Our Recovery Account

I'm not in the best way. (Here is where I edited out three paragraphs of dwelling on my difficulties. In short, we moved and I lost contact with recovery support and bishop. Since we've been here I haven't reconstructed my recovery network or contacted the bishop. On top of that, I've reached my max with schooling, teaching, and home fixit issues like leaks/water damage and my son almost melting our microwave...yeah, smoke stench. In all that word vomit, I came up with a comparison of recovery work to a bank account, and that's what I'd rather have this post be about.) 

If recovery is a bank account--recovery acts coming in minus addiction acts going out--I've been slowly headed towards bankruptcy since we moved. For example, after moving I didn't go to recovery meetings for three weeks (in my defense, my wife specifically asked me not to go so I could stay home and help her). Near the end of that time my wife and I had the most serious fight of our marriage. For about three days a cloud of angry silence brooded over the house, and I thought a lot of angry thoughts. I think I've mentioned somewhere about how that resolved, but that's a sign to me that not all is well in my recovery. Also, yesterday was a bad day for my recovery. (Time for honesty...you, blog, will stand in for my sponsor and bishop, won't you? Thanks.) I broke some of my personal rules, some of which were worse than others--rather than working the whole time on school work, I read news articles about Apple's new tech, watched some YouTube videos about video games, and clicked on an image search when it wasn't really essential. Actually...let's keep it really real. It was completely unnecessary to click on, I "accidentally" saw a thumbnail picture with nudity in it, and I should lose my 8 month sobriety date for it.

Back to that after I pursue this idea of the bank account. So the basic idea would be that recovery happens when we have a positive number in our account, and addiction happens when there's a negative number. I like this idea better than just "acting out = not in recovery" and "everything else = recovery." But let me get specific with a table, cuz I'm into that kinda thing:

Deposits to Recovery Account	Withdrawals from Account
Actively avoiding lust hits. Progressive victory over lust.	The reluctant, unavoided, or actively pursued lust hit.
Reaching out to fellow addicts in a moment of weakness.	Unmanaged anger or resentment for real or imagined wrongs.
Participating in recovery meetings.	Spending time or money on selfish wants instead of needs.
Studying addiction recovery materials and work on 12 steps.	Allowing mental fantasies to run wild, whether sexual or not.
Actively engaging in scripture study and prayer.	Using sex with spouse as a release for sexual desires.
Thinking about and serving family members and others.	Justifying inappropriate actions instead of owning them.
Daily checkins with spouse or sponsor.	Acting out sexually.

If I look at it this way, I'm averaging about 2 1/2 out of 7 on the deposits side and 4 out of 7 on the withdrawals side. Yeah. Sinking ship.

So what do I do from here? The first step is this blog post, admitting to myself and others that I'm not "in recovery," including giving up my sobriety date. Secondly, I need to reach out to my wife and start our daily checkins again. Also, I need to strengthen my recovery network: I need to talk with the bishop, exchange phone numbers with other guys in my ARP group, and contact my brother more often. I'm still trying to wrap my head around why I have such a hard time keeping up my scripture study and personal prayer, but I think that needs to be a part of this recovery self-intervention as well. I've been disturbed/upset by things I've read on the WOPA side of the LDS Addiction Recovery Website, so I need to stop checking some of those sites.

Ok. I feel much less disturbed. If I'm being honest with myself, I haven't had consistent progressive victory over lust during the last 8 months anyways. So giving up my recovery date, even though I didn't technically act out, will give me a chance to make the date mean what I want it to mean. And once I start making more recovery "deposits" I'm sure I'll be feeling even better. I encourage anyone reading this to make a personalized list of things that are deposits or withdrawals for you and see how you're doing. I'm planning on encouraging my wife do it. Just putting things in these terms was a pretty big wakeup call. 

