How Do You Win The Battle? Surrender.

Scott Peterson (LCSW, CSAT) (Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Sexual Addiction Therapist) has over 20 years of experience with sexual addiction recovery. When I asked Scott to do a post with us I asked him to think about it and let me know. He immediately answered, "Surrender". It took me a while to start to understand the principle of surrendering my addiction, but it has made all the difference. . .or you can just keep trying harder. . .

"The paradox of Surrender: When we want to hold on tighter, when we want to exert our selves in terms of how much self-control or will-power we have. . .we in fact have to let go."  

"Vulnerability occurs when we take the two most important risks there are. The first risk is knowing our selves as we really are. There's no pretense, no attempt to deny. As well as allowing others to see us as we really are."  

"We need to make what is implicit inside of us explicit. If we are able to make it explicit it means we are able to do something about it."

"This is the heart of Surrendering, transferring our weaknesses from our hands and placing them in Jesus' hands. The opposite of 'white knuckling' it."  

 "Typically when we say, "I'm going to try harder" what that means is is I'm going to take all the methods I've used with addiction and just do them with greater intensity and greater strength and energy. But it's the same old way. It's the same old way that has not worked in the past and no matter how hard we try it won't work in the present or the future."