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?

Disturbance

I'm not going to tell you my record for number of years that I've avoided going to the dentist, but I'll let you know that it's somewhere between "a few" and "several." Many of us desperately want to avoid discomfort and pain, even at the expense of healthy habits, healthy relationships, and healthy teeth.

We're like pools of water trying to maintain a calm surface...and life loves throwing rocks at us. Whenever someone we like ignores us, or when we accidentally offend a friend, or when the door handle comes off in our hand, we become disturbed. We have a number of solutions to the ripples that inevitably rock our world--like my approach to dentistry, we avoid things. Sometimes we try to counteract the unpleasantness by lashing out (road rage) or numbing (the entire "Thank Goodness It's Friday" mentality, which is basically code for "now I can try again to numb my problems out of existence").

Life throws rocks into our otherwise peaceful existence.

I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about something my sponsor told me about disturbance:

We become disturbed to the degree that we're broken. 

In other words, if I'm upset about something, it's not the thing I'm upset about that's the problem. The problem is that I have some deficiency or personality flaw. Let me give you an example:

One day I publicly embarrassed a student. She and her friend were on the gym team, and I asked, "does the fact that you're in class and she's not mean that you didn't make the cut and she did?" A dumb thing to say, although I didn't mean it maliciously. She was apparently feeling pretty sensitive about it, and ever after that day she and her friend hated me. I even took them into my office and apologized, explaining my side of it. At the end of the semester I got a surly email from one of them, complaining about her grade. I (believed that I) honestly wanted to help her understand, so I sent an email explaining some piece of wisdom. Then she abandoned all thoughts of not-offending-the-grade-giver, and she let me have it. After I read her email I was SO upset. I felt misunderstood, stereotyped, and unfairly attacked. All her faults and weaknesses made me choke on her words--"She was such a half-hearted, flakey, overconfident, entitled student--what a hypocrite that she would attack me without seeing her own shortcomings!" I struggled for days with a desire to write her back, pointing out all these mean things I was thinking about her. I even wanted to justify it as helping her be a better person ("somebody needs to give her a wake-up call"). I'm glad I let it lie.

I can see now that, yes, all those mean things I thought about her were more or less true. However, I was at fault. I was angry because I felt guilty, prideful, insecure, and hypocritical. It was a bad semester--I was knee deep in a secret addiction to pornography, daily lying (mostly through omission) to my wife. I didn't dedicate enough time to my students because I was drowning in other work, acting out, and numbing my guilt. To some degree I knew she was right--I was a broken and hypocritical person. Even though that's so clear to me now, all I could see were her problems (more on this intentional blindness in a future post--I call it the reality distortion field).

Here's where things get tricky. It's easy to look into the distant past and see mistakes like this, but disturbance is around us all the time. I've found myself getting angry, then remembering this idea that I'm at fault if I'm disturbed. I want to yell--"my kid just drew all over himself with a marker! How am I to blame!?" or "That woman, a member of the church, was super immodest! I didn't want her to dress like that, yet I'm super triggered! How am I to blame!?" This indignation is a bad sign. Doesn't it just feel like I'm trying to force the water to be calm?

Instead of focusing on the "originators" of the disturbance, I need to look at myself: "I just yelled at a three-year old for doing something completely predictable and completely non-permanent; what have I done recently that's causing me to feel like lashing out?" or "I--the messed-up addict--am railing against a woman who in all likelihood doesn't understand and is trying to cope with her own problems; what do I need to do to regain my equilibrium, then strengthen my recovery (which has apparently gotten off track)?"

Here's where I edited out a paragraph that was meant for someone else--someone who is disturbed by something I want to defend, and I wanted to force this person to look at their disturbance as a sign that they should be more concerned with their own personality flaws than with this thing. However, I realize that my reason for putting this paragraph in was to lash out and lecture, not deal with my own disturbance. I write this paragraph to acknowledge that I'm a flawed, disturbed individual who needs to be more concerned with my own personality flaws than with this person. 

The solution isn't to try to move my pond out of the way of the rocks. It's not to yell at the rock thrower. It's not to find a way to create ripples that cancel out ones that are already there. There are times when I can figure out how to deal productively with my problems on my own or with the help of others. With addiction, though, there are so many ripples and counter-ripples there's only one real solution. It's to come to Him who commanded the waters--"peace, be still"--and they were calmed.

Job understood this, and he proved how un-broken he is. All his physical possessions were destroyed, his ten children were killed, and he was rejected by his friends and wife. If that's not disturbance, I don't know what is. Still, he said, "Till I die I won't remove my integrity from me" (Job 27:5) and  "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19:25-26).

