When I entered the program, I acted out almost daily. As I progressed, I would act out weekly, every two weeks, every month, etc. It seems to me as though I have some sort of capacity to hold lust within me – I’ll call it a lust balloon. Once I have filled this balloon with lust, I feel compelled to resort to my addiction by acting out my addictions physically.
Tag: Brain
Surrender Before Sleep
I have learned to take a few minutes before bedtime and think back on the day to see if any triggering memories from the day pop up. I have learned that if anything pops up, I didn’t really let go of it during the day and so I have to let go of the thought or visual again and again until it stops coming back to my mind. See the Step 3 and Surrender articles for more detail around how to let things go, or surrender them.
When I do this, I have a purer sobriety and am much more lust free, and the lustful dreams don’t happen. Again, I don’t know how this works but it does. I talked to someone who was at an earlier stage of recovery who had tried this and they said that unless they were in a good place spiritually, thinking back on the day would bring up things that they were unable to let go of and it ended up making things worse. Through that experience, I have learned that I must be in a good spiritual place and must be able and willing to surrender my lust before I can use this technique successfully.
Dreams
One other area that was troublesome to me was lustful dreams. I had heard that I am not responsible for my dreams and sometimes I would look forward to them just to relieve the pressure of my lust. I never felt good about that though.
Over time, I found that lustful dreams went away completely as I stopped stuffing myself with lust all day long. As I learned to let go of lust and stop letting it into me throughout the day, I could go for years without any sexual dreams at all – nor did I want them or need them for relief. The pressure went away once lust went away.
Changing Habits
Recently, I changed the location of the trashcan in my cubicle at work from my right side to my left side. It had been on the right side for several years. After switching it to the other side, I spent a lot of my time turning to the right to throw away the trash, realizing in frustration that the trashcan was no longer there and then turning to my left to finally throw the trash away. With time and patience, I started catching myself earlier on and only started thinking about turning to the right and finally, I now just turn to the left by habit.
Reprogramming My Brain in Recovery
Not only did I need to reprogram how I thought about women and other triggers, but I had to reprogram my deeper thoughts about being worthless, needing to be perfect to be loved, etc. I found that reading a list of positive truthful statements daily helped me to do this. Over time, I found out what lies I was believing from Satan and reversed them. For example, one lie he told me was that “I have to be perfect to be loved or helped by God”. I reversed that to say “God will help and love me when I’m imperfect”. There are many more statements I read each day. Something about saying those things over and over gets me to believe in them more each day. I get the negative versions whispered to me every waking moment so I deserve to have someone (myself) tell me the truth instead.
Abstinance from any addiction also improves how my brain works. Recent studies have shown how the frontol lobes shrink when people engage in addictions of any kind. The “natural” addictions (food and sex) affect the brain more and the other addictions (alcohol, meth, cocaine, etc.) also affect it in similar ways, just a little less. The frontal lobes are the brakes for my brain that make me think through to consequences for actions. Addictions also cause me to have fewer pleasure receptors in my brain as my brain tries to seek equilibrium. This makes normal life more miserable and the addiction becomes my new normal. All of this keeps me in the addiction. These studies also show that with abstinance from these addictions, my brain heals and goes back to normal over 1-2 years.
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