November 17, 2020

 

At Elevated Recovery, we understand the power that addiction has over people’s lives. Understanding that is not a pleasant experience. It’s a very sober analysis that you tend to think about in the long hours of the night, or in contemplation of the troubles that beset the human spirit.

 

On the other hand, we also know that humans have the ability to bounce back, to be resilient and beat addiction with the right support and resources.

 

Interventions are key in ending addiction, but not everyone thinks carefully about what interventions mean. There are different kinds of interventions that can have a positive effect on someone’s journey. Every different kind works in its own particular way, but knowing more means that you are more likely to make a difference. 

 

Family and Friends

 

The kinds of interventions that we most commonly think about are group interventions with family members and friends.

 

These settings are familiar to us partly because they are external to the personal struggles and problems that people experience within themselves. You see them on television, and you understand how people get together to achieve these kinds of events.

 

Institutional Interventions

 

We’re also familiar with the idea of institutional interventions in the form of rehab centers and other types of facilities.

 

However, we don’t usually see their inner workings of these types of important interventions unless we’re in need of the services ourselves. The nuts and bolts of how these facilities work are carefully shielded from the public.

 

So we don’t tend to know as much about how these interventions work, but we know they work based on professional protocol and the vast resources of these types of enterprise.

 

Personal Interventions

 

There’s also something you might call self-intervention, and that’s pretty obscure to people who haven’t struggled with addiction or watched a loved one struggle in their own personal lives.

 

Self-intervention is the type of thing you might casually call ‘willpower,’ but it’s much more than that. At Elevated Recovery, we give people tools to practice self-interventions that change their lifestyles when it’s a little bit of extra help that they need. Want to learn more? Utilize the resources that we provide on our web site to understand more about how these types of assistance work, and what the road map to recovery often looks like. For instance, review our resources on the process of “rebooting,” and you’ll start to see what’s possible, and how to go about changing your life. It’s all part of a scientific and methodical approach to ending addiction – on your own terms!

 

Have you had a hard time asking for help with your porn addiction problem?

Many guys struggle with ending their out of control behaviors because too many of them view it as a moral problem. Certain therapists, counselors, groups, and approaches believe your addiction stems from a moral deficiency. This instills feelings of shame and makes it harder for you to ask for help.

They’re wrong, though. 

Porn addiction is NOT a moral problem.

Porn addiction is a BRAIN problem.

Before you can follow the Porn Reboot system, you have to change this limiting belief. You’re going to stay trapped in the cycle if you keep looking at your out-of-control behaviors as a moral problem. When you see them as a brain problem instead, you can overcome them. 

Here are three reasons why your porn addiction is not a moral problem but a brain problem.

1. Believing porn addiction is a moral problem makes the cycle of relapse harder to overcome.

If you’re trying to end your pornography addiction and sexual behaviors, you’re probably caught up in a cycle of relapse already. You’ve likely tried to stop at least a few times before. Maybe you made it 30 days, 60 days, or even 90 days, but eventually, you find yourself back where you started.

It’s not easy to escape from the cycle of pornography addiction. You’re not going to be perfect when you’re ending your behaviors. That doesn’t mean slips and relapses don’t feel like a failure, though. Relapses are discouraging when you’ve been working to stay away, but it worsens your feelings of failure when you attach a moral connotation to them.

You might tell yourself you’re a bad or sinful person for watching the type of pornography you do. Maybe, you feel like you’re undeserving of certain things because of your addiction. Whatever you tell yourself, you’re making your perceived failure worse. These inner monologues stem from believing your porn addiction is a moral problem.

Shift the way you look at it. When you realize your porn addiction is a brain problem, you can do something about it. There are changes you can make. You’re able to logically assess what happened without feeding into your false narrative. 

Relapses happen before you commit to the system. Maybe, you were stressed out. Perhaps, it was a long day and you were overwhelmed. You might have just been bored, but telling yourself the relapse happened because you’re a bad person, is only going to make it harder in the long run.

2. People have different definitions of morality.

Morality means different things to different people. Most humans have a shared sense of general morals like don’t lie, don’t kill, or don’t steal, but each person develops their own specific idea of morality over time. It’s usually based on some general rules you pick up from different places, like your parents, church, or society in general.

This is another issue with seeing your porn addiction as a moral problem. Morality varies across the board depending on who you ask. This isn’t just a religious vs. non-religious issue, either. Even religious people have different understandings of morality!

For example, there is a portion of the population who wouldn’t lie about anything. They would never tell a lie about anything at all, even if it ended up hurting other people. There are some people who would lie under certain circumstances, usually to avoid hurting a person’s feelings. Then you have compulsive liars who will lie about anything whenever they feel like it.

That’s just one example of the wide range of morality. If morals vary so greatly across the board, how can you expect to recover by viewing it as a moral problem? When you see it as a brain issue, though, it leaves little room for argument and you can make the necessary changes.

3. Moral solutions only involve two things: willpower and punishment.

The only solutions to a moral problem involve willpower and punishment. Take a Christian upbringing, for example. If you asked why you shouldn’t do a certain thing, you were probably told that you must obey to avoid being punished. Then you have to use your willpower to keep from doing that thing and getting a punishment. That’s how it worked for me growing up.

On the other hand, brain problems have many different solutions. There’s an entire, reliable system built to help you recover. Every time you apply it you know it’s going to work. It teaches you specific ways to handle your problem instead of white-knuckling your way through it. 

The Porn Reboot system helps you build a predictable system to overcome your addiction. You create a predictable, routine schedule that works for you. Your routine then becomes habitual as you implement it over time. There’s no need for willpower or fighting temptation. You’ve replaced your temptations with an effective system. 

You can’t use the system to replace a moral problem but you can use it to replace a brain problem. Instead, you’ll find you can overcome your pornography addiction and out of control behaviors as soon as you shift your perspective.