You CAN Kick Your Porn Habit Forever This Time!

Dear Nathan,

It's 2:40 a.m. and I can't sleep. I woke up a few minutes ago and remembered what you told me in our session yesterday. "Two or three in the morning is when I get my best worst ideas."

In the evenings you feel motivated and determined. You just had a day to work for your family and an evening with your amazing wife and kids. You go to bed feeling close to them and close to God. No inclination to act out sexually.

You wake up worried about work situations. Your mind has been mulling them over in your sleep. How will you motivate your sales team? They're not even set up for success within the company at this point! There's so much you needs to teach them, so much that needs to be addressed with management. Life feels chaotic and off kilter.

The Garbage that Looks Like Gold

You and I have likened your addiction, your indulging in sexual thoughts about strangers and the behaviors that follow thereafter, to gold-panning. In the middle of the night when work feels onerous and real life seems bleak, you often find yourself knee deep in a river and look down to discover sparkles everywhere. Refraining from fantasizing and planning at that point feels like trying to ignore a river bed teaming with gold dust and nuggets. You can't seem to fall back asleep. It seems that your choices are either to go with the flow of the sexual river and indulge--masturbate to fantasy and/or plan how you're going to get an even better fix later in the day... or press on upstream against your urges--which won't make them go away, it will just insure that the battle continues.

I woke up thinking of your struggle and this thought came into my head: "Don't fight the flow of the river Nathan. Don't get too caught up battling the urge to look down at the gold. Instead, fill your mind and heart and life to overflowing with light and love.

Flood Your Life with Love

Jesus said, "Perfect love casteth out fear." It can cast out lust, too.

Your daughter is six years old. She will be eight in 17 months. If you are a worthy member of the LDS Church at that time you will be able to baptize her. Unfortunately, you haven't been worthy to perform a priesthood ordinance for years.

"Mark, I can't not baptize her!" you told me yesterday. I couldn't agree more Nathan!

I told you I want you to send me a picture of you and your daughter dressed in white right before you walk down into the baptismal font that day. Like the wonderful picture I have of a multi-generational family outside the St. Louis LDS Temple, it will a token to me, a reminder of why I come to work every day.

Nathan, that image of baptizing your daughter can be a part love you keep pouring into your consciousness when the garbage that looks like gold sparkles back at you from everywhere you look.

What Picture Captures The Version of Your Future That's Overflowing with Love and Light?

My friend and master addiction therapist George Collins asks his porn and sex addicted clients to promise to send him a picture of them at Disneyland with their wife and kids, mickey mouse ears and all, in a few years once they've established a solid recovery from their addiction and their life has progressed beyond it. Some of them look at him like he's crazy. Do you know who you're talking to here--a lonely single guy who binges on porn like it's a part-time job and can't get a date because he's scared of his own shadow? So George breaks out photos of other guys who've been where they are. Only in the photos they're beaming and clinging to loved loved ones. And every one of them has on the Mickey Mouse ears as a wink and a nod to their old friend, George.

How Do We Keep the Love Overflowing?

Nathan, after you think for a while about that sweet future day, you and your daughter radiant in front of the baptismal font, your mind will of course be drawn back to the garbage the looks like gold. Here are three more rivers of love, always flowing strong, that you can channel like streams with inlets into your mind if you so choose:

1. Ponder God's Tender Loving Touch

Nathan, since you and I are both LDS, I will remind you of something that George Q. Cannon, an early apostle of the restored Church said about God's love and attentiveness to us:

"Now, this is the truth. We humble people; we who feel ourselves sometimes so worthless, so good-for-nothing; we are not so worthless as we think. There is not one of us but what God's love has been expended upon. There is not one of us that He has not cared for and caressed. There is not one of us that He has not desired to save, and that He has not devised means to save. There is not one of us that He has not given His angels charge concerning. We may be insignificant and contemptible in our own eyes, and in the eyes of others, but the truth remains that we are the children of God, and that He has actually given His angels--invisible beings of power and might--charge concerning us, and they watch over us and have us in their keeping" (Collected Discourses, p. 143-4).

You didn't roll off a heavenly assembly line, Nathan! An adoring Heavenly Father nurtured your spirit, "caring for" you, "caressing" you. I know they veil is shut now and you can't recall that father-son bonding time, but I also happen to know that you have a vivid imagination!

2. Program Your Mind to Obsess About Love

Nathan, you are blessed with an amazing ability to hold onto a thought and not let it go until you bring it to completion. When you set a goal to visit the top ten roller coasters in the United States, you kept going until you accomplished that. When you're locked onto serving a customer, you knock the ball out of the park and insure they're not only satisfied, they're a friend for life.

Now it's time for you to become absolutely immersed in loving thoughts and feelings. Start with the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. Ravikant will convince you that you don't have to remain a victim of your mind loops, you can decide their content. And what better content to loop on than loving yourself?

3. Look Around with Your Spiritual Eyes

As powerful as the process can be, looping on "I love myself" won't remain fresh forever. Fortunately, there is always fresh material for a mind laser-focused on love: other people. They're all around us. We just need to see them and respond to them as they genuinely deserve. No one taught this better than C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption (The Weight of Glory).

Nathan, It's 4:00 a.m. now. Time to go see if I can drift off for a few more Zs. I hope I've given you enough to chew on for today. Tap into one or more of these sources and keep the flow coming. Overflow your mind and life with light and love so there's less room for the garbage that looks like gold. If you spot a fleck or a nugget, don't argue with yourself about it. Simply crank the love spigot another turn and keep the light flowing in.

Readers, what do you do to keep your life oriented in the direction of love and light so that darkness has less power over you? Please share your ideas!