A Neurosurgeon's Perspective: Making a Case for Sexual Addiction & Hope for Recovery w/ Don Hilton

In this episode of the Pathway to Recovery podcast, Tara shares a recent presentation given by Dr. Donald L. Hilton Jr., a neurosurgeon and academic who has studied the effects of pornography on the brain. Hilton discusses how his background informs his understanding of addiction and recovery, offering insights into the nature of addictions (including sexual addiction), and the journey towards healing.  Insightful stories, analogies, and quotes are used to explore the complexities of addiction, the impact of addictive behaviors on others, and the concept of recovery as a transformative process. The discussion also covers techniques for building empathy for others, the significance of a safe, supportive environment for recovery, and the idea that recovery is a continual journey of self-improvement and understanding.

Transcript

A Neurosurgeon's Perspective: Making a Case for Sexual Addiction & Hope for Recovery w/ Don Hilton

 [00:00:00] 

Welcome to the pathway to recovery podcast. I am your host, Tara McCausland and I have a special episode for you here today. We had an event last weekend, our annual Women's Workshop. And as a part of that workshop, the spouses of those women were able to attend an online event with a special guest, Don [00:01:00] Hilton, who is a neurosurgeon who practiced in San Antonio for 30 years. 

He, in this presentation, talks about how his experience as a neurosurgeon informs his understanding of addiction and recovery. So we wanted to share this with you, and you'll probably know that he was sharing slides through this presentation. 

Invitation to Access the Digital Recovery Library

So, as we've done in the past, we invite you if you're interested in seeing those slides and actually catching the last portion of the Q and A, we invite you to go check out our digital recovery library, where we will post the video of his presentation, along with the slides and the full Q and A at the end. For a donation of $12 a month, you get access to this and so many other really great presentations from very qualified individuals in the field of sexual addiction and betrayal trauma. So we'd invite you to go to salifeline.org and check out our digital recovery library. And we hope you [00:02:00] enjoy this presentation given by Don Hilton.

Justin: All right, let's jump into our topic and presenter tonight. I have the honor of introducing Dr. Donald L. Hilton Jr. and his topic that he'll be speaking on, which is “Understanding Addiction While Embracing Recovery.” So here's a little bit about Don. Don graduated with honors from UTMB Medical School in Galveston and is a board certified neurosurgeon who has practiced in San Antonio for 30 years.

His interests have included minimally invasive neurosurgery and assisting in the development of this field for nearly three decades. He has published and taught neurosurgeons over the years, including as an adjunct associate professor and fellowship director at the University of Texas Medical School in San Antonio in the past.

Don serves on the board of directors of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in Washington, DC. He has also written peer reviewed journals, journal [00:03:00] articles, and book chapters on the effects of pornography on the brain and has spoken nationally and internationally on this subject. Don presented at BYU Education Week for many years, at numerous universities, and has also been a featured expert in several documentaries.

He has spoken in Indonesia, Singapore, Mexico, the Warsaw Poland Parliament Building, and in a Congressional Symposium in the U. S. Senate Building. In 2017, Don was invited to speak at a Vatican sponsored conference in Rome, where he and his wife Jana and other participants met Pope Francis in a private audience.

Don and Jana have five children and 16 grandchildren. Don, we're excited to hear from you. The floor is yours now. 

Don: Thank you, my dear friends and brothers. And it's so good to see some faces that I recognize, so great to spend this time with you. 

Exploring the Concept of Addiction

Don: I think everyone here understands the term addiction and I would assume that most of us here agree that addiction [00:04:00] is a real entity. And we'll talk about it and define that. I'm going to talk a little bit about the word addiction. It generates a lot of discussion today. I think we all agree with that and not everyone is of the same mind. Some would argue that addiction is only with drugs. Maybe it could be with gambling but certainly not with sex.

Recovery has different definitions as well, so I think I thought it might be helpful to just show some slides and discuss a little bit, some thoughts around those two terms and kind of my thoughts about them and how they've evolved.

Understanding the Brain's Role in Addiction

Don: I'd like to start off with this picture. This brain is actually my daughter's brain. She was having headaches many years ago. It was a normal MRI of the brain. And her headaches are better, thank goodness. But anyway, this is her brain. 

And if you look to the left, you'll see the frontal cortex, which is the frontal [00:05:00] area over our foreheads. And then in the back, you see the brain stem, which is the part of the brain that drives desire. It drives wanting, it drives helping us consume things that allow us to thrive. It makes us want to eat, reproduce, those kinds of things.

