Gratitude for Recovery

Again, I haven't felt I have much to say of late, which makes me feel ungrateful for the recovery process. I am grateful for the recovery process, but I am often a man of few words.

Today, I'm grateful for the strength the Lord has granted me in response to my doubled efforts to overcome my sins.

A lot of the time, addicts feel the Lord will suddenly reach out and fix us because we're hurting a lot or have been suffering for a long time. I've learned the hard way this is not true. The Lord yearns for us to be fixed by Him, but he doesn't fix us until we have exerted our faculties of intelligence, love, humility, and new knowledge until we can manage ourselves. Once we can manage ourselves and stay clean, the Lord's power can wipe away our tears and make us new creatures. We cease to desire evil.

This takes a lot of work. First of all, we have to even know what addicts can do to stop acting out. Our society doesn't help people with that. Generally, we're in the dark and don't know what can be done. We are, sadly, left to believe it's up to our puny wills to conquer our huge problems. Not going to happen.

After thirteen+ years of struggling with addiction, the Lord has lead me to the point where I can't take my addiction anymore. I have no excuses anymore. Once I got to that point, the Lord blessed me with the knowledge I need to manage my addiction and become sober. I believe He waited to bless me with this knowledge so that I wouldn't be condemned further for having that knowledge and not being ready to act on it. We are judged more severely for rebelling against the greater light. I am grateful that God waited until I was ready to accept help from Him.

I urge you to read "Perfect Liberty I Manual" at this location:

http://addictionrecoverylds.blogspot.com/

It was written by a psychologist who works for the LDS church's Family Services. He understands how people can overcome addictions. His insights and exercises are saving my bacon.

Emergency Live-Saving Kit

Gotta keep up with this blog thing! I don't usually have much to say, so blogging isn't my forte. However, I'm back!

The good news is that I haven't had another relapse since the day before I wrote my first article on this blog! I feel so great!

I attribute this success to a few things.

Firstly, God is good and His power is in the lives of all those who are seeking Him.

Secondly, my love for my wife is too important for me to ignore, and I have become more and more desperate to destroy my addiction before I lose her.

Thirdly, I have been given some great tools. One is in a book you can read here. In that book is a page about the "Emergency Life-Saving Kit". This kit involves a page the addict writes about several things. First, he writes positive reasons for not acting out with his addiction. Second, he writes the negative consequences for acting out. Third, he writes down things that are inspiring to those trying to conquer sin. These things could be quotes from scripture, general authorities, or other people. The inspiration could even be other great things like pictures of loved ones who are hurt by the addiction. Last, the addict writes a plan for what to do when emotional triggers and temptation arrive. For me, I wrote down a phrase of scripture to repeat in my head until my thoughts and moods change, I wrote that I'll talk to my wife about my emotions BEFORE I act out, and that I'd go for a run outside if my temptations are unmanageable.

This Emergency Life-Saving Kit really has been a life-saver. It has saved my bacon. It works! Once the page is written out, the addict is to print it out and put it in his wallet, as well as keep it on his desktop. He is to read it and review it daily, as well as when he is feeling tempted. I can't say how powerful this has been. I wish ever addict knew of this technique! Go read that book! Use it!

Visions and Blessings

I was thinking back a few months and decided I should share an experience my wife and I had in relation to my recovery from addiction and her recovery from depression.

After a relapse, my wife was understandably very upset and I was understandably very discouraged. Years of pain resulting from this addiction were burying me in hopelessness.

Fortunately, my bishop had recently directed me to an LDS ARP meeting. I was gaining new insights weekly. One of the suggestions in the ARP manual was to pray to the Father to show me life in the future if I did not repent. So I asked him one day.

That night, I dreamed that I was in a singles ward, and that I had been separated from my wife. I felt really awkward at the singles ward because I knew everyone else felt awkward that a divorced guy was in their congregation. The bishop was really kind to me, though. And he was deeply concerned about my being without a woman. Because I had been married, he believed that my emotional recovery would require being with a woman, and he set out to try to get me on a date. He said he knew a girl who was a lot like me. When he told me who she was, I remembered seeing her at church and thought she was really pretty, and was even sure that she had shown signs of liking me. I consented to go on a date with her.

The dream time-lapsed to my date with that girl. We were at a sit-down restaurant. I was sitting across the table from her and admiring her beauty. She was blonde and looked like a Hollywood star. She looked like the girls that permeate filthy entertainment everywhere. And she was really nice to me. We had a great dinner. However, there was a pervasive unhappiness underlying the whole scene. I missed the woman I had been married to (my wife).

After dinner, I took the girl I was dating to her home to drop her off. She invited me in. She wanted to be physical. I consented to a kiss, but at that point in my dream, I lost it. I couldn't bear the thought of being with this woman. I wanted the affection she had to offer, but I wanted it from my wife, not from this new girl! I began to ball hysterically. I knew I could never be happy again because I had lost my wife. I wanted so badly to love and be loved, but felt that anything I could get at this point was shallow, empty, and lacking in eternal scope. The pain was unbearable. I needed my previous marriage back and I couldn't accept anything else.

I woke up at that point, feeling that I had just been given a dream by God. I knew my prayer had been answered. Then my wife woke up and related to me that she had had a dream about our future. It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, my wife had prayed that same day that the Lord would show her what our marriage would be like if I overcame my addiction. She was worried we wouldn't be happy again.

In her dream, she saw us together with our children. She said everything was peaceful, and that I, her husband, was a perfectly happy and content man and a great husband and father. I was functional and there were no fears or worries at all regarding my addiction.

