Step One, Honesty

After realizing that what I am doing follows pretty closely the LDS Addiction Recovery Program, I decided to actually go through the workbook that is used in that program.  The first step is Honesty: Admit that you, of yourself, are powerless to overcome your addictions and that your life has become unmanageable. 

I’ve been pretty honest in the blogs I have already posted, but for this step in the program, I need to get real about accepting that I have an addiction, which requires more than just a decision to stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing. 

It took a long time for me to be able to say that this definitely is an addiction.  I didn’t want to use that as an excuse for bad behavior or jump on the bandwagon of blaming my choices on an inability to control my actions.  I also didn’t want to wrongfully equate my struggle with that of people dealing with life-threatening addictions that I felt made what I’ve been going through seem like child’s play.  It wasn’t that I felt admitting to an addiction would say something bad about me.  I felt that claiming an addiction would put more importance and severity on the situation than it deserved. 

I have had my eyes opened during the last few years that I have studied behavior modification through the gospel, and I realize that what I wanted to classify as a weakness truly is an addiction.  Accepting that allows me to see the change I’ve been seeking in a completely different light.  I am not just dealing with a problem or a bad habit.  It is an addiction.  That means I cannot just find a way to manage it and keep it from getting out of control.  Addiction by definition is being out of control.  I can’t just change my behavior long enough to lose weight and then go back to old behaviors, just being careful to be moderate so that that I don’t regain the weight.  Addiction recovery requires a complete and permanent change.

Since I am not addicted to a substance but a behavior, I have to first be very clear on what the addiction is.  There may be certain foods that trigger the behavior, and they would need to be avoided, but other than that, this is not about giving up food.  It’s also not about losing weight.  It’s about overcoming the addictive behavior that has led to a weight problem. 

An alcoholic gives up alcohol completely so he can be sober.  Someone with a food addiction does not give up food completely.  We all have to eat.  I found myself stumbling on that thought for quite a while, but it is now clear that it’s not the food itself that is the problem.  It’s the way I think about food and the way I use food that is the problem.  The addictive behavior I have to stop participating in forever is eating to feel something. 

When I am engaged in the addictive behavior, I find that I think about food all the time.  What am I going to eat?  What do I feel like eating?  What would make me feel good?  As soon as I finish eating, I start thinking about the next time I will eat and going through the same questions.  If I want to make a day or an event special, I would think about what kind of food would make it special.  If I’m going to have time to do whatever I want to do with no restrictions, I think about what I should eat while I do whatever else I choose.  I often find that I’m not hungry, but I have a relentless urge to eat something.  I want to eat something that will give me a feeling.  Food has become the central focus in meeting my needs and the most important thing in my life.   When the addiction is really kicking in, I eat when I’m not hungry.  I don’t stop when I’m full.  I want to keep eating even when I feel stuffed.  My brain tells me to stop.  I know on every level that it’s not right to eat, that it won’t give me whatever it is I’m trying to obtain, but something in me keeps urging me to eat.  I feel completely and totally out of control.  I’m an addict.

It’s a scary feeling.  It doesn’t happen all the time.  In fact, now it is very rare, but when I’m caught up in that behavior, it can occur over and over for days, weeks, even months at a time.  I don’t really enjoy doing anything else.  I think my only enjoyment is eating, but that’s not enjoyable either.  I’m just miserable. 

When I get into that addictive frame of mind, I do not have the Holy Ghost as a companion.  In fact, I feel like I am wearing armor around my soul, and I can’t feel anything.  I feel like darkness is closing in around me.  There is no joy or peace in my life.  It is true that our physical condition and behavior have a great effect on our spiritual health.  That is one of the main reasons I have fought so hard for the last several years to overcome this addiction.  The spiritual and emotional pain has driven me more than my physical condition. 

I know that this battle is winnable, but I can’t do it alone.  I have to continue to work consciously on changing my thoughts in a way that allows the atonement of Christ to give me the feelings I crave.  When I do that, I find that the addiction is silent.  So I pray and study the scriptures daily.  I meditate and try to engage my mind and my heart in activities that I enjoy.  I am honest with how I feel and what I am doing.   

If you would like to watch someone else’s story about how this program has helped them in their addiction, click on the link below for Step One: Honesty – David’s Story about Sex Addiction Recovery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_DtmXXpw6Q

Dealing with Addiction

Our desires reveal what is truly in our hearts, what is most important to us, and what direction we are headed.  Sometimes there seems to be a disconnect between what we want and what we are actually doing.  When that happens, it is because our heart and our mind are not working together.  Addiction can be the source of the confusion.