Dopamine comes from that brainstem and glutamate comes from that cortex, the reward center. This is simplistic, but it's basically, I think, accurate. It really weighs these rewards and tells us [that] we want to do things that help us survive. But the thinking brain will say, “Well, we want to moderate it though. We don't just want to pursue the same reward all day, or we'll never get anywhere in life. Or we might even go places we don't want to go with different rewards,” certainly with heroin, alcohol, with gambling, with sex, with any of those things. And so that's just kind of a general lay of the land. 

Now, there are some thoughts here that I thought were interesting. [00:06:00] “It will not do, my friend, to grant an easy indulgence to natural appetites and desires for they ever seek to be our masters.” A philosopher said this. I thought it was really interesting because there's this [attitude of ] “Do what you want. Be authentic. If you desire it, do it.” It's kind of the philosophy of the world now, isn't it? And yet here's this idea that our own desires become our masters, just as Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote with Hotel California and the Eagles: “We can become prisoners of our own desires, prisoners of our own making.”

Also from C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape is teaching his nephew Wormwood how to be a good devil. And he said, “An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.” [00:07:00] And that's actually what happens with all addictions is we pursue this shrinking reward, the wanting becomes the most important thing, even over the pleasure. And sadly, this is true for all addictions, whether they are substance addictions or behavioral addictions as well. 

The Historical and Cultural Context of Addiction

Don: So this word addiction that tends to cause such consternation, we first see it in 1529. It's in Antithesis by Frith and it's from Latin and it means “assigned by decree, made over, bound, devoted.”

I think we would all agree that's a pretty good definition for addiction. When we're in an addiction and we are focused on that addiction, we are made over, bound, and devoted to give up everything for that addiction, whatever it may be. That's a [00:08:00] recovery slide. We're going to do that at the end. 

The Science and Misconceptions of Addiction

Don: Now, continuing with addiction. Well, go through the word addiction first and we'll come back and we'll spend some time on our favorite subject and that is recovery.

This is from the Henry Waxman subcommittee in 1994. When the tobacco seven got up and they had PhDs with them saying, “Mr. Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definition of addiction.” It was amazing. I think they were the only seven people in the world that believed that cigarettes were not addictive, but they did.

And they had the gall to tell the world that. And fortunately the plaintiff, this plaintiff lawsuit didn't agree and the subsequent plaintiff lawsuit and they paid billions, but tobacco is still going today, isn't it? They didn't stop it. Certainly. 

And the pornography industry and those that support it are exactly like the tobacco industry. And they fight the addiction label tooth and nail, not only them but their [00:09:00] apologists and their apologists are everywhere sadly. Now what they'll say and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this - if any of you are interested Andrew or Steven can connect you with me if you want some of the good science on this, there's a lot of it.

And I'm doing this just to arm you, but what you'll see is, well, the DSM says that sex pornography is not an addiction. Again, we could talk all night just on this ludicrous concept, but I'll just say that, and this is from 10 years ago in Scientific American, the DSM's fundamental flaw is that it says nothing about the biological underpinnings of mental disorders.

Remember, the DSM 5 defines gambling as an addiction. In other words, online poker is a biological brain addiction, but online pornography is not, according to the DSM, which is ridiculous. The only reason that it [00:10:00] didn't make the DSM 5, and we know this, was the lobby of the pornography apologist that fought tooth and nail.

And there's so many people, Mark Potenza at Yale and others that feel that this should have been labeled an addiction. If you look at the Potenza, Voon, Kraus paper that was published in Lancet, they all argued that the DSM and the subsequent ICD 11 should have included this as a behavioral addiction.

Now, the ICD 11 did include compulsive sexual behavior as an impulse control disorder, and the pornography apologists of today don't like to acknowledge that fact. Frederick Totes is a famous neuroscientist, or a biological psychologist, and is one of the pioneers in that field. The Bindra Totes theorem has to do with wanting and he said, “It is beyond my understanding that anyone could deny the reality of [00:11:00] sex for an addiction.”

Professor Totes is a professor in England and well respected in the field of brain science with regard to wanting. He was a mentor of Kent Barrage and Terry Robinson. I think Kent Barrage was the one who's at University of Michigan, [he wrote] the Barrage Robinson paper on the incentive motivation theory of addiction, which is now a model for addiction. I don't think anyone really doubts that it's real. Professor Totes really mentored them in that. 