That's the kind of pond I want.

Failure is an Event, Not a Person

If recovery is a path with rough, steep sections and smooth, relatively easy parts, I'm pretty sure I'm in a rough, steep part right now. Partly it's because of other pressures (7 days until a move, upcoming teaching, upcoming schooling, family's illness, kid's dental work, car trouble, 4 kids and their propensity for bickering/unhelpfulness/unrequested murals), but partly I'm not sure why. Both me and my wife have been feeling a bit down about our...fill in the blank. Marriage,  parenting, recovery, habits, etc. Basically, I've felt like I'm a failure at this recovery thing. And after my last post, even the sobriety thing is in question. :)

Still, earlier this week I had a tender mercy experience where I got a glimpse of my own recovery.  I went to an ARP meeting for the first time in five months. I've been going regularly to SA meetings during that time, but since I'm moving next week I wanted to go and 1) let everyone there know I didn't just fall off the wagon, and 2) put in a plug for SA, which has been super helpful to my sobriety/recovery. Since I hadn't been in so long, it brought back very clear memories of what I felt like the last time, regardless of all the intervening meetings.

The first time I went to an ARP meeting five-ish months ago, I was slightly nervous, not really sure about what to say, but really impressed with the spirit in the meeting. Sometimes in meetings the last several months I've shared because I feel like I should and that it would be good for me. I end up rambling about random things, then ending awkwardly. Pretty much every meeting I end up feeling that everyone else's share is so much more enlightening and amazing than mine...which I guess is a good thing (I recently heard the advice "stick with the winners.").

It's not only in meetings; throughout the week I'll be trying so hard...then I'll fall flat on my face. I'll come home from a super spiritual, empowering meeting then find myself yelling at my kids. I'll intentionally choose to reach out and call someone in my group, then later find myself making a google image search of an innocuous word, hoping for some kind of immodesty.

Side note: isn't it sad that even with "SafeSearch" on, stuff still comes up? How porn-infused is our culture when almost any word turns up porn? Also, I've since told my sponsor that if I do any Google image search like this I'll consider it a lapse in my sobriety.

Honestly, even the day I went to the meeting I wasn't having that stellar of a day. I'm pretty determined that I'm not going to replace one addiction for another, which has left me grasping for video games, movies, ANY entertainment to escape from my unwillingness to cope with life.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at the meeting that when I shared I felt confident and helpful. I'm pretty sure I rambled, but it seemed like it was from one good thing to another. In any case, it was a clear, powerful feeling, and I feel it was a blessing to have a brief snapshot of the progress of my recovery.

It helps me realize that I may fail a lot, but that doesn't mean I'm a failure. Failure is a thing that happens, not a part of my identity. And not only that, but I HAVE made progress, despite not being able to see it every day.

What is Sobriety?

One of the new terms I've started using since becoming familiar with 12-step programs is "sober"/"sobriety," as in "I've been sexually sober for five and a half months." In my mind it's always been a pretty clear definition; if an alcoholic drinks alcohol they've broken sobriety. If a sex addict has sex (aka orgasm) with self or someone other than spouse, they've broken sobriety. "Sobriety," along with the similar "acting out," seems like a pretty useful measurement when talking about recovery.

However, it isn't as clear-cut as I originally thought. Did you catch the mismatched examples in that last paragraph? One drink of alcohol=sex? I don't think so. It would be more accurate to say one drink of alcohol=one lust hit...but that seems a little unrealistic, right? With immodesty everywhere (especially in hot weather) and lustfulness so widely accepted, surely there must be more to losing sobriety than ogling women in a supermarket?

I recently came across a short SA essay (see what I did there?) entitled, "What is Sex with Self?" It was from someone named Harvey A, who apparently had been sober for 26 years, as of 2010. I'm going to quote from a few paragraphs of it:

"Those people who wonder why they repeatedly relapse might consider that they have never really gotten sober. Yes, they stopped masturbating to orgasm, BUT nothing else changed. Some continued stimulating themselves but not to orgasm. Others continued watching internet pornography and others live in sexual fantasy while letting themselves become aroused. If this isn't 'sex with self,' then what do we call it?...

"What is the solution? Do we itemize each form of sex with ones self? Do we define specifically for each other? Do we merely continue to ignore this problem as a fellowship and just say it is part of progressive victory over lust? No. I do not believe these are the solutions. I believe the solution is in the statement, 'to thine own self be true'....We [discuss with our sponsor, saying] something like this, 'I do such and such behavior to sexually stimulate myself. This is a form of sex with self. If I do this behavior again, I will call it a loss of my sobriety.'"