There is a pleasure center in our brain that urges us to make correct choices in the moment to insure our safety and to give us pleasant experiences instead of unpleasant ones.  That part of the brain is what is referred to as the natural man and often does not work in our best interest.  When it exerts too much power over the part of the brain that reasons, understands consequences, and makes choices — the part of the brain where our agency is exercised — we may engage in addictive behavior that is destructive.  The actions that come out of the natural man part of the brain are not necessarily the ones we desire, even though we act as though they are exactly what we yearn for. 

Behavior that insures safety in a moment when you are threatened in one way or another or that brings momentary pleasure in response to a traumatic event can be very undesirable and even destructive if it becomes our default reaction to everything in life.  Sometimes those behaviors have no redeeming value and have just become habit through repetition because of a bad choice or by design because of uneducated behavior.  In addiction, instead of our thinking brain controlling that natural response center and making correct choices, the natural man is controlling our actions.  Even once we realize the behavior is destructive, we continue to engage in it because it has become automatic.  The brain urges us to do what the heart tells us is undesirable.

This addictive behavior can be corrected by overcoming the natural man.

“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticing of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”  Mosiah 3:19

Twelve-step programs that help people to overcome addiction may not follow this plan exactly, but they have some remnants of it.  They require the addict to humble himself.  The ones I am familiar with require turning to a higher power, acknowledging weakness and inability to handle the problem alone.  They require submission to the requirements put on them to demonstrate a true change of heart.  The addict has to seek forgiveness and begin life anew. 

Addictive behavior is an attempt of the brain’s pleasure center to satisfy is a desire of the heart in a most ineffectual and inappropriate manner.  To truly put off the addictive behavior, we need to uncover what that underlying desire is and satisfy it in the proper way.  Then the urge to engage in the addiction can be turned off completely and will not return as long as we continue to use our agency to make right choices.   The addictive behavior has actually been trying to satisfy Satan’s counterfeit of the true desire.  When we are feeling divided between what we want and what we are doing, I believe that is when we have reached the point of wanting to make a change.  We want to stop acting on the defective, mind-driven response to our desire, but the addiction makes it very difficult.   

The first step in attacking an addiction is to turn to God.  He wants to help us.  He will help us, and he will make sure we get everything out of the experience that we need.  We have to understand our behavior, our weaknesses and our triggers.  We have to put forth effort to resist the undesirable behavior and engage in behavior that brings us closer to the Lord. 

What is pleasurable now can become undesirable and even offensive to us as we make changes on a deep, personal level.  I can’t stand the scary movies I loved as a teenager.  I can’t enjoy books with bad language, sexual content or crude humor.  I used to be able to overlook those things, but now I just feel offended.  I have no trouble not watching those movies or reading those books even though at one time they were my sources of pleasure.   No effort or restraint is required.  I don’t feel that I am being denied in any way.  There are other things in my life that I know I would be better off without, and yet letting go of them is not appealing to me or is very difficult to do.  This leads me to conclude that the key to giving up anything that is unrighteous is to keep progressing spiritually until at some point each undesirable activity loses its appeal.  

I believe that whatever is currently bothering me is what my spiritual progression has prepared me to give up.  For me, that nagging behavior at this time is the addiction I like to refer to as recreational eating.  It is hard to give up food as my pleasure, but as I continue to push forward spiritually, I believe it will be possible to do so.  The way I feel about the problem now leads me to believe it is time to actively engage in changing in this area of my life.  And I believe that someday I will realize that recreational eating has become a thing of the past for me, something that I actually find undesirable, even offensive.   

To learn more about addiction, watch this video.  It contains information that gave me real hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwYASU-YVcw&list=LLCIPtHzA86fFlXqvQ1J3tHA&index=1

Willpower and Carnal Desires

Just by being born, we became susceptible to the carnal, sensual and devilish nature that leaves us vulnerable to sinful desires or urges.  That is our fallen nature or the natural man in us.  This blog is focused on one of those sinful urges, finding pleasure through food, but the principle is the same no matter what inappropriate behavior one feels drawn to indulge in.

Most people, when they decide they want to change, decide to simply stop doing the unwanted behavior or to start doing the desired behavior or maybe to exchange the undesired for the desired.  In doing this, we employ willpower, the inner strength to control one’s actions.  Few people find success in these endeavors, because willpower just simply doesn’t work long term.  Trying to change using willpower, or in other words, trying to control one’s desires or deny them, sooner or later ends in defeat.  That does not necessarily mean that we are weak or failures or that we did not put forth enough effort.   The reason we are unable to make real and lasting change in our behaviors or personality is life was never set up for us to be able to fundamentally change ourselves. 

