Question: I don’t feel worthy of the Lord’s help. How can I ask for a gift of grace?

Answer: Positive vision and faith for recovery includes three core beliefs that bolster recovery will and work. These essential recovery beliefs are: 1) “I am a person of divine nature and infinite worth.” 2) “I can repent, grow, and become more like God.” 3) “God loves me and I am deserving of love.”

Excessive guilt and shame strikes not at behavior, but at the soul. It attacks these essential beliefs and replaces them with debilitating lies: 1) “I am profoundly flawed; I am worthless and bad, one of God’s ‘rejects’”; 2) “I can’t change”; 3) “God and others condemn and reject me; I am not deserving of love or help.”

All those who assist and sustain recovery need to support and sustain these essential truths and faith.

Question: Why is addiction so bad for me?

Answer: The consequences of addiction are numerous and far reaching. Addiction is hedonism in action—the unbridled pursuit of physical sensation and pleasure and gratification of appetite. Consequently, not only does addiction itself cut a broad swath of destruction across one’s life, the hedonism that underlies it spills over to flood life as well. The impulsive and compulsive pursuit of pleasure, even at great personal risk, quickly spreads beyond the original addiction.

Question: Addiction affects only me. Doesn’t it?

Answer: No. Addiction affects both spouse and children, unfortunately. Selfishness, fueled by addiction, disintegrates covenant relationships broadly. Preoccupation with pleasure produces irritability over the natural claims of relationships upon us. Responsibilities and restraints required to make relationships work are resented. Contention is common as addicted persons fight self-denial for the sake of relationships. Yet ironically, resulting loss of intimacy and attachment often only fuels the appetite for escape into pornography’s fantasy. A vicious cycle strengthening entrapment readily results.