Addictions (Part 1)

This is part 1 of a 2 part series: Part 2

Transcript:

Alasdair Groves:
I knew that tackling the topic of addictions was not going to be quick and easy. I didn’t anticipate just how much Mike Emlet and I would get talking about addictions in a way that did not lend itself to an easy close. So today’s episode on addictions is actually part one of two, which we didn’t know when we were initially taping this. So you can look forward eagerly to part two when we come out with that. But I hope that you’ll enjoy the first part, Thinking About Addictions, simply in terms of saying, “What are they? What’s going on inside the experience of a human being that we would qualify as addiction?” Please join us.

Speaker 2:
You are listening to a podcast of the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation. CCEF is committed to restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church. You can find our podcasts, books, articles, videos, and many more resources for Christ-centered pastoral care at our website, ccef.org.

Alasdair Groves:
Welcome to CCEF On The Go. I’m your host Alasdair Groves, faculty member here at CCEF. Today I am speaking with Mike Emlet, also a faculty member at CCEF. Mike, welcome.

Mike Emlet:
Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Alasdair Groves:
Mike, I wanted to dive into a huge topic today, a topic of addictions, and I was trying to think what it is that I’m hoping we can accomplish in the space of a podcast on such a significant topic, especially one that obviously culturally is especially in the spotlight, obviously here in Philadelphia and where I live up in New Hampshire and Vermont. It’s just, everyone is using the word epidemic in terms of drugs, but that’s hardly the only addiction on the table. You’ve got Apple talking about trying to get people not to use their smartphones so much, which is a pretty good indicator that something’s up. I guess my question that I’d love to launch from is something like this. What is the most current update on your thinking in addictions? Where’s the center of your focus when you think about addictions and helping people in the midst of addictions, large or small, whatever it is that’s caught your attention most recently? I know this is something you’ve thought a lot about. Bring us up to speed with your thinking.

Mike Emlet:
Well, I think there are probably a lot of facets to that. I think one of the things that has struck me the most lately has been the importance of the church being a community that really is able to walk alongside those who are struggling with addictions. Because I think people struggle alone or they go to other sources of community to find help. And can’t the church or shouldn’t the church be a place where we are free to talk about these struggles and then for people to find real help? I think that there are multiple facets that I keep returning to, but that’s one of them that seems very relevant right now. I think continuing to realize and talk about the real bodily and brain based aspects of addiction, because certainly that’s what the secular world is, and addiction research is focusing on in terms of addictions being a brain disease. And I think, oftentimes, when the church talks about addictions it can be very polarizing. It can either be viewed predominantly in sin and willful categories, or in bodily-

Alasdair Groves:
Purely biological.

Mike Emlet:
Purely bodily categories. I continue to feel like those aspects of addiction are important to talk about as well, to help people even have a framework for understanding the struggle. I think those two, the church as a helping community and then do we even understand the process. What happens with addictions? What’s behind addictions? Because then that suggests what the way out could look like.

Alasdair Groves:
Yeah. A couple of questions are jumping to my mind, Mike. Let me start with the one there that you are raising in that second point. You’re talking about both the body-brain piece and the sin, slash, will, slash, desire piece. Let me put the question this way. What is it that you would say is most important to know about the body-brain piece of the addictive experience? What is the practical take-home value for us in having some sense of, and I don’t even know, are you thinking underlying neurobiology or are you thinking of other things, what’s the addictive physiological stuff that you would say, “Ah, this is what we need to get our heads around in the desire to see people breaking addictions and growing sanctification.”?

Mike Emlet:
Yeah. Well I think first and foremost, the struggle with addictions reminds us that we are bodily creatures. We know that, we go through life in a sense experiencing life that way. But when there is a particular part of our created makeup that is engaged and deeply engaged in the struggle with addictions, it really is important to keep that at the forefront. There are many things, many issues that we struggle with that there is not a strong, if you will, bodily component. People don’t get high from gossiping or procrastinating or whatever the case may be, but there are ways in which our bodies get hooked with regard to substances and certain practices, gambling, pornography use, that tap into God given pathways of pleasure in our brain.

Mike Emlet:
This is part of our wonderful, created makeup that we were, in a sense, designed to experience those pleasures. The problem is when there are these external substances or practices that are making that system go on overdrive. And I think if we don’t recognize just how entrenched the body can be, we’ll see addictions more primarily, or maybe exclusively, in the category of, “Well, this is just a choice. This is an issue of desire.”-

Alasdair Groves:
Just say no.

Mike Emlet:
“This is a worship disorder.” Which I don’t at all disagree with, but it’s a worship disorder that can often hijack the body. And I think both of those things are important to remember.

Alasdair Groves:
Right. I remember even just the feeling of holding yet another Mike Emlet book in my hands, the physiological experience of that. No, it just captured me and I-

Mike Emlet:
Ah-ha, yes.

Alasdair Groves:
Some addictions, shouldn’t have to [inaudible 00:07:46], right? They’re good addictions.

