This Week In Recovery Lesson
Biochemical Warfare: Moral Sabotage
Getting more specific about addictive thinking and behavior, it is necessary to examine how addiction hijacks the brain and mind under the control of the selfish sin nature. The GO system of the brain, with hedonistic impulsive intentions, is on a daily mission to satisfy whatever it craves. It is not overly bold to refer to the impulsive intentions of the GO systems within our brain chemistry as hedonistic. Some of the most respected, moral, and honorable men and women of godly integrity have fallen spell to the hedonistic passions of their sin nature and given in to addictive urges that have undermined their values and led to gross immorality. How many times have we heard about preachers, priests, pastors, musicians, government leaders, ministry leaders, husbands, and wives, who have forsaken everything of value to engage in sexually immoral behavior. How many marriages and families have been broken up? How many churches have been split apart? How many election campaigns have disintegrated? How many lives have been destroyed by moral depravity?
Sexual Addiction
Sexual addiction is destructive on so many levels in part because it is often misunderstood. The tendency is to consider sexual addiction as a matter of sexually deviant behavior that is only occurring in a smaller select portion of society. Sexual addiction is confined to the pedaphile, the rapist, and the rest of the sexually abusive molesters lurking in the shadows, right? So false! Once sexual addiction is understood, it brings to light the sexually addictive tendencies in most adults; in particular, adult males. Perhaps even more than alcohol and drug addiction, sexual addictions are responsible for the deterioration of a person’s value system and moral judgment. Like all addictions, once a person ventures into the rituals, behavioral practices, and the culture of sexual addiction in its various types and forms, it becomes extremely difficult to turn back to life before the addiction. When you go there, you typically stay there, and go deeper and deeper into its clutches until you’re over your head in depravity and moral deviance; from the internet to the private room somewhere.
The problem with attraction, lust, and romantic ‘love’ is that it revolves around brain chemistry. Thoughts of lust will cause the release of a very powerful chemical in your brain chemistry known as phenylethlamine. Once this chemical is released it leads to the sense of compulsion and drive toward sexual activity. When a person aroused is not allowed to follow through sexually, we have what we know to be sexual frustration. Whenever there is brain activity of a manic nature—a natural high, so to speak—coming down from the high can be quite difficult to the system to the point of feeling painful. Lust and sexual activity bring on that sort of euphoric high. There is another kind of sexual addiction at work in the minds and lives of God-fearing people. It is what some experts refer to as ‘love’ addiction.
Love Addiction—
Attraction can have a similar effect, biochemically speaking, as lust. There is an increase in adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that work to activate the natural stress response to the feelings of attraction for someone. Elevated heart rate, the anxious heat that comes on, combined with dopamine and serotonin activity sends one off to the races during attraction. Adrenaline and cortisol are the same stress hormones that build when triggered by anger, jealousy, and rage; that if left in an elevated state can cause so much anxiety and stress it can lead to health problems. So when someone’s sexual advances are rejected, or when someone gets their heart broke, or when someone is simply dangling in anticipation of seeing their love/sex interest, stress levels can be such that the person can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t focus on tasks, etc. In the absence of their “drug”, the love/sex addict can experience biochemical withdrawal contributing to their stress.
Researchers agree that at the onset of attraction is high levels of dopamine, the brain chemical (neurotransmitter) that triggers the sensation of pleasure and reward. Helen Fisher of Rutgers University has stated, “couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship”. It turns out serotonin levels are lowered during attraction, which apparently allows for the obsessive thinking about the object of attraction. Dr Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa (Italy), discovered through the blood samples of twenty couples in a research study, that serotonin levels of new lovers were equivalent to the low serotonin levels of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients. When partners sharing their intense attraction express themselves sexually to one another, there are even more hormones at work. Oxytocin is the powerful hormone released during orgasm between two people that evokes the powerful bonding experience. The hormone vasopressin is released in couples that evoke the feeling of commitment between partners.
What is the point of all this brain chemistry stuff?
The point is that once “we go there” it becomes increasingly, seemingly impossible to end the thing once it’s started. People go from attraction to attachment, even when they are married to someone else. When, biochemically speaking, we have built up tolerance for our spouse, and all that surging biochemical stuff seems to have settled down, the new attraction—forbidden love—triggers the surging neurotransmitters and hormones and one is internally off to the races again, dared to express oneself externally. The issue, of course, is that we are targeting someone other than our spouse/mate with all this biochemical attention. The scope of internal indulgence and external expression can then range from masturbation to marital infidelity to deviant psychosexual obsession and sexual depravity.
