had lunch with my friend greg, a mental health professional, today. he and i have been talking about the incredible cultural saturation of pornography - an epidemic, in his words - and about the inadequacy of both the church and the state to truly offer any real world help.
it seems like, when people become addicted to porn, their best hope is to just stop and hope for the best.
they're like white-knuckle drunks.
sure, there's accountability software which (in my mind) is the best option
but even that only makes failure doubly-painful because now someone knows all your secrets and is forced to act on them
which usually have some painful (and shameful) consequences,
often disproportionate to the crime.
anyway,
greg has a hunch that there has to be a way to fight porn addiction
much like we fight other illnesses (because it does contain many similar characteristics to mental illness)
and much like we fight other addictions (because it does contain all of the same characteristics of other addictions - alcohol, hard drugs, etc).
so he's on the lookout for some people of passion to dig up some research on porn, addiction, recovery, and re-mapping neural pathways for the next year in an effort to establish a treatment program.
it is very much needed
after all, if someone comes to me and tells me they have ADHD, i send them to greg
but if they confess an addiction to porn all i can really tell them is that they should stop.
people need real help for their real problems,
not just guilt and a high punishment for failure.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
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I stopped a guy on the freeway one day and he only had one arm...the other was amputated at the elbow. I asked what happened and he was reluctant to tell me his story, but he told it anyway.
ReplyDeleteHe has/had a problem with lust and masturbation, so when he became a Christian he took the passage quite literally that says, "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off."
Literally, dude laid his right arm across the rails of a train track and consciously let a train chop off his arm.
Maybe that's the only best way. I dunno! Never-the-less, dude has guts!