Neuroplasticity and Learning in the Context of Addiction

Don: Now let's just go through a few things about learning. The brain is plastic. Well, that means it changes. And this if from over a decade ago, the brain is the source of behaviors, but in turn, it is modified by the behaviors. It produces learning, sculpts [00:12:00] brain structure. 

And this was from the violin studies of 15, 20 years ago, where studies showed that the parts of the brain that control the left hand in violin players enlarges like a muscle. The more that the violin player exercises, so to speak, practices, and the earlier they start to do so, their brain enlarges. And what that is, is it's a neuroplastic enlargement of learning, and other behaviors cause enlargements in other areas. So we know that the brain literally learning sculpts the brain.

Yet addiction represents, and this is another neuroscience paper by Karen Malinka in Nature Neuroscience Reviews, addiction represents a pathological, yet powerful form of learning and memory. So yes, the brain is plastic and it learns, and not all learning is good. It can also learn to be focused on one particular desire to the exclusion of all others. 

This is a great definition of addiction. It was [00:13:00] published by some addiction scientists, well, almost two decades ago. I love this definition. “The continued use of mood altering, addicting substances or behaviors, i. e. gambling, compulsive sexual behaviors despite adverse consequences.” Simple but profound definition, and that's the reference for it. 

Now, this one we're going to read, I'm not going to put a lot of long quotes to read, but this one, it's fantastic. And this is a great book to read. Mark Lewis had a significant drug addiction, he gained recovery, and then he wrote a book about his experience, and he describes kind of what happens with the brain with a heroin trip, et cetera, and what it feels like and then what's happening in the brain when it happened. 

So it was a really interesting perspective and as he gained recovery, of course, he wrote this: “Good old dopamine, the chemical mover that gets us to chase after whatever it is we want, whatever spells [00:14:00] relief for starving animals. Dopamine makes the brain a vehicle for seeking food. For addicts, it sends the brain hunting for drugs. In fact, dopamine power, desperation can change the brain forever because it's message of intense wanting narrows the synaptic, the field of synaptic change, focusing it like a powerful microscope on one particular reward, whether in the service of food or heroin, love,” we can say sex in this case, they're not exactly identical. 

Notice he's going between substances and natural behaviors, “...food or heroin, love or gambling, dopamine forms a rut, a line of footprints in the neural flesh, and those footprints harden and become indelible, beating an intractable path to a highly specialized and limited pot of gold.”

I will say this right now. We're going to come back to recovery at the end. Recovery forms a rut, a line of footprints in the neural flesh, [00:15:00] and they harden, and they become indelible, and they also lead to a real pot of gold. And that is recovery, peace, happiness, living in a life of recovery. So neural learning works both ways. And I'll talk about recovery later and more about that. 

This is a paper I wrote in a neuroscience psychology journal a number of years ago about pornography addiction, A supernormal stimulus consistent in the context of neuroplasticity, and I won't take time to go much into this paper. But if you're interested in the subject, you can Google this and pull up this paper and then again, you can get my email or cell from others and I'll be happy to talk about it.

Now I'm going to quote a couple of world religious leaders. We're keeping this non denominational tonight, so I'm going to use two world leaders that have spoken recently about this. 

One is Pope Francis. Pope Francis said, “Sexual pleasure that is a gift of God, is undermined by pornography: [00:16:00] satisfaction without relationship can generate forms of addiction.” This is earlier this year that Pope Francis said this. Now a few years ago, Jan and I had the wonderful privilege of being invited to speak at a conference on protecting children from pornography at the Vatican in Rome, and Jana and I were able to meet Pope Francis in a private audience.

And at that audience, it was in the Vatican apartments, I say apartments, I mean, Bernini's on the wall apartments, you know, don't think of the apartments down the street. It was remarkable, but Pope Francis, in that audience, told us, our group, “We would be seriously deluding ourselves were we to think that a society where an abnormal consumption of Internet sex is rampant among adults could be capable of effectively protecting minors.” I thought that was a really thoughtful insight that he gave us there. 

Now, President Russell M. Nelson of the [00:17:00] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently said, “Any addiction, be it gaming, gambling, debt, drugs, alcohol, anger, pornography, sex, or even food, offends God. Why? Because your obsession becomes your God. You look to it rather than to Him for solace. Do you struggle with an addiction? Seek the spiritual and professional help you need.”

