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As you’ve worked through the steps to this point, you have also faced your own share of humbling experiences. Each step is based on our willingness to humble ourselves.

Consider with me for a moment what this journey has taught us so far. What has facing our addiction in the first three steps taught us about humility, about powerlessness and our need for God? What has the inventory process taught us about our past behaviors, and about the character traits that have contributed to our addictive patterns?

This process of being prepared by humility continues now in Step Six, as we come to grips with the weaknesses revealed in Steps Four and Five. We can’t conquer them without the Lord, any more than we could conquer our addictive behaviors without Him.

Finally Facing Life Without Our Addiction

I have heard many people in Twelve Step meetings express surprised discouragement. It seemed that just when they began to get abstinent from their addiction, everything else in their life started to go wrong. Suddenly, they were having more arguments with their wife, their children were acting up, work wasn’t going well, and so on. “What’s happening?” they cried. Like me, they thought that as soon as they tried to “straighten up and fly right,” life would take off in a better direction.

A similar phenomenon was observed by the wives of the first alcoholics to get sober in AA: “He may not be drinking,” they exclaimed, “but in every other way, he’s as bad as he was when he was drinking!”

This phenomenon has come to be called a “dry drunk.” Sometimes the expression, “Can’t get drunk, can’t get sober” is used.

This observation is almost universal throughout all kinds of addiction recovery. It makes sense when we remember and admit the reason we originally resorted to using our addiction was to numb ourselves to the stress of facing the challenging realities of our lives. When we stop using our “drug,” we inevitably find that those challenges haven’t gone away. We can’t hide from them any more, and they now demand our attention. These challenges are actually symptoms of our underlying character weaknesses, just like our addiction was. Our problems with wife, children, job, etc., will not improve until we are ready to turn all our character flaws over to the Lord.

The truth is we can’t overcome weaknesses, or even start surrendering them to the Lord, until we recognize that they exist in us and are not being imposed on us, or caused by some stimulus in our environment. I may think I am doing well, behaving kindly and patiently, and then some sudden provocation catches me off guard. Someone pulls in front of me in traffic, forcing me to immediately apply my brakes in order to avoid an accident, or my daughter needs to use my computer at the last minute to finish a homework assignment when I was planning on doing some important writing myself.

When I catch myself reacting uncharitably in situations like these, my first impulse is to excuse myself because the event came on me so suddenly. I tell myself, if I had had more time to prepare, I could have acted more kindly. But on the other hand, isn’t my first reaction – how I respond before I have time to think it over – a truer indication of what I really am, of how much of the natural man still exists in me?

I lived in the southern United States for several years, and while there I became acquainted with roaches. Since roaches live in out-of-the-way places and only come out at night, you can go for years without knowing you have them. When I would go into the kitchen at night and suddenly turn on the light, dozens of roaches would scatter for cover. The sudden turning on of the light didn’t create the roaches; it merely caught them before they had a chance to hide.

Similarly, when I am caught off guard by some upsetting circumstance, the circumstance doesn’t make me impatient or unkind, it merely shows me how much impatience and unkindness still remain in my natural-man self. That self is a part of me that I don’t seem to be able to change. It is a part of me that I must surrender to the Lord and ask Him to heal. That is the essence of Steps Six and Seven.

When I was still looking at pornography and masturbating, many “less serious” behaviors in my life went totally unnoticed. Compared to the struggle I was having with my addiction, these lesser faults just didn’t seem worth worrying about. When I finally allowed the Lord to bless me with abstinence, I began to notice a lot of things that needed repentance. For example, I realized I needed to repent of being inconsiderate of others’ time by being consistently late. I needed to repent of being impatient with my wife and children over what were actually trivial issues. I needed to stop trying to control everyone around me.

The major change in my perception of myself reminds me of an amusing, but at the same time, telling experience I had once in connection with a trip to the temple. Even if you haven’t been through the temple yet, you probably know that everyone dresses in white clothing there. One morning, as I was getting ready to leave for the temple, I put on a white shirt that I could also wear during the temple services. Then I put on my Sunday suit and took the rest of my white temple clothes in a suitcase.

In the dressing room at the temple, when I changed into my white pants, I was startled and disappointed to realize that my “white” shirt was not really white at all! It was actually a pale yellow. Hanging next to the darker clothes in my closet, it had only appeared white. When I put on pants at the temple that really were white, I could see my mistake. Fortunately I was able to rent a white shirt and participate in the session.

Similarly, some of my “lesser sins” hadn’t looked that bad when compared with my sexual acting out, but when I became abstinent, those other sins began to be apparent.