Mike Emlet:
Well there are some programs for that.

Alasdair Groves:
Yeah, no, it’s interesting even, that you raise the point though about you don’t get high on gossip or whatever, but I think it has actually even been helpful to me to recognize even something like gossip or approval or more sort of emotionally driven things that one can become, at least something like, addicted to in that sense. That even there we probably don’t think of it this way and we tend to ignore it, but there’s a physiological and obviously dopamine serotonin sorts of things going on in the brain. But even just at the level of there’s a little rush that you get.

Alasdair Groves:
Procrastination would be actually, if I think back to my own experiences, procrastination, there’s something, there’s actually almost a physiological itch and there’s a relief that you feel almost in your chest and shoulders when you push the computer away and stop working on the paper and go distract yourself with something else. But then there’s also this hovering anxiety in the background, that’s also kind of a tightness and a tension. I’m actually being struck by even the things that aren’t as physiologically obvious. And that could be also the Facebook or Pinterest or video games or things that we might not think of having as physiological component as an alcohol, pornography, heroin.

Mike Emlet:
Well, and you’re highlighting that all desire is embodied. We don’t have desires apart from our bodily existence. So I think we’re, in many ways, standing on Ed Welch’s shoulders in terms of talking about issues of how do we understand addictions. And so in a fundamental level, it is a disorder of desire, but it’s a desire that also becomes more and more entrenched in a bodily way. And so there’s a spectrum of that. And I think you’re highlighting that spectrum. We’re never not body.

Alasdair Groves:
And I think it just speaks to one of the battle grounds. If you see addictions as purely spiritual, emotional, worshipful, whatever, you will not be as inclined to think in terms of fighting battles for the body. And there’s a wisdom, even in terms of practices, recognizing I want to fight this even in terms of how can I put my body in a wise place to resist this temptation and some of that may actually be a geographic issue of, I will stay further away from X, Y, and Z place where I would experience temptation, or flee temptation. Sometimes it’s going to look like that and physically removing myself. Other times there’s going to be elements there. Will you say a word or two about the other side of the equation, about the desires piece, the worship piece, just any current, especially bright thoughts for you there?

Mike Emlet:
Well, I think one of the things that does immediately, in terms of thinking about addictions as disorder of desires or unruly desires, it immediately starts to level the playing field in terms of the struggle of addictions. There’s a way in which then all of us can identify. If you ask the question, “Are you an addict?” Many people would say, “No.” But if you ask the question, “Do you struggle with the desire to say no in one or more areas of your life?” We probably all would say, “Yes.” That there are places where we struggle to say no to unrelieved desires.

Alasdair Groves:
And if you wouldn’t say no, I’d like you to go pray for five minutes and ask the Lord to reveal to you what you’re not seeing.

Mike Emlet:
Exactly. Yeah. So I think understanding addictions, first and foremost, at the level of desire, immediately starts to create a level playing field within the church, so that it’s not these people who struggle with addictions and we don’t. And that’s in no way to minimize the life threatening, life dominating nature of very severe manifestations of addiction. So I don’t want to go to the other extreme and say, “Oh, it’s all the same.” But I think that also goes a long way. One of the practical outworkings of that is that they were more willing, I think, to come alongside those who are struggling in those life-threatening and life dominating ways, because we ourselves know where we find it difficult to battle unruly desires in our own life.

Alasdair Groves:
Jumping back to your first point, but also in a sense you’re segueing us here already by talking about how being able to identify, even if you are experience of struggling with saying no is not as severe as a person who might be labeled a capital-A addict. What is it that the church can do to be more inviting and welcoming to people struggling with addictions of various kinds, especially, probably the more sort of technicolor ones? Why is it that we aren’t always that place that people turn? I have thoughts on this. It does seem like I’ve heard people say, and I agree, that the church should be the premiere place for battling addictions. We have this vision of not simply that we can say addictions are bad and destructive and wrong, and we want to help people turn away from them, but we can also do that with grace. We don’t have to say, “Oh, it’s not a big deal.”

Alasdair Groves:
One thing I have, personally, really objected to in the secular way of handling things that I have seen largely, again, I’m generalizing here, but I sense in the secular approach that there’s been this, I think good, right, common grace way of people wanted to show compassion for people with addictions, which I think is amen, that’s right on. But the only way our culture knows to show compassion is to remove responsibility. So if you’re going to feel bad for you and give you mercy, it’s because it’s not really your fault. And we’ve got to remove that agency, which then leaves you in a bit of a pickle, because now you’re calling people to do things and own things and take responsibility, even though it wasn’t your responsibility for getting here, which is a little bit tricky logically. But the Christian faith offers something so much better than the removal of responsibility, we’re people who can say, “Even when something is completely your fault…”

Alasdair Groves:
I’m not saying that all addictions are completely in someone’s fault. I’m just saying even when the situation, this is absolutely your problem. There’s grace that meets us. And we can have enormous compassion on someone whose sin, willful high handed sin, is completely destroying their life and we can have nuance in even saying, “Well, there’s willful sin and there’s biological entrenchedness.” And so on and so forth. So how does the church live that out? We ought to be the best at this. Where do you sense us, again, huge question, but any thoughts just on where we’re struggling, how we can do better?