So here are two world leaders both calling pornography, sexuality that it can become an addictive behavior and they use that word. I would, for people trying to soften the addiction word, for instance with Pres., Dr. Nelson, I would point out that he's a very astute scientist and has not only MD, but a PhD, is very understanding when he uses the word addiction. He doesn't use this so naively. 

Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the chaos of addiction because with those that are inside the throes of addiction, let's say that we're struggling with a drug addiction, a [00:18:00] behavioral addiction. It could be gambling. It could be pornography. It could be any addiction. But when we're in that addiction, we are the eye of that hurricane. And in that eye, it's calm. Think about that.

When you're in the eye of the hurricane...I'm actually at my mom's house in East Texas right now visiting this weekend and several hurricanes, Ike, Audrey, have come through here. And boy, she had a lot of tree damage with one of them and there were a lot of homes flooded in this area too.

We came and helped muck out homes. What happens is when the eye comes through, and the eye did pass right over this area with the last one, a couple of my friends rode it out. They didn't leave town. They rode it out in the local church building here. It's a brick church building. When the eye passed, they said it became dead quiet. They walked outside. 

And then, of course, when the other wall hit, it was again, 110 mile an hour winds. [00:19:00] But it's calm. And so when we're in the throes of an addiction, it's calm. Everything makes sense. The only reality or truth is satisfying the addiction. 

And why is everyone bothering me so I can't satisfy the addiction? Just get out of my way. Everything's calm. It makes sense. Perfect sense in the eye. Now, the chaos around that's destroying lives, careers, relationships, [we’re] oblivious, because it's calm in the eye. It all makes sense. And so when that eye becomes our reward center, then our reward center makes sense. Look, the only reality is satisfying the addiction. That makes perfect sense. 

If you look at how a hurricane forms, it's the warm air that rises in the center. And as it does, it creates the vortex of the swirling winds. And in a sense, that's the dopamine deficiency. As the brain becomes imbalanced, then it's a dopamine vortex and that fuels the chaos to satisfy the dopamine. It [00:20:00] doesn't matter what else happens. It's a dopamine sump. 

So here's another one. The vortex is the eye, behavior is the chaos on the outside. So the insatiable appetite for the warm air, in a hurricane's sake, feeds the vortex drives the chaos. So the insatiable appetite for whatever the addiction is will feed the vortex and the vortex drives the bands of chaos that destroy the lives around the person satisfying themselves for the addiction. It's all calm in the eye when the addiction is taking place, when the addiction is being satisfied or attempting to be satisfied. Well, that's it. That's the only thing that makes sense at that moment. 

So here again, going back to the earlier slide that I showed, you have this prefrontal cortex and this dopamine coming in with these swirling bands to the eye and the eye where the nucleus accumbens is. The only thing that makes sense is satisfying this new [00:21:00] normal. Okay. So let's pivot a little bit. 

Moving Towards Recovery: Insights and Strategies

Don: Let's talk about moving away from that. Victor Frankl, remember Auschwitz, he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, he said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That is an amoeba up on your right eating a paramecium. The amoeba doesn't really think, it's a single cell organism. A paramecium is as well. The amoeba senses the paramecium and eats it. It's a stimulus response. There's not much brain power here. Victor Frank along our left is a very learned, emotionally salient person who understands human relationships after coming through Auschwitz and losing his family there. 

Now, this one I thought was also insightful, this other philosopher. “We cannot be free of nagging desires through suppression. This is like trying to keep a rubber [00:22:00] boat beneath the water, but we remove compulsive desires altogether by understanding their nature.” I love this quote because really this is talking about us trying to really white knuckle the rubber boat beneath the water and just keep it there through sheer white knuckle force, but the rubber boat still wants to burst out to the surface. To remove the compulsive desire, i.e. this force, we have to understand the nature of it. We have to understand it and understanding that, we can change the dynamic of what we actually want.

Going back to what Victor Frankel said, and many of you may know Jeff Board. He's a dear friend. He's down in Saint George. He's a therapist and Jeff gave this analogy of how too often we play recovery on the 1 yard line. We give the opponent, i. e. addiction, the ball 1st and goal on the 1 yard line, and then we line up to play defense. And we'd make [00:23:00] these valiant stands, goal line stands, and we may get one goal line stand occasionally. But for the most part, addiction has this big fallback, and it's just BAM, and they come running over the goal line.

