Sex, Food, and God | David Eckman

David Eckman. Sex, Food, and God: Breaking Free from Temptations, Compulsions, and Addictions. Harvest House, 2006. 256 pp.

Addiction is always the backward use of what God intended to be much easier and happier. Addiction is the misuse of the good. What this book offers is the way to step out of temptation, compulsion, and addiction . . . and step into the world of using what is within us for our good, especially food and sex. Leaving addiction behind will bring a person into a world that eventually will feel good and complete and happy. What this book is about is how to enter that world and stay there.

You do not have to be addicted to benefit from the contents of this book. You just have to be like the rest of us–surprised by how compelling food and sexuality can be, and surprised by how weak-willed we appear to be. As I survey some of the concepts we’re going to cover, you may also find one, several, or all of them to be surprising to you–and perhaps of special interest or help.

What You’ll Find in the Following Chapters

GIFTS, ADDICTIONS, AND GOD. Perhaps you want to learn how to make the best use of the good gifts of life, like food and sexuality. Or perhaps you want to see how the good things of life relate to God. On the other side, maybe you want to discover why temptation, compulsion, and addiction are so powerful in our lives. In all these cases, this book is for you.

AN EXAMPLE OF A JOURNEY TO FREEDOM. If you want to see what God can do with a life trapped by different forms of addiction, later in this book you will read the story of Tammy Jo. She was codependent–she panicked without a man in her life. She was addicted to tobacco. And she was anorexic. She had every reason in the world to be stuck in addictions. Born out of wedlock, sexually abused from the age of five, a victim of the pornography trade, married at age 14, bereaved of a beloved daughter . . . her heartaches seem endless. We will see how she was brought out of that.

WAYS TO DEAL WITH A TRAP YOU’RE IN. If you are caught up in an addiction, this book is for you. As a prime example, pornography and sexual temptation and addiction are now serious issues not for just men but also women, and so a fresh look is needed to deal with that onslaught. Increasing numbers of women are trapped by the crack cocaine of Internet porn, as shown by the fact that 32 million American women had visited at least one pornography Web site in one month of 2004 alone. And 25 million Americans visit cybersex sites for between one and ten hours per week, with another 4.7 million doing so in excess of eleven hours per week.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF FAMILY BACKGROUND TO TEMPTATION, COMPULSION, AND ADDICTION. If you think this may be a key concept for you or someone you know, again, this book is for you. To underscore the Bible’s approach on this issue, we will draw information from the largest study done on the subject in the history of the world. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study was carried out by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and Kaiser Permanente (the largest HMO in the country) to examine the connection between bad experiences in childhood and adult health. The results are stunning . . . and may make you look at all of life in a different way.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PAIN–ESPECIALLY EMOTIONAL PAIN AND STRESS–AND TEMPTATION, COMPULSION, AND ADDICTION. Just to give you a quick look at what is coming later, consider an amazing statistic found in medical literature. Heroin use was common among American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Many of them would simply have been considered hopeless addicts. Yet within ten months after such soldiers returned to the United States, only 5 percent were still injecting heroin. There is no program in the world that has had such medically incredible success. Alcoholics Anonymous looks feeble in comparison. What brought about such an unbelievable cure rate?

In dealing with addiction, the assumption is almost universal that it is the chemicals that get a person hooked, and the chemicals that keep them hooked. That idea is utterly contradicted by the results of the “no-bullets-flying therapy” (in other words, getting out of Vietnam and away from the immense, moment-by-moment anxiety and danger)–which brought about a 95-percent cure rate among “participants.” This leads to a truth we will spend several chapters exploring: Reduce the heart’s pain, and addiction drifts away.

If you want to know why this principle is not only true, but profoundly biblical and vastly effective, this book is for you. And we will answer two questions:

1. What is the most effective way to reduce the pain within?
2. How do we use a pain-free heart to address the challenge of temptation, compulsion, and addiction?

THE POSSIBILITY OF “ADDICTION-PROOFING.” If the principle we just mentioned is true–reduce the pain, emotional or physical, and addiction drifts away–there is one more implication: Making our hearts and lives “addiction-proof” becomes a real possibility.

Whether it is food addiction, heroin addiction, sex addiction, alcohol addiction, workaholism, rageaholism, or any of the other two dozen or so compulsions/addictions, we will learn how to protect our hearts from being enslaved. As we grasp truths about addiction and pain in the heart, our hearts can then relax and thrive under God’s kindness and grace. In other words, we can start to develop a romance with God, which is the best (and really, the only) method of true addiction proofing.

To pull together into one phrase what I’ve been saying, the goal of this book is to show you how to have a happy heart. Now, you might react to that statement in one of two ways:

• “A ‘happy heart’? Dr. Eckman, that phrase sounds goofy, like ‘they all lived happily ever after.’ Isn’t unhappiness the deepest reality of human existence? Life on earth is crappy, and I think you’re living in a fantasy world.”

• “Dr. Eckman, I feel pretty happy and content most of the time. Aren’t people who are unhappy–and then get into addictions and so on–choosing to be that way? I think they’d feel better if they just made better choices.”

To the group responding the first way, I want to mention my own background. I grew up in an alcoholic home–that is, in the World-of-Walking-Backward. During my nearly 20 years there I did not believe there was such a thing as happiness. But the truth is, that is the fantasy world.

Today I know different, and I believe that a vibrant Christian spirituality is the way to eventually feel good and complete and happy. What do you have to lose? You will probably not be unhappier after reading this book . . . and you might find contentment and joy you can’t conceive of right now.

To the people responding the second way, I would say that it is crucial for you to understand the mental/emotional world the other half lives in (I sometimes call it the “opposite world”). You have to deal with such people all the time. Many of them may end up among (or now be among) your family and friends. Do you want to connect–deeply connect–with people you know and love? Do you want to protect their hearts from addiction, compulsion, and temptation, even though these things are not such a struggle for you? And do you want to be prepared in case you get blindsided by an overpowering urge that could pull you down into misery?

In either case, this book really is for you. I invite you to turn the page and learn more.

Taken from Sex, Food, and God: Breaking Free from Temptations, Compulsions, and Addictions by David Eckman; Copyright 2006 by David Eckman; Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR; Used by permission.

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