Progressive victory over lust means we will make mistakes. However, I'm starting to feel that it's easy to stall out and plateau in those victories. It would be nice to just have a checklist of things that are forbidden, but I find myself constantly trying to push whatever boundaries I set for myself. If I really had an attitude of wanting to be true to myself, I would be more sensitive to my own thought processes and desires. Being true to myself is a boundary that resists my desire to push boundaries.

Let me share another way of looking at sobriety that goes along the same lines as what Harvey A. wrote. Here's an excerpt from a personal story in the SA White Book (page 23):

With no more resorting to 'drugs' to avoid the reality of my own emotions, I began to see and feel them. Raw nerve endings of resentment, negativism, anxiety, and fear became exposed. Above all, I think I was afraid of finding out what I was really like on the inside. It wasn't pretty. I discovered that uninsulated by lust, sex, pills, alcohol, or entertainment, I was a very marginal person and would have to begin growing where I had left off at the age of eight. And so the pain began. That's when I saw the truth of another paradox: We have to suffer to get well.

I really have felt those "raw nerve endings" recently. They desperately make me want to numb them with something--video games, ice cream, escapist entertainment, and lusting. It's hard to face my own weaknesses. I wish I could just go on with life. But there aren't any shortcuts in sobriety, and when I find myself trying to avoid the pain, covering it with some kind of medication, that's when I need to question whether I'm actually sober and in recovery. Not only is sobriety not comfortable, but it's painful.

So the next time I'm feeling the lust hunger, I need to work on my reaction. Rather than think about how I can find some loophole and still get lust hits while still maintaining "sobriety," I need to be more in tune with who I am and accept that painful feeling. Will there come a day when I can have sobriety without any pain? I hope so, but for now I need to remember that the pain from not hiding  means I'm sober.



P.S. Last week I wrote about my ultimatum--write in my journal and control my video game use, or face a long-term ban. The first few days of the week things went pretty well--I had solo video game time and used it to increase my productivity. However, I'm sad to say that after those first few days things didn't go very well. I've decided to ban video games for the next four months. I'm going to have to be more specific, but maybe I'll do that in an update to my boundaries. Now that I think of it, I think I'll have to update them anyways when I move in a week and a half (!). 

Making my Desires into my Allies

A while ago my wife had an interesting conversation at a recovery group meeting. After she mentioned that I'd been sober for (at the time) about four months, the woman she was talking to said that was usually the amount of time it took her husband to relapse.

I don't know if that's a universal thing, but I sense I've started to plateau in my recovery a little bit. It's not just the slowing down in my posting to this blog (though I've started three posts since my last post--one about a story in the D&C, one about video game addiction, and one about general conference talks). It's also probably in part due to outside influences making my life crazy: we're moving in less than a month, we're in the process of buying a house to move into, I'm finishing up this semester of teaching, and I'm preparing to teach two new classes/take three classes in my PhD program next semester. And then there's the usual insanity that involves having four boys.

But, more importantly, I've become lax in certain areas of my recovery. I've let other interests, including video games, crowd out the actions that lead me to feel like I'm making progress in recovering myself. I want recovery. I know trying to escape my stresses and insecurities with video games and drown them with ice cream isn't going to work. But at the end of a long day after the kids go down to sleep, I'm having a hard time making that acknowledgement part of my daily routine.

It all comes down to what I desire. Here's an amazing quote from Neil A. Maxwell, in a talk from this last conference by Randall L. Ridd:

"What we insistently desire, over time, is what we will eventually become and what we will receive in eternity. ... Only by educating and training our desires can they become our allies instead of our enemies!" Ensign Nov. 1996

I do want recovery, but do I want it enough to "educate and train my desires" away from the path of least resistance and towards the path of recovery? If so, I know what I will become and where I will end up. I sense there's a long-term video game ban in my near future, but I'm going to give it a week to see. Instead, I'm going to do something that I think will help me be more in tune with my desires and where my heart is.

In a recovery meeting a week and a half ago, I felt an amazing outpouring of love and the spirit. It was an amazing experience. Afterwards I called my brother (who's further along in his recovery than I am) to share some ideas and excitement about it. One of the things he mentioned was how much journal writing has helped him. We talked about using the journal to better understand our thinking, and not just a place to record what's happened (something I've done in the past).

This week I'm going to explore where my heart is in my journal every night right after the kids go down. Because right now, my desires are working against my long-term well being, and to successfully be in recovery I need my desires to work for me.