And his point, and I think this is a great analogy, is to put the addiction on the other one yard line, so they would have to try to make a lot of first downs to even get anywhere near the goal line of a relapse, i.e. from the perspective of the addiction being the offense here. So, don't give up. What do we do? And this is not  a rhetorical question. What are things that we do to give the addiction, our opponent, a first down on the one yard line and then sit there and try to make heroic goal line stands our whole life?

Is there a way to play defense smarter and better? That was Jeff's point. This is a definition. I had thought about this for years, and this is something I came up with many years ago. And I'm not saying this is a perfect [00:24:00] definition, but it worked for me. It's “Recovery is a process, not an event.” I thought of this when we were actually in Hawaii once and it was just one of those perfect evenings. I'm not a good photographer. I just lucked out and I got this shot with the sun just coming right up on the beach. It's on the North Shore. “Recovery is a process, not an event.” It is a lifelong attitude of introspection, which motivates consistent action and acceptance of personal responsibility.

In the end, recovery is both a technical and a spiritual journey. And I added that because there are many who just try to pray away addictive behaviors and desires. And certainly prayer is important, I believe. And I believe that God, our higher power, is essential in that. But I also think it's a technical journey.

I think it's a journey of going through step by step, no pun intended, twelve of them, [00:25:00] process, continually, and embracing and learning to love those steps and make them part of us so that we love them.

Embracing Recovery and Rediscovering Humanity

Don: We don't just do them. And so that's the technical aspect. We pay attention to the technical aspects. We set real boundaries that work for us. And what are those boundaries? Well, we'll figure those out with our accountability partners, with our sponsors, with all of those that help, with our spiritual leaders, our therapist. “Whatever it takes is,” we've all used that phrase for many years, “Whatever it takes.” And in doing so we can become human again. What do I mean by that? 

The Impact of Addiction on Empathy and Humanity

Don: Well, Cicero, On Friendship, he said this 2, 000 years ago, “Yet more if emotion be eliminated, what difference is there? I say not between a man and a brute, but between a man and a rock or the trunk of a tree or any inanimate object.”

Pornography addiction, sex addiction [00:26:00] erodes empathy and empathy is what makes us human. Loving and feeling compassion for our loved ones, for all of humanity, for everyone, seeing people as people and not objects to use or consume. And so as we gain recovery and come back to wholeness. Then we become human again.

We start to feel again. We feel love. We feel compassion and we feel empathy and empathy comes back. 

C.S. Lewis on Recovery and Undoing Evil

Don: Now, this is one of my favorite quotes on recovery. It's C. S. Lewis. Again, we could spend all night on this one, but, we'll just go through it briefly. And then you can, of course, find this, it's the preface to The Great Divorce, the book he wrote. Now, he doesn't mean the great divorce in a marriage way. He means to divorce ourselves from Satan. That's what he's talking about, the great divorce. 

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right [00:27:00] road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound. Bit by bit, with ‘backward mutters of dissevering power - or else not. If we insist on keeping hell, or even earth, we shall not see heaven. If we accept heaven, we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs.”

Again, C. S. Lewis. I love that point, you know, unwound step by step, point by point, bit by bit. And really, that's what we're doing as we go through, as we work our steps, as we consider, as we change. We're going back and we're becoming someone [00:28:00] different. 

Galveston's History: A Metaphor for Recovery

Don: All right, just an analogy again on kind of getting it and understanding it. Analogies helped me to think. And these are some that have come. Okay. I was born in this city, Galveston. My father was a medical student in this city in 1959. And this is over half a century earlier, that Galveston City in 1890, it was the Wall Street of the South, biggest cotton port in the U.S., third busiest port, more millionaires per square mile than Newport, Rhode Island. So it was pretty much on the top of the game, way bigger than this little town of Houston up the river from it. 

And of course, the Galveston Storm of 1900, completely leveled Galveston, 6, 000 to 7, 000 dead, still the largest natural disaster in U.S. history. More dead from that event than any other event in U.S. History. Now, again, I'm going to go back and forth. You can see where we're going here. It's the hurricane that did it. It's that chaos of the bands. So the chaos [00:29:00] addiction to the unmanageability of addiction. So in the eye, we think we're managing the calm of the eye, but the storm is doing this around us and destroying Galveston.