Learning What Really Needs to be Surrendered

For years, I thought I knew what needed to be fixed in my life. I needed to stop looking at pornography! As I mentioned before, as far as I was aware, this addiction was my only real weakness. If I could just get this problem under control, I was sure I would be very nearly perfect! The Lord had something more in mind, however:

I really used to wonder at that verse, thinking, “I don’t need to go to the Lord and have Him show me my weakness! I know what my (one) weakness is – it’s this darned addiction.” What I didn’t realize was that my constant obsession with my addiction – either doing it or resisting it – was helping me to ignore a lot of other problems in my life. It was kind of like having your house on fire. It doesn’t leave you much time to worry about tidying up the living room.

One of the weaknesses the Lord showed me was how carnally minded I was. The obvious example was my addiction to sensuality, but being carnally minded also included my essential character flaw of relying on the “arm of flesh” in my life as a whole. The following verse was a real shock to me:

I could handle the accusation of having a carnal mind, but the phrase “enmity against God” hit me like a slap in the face! Enmity means “a state of ill-will, hostility or hatred.” But I certainly didn’t have any “ill-will” toward God! I loved God, or at least, I thought I did.

I immediately rejected the suggestion that my bad choices grew out of hostility or hatred toward God – that language was simply too strong to describe me. But on the other hand, I couldn’t deny how deep my rebellion against God had been.

How many times had He prompted me through His Spirit to turn away from sin, and I had ignored Him? How many times had He invited me to turn to more enlightening, uplifting thoughts and actions? And how many times had I turned my back on those promptings and rejected His invitations? Too many to count.

Eventually I came to the point where something within me began to recoil from anything spiritual, even from the mention of the Savior’s name! It got to where, whenever the Lord’s Spirit would invite me to pray or read the scriptures or participate in some other faith-promoting activity, a dark spirit would whisper in my ear: “Don’t do that. If you do that, the Holy Ghost will start to work on you and then you won’t feel like playing. It will ruin our fun.” Today, I look back with horror at how far I allowed the adversary’s influence to penetrate my soul, and how slowly I began to turn away from it.

Someone once said that when we first start to come back to God, we don’t rush toward heaven as much as we back reluctantly away from hell. That was certainly true for me.

Thinking about how diligently I avoided the heart-deep changes Step Six and Seven require of us, I am reminded of an old-fashioned remedy for toothaches I learned from my parents. As a teenager, when I had a toothache, I would often put off going to the dentist; instead, I would use a drop of clove oil on the tooth to numb the pain for a while. Of course, it didn’t do anything to stop the decay, but in my childishness, stopping the decay wasn’t what mattered to me. Stopping the pain was all I cared about. My efforts at evading the dentist would continue until finally the pain became so intense the clove oil wouldn’t mask it any longer. Sometimes the decay had gone so far that the tooth had to be pulled. A lot of the dental problems I deal with today are the consequence of my prior attempts to postpone genuine healing.

In the process of working Step Six, I began to realize I had been using my addiction like I once had used the clove oil, to hide from weaknesses in my character that were now coming to the surface. For example, I began to see that my impatience with others represented tremendous selfishness I would not see before. I also discovered a deep-rooted unwillingness to face the challenges and responsibilities of my life, wanting others to fix things for me. Gradually I realized these deeper faults were actually at the foundation of my addiction. I had to admit I had used pornography to avoid facing life and turning to the Lord for guidance and power. When at last I started to become abstinent, the inside-out work of Step Six could finally begin.

Outside-In Vs. Inside-Out

From the beginnings of AA, Twelve Step groups have taught that the devastating condition we call addiction is primarily a spiritual disease, and that any lasting cure also has to be spiritual. The deeper we allow these healing spiritual principles to reach into our beings, the surer our freedom will be. The SA White Book puts it this way:

I tried for years to conquer my addiction by using what Alcoholics Anonymous calls “half-measures” (p. 59). I attended innumerable self-improvement classes and workshops on motivation. Even after I started attending Twelve Step meetings, I was confused for awhile. I sincerely thought the program and all its tools or aids to recovery were the answer.

So instead of attending classes on motivation, I attended Twelve Step meetings. Instead of self-help books, I read Twelve Step literature. But still the lasting peace I sought evaded me.

During the preparation process of Step Six, I was brought down into the “depths of humility” (2 Nephi 9:42) to realize I was still resorting to “half-measures,” using the tools as if they held the healing power that only one source can provide. Elder Richard G. Scott provided the answer to my confusion:

We must be healed from the inside out. The change must happen in our hearts-a change that can only be brought about by the Master Healer. That is the testimony of President Ezra Taft Benson:

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people (Ensign, July, 1989, 4).

The second half of this chapter will be posted next week.

Clean Hands, Pure Heart by Philip A. Harrison, and its companion LDS 12 Step book, He Did Deliver Me from Bondage by Colleen C. Harrison, are available at most LDS bookstores and can be ordered online at www.ldscloseouts.com or www.rosehavenpublishing.com