That was an amazing experience for us. The Lord showed us what our options are, and though there is definitely reason to fear my addiction, that we should have hope because happiness is what He has planned for us and his Atonement has made recovery possible.

I highly encourage struggling couples everywhere to take the advice in the ARP manual and ask the Lord to show you the consequences of repenting or not repenting. He will show you His love.

Goals Are Hard

So, in my last post I wrote about goals.

*ahem*

Yeah, so my exercise didn't go so well. I'm too focused on goals.

What?

Okay, my biggest problem with sitting down and writing out a bunch of goals is that those goals have wars with each other. Some goals try to completely destroy other goals by being loud, demanding, and more attractive than the others. It's like Goal High School. Full of drama.

I've been working on my goals. I promise. Just some of them have taken the back seat.

So I feel good about spending so much time on goals. But now I need to plan a schedule, I've discovered. And pray that I can stay focused on it. All of my goals mean something to me. I just need to figure out how to be consistent and more like my wife. That is, I need to be able to manage a billion things at once like she can.

To help me combat this problem, I read a great article on lds.org called "Personal Time Management: One Key to a Leader's Effectiveness"

There are lots of good things in the article. One point was that nobody can manage time. It's fixed, and everyone always has the same number of hours in a day or a week. Rather than thinking of it as time management, we should think of it as personal management.

The article has a great suggestion for starting out with improving personal management. It reads:

"A very valuable exercise in learning better time utilization is the task of keeping a time log for a specific period of time. Try writing down every 15 minutes how you spend your time. Keep this log for a week and total up where you have spent your time in those 15-minute increments. Your summary will usually bring about a great realization that you have not spent your time where you thought you were. With that information, sit down and think through the ideal expenditure of your time as compared to the actual. Make plans and commitments to change you behavior accordingly."

So, that's something I'm going to do the week after Thanksgiving travels and craziness. Sounds hard, but it will be worth it, I think.

Running from Fire

A common piece of advice for recovering addicts is the importance of exercise.

Ugh.

I have never been good at staying on top of excruciating physical exertion! It's, well...excruciating. For one, my preferred types of activity include things like drawing, playing the guitar, reading, playing games, and enjoying movies. So basically, sitting on my duff is what my life is about.

 On top of that I have asthma. Physical exertion hurts!

Well, I sat down and wrote a list of goals. I needed to show myself, the Savior, and my wife that I am committed to my recovery. So goals were something my wife and I decided I should set. She recommended exercise, which she takes a lot more seriously than I do. I decided to exercise three times each week.

And I put it off until today, which is a Thursday. That gives me tomorrow and Saturday to work out.

I just tried to run.

My chest still hurts. Whatever. What's worse: burning lungs or burning in hell fire and brimstone? I'll take the former, thanks.

One thing is for certain: running helped me to clear my mind. The reason I actually got myself motivated to run was because negative emotions were beginning to dominate my mind. The sorts of emotions that lead me to act out. I recognized it was happening, so I booked it out of the house.

That was pretty awesome for me to do, even if I say so myself. Turns out that burning lungs feel pretty good. Especially compared to a burning conscience.

I plan to run from fire regularly now. I hope it becomes more enjoyable, but if not, who cares?

Not me.

He Gave Me a Knife

I have been going to LDS Family Services to obtain counseling lately. It has been a great help to me in understanding what I really am working with as a lust addict. I won't go into great detail about it, but I will talk about one thing. My therapist suggested that I think of a symbol to replace porn with. Every time I'm tempted to act out my addiction, I should think of the symbol. Many addicts think of a bottle of poison, a gun, or something like that to remind themselves of the danger of their addiction.

To me, none of these images were powerful or effective. It is better to die than to sin, so poison and guns aren't the solution. I spoke with my wife about an effective symbol, and together we came up with more of a story that illustrates the danger of addiction.

Because addiction is something humans develop as a method for coping with negative emotions, we are seeking a medicine for wounds.  Let's say that wound is depression.

We are alone in a room, and our wound is open and the pain is real. We want some way to get rid of the wounds. We're so focused on our pain; the room we're in becomes dark and we can't see. Someone comes to us in the darkness, but we don't see him there. We don't know he's there. He whispers in our ears so quietly that we don't realize it isn't our own minds making suggestions. He whispers, "Here, take this tool, cut out your pain with it." He puts a knife in our hands. We are feeling completely focused on our own pain, and we can't think logically anymore. We take the knife, and we start stabbing into our wounds with it. When we've had enough, we put the knife down and begin to bleed all over the place. We wonder what we've done and why we've been so stupid.

Eventually, we are desperate for help. We recognize we're killing ourselves. Then we hear footsteps outside of the room.  Someone is coming. Maybe they could help. But that voice whispers in our ears again. "Quick! Hide your wounds! Someone will see how stupid you've been to stab your wounds with that knife!" We are so embarrassed. No one will help us. They'll see how stupid we've been and think that we are intentionally killing ourselves. They will berate us, reject us, and it will be worse than if we just died on our own.

We roll over to hide the blood.

We repeat this process over and over, until there is so much blood that we can't hide it. Against our wills, our loved ones begin to see there is something horribly wrong with us. But that voice always comes in the dark, and that hand always gives us the knife, and our wounds are too big and complicated for us to know what to do with them. We need a true healer.

We need the Master Healer.

That is the story. Of course the dark room represents our blind isolation, which is a huge part of addiction. The unseen man with the voice and the knife is Satan, our greatest enemy.

Yesterday, he handed me a knife. I'm so tired of that knife. But I used it because I'm so used to using it as my attempt at healing wounds. It needs to stop. It is such a stupid thing to do.