Now, Isaac Klein, this is an amazing book. It's called Isaac's Storm. It's a fascinating book about the Galveston storm of 1900. And he, Isaac Klein, was the chief or the director of the U. S. Meteorological Center at Galveston in the 1890s up to the storm. And he said, literally, “The opinion held by some who are unacquainted with the actual condition of things, that Galveston will at some point be seriously damaged by some such disturbance,” meaning a hurricane, “is simply an absurd delusion.”

He said it's impossible. Galveston cannot be destroyed by a storm. Later, afterwards, he said, after he lost his wife in the storm, when they found her body. He could tell by the wedding ring. That's how he recognized her. [00:30:00] So he experienced tremendous loss and he said afterwards, “This being my first experience in a tropical cyclone, I did not foresee the magnitude of damage which it would do.” 

Learning from Loss and Embracing Change

Don: Now, I like this learning process that Isaac experienced here. Of course, I feel sad for him with what he experienced with his loss, but I'm talking about what he learned here. He changed. He thought, “Okay, I get it. I understand. I didn't understand, but now I do understand.” What helped him?

Well, he didn't want the loss, but he really got it afterwards. We don't really want the losses that come to us if we act out in our addictive behaviors. But the lessons that we learn from them can be invaluable to us. They can change us. They can, like Isaac, help us see things that we didn't see. 

Now, Rhyll, we were with Stephen and Rhyll once, and we had a family member, and we were wondering what we could do to help them understand and see things differently. And I remember Rhyll told Jan and Stephen and [00:31:00] I, that we can pray for interruptions to come into their life, which would turn them towards recovery. I just thought that was so inspiring that she said that and Jana did as well. 

Okay, another analogy was back in 1900, on September 8th, 1900, when the storm hit, how could they know about the storm? They didn't really know it was coming. There was no way to really understand it. And this is a map that was drawn on the day of the storm where they went back and redrew the approach after talking to some weather folks in Cuba and other places. But they had no idea. It was only redrawing it after the fact. And this was the Bolivar Lighthouse right across the bay. And that's really the only way they could see a storm, was to look in the lighthouse and see the waves. 

So are we looking at addiction with a limited understanding? Or now it's different, of course, with hurricanes. We have satellites. This is Hurricane Ike, for instance. And we also now have a [00:32:00] lot of tools that we can use to understand addiction differently and to see it with a different eye so that we don't have to just wait now. Sexual addiction wasn't even understood decades ago, and now we understand it as a process that we can work with. 

Now, this medical school on the left, this is my medical school. Of course, the medical school's much bigger, this is the original building, and that's after the storm. This is one of the few buildings that was standing after the storm. You can see the wreckage around it. 

The Power of Recovery: Restoring and Rebuilding

Don: This is today, it's been restored, and that's what recovery does. It can restore. And I think the building is probably much more beautiful today than it was before the storm. I mean, I saw some pictures before the storm and it looked nice, but it's gorgeous today. They really did a nice job with “Old Red” as we lovingly call it, kind of the symbol of our school. 

That's recovery, you know, because when God builds us back, He does it better, doesn't He? I love this from Victor Klein, [00:33:00] who really talks about recovery. And he lists four major factors that he found that most predicted success.

Creating a Safe Environment for Recovery

Don: First, the individual must be personally motivated, and it's got to come from within us, to be free of his or her addiction and possess a willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve success. You can never force a person to get well if he or she doesn't want to. 

Second, it is necessary to create a safe environment, which drastically reduces the access to porn and other sexual triggers. What is that safe environment? Well, I would argue that for most part, that environment is the same for everyone. There are some places that none of us should ever go, in our mind or physically or on the Internet or online. We just don't go. 

There are other things that may be unique to that person. Maybe someone is like, “I'm not going to a beach. I don't want to go to a beach. It triggers me.” Someone else may have something else that for them, at least at that time in their life, [00:34:00] is not as safe for them. So a really safe environment needs to be created by us honestly and in consultation with our sponsor, with others that we love and trust and with ourselves as we're honest and with God teaching us.

Third, he or she should affiliate with a 12 step support group, which, that's why we're all here. Four, the individual needs to select a counselor/therapist who has had special training and success in treating sexual addictions. That's key, not all therapists understand addiction. Some therapists are more of the camp that there's no addiction with sexuality, which, as I said, is ludicrous. Choose someone that does understand it. 

Now this is that quote that I passed on earlier, because it really has more to do with recovery. “Refrain tonight. And that shall lend a kind of easiness. To the next abstinent the next more easy. For use almost can [00:35:00] change the stamp of nature.”