Mike Emlet:
So it’s interesting talking with folks I know who are part of 12 step groups or attending AA or something like that. One of the things that is interesting is, there is just a high degree of honesty about the struggle. There is a freedom to be able to talk about the struggle without a sense of judgment. And it’s not then, well, you just accept this. There’s a lot of accountability. There’s a lot of challenge of self deceit and practices that, “Well, you should have known better there. If you did X, Y, and Z, that you would go down this road” And I wonder if we can have that same level of honesty and frankness that is undergirded by the gospel. And I think one litmus test for a given church is, how honest are we just in general about talking about issues of sin and struggle? Is there transparency in the preaching of the word? Is it really clear that this is a church for people who really do need Jesus, who really are struggling and are struggling with a multitude of issues, addiction being one of them?

Mike Emlet:
If I think if we’re talking more about that, people will be more likely, in a sense, to come out of the woodwork and say, “Yeah, I’m really struggling with this.” So I think that’s one thing. Are we transparent about struggles, including addictions? And then I think probably another barrier is just the sense of what do we do or how do we help, because in so many ways it can be a very systemic kind of problem and overwhelming with multiple areas of a person’s life being upended, their relationship. So there may be counseling that has to happen with regard to marriage and family. And then there are the physical issues and legal issues. So I think for us as churches, simply being more proactive in how do we help in these multiple spheres? Where else do we need to partner as a church? We’re not going to do detox, but we ought to know what’s in the area in terms of resources where someone who really would benefit from a physical detoxification could go. So some of it is educating ourselves and being proactive in that way.

Alasdair Groves:
As you’re talking, Mike, I’m even just thinking, probably on so many of these things, let me rephrase that. Not probably. Certainly on these issues, any church is going to do well to ask the question of what is the next step to take or the next two steps to take. Because I think it can feel a bit overwhelming of, “Okay, there’s all these different groups, there’s AA and there’s Celebrate Recovery and there’s Narcotics Anonymous and just, there’s all these different things out there that we might, maybe we could host a group or something like that. If we don’t have certain internal resources or maybe we should be developing our own thing and we need to create a culture of greater transparency.”

Alasdair Groves:
My hope would be that knowing that there are churches all across the spectrum of there’s churches that have addictions groups that are meeting and they’re either hosting from outside sources or they’re doing inside whatever to churches that would say, “We know there are probably people in our pews who are dealing with this, but we don’t know who they are. And, right now, they don’t seem to feel comfortable revealing themselves and they haven’t been outed yet by their spouse. How do we take that next step?”

Alasdair Groves:
And so I think, thinking just in terms of how do we move, maybe the next step is to research. What are those resources like you were just talking about in the area around us, maybe the next step is to say, “How can we commit ourselves a little bit more to a culture of transparency? And what would it look like for us, as a church, to grow in talking about the grim realities of our sin in daily church life and becoming a place where that…” Again, not in a way that sort of glories in, “Oh, we’re so broken and isn’t that wonderful.” But in a way that says, “Let’s just face the reality of where we are, that we might grow, that we might be healed, that we might turn from evil and repent, that we might have compassion on each other and say, ‘Yeah, I know how difficult that is.'”

Alasdair Groves:
So I think probably the easiest way for us to start would be for you to just confess the three worst things you’ve done in the last six months, Mike, since we’re just in a private context here. So if you’ll just kind of lead out when that-

Mike Emlet:
Yeah, look our time is up, Alasdair.

Alasdair Groves:
That’s right. Yes. Well, our time actually is up. So I will let us wander off from that point. My hope is that conversation about addictions is just one that we don’t let ourselves off the hook on, certainly here at CCEF, but as a church as well. It can be easy to be overwhelmed. It can be easy to feel a sense that, man, there’s too much to do, or we’re not sure where to start, or we’ve done it and it gets so messy and time consuming and people just end up angry with each other and with us. And I think the long vision persevering and recognizing that the gospel does in fact offer a motive and a meaning and a community that can produce real change in people’s lives. We must clinging to that hope and take that seriously. Even if the pathway there isn’t always an easy step by step process.

Mike Emlet:
Yeah, that’s right.

Alasdair Groves:
Thanks so much for coming in.

Mike Emlet:
Sure, my pleasure.

Alasdair Groves:
If you’re interested in following up on today’s conversation, we’ve linked it to a blog by Ed Welch called, Four Reasons for Addictions, and that will be posted just under the little signal, the download link for our podcast for today. You can find that at ccef.org/podcast and as always, feel free to send us any questions you have. ‘Til next time, blessings.