We hear that so and so left their spouse and their children, losing everything, for an affair that lasted three months until all the energy was sapped out of that forbidden relationship. “How could he do that to his wife and children?” “How could she turn her back on her kids like that?” “They seemed to have such a good thing going.” “How could that pastor do that to his family and his church?”
One can be known as a man or woman who loves God and serves God with their lives, and still yield to the addictive urges that reside in each one of us. King David of the Bible is one who lived to serve God, proclaimed by Scripture to be a man after God’s own heart. Yet he succumbed to the biochemically-driven addictive urges when it came to sexual activity to the point of deviant depravity. David was guilty of, at the very least, conspiracy to commit murder and “legal” forms of adultery, to be with the women he desired. Plus, he was a king with all of the power that came with being king. Imagine what power for all of the hormonal activity in David’s brain?
King David was an extremely powerful man who used his authority to his advantage to manipulate women for his sexual prowess and gratification. Whether it be brazen or more subtle, men have a way of using their position of influence to attract and lure women for their addictive selfish gain. Women, on the other hand, have their manipulative methods as well to pursue and persuade men of their interest. King Solomon, King David’s son with Bathsheba and a womanizer in his own right who “posessed” hundreds of wives to gratify him, wrote the following in the Old Testament, from Proverbs Chapter 7 (NLT):
1 Follow my advice, my son;
always treasure my commands.
2Obey my commands and live!
Guard my instructions as you guard your own eyes.
3 Tie them on your fingers as a reminder.
Write them deep within your heart.
4 Love wisdom like a sister;
make insight a beloved member of your family.
5 Let them protect you from an affair with an immoral woman,
from listening to the flattery of a promiscuous woman.
6 While I was at the window of my house,
looking through the curtain,
7 I saw some naive young men,
and one in particular who lacked common sense.
8 He was crossing the street near the house of an immoral woman,
strolling down the path by her house.
9 It was at twilight, in the evening,
as deep darkness fell.
10 The woman approached him,
seductively dressed and sly of heart.
11 She was the brash, rebellious type,
never content to stay at home.
12 She is often in the streets and markets,
soliciting at every corner.
13 She threw her arms around him and kissed him,
and with a brazen look she said,
14 “I’ve just made my peace offerings
and fulfilled my vows.
15 You’re the one I was looking for!
I came out to find you, and here you are!
16 My bed is spread with beautiful blankets,
with colored sheets of Egyptian linen.
17 I’ve perfumed my bed
with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
18 Come, let’s drink our fill of love until morning.
Let’s enjoy each other’s caresses,
19 for my husband is not home.
He’s away on a long trip.
20 He has taken a wallet full of money with him
and won’t return until later this month.”
21 So she seduced him with her pretty speech
and enticed him with her flattery.
22 He followed her at once,
like an ox going to the slaughter.
He was like a stag caught in a trap,
23 awaiting the arrow that would pierce its heart.
He was like a bird flying into a snare,
little knowing it would cost him his life.
24 So listen to me, my sons,
and pay attention to my words.
25 Don’t let your hearts stray away toward her.
Don’t wander down her wayward path.
26 For she has been the ruin of many;
many men have been her victims.
27Her house is the road to the grave.
Her bedroom is the den of death.
The woman of this passage in Proverbs was married. Her husband was away, and it is likely from this story that she suspected him of infidelity as well as he left with a wallet full of money and tends to return home broke. So if he is going to be away for a month on that “business” trip he’d been talkiong about, that she suspected would be a month of boozing with prostitutes, then she would pursue on her end what he’s pursuing on his. This married a couple had developed a pattern of this kind of promiscuous behavior. Perhaps they shared the same suspicions for each other and were each intent on not being the victim. However to satisfy their addictive cravings they would need victims. So they would prey on the naive and gullible who had their own issues with sexual hunger and weakness. In the end, we have at least one destroyed marriage and probably a great deal of heartbreak. Their may be other consequences of addiction, such as disease and death—whether it be spiritual death in the present, physical death, or a lifestyle of feeding addiction and rejecting God’s fellowship and relationship that results in eternal separation from God; the worst kind of death.
- How many forms of manipulation are identified in the Proverbs 7 passage? List them and how their used.
- Did you identify her attempt at spiritual manipulation in the passage as well?
- Honestly, how do you—men and women—use sexuality, overtly or covertly, as a tool and even as a weapon to manipulate people to get what you want?
- In marriage?
- With friends?
- At work?
- Socially in general?
- To get laughs?
- How has that worked out for you? Explain.
- How might the manipulative purposes of sexuality be addictive in your life?
Please refer to this week’s TWRAC 013.
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