The Addict's Reality Distortion Field

In our addiction we do a lot of damage. When we do things we promise we won't do, we turn our back on a lot of people--Jesus and the commandments; our spouse and our covenants; our family and their expectations; ourselves and our sense of integrity. We don't want to turn our back on these people because we love them and want what's best for them. In order to not become the bad guy, we need to justify our disobedience and selfishness, and that's where some mental contortionism comes in. I call it the reality distortion field. (Quick caveat--in case you didn't pick it up from the sketchy name ("isn't a reality distortion field something on Star Trek?") I have no training whatsoever, and I base this post strictly off of my own thinking and things I've heard in support groups.)

The reality distortion field is like a fun house mirror for the way we view the world--every problem that comes our way is bent to take an optimistic, beneficial shape. With this ability I can twist any unfortunate fact that makes me look bad into something that appears to be outside my control or unfair or not as bad as it is. For example, my "addiction to compulsive sexual behavior to deal with my character flaws" was actually only "a small problem with pornography that I'm never going to do again, I promise." Facts about my performance in my parenting, marriage, jobs, etc. have all received a similar whitewashing through the years.

As I've written and rewritten this post, I've come to the conclusion that addicts don't have a monopoly on the reality distortion field. A woman whom everyone thinks is beautiful may consider herself overweight and hideous. A parent who's pressuring their near-tone-deaf child to try out on American Idol may be convinced their child is a musical genius. A person investigating the church may decide it's completely unreasonable in the kinds of behaviors--tithing, standards, weekly meetings, callings, etc.--it requires of them (I experienced this last one a lot on my mission in a Scandinavian country). The common ingredient between all of these--in particular addicts--is pride. Here's how a guy in my support group put it: each of us have a throne inside of us, and either we can sit in it, or we can let God sit in it. And God is a pretty cool guy, because if we want to sit in it, he'll stand aside and say, "No, go ahead. You sit there as long as you want...let me know how that turns out for you." It never turns out well, though we often optimistically tell ourselves it will.

I believe in optimism. "The gospel" is literally "the good news"--if we focus on the gospel, we're focusing on the good news. Faith, including having faith that we can change, is the first principle of the gospel. If we didn't have hope for the future and that things can be better, why would we do anything that we do? However, there's a difference between actual faith linked with a resolve to be and do, versus unrealistic expectations for the future based on overconfidence in our own ability. There's a difference between hope that we can overcome our addiction and become pure through the atonement versus false hope in ourselves coupled with a willful ignorance of how the gospel and repentance works.

False optimism is often the heart of the addict's reality distortion field. I can't tell you how many times I told myself, "this is the last time"...probably every time I acted out. Was it a lie? Not completely--I genuinely thought that the motivation I felt when I committed to be better was going to keep me safe when temptations came along later. Every time I acted out my self disgust was so focused, my resolve so clear, that it looked, in that moment, like finally I had solid ground to base my recovery on. Of course, I was forgetting that I had those same feelings EVERY TIME I had acted out. Why do we forget? Because this is a forgetting disease. Satan's lies or our own twisted brains keep us from realizing that we aren't actually trying anything different to change the outcome, so there's no possible way it will turn out differently. Our pride--sitting on our throne, trying to solve our problems in our way (or asking God to solve our problems in our way)--blinds us to the reality of our situation.

Like the stereotypical used car salesman who only has good things to say about his cars, we develop ways of portraying our situation that minimize our guilt and excuse our behavior. We HAVE to use porn and masturbation to numb our feelings because we're under extra pressure and deserve a break. And if we aren't under extra pressure...it's because we're bored and deserve some excitement. Or it's because we don't get enough love and support at home. And if we DO get enough love and support...it's because we're smothered by too much positivity. Or it's because of our upbringing, or the culture we're in, or ...(ad infinitum).

