Addiction is a brain disease, just as cancer is a disease of the body, and requires both spiritual and physical healing. Just as It takes recovery work to heal your mind, that is how spiritual workis needed through repentance to heal your soul.
The purpose of the Atonement is not to physically reverse the damage that has been done to your brain due to your addiction, rather it is a healer of souls, and refresher of spirits, and righter of spiritual and temporal wrongs. Only Jesus canconmpletely heal your brain, just as he helped the blind to see and the lame to walk. The Savior IS a healer of bodies.
When it comes to pornography or sex addiction (or any addiction really) there is a physical change that happens in the brain. Because the years of pornography use has literally rewired the brain -- and the only way to undo that is to REWIRE the brain. God has created our brains to do amazing things, but when we misuse them by feeding them a steady stream of chemicals that are released when viewing porn, etc we need to put in the same work and learn new behaviors that will let the brain heal and build new pathways. That comes through new healthier patterns.
Support groups, therapy and journaling are helpful tools required to help develop and maintain new patterns. Addiction recovery rarely happens in seclusion or isolation. There is a phrase in recovery:
White Knuckling. This is the act of just shoving the addiction into a closet and fighting to keep it in there -- often, when men and women ‘give up any form of addictions e.g porn’, this is what they’re are doing -- shoving it back into a closet and ignoring or fighting to keep it in there. Teeth clenching, muscle tensing, white knuckling it. This is what MANY of our men and women do about their ‘porn problem’. True recovery comes with a lot of work, but the payoff is huge -- a rewired, healthy brain. A happy brain. New patterns and new behavior. Though the work is tough. It's long and hard and emotional. It's vulnerable. But, the payoff? It's enormous. And well worth all the work.
Andrew, from Rowboat and Marbles says, "We Need to Understand that “Repentance from Sin” and “Recovery from Addiction” are Not the Same Thing. They are interconnected, but they are not identical….just because a man repents of his sins, it does not automatically mean that he has entered recovery from his sex addiction... Addiction has spiritual, emotional, mental, physical and neurological components. For this reason, recovery from addiction requires more than “traditional” repentance from sin... To beat it, he needs to couple his repentance with recovery. Only then will he finally be able to forsake the sin and become free. Only then will he truly come to feel and understand the peace of God’s forgiveness and the purifying effect of Christ’s Atonement."
LIFE AFTER ADDICTION
Quitting is
a decision that you can never regrect! Haggai 2:9