That's what I was talking about earlier, where those ruts in the brain can be good ruts in the brain. They can become new paths of recovery that are then indelibly formed in our brain and help us then to pursue healing paths with ourselves and with others that we love.

Okay. This last analogy. Now, this was Ike and Ike came through my mom's property and knocked a lot of her trees over. This was a big oak tree in her backyard. And we were pretty surprised when that one came down. But if you look at it, you notice that the roots aren't as deep. And I was kind of surprised. I thought the roots would have gone a lot deeper than that. But that's what happened when the winds hit it. The tree went over. 

Now, this is a tree that's probably about 50 yards from the one that you saw lying over. This is a southern live oak tree. This live oak tree is probably in the range, if you get the circumference, [00:36:00] of 600 to 700 years old and it lost a couple of small branches. But it's been through many storms and it's still standing and it didn't fall over.

And this is why. These roots, if you'll look on the far side, they go 20, 30 feet out from the tree. I mean, that's recovery. Recovery not only helps us understand, it helps us prevent other issues with things we haven't seen before because we have a better eye to see it. Some of the other concepts we've talked about, but it just roots us.

It roots us with support, with sponsors, with lifestyle change, eventually with changes in our very thoughts, eventually with changes in what we want, our desires. Does that happen instantly? Absolutely not. Are we to lose hope because our desires haven't changed as quickly as we want them to? Absolutely not.

But do [00:37:00] we always understand that they can, with time, with healing, with recovery, change and become roots of healing that can withstand the most severe storm? Absolutely. We need to keep that hope and that faith because it's true. We can't change ourselves, but God sure can. 

Now, Galveston, if any of you've been to Galveston, you'll know there's a seawall, it's got seawall and a boulevard runs on top of it. Right after the storm, that next year, they started building this big seawall to prevent the city from being buried by water as it was in the storm. This is the seawall today, and with the several  big storms that have come recently, there was some wind damage, but it didn't destroy the city. It hasn't happened in 120 years, and this seawall has done its job and it has provided the barriers, the safety, the safe environment, the change.

They actually elevated the buildings. They literally raised all the buildings up [00:38:00] near it on stilts. They filled dirt in and made the whole city higher. That's what we can do. Recovering makes us higher. It raises us. And then we put a seawall to protect ourselves from the storms. 

Okay, and I'll finish with this last analogy. Janet and I had the opportunity a few years ago to go on a Travels of Paul cruise with Michael Wilcox and he’s just a delightful person. When he talks about whatever he's talking about, he knows everything about it. He's just a joy to listen to and to travel with. And we were going across on this cruise and we went to Ephesus and up some of those places, but also to Istanbul. 

But in the Greek Isles, he told this story where the mythology supposedly said that it happened. Now in that top one, that's an old and ancient Greek base that depicts Odysseus and his men sailing [00:39:00] by the island of the siren. So the sirens were these kind of mythical half female seductive creatures that would sing and seduce the sailors so that they would either jump in the ocean to swim to the island and drown or sail their ship into the rocks.

So, the sound was so seductive, so compelling, that no one could resist it. So, Odysseus, to get by the island, the island of the sirens, had his men plug their ears with beeswax and then he had them tie him with ropes to the mast, he wanted to hear it. So they did get by the island and he tried to tear himself loose to jump in the water, but he couldn't. He was tied. 

So that's one way to do it. I call that the white knuckle method. Now, and it's better to do this, of course, early on than to jump into the water and swim and crash into the rocks, drown. But I think the bottom one is better, [00:40:00] and Michael told us these stories when we were in that part of the world.

Now that's Jason and the Argonauts, and they also later went by the island of the sirens. Now what they did, they had something else on the ship with them, they had Orpheus. And Orpheus played the lyre and sang and had, our legend says, the most beautiful voice and ability with music in the ancient world.

And so when they came by the island and the siren started to sing, Jason had Orpheus play his lyre and sing to the men and the music of Orpheus was so beautiful and so compelling that they didn't care about the sirens. They lost all desire for that and listening to Orpheus and Michael Wilcox used the phrase, “because Orpheus sang a sweeter song.”

I think that's recovery. I really do believe that as we change our focus and we sing this sweeter song and hear this sweeter music [00:41:00] of being human, that that combined with everything else that we do to seek grace from God to help us: help from our sponsors, our family, everyone that loves us.