Some have said that the way to conquer a bad habit is to replace it with a good one, to identify the underlying need and find a better way to meet it.  Years ago, when surgery for weight loss was really becoming popular, people who had part of their stomach removed so that they could not overeat found they were still desperate to meet their desire for pleasure.  Being physically unable to do so with eating, some started developing other undesirable addictions, such as gambling, shopping, and sex.  They had not uncovered the root of their problem and dealt with it.  They had just cut off the outlet they had been using.  They were still trying to appease the natural man, who is and always will be an enemy to God.    Satisfying him is to turn away from God.   There is another need under that desire for pleasure, and that is the one we need to uncover.

Catherine Thomas, a BYU scripture professor, said, “Men were designed to be essentially powerless in this life except for their agency either to draw on God’s power ….. or to refuse his power.”  In John 15:5, Jesus said, “….without me ye can do nothing.”  The only real and lasting, positive change comes through the grace available to us through the atonement of Jesus Christ.  If we want to get rid of habits or behaviors that are wrong, sinful or undesirable, we have to humble ourselves and exercise faith in the Savior and repent, or in other words, turn completely to God with a willingness to accept his will as we stumble along the path he has put us on in this mortal existence.

Mosiah 16:5 says, “…he that persists in his own carnal nature… remaineth in his fallen state and the devil hath all power over him…”  That’s why any changes in diet that are still seeking to satisfy the desire for pleasure are not a solution.  It is just a continuation of the carnal nature.  We find ourselves trying to be carnal in a more acceptable way, a way that we hope will mean weight loss and better health and freedom from thinking about food all the time.  Even if we accomplish all that, if we are still seeking to satisfy desires coming out of our fallen nature, we remain in the same condition, subject to those desires that push and pull us toward some kind of behavior, feeling or attitude that keeps us away from God. 

The solution can never be reached by trying to satisfy the carnal need.  The solution is only found in changing so that the carnal desires are removed completely and permanently, and that is only possible by overcoming the spiritual death that put us in that condition in the first place.  We “must be born again; yeah, born of God, changed from [our] carnal and fallen state to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters.” (Mosiah 27:25)  Instead of appeasing the natural man and his desires, we are told over and over that we must put him off.  We must be changed.  We must get a new heart, a new spirit, or newness of life, a new mind, become a new creature, be born again.  We must have no more disposition to do evil but to do good. 

We can’t do any of that.  We cannot give ourselves a new heart or mind.  We cannot remove the natural man or overcome our fallen nature.  We cannot make of ourselves a new creature or give up our disposition to do evil.  There is only one way these things can happen, and that is through the power of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  God has to change us.  He has to lift us up from our fallen state.  He has to give us the new heart and mind and disposition.  We cannot take these things or imagine them or conjure them up.  We cannot claim them by right.  They must be bestowed upon us by the Savior. 

So what is required of us?  We must have faith in Jesus Christ, humble ourselves, see our fallen nature and our weakness and our need for him.  We must seek his will and accept it, make it our own, and act on it.  In short, we must seek always to be spiritually-minded, for if we are not, then we are carnally-minded and still in the grips of Satan.  We have to be lifted spiritually.  Basically, we must repent. 

To repent means to change by turning away from the things of the world or natural man and turning towards God.  And that takes us back to the neuropsychology of change model.  To make that change, we need new thoughts that will give us new feelings that will lead us to new actions so that we create a new reality for us to live in.

So permanent change requires attacking the problem at the root, which is in the mind and the heart.  It also requires changing in the Lord’s way, which means seeking his guidance, support, and power through the Holy Ghost.  During one of my non-guided meditations, I was pleasantly and overwhelmingly surprised to see Jesus walking toward me across the water.  He held his hand out to me and asked if I was ready to walk on water.  I said yes, took his hand and stepped onto the water.  After just a few steps, he stopped walking and asked, “Why are you able to walk on water?”  I answered, “Because with you, anything is possible.”  Even as I said it, I realized the truth of that statement.  With him, anything is possible.  That means this change I have sought for so long is possible if I do it hand-in-hand with him.  I realized that day that, if I have faith in the Savior, I can do anything if it’s his will that I do it. 

Man’s way of dealing with the natural man is to attempt resistance and denial of those drives, but God’s way is for us to yield to his will instead of those primal urges.   We have to seek the Lord and pray for his will to be made known to us and for it to become our own. 

“Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Romans 12:2