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.
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