Addiction In Modern Times

More often than not these days I have someone walk into the office and admit to an addiction. One particular instance came when a man entered at his “wits end”. He confessed of his addiction to pornography. “It is destroying my marriage,” he said, “And I feel powerless against it.” 

Indeed, it is so easy to become addicted to pornography in a culture where sex sells. In a culture that bombards us with billboards, magazines, television, and movies feeding an internal desire that people have: An internal desire to feel love and to give love. The desire to feel and give love is good and positive, but media perverts love’s goodness and distorts it in selfish and demeaning ways. Underlying the distorted sexual desire and addiction to porn is an unrealistic and unhealthy expectation of what love making is: something beautiful, healthy, and consensual. When it becomes perverted, what was once good becomes a selfish struggle. This selfishness will inevitably tear us, and others, down - instead of lifting others, and us, up. And people succumb to it - feeling powerless.

Yet, even though in a culture where addiction to pornography is easy, we know it is against our inner spirit. We know that it leads to a path contrary to where we want our life to go: a path that deters from healthy focus, pure hearts, and a clean spirit. And all of that determines our success and victory in the “foxholes of life”. Sure it is a self-control issue and it is also an issue of reorganizing personal priorities. We are not powerless against it. A strong spiritual resilience is not one that drains the spirit of another or takes whatever it wants selfishly. A strong spiritual resilience gives its strength to others, to nature, to the other and a strong spiritual resilience will receive its strength from others freely.

"Lean into it!"

Tom Holdcraft

Resilience Consultant, HPC