I think it's a sweeter song and I think eventually we can all like Jason and the Argonauts, sail past the sirens of the world and simply want a different thing, a sweeter song. 

Justin: Thank you. Thank you so much, Don. Very good. Very good stuff. Appreciate that. I've received a couple of questions from our audience here, and I've written one or two down also. 

Navigating Recovery in Healthcare: Boundaries and Empathy

Justin: First, one question comes from Tyler. Tyler says, “How do you navigate practicing recovery as a healthcare provider when you come in contact with people in their most exposed, vulnerable, intimate form?” And this is coming from a nursing student. So what are your thoughts on that? 

Don: Yeah, so as a nursing student, this is kind of a new boundary, you know, it's human beings that are [00:42:00] vulnerable. It's new and I would say that just as we have boundaries of sea walls, the sea walls of Galveston are walls that are constructed. We have boundaries in our minds that we build and it's truly an opportunity to see these humans, these vulnerable people coming for help, with their very lives exposed in that way. We need to literally form that wall, that seawall, to just change the way we think about those, and then have this wonderful and unique opportunity to think about the human body in a different way, and to not see it as a sexualized object. So, it's a learning process, but yes, as a new student that's never really been exposed to that, it's a new wall to understand and to build.

Justin: Thank you for that. 

Empathy in Recovery: A Lifelong Journey

Justin: So this next question that comes in aligns with one of them [00:43:00] that I wrote down and it has to do with you talking about how our addictions basically destroy our empathy, our ability to empathize and have compassion for others. And recovery can restore that. “I've been in the rooms for ten years and I still really struggle with compassion and empathy for others.”

So the question here is “What does that process of regaining empathy and compassion look like to you?” And then I want to follow it up with one from Greg, from our audience. “What are the top two techniques or tools you can give us, to help us practice empathy?”

Don: I think just practicing seeing people as a mirror of us, we have empathy for ourselves. We think, well, I don't want to do that. I don't want to feel this. I don't want to experience this, things that are painful and then just practicing. 

[Saying], that's me. That is another human being that feels just like I [00:44:00] do. And I don't want them to feel the slightest pain as well. I will say that with recovery, with time away from the bleeding or the acting out of addiction that empathy returns and it takes time. It's a process and it's not instant, but it can come and it can be a great gift. I also think we simply have to just pray for it and be patient and wait for ourselves to understand and learn. 

One way too is to look at betrayal trauma stories, and it may not be right for us to go tell our spouse, “Tell me about some betrayal,” you know, it may be triggering, but there are things we can read about betrayal trauma where we can understand the harm that's been caused. And we can understand that. As we do, we can start to see others in an [00:45:00] empathetic light. But again, I would caution that we are patient and if we don't feel that empathy is there right away, it will come, but it may take time. It may take years, but it's a wonderful journey to feel again and to feel empathy. 

I think it's a lifelong journey. I don't think we can say, “I'm there. I got empathy down.” But I do think that as we gain more time and healing and recovery then it will start to make more and more sense. But again, it's a lifelong journey that hopefully we never quit learning. 

Justin: Yeah. I appreciate that. And in my own recovery journey, I find that anytime I arrive at a place and I think I've arrived or, “Oh, I got this,” I'm in big trouble, no matter how far along the path I am. What are your thoughts on that aspect of it? 

Don: Oh yeah, it's like that game the other day. I forget which one it was, but they thought the game was over and man, just the minute you become lax, that's when the other [00:46:00] three pointer comes down. Oh it was the Spurs, the Spurs and the Nuggets.

We were there in town and I was there with my son in law and his brothers. There were nine of them in town and they all had their Denver Nuggets jerseys on. And of course our Spurs aren't doing so well this year. And it was the last game, they were in San Antonio and I didn’t expect them to win.

I said, “Look, I like Denver and the Spurs are out. So I'm going to be a Denver fan.” But they were 23 points ahead, 23 points and the game was over in the third quarter. And just then Wimby, you know, our new guy that’s seven foot four, scored four three pointers. And suddenly it was halfway. And then they just kind of stuck around.

They never led until [there was] five seconds left, when the guard came and dropped a floater in with 0.9 seconds. And the Spurs won 129 to 120. So it's like, you just never give up. Because you think it's over but it's not and it's something that we learn if we just keep going and trying, [00:47:00] then it can happen, you know, it really can.

We just never feel that we've arrived because the minute we become complacent like the Nuggets did, then, you know, we lose out. 

 [00:48:00]