exceeding what’s planned),
___ can’t quit (persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to stop for good),
___ time loss (using takes up excessive amounts of time),
___ preoccupation (thoughts of using keep intruding),
___ irresponsibility (using occurs during times committed to obligations or responsibilities),
___ social fallout (recurrent negative consequences of use in work and/or family life),
___ social dropout (skipping social, occupational, or recreational activities to use),
___ behavioral escalation (it takes more pot or risk to get the same emotional relief), and
___ withdrawal symptoms (irritation, tension, or despair when unable to get high).
How would you score yourself or your loved one on these criteria?
The most widely recognized positive uses of marijuana are with medical patients who are fighting chronic, debilitating, perhaps even fatal stress-fed conditions, such as cancer, Parkinsons, PTSD, ADHD, etc. It is useful with patients experiencing chronic pain. It also benefits neurotic, overly responsible people who need temporary assistance learning to loosen up in a recreational setting.
However it has not had good outcomes with people suffering from confusion and inner turmoil, such as schizophrenics and folks with mood disorders, because they become more withdrawn into their troubled selves. Nor has it been good for passive, disengaged individuals who are under-achieving in their financial and career lives, or for disengaged people who aren’t well connected or bonded with their significant others.
For middle school and high school students, a growing subculture has developed that celebrates vaping. The darker elements of the marijuana industry is producing and distributing misinformation that looks very scientific. These videos, podcasts, memes, and links give much encouragement to vapers for using.
The same social media are very inviting to social opportunities. They provide an easy entry and access to young people who lack social skills, or who are going through a hard time and need to socialize with others who feel disconnected.
Emotional pain, like physical pain, has two healthy effects on people: it draws our attention to problems, and motivates us to solve them. Emotional pain as a very important third purpose, that physical pain does not -- it motivates and actually creates emotional bonds with other people going through similar problems and emotions. Marijuana numbs both physical and emotional pain, and the sense of urgency or importance about anything that might need to be done to solve a problem.
Therefore, young people who get high together are drained of their awareness of their problems, their motivation to solve them, and their access to other people who are not only facing such problems, but also finding ways to bring good things out of these painful situations.
Compared to beverage alcohol, booze leads people initially to higher levels of social interaction and other purposeful activities. Pot on the other hand leads its users to become more passive spectators, more likely to withdraw from social activities, at least from those people who don’t use marijuana. In short, alcohol tends to make folks more active and passionate, whereas pot tends to make its users more passive and reflective. Alcohol initially expands the intensity of whatever it is poured out onto, whereas marijuana puts a calming fog down on whatever it finds. Pot therefore has a much better and far less damaging effect than alcohol does on people who are angry, or driving a vehicle.
Legalizing marijuana use is likely to have similar effects on society as legalizing gambling has had. There will be more of it done, and less fear and shame for doing it. It will be more popular with lower classes whose lifestyles evoke higher levels of anger, tension and stress. Therefore it will raise more money for government and big business at the disproportionate expense of the lower and middle classes.
So is pot doing you more good or harm? How can you determine if your use of pot is having a more positive or negative effect on your life, and on those around you? The answer is as simple as it is painful and challenging. List four or five things that you most want to accomplish or experience in life. (If you have trouble doing this, you might be getting too much THC, or TMW, “too much weed.”) Then ask one or two adults who depend on you the most to answer the same question about you (to list four or five things they most want you to accomplish or experience in life). Then exchange copies of your lists so that all of you are looking at the same expanded list of goals. Finally everyone is given list of marijuana’s effects bulletized above, asked to consider its effects on all the various hopes and goals for your life, and to give a number from -5 to +5 on how they believe smoking pot will affect your chances of fulfilling each particular dream. When you get everyone’s papers back, the numbers will pretty much answer your question.