Pleasure unwoven - drug addiction is a "choice disease" with a cure

HOPE, our brains are plastic and can change over time. Your job, be patient and don't engage the addiction long enough and you'll arrive at a day when your addiction is no longer a temptation.

Application for change
1. Pray and do everything you can to promote health and healing. What worthwhile things should you do in the morning, to know and listen to God? How could you occupy your time for maximum benefit while your in this time of healing and recovery? Where is a safe place you'll go when the crave is unbearable, how will you get there?
2. Get help from others, build a support network. What are some places you'll go to get support? How will you stay engaged in the network? How does giving help to others, bring help and healing in your life?

1. Is Addiction Really a Disease?2. Choice argument: Adicts can stop at any time. Take a drink, but if you do I'll shoot you dead. Behaviors and symptoms. With behavior, you can choose, with symptoms there is no choice.
3. Addiction is a disease of choice.
4. Periodic Table of Intoxicants, the dopamine hypothesis - chemicals and behaviors (cross addiction to get "high" with excessive exercise instead of chemicals).
4. Dopamine's Role in Reward (version 2) "creates wanting" through a message of "better" to the brain (food, sex), until it reaches the #1 spot of survival. Addiction even with worse and worse consequence.
5. Dopamine & Glutamate in Addiction "I want UP" and "go get it DOWN", destructive flash flood, washing away everything, deep change. "Pathological overlearning" permanent memories that leave the addict susceptible to relapse.
6. Stress & Addiction - Balance in the brain. Change restores balance. Brain loses availability to experience pleasure normally.  They are "Pleasure deaf". Subconscience tendency to relapse at the worse possible time.
8. Hypofrontality in addiction - Craving suffering caused by the brain, disease of craving. Invisible, involuntary, real.
Memo to Self Frontal Cortex - isolation is a terrible way to try and stay sober. Valuation is an important component of choice, so is social queues, so is self-consciousness.
 - see emotional intelligence: the ability to see yourself clearly, not self-deceptive, thinking of yourself greater than you are. 

Landscape of the Mind: Addiction Explained - frontal cortex: the highest level of the brain: Love God and Others happens here, Moral failure happens when highest level rejects God and others. However, addiction impacts a much lower part of the brain. What the Bible calls "Natural man" is in the midbrain. A pleasure center of the brain was found, where rats would not eat, have sex or do anything else until they died from shock or overdose from repeatedly dosing these areas of the brain.
 - Drug and survival are indistinguishable because the addiction has hi-jacked the brain
 - We have power to "retrain our brains" as the Bible says, renew your mind. 3 sets of 3 weeks to change our brain.
 - Inability to perceive light is called blindness, inability to perceive sound is called deafness but an inability to perceive pleasure is morally loaded. Addiction is the brain's inability to perceive, process and act upon pleasurable experiences. A brain disorder around pleasure and it's function in our basic survival.
Wowza, I was talking with my mom about sins people naturally struggle with, some with food but with an addict - it's a desire to be out of control. Drugs make us senseless and the addict things perceive this as being cool.
 - HOPE, our brains are plastic and can change over time. Your job, be patient and don't engage the addiction long enough and you'll arrive at a day when your addiction is no longer a temptation.

Application for change
1. Pray and do everything you can to promote health and healing.
2. Get help from others, build a support network