The reality distortion field is the biggest barrier to recovery for a few reasons:

• Recovery requires hard work. And notice it's called "recovery work." It's not called "recovery thinking" or "recovery talking." When we're in the midst of our own delusions, especially if we have some sobriety, we start to feel like we've got this recovery thing down! Our genuine excitement distorts into a false confidence that we can lighten up. We tell ourselves we're working when we're actually more concerned with seeing what we can get away with as we coast, not with doing whatever it takes--fearless and tireless action--to overcome our addiction.
• It's impossible to recovery without brutal honesty--both with ourselves and others. When we're in a habit of sugarcoating, blame-shifting, whitewashing, qualifying, justifying, backpedaling,  minimizing, and straight-up lying, how could we possibly hope to overcome the problem, let alone even know what it is?
• We can't recover without thorough accountability. The reality distortion field is a defense mechanism, which is inward and isolating: "I don't need help; nothing's wrong and I'm doing fine!" Recovery is outward and open: "I'm out of control, and I can't do this on my own." Recovery necessarily involving others--especially recovering addicts.  They know how to keep us honest since they've told all the same lies.

In this life, we "see through a glass, darkly" (1 Cor 13:12). We don't know the whole context of our actions. Everyone is forced to interpret their perception of reality, in ways that are inevitably inaccurate. However, I'm convinced that with a concerted effort, we can reshape our opinions and attitudes to be less accommodating to our fleshly tendencies and closer to the way things really are. 

Conditional Hobbies

Classical conditioning is a form of acquiring behavior described by Ivan Pavlov in the late 1920s. You've probably heard of his research with his dogs, some food, a bell, and a bunch of slobber. Here's basically how the theory works: A conditioned stimulus (the bell) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (the taste of food), which results in an unconditioned response (salivating). After repeated pairing, the dogs developed a conditioned response (slobber time) to the conditioned stimulus (the bell) alone...no food involved.

This totally makes sense. Our brains thrive on connections--we finish peoples' sentences, predict the outcome of the big game, and don't even bother trying out that Cinnamon and Liver Ice Cream--because (we think) we know what's coming. The important thing with classical conditioning, though, is that the conditioned response takes a long time and a concerted effort to overcome. The brain has  become rewired to expect or output a certain type of behavior, and reversing that process doesn't happen overnight.

The connection to porn use is pretty straightforward. The conditioned stimulus is the sight of a beautiful woman, the laptop, the bathroom, the whatever; the unconditioned stimulus is physical pleasure; the unconditioned response is the lying, the manipulating, the secrecy, the behavior that makes the pleasure possible. If you think about recovery lingo, the "bell" is a "trigger." What's being triggered? The response that we've conditioned ourself into.

I'm going to take the conditioning one step further. As I've mentioned a few times, I also have an addiction to video games. I don't believe that video games are inherently bad--in fact, I cherish some of the positive memories I have playing video games with my siblings and friends growing up. My concern isn't even that video games can become a way to escape reality. My concern is that video games, for me, became a way to escape the reality of my sex addiction, and they became closely linked. So many times I would try to avoid the guilt from my lust addiction by drowning it in video games. Or I would try to manage and control my other problems with rewards of video games. So now, when I get really into video games...I overdo them and get triggered, even though there's nothing questionable in the games I'm playing.

The point I'm trying to make is that I'm convinced that part of the reason I'm having success in my recovery right now is because I've given up video games, YouTube, TV shows, and news websites (Reddit, CNN) that were acting as my "bells." There are obviously problematic content on any of those things I gave up, but I believe they can be used responsibly...but, for now, they are just too closely connected to my addiction for me to use them responsibly. I don't know if this is a universal thing, but I would challenge anyone who reads this to question behaviors--even perfectly acceptable behavior (though I'd wager not)--that may be a subconscious causal link to your addictions.

I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from David O. McKay (given in 1935): "We sow our thoughts, and we reap our actions; we sow our actions, and we reap our habits; we sow our habits, and we reap our character; we sow our characters, and we reap our destiny." Where we end up in the eternities and at the end of our lives depends on our thoughts. When our brain is rewired by the powerful chemicals involved in porn addiction, our thinking becomes skewed, no longer leading us where we want to go. The big question, then, is are we willing to sacrifice other hobbies that have been contaminated by our addiction in order to straighten out our thinking?