Pornography addiction...

The Dog Returns

“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” Proverbs 26:11 (NKJV)

There was a time that I thought I was the only person on the face of the planet who did it. I was sure that there was no one else who would understand what I was doing or why I did it—this ritual of regurgitating my past, leaving it behind me for the umpteenth time, then returning to it again and again, as if I had hoped to find comfort and familiarity there. Now, nearly ten years after a miraculous deliverance from addictions to pornography, sex, alcohol, and gambling, I see the same behavior in other people whose lives are still being hammered by similar addictions.

There is a direct correlation in this verse to the habit filled lifestyle of any addict, but especially for the pornography and sex addict. The word in the original Hebrew text that is translated dog in Proverbs 26:11 is keleb. This is the same word that is used for dog in Deuteronomy 23:18. “You shall not bring the wages of a harlot or the price of a dog to the house of the Lord your God for any vowed offering, for both of these are an abomination to the Lord your God.” (NKJV) But in this passage of scripture, the word dog is a euphemism for male prostitute or by extension, a sexually immoral person.

Proverbs 26:11 could read, “As a sexually addicted and perverse person returns to the regurgitated filth of his past, so a stupid person repeats his foolishness.” How many times would I bring up the atrocious ugliness of my past and spew it out in front of myself—thinking, hoping, and praying that this would be the time that it finally disappeared? How many times would I repeat my foolish activities? Spiritually and physically poisonous habits had characterized my past. The emotionally dead place in my innermost being that was vacated when those habits were vomited up, was never doctored or tended to; never replaced with a godly, psychologically sound personality. I would return to see where I had been. I wanted familiarity. I was comfortable with the stench of a sick lifestyle that had been all I had known.

But why? Why did I continue in the destructive ways of my past? Why did I repeatedly return to a past that held no future for me but death? Probably for the same reasons that most addicts do—because Satan, knowing the ways that neurochemicals and hormones in the human brain can work together with a variety of societal factors, targeted us for destruction.

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Humans are designed with a reward system in place. Hunger, thirst, safety or survival, and sexual activity are activities that are naturally rewarding. When we sense hunger, we reward our bodies with food (something pleasant) to avoid starvation (something that would be painful). Dopamine, endogenous opioids, norepinephrine, and serotonin are some of the neurochemicals that are involved in the natural operation of this reward system. At the same time the physically rewarding activity is taking place, memory functions in the brain are associating the source of the pleasure with the pleasant feelings. In the pornography addict, for example, images that are being viewed during masturbation are burned into the memory at the point of physical release (the reward). In short, that reward then reinforces the desire for another dose of norepinephrine (adrenaline) that was released during the previous period of sexual activity. Soon that desire becomes a need, and the cycle has begun. Our bodies tell us that we have a need. We participate in an activity that supplies that need. Our bodies then reward us for having supplied that need, and then the cycle is repeated.

The complete neurochemical process that takes place as we become addicted is too complicated to spell out in this short article, but perhaps you can see that there is much more to our downward spiral and our insistence upon returning to the regurgitated remains of our past activities than we have been led to believe. Some people believe that addiction is a spiritual problem only. “Just get over it!” they say. Then there are those who say that it is only a physical problem. “My addiction is a sickness. I’ll always have to fight this disease,” they would have us believe.

The truth is that addiction is a spiritual problem with physical manifestations that cannot be overcome entirely without a divine touch from the God who created us. It is indeed a spiritual battle. This continued destructive behavior has its roots in the spiritual warfare that rages around us. But it is also a physical and psychological one. We are a spirit, we have a soul, and we live in a body. The three work together without our giving the process a second thought.

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