Taking Control of Your Environment
Familiar places, familiar habits, familiar sin.
When I first discovered pornography, I was in my room back home. Every time I would go back to that same bed, I could feel the pull to want to watch. Repeated relapses in that room made it a habitual practice that when I entered that room, I was immediately tempted. My environment was re-enforcing my behavior. It was private, I was alone, my phone / tablet was near my bedside with a charger. I could shut the blinds. I could lock my door. I could hear if someone was coming close to entering my room. I had escape plans and plans on where to hide my electronics if someone were to come into my room. I positioned myself so that even if someone entered my room unannounced, my screen was not visible. My environment supported and made it easier to sin again and again and again.
Interestingly enough, you would think the habit would go away once I left the room. That is, until I find the same privacy, aloneness, and control of another room like a hotel.
Our environment tends to shape up for the better or for worse, especially when we first start to break free from addiction. When I talk about “environment,” I not only am referencing the places that we have been, but the things around us as well. In order to change our environment we need to first identify it.
If we are at a bar and we are struggling with alcoholism, chances are we are likely to be tempted to go back to the bottle. Initially, our environment should change. Likewise, if you go home and the fridge is full of alcohol, steps need to be taken to eliminate the source. We want to create degrees of separation that make it more difficult to return back to our familiar sinful ways. If the fridge is empty, it would require you to go out of your home to buy more or get it from a local pub.
A pack of cigarettes in our pocket when we are trying to quit smoking is like keeping your phone near the bedside when you are struggling with pornography. The proximity is tempting. It may not fix the issue entirely by making it more difficult to indulge in the addiction, but it is part of the first step process to making an effort to change.
Our “friends” in our walk with recovery may not be our friends after all. If the people you claim to be close with are the ones enabling you to drink, smoke, cuss, watch filthy things, you may need to weigh the cost of the path you are on. It is not easy to get free from smoking weed if your friends do the same, especially if that is the way you connect with them. Count the cost of losing your friends for the sake of your freedom. It most likely will cost you your relationship with them. This will be difficult, but the potential beautiful outcome at the end of this choice is the reality that you will get free, and you will set the example for your previous friends to latch on to. Free people free people, and you may be that conduit that helps lead them to their freedom as well. Now this is what true friends are for.
If you are struggling with porn, you may find it helpful to get a blocker like Covenant Eyes that will help to filter out and block content that could cross your eyes. Covenant Eyes also will send reports to a person whom you associate as your accountability person. The app takes periodic snapshots of your phone usage and automatically sends it to your accountability group. Visit the Covenant Eyes website here.
Although changing your environment and adding blockers most likely will not solve your addiction, it will place degrees of separation between you and the sin which is essentially when first starting the freedom journey. Most people in recovery understand that these things are tools and are not the solution to the heart problem we desperately need the Lord to intervene in. The healing of our broken heart is the key to getting free. This is why alcohol, drugs, pornography, etc. tends to work on people because it makes you feel like you are whole for a few minutes before bringing swift destruction to your life, relationships, job, family, marriage, or even killing you.
In this blog post, I briefly talked about environment. There is so much more to discuss on this topic and maybe I will add on to it in the future as I continue on this path of recovery as well. I hope that some of the things I said in this post was helpful to at least consider some of the surrounding things happening in your life. The cost is great to change your environment, but the cost is greater at the expense of yourself. You are worth getting free, let’s take these steps together.
Walk with the wise and become wise,
for a companion of fools suffers harm.
Proverbs 13:20
