I have written elsewhere that the cure for addiction to pornography is spiritual rebirth. While I believe what I wrote is true, it has been brought forcefully to my attention that taking away a poison does not necessarily mean that all is well in an individual. I want to clear up confusion about the difference between being healed of addiction (or a grudge, or obsessions, or jealousy, or any other malady of the heart that rebirth can heal), and having the consequences of choices reversed.
Let me offer a medical analogy. I believe that health problems can be chalked up to one of five causes:
1. Poisons-something is in the system that does not belong.
2. Deficiency-something important is low or absent from the system.
3. Excess-toxic amounts of something that is necessary for survival.
4. Deformity-all the necessary ingredients are there, but the organs are arranged counterproductively.
5. Some combination of 1-4.
Deficiency: Lost Opportunities
Removing a poison like mercury from a body will help it to function properly, but it will not spontaneously cure iron deficiency. Likewise, removing the desire for pornography through spiritual rebirth will relieve the ills that come with it, but it will bring back lost opportunities for development. The desire for pornography may be gone, but the opportunities to develop social skills through dating that were missed do not re-present themselves. The thousands of hours lost in solitude could have been filled with many positive learning experiences, and that time is permanently gone.
Here is a huge section of a talk by President Eyring, from the October 1999 Conference. The talk is called Do Not Delay, and he makes clear what I am trying to get at:
"I knew a man once...When he was 12 he was ordained a deacon. Some of his friends tempted him to begin to smoke. He began to feel uncomfortable in church. He left his little town, not finishing high school, to begin a life following construction jobs across the United States. He was a heavy-equipment operator. He married. They had children. The marriage ended in a bitter divorce. He lost his children. He lost an eye in an accident. He lived alone in boardinghouses. He lost everything he owned except what he could carry in a trunk.
"One night, as he prepared to move yet again, he decided to lighten the load of that trunk. Beneath the junk of years, he found a book. He never knew how it got there. It was the Book of Mormon. He read it through, and the Spirit told him it was true. He knew then that all those years ago he had walked away from the true Church of Jesus Christ and from the happiness which could have been his.
"Later, he was my more-than-70-year-old district missionary companion. I asked the people we were teaching, as I testified of the power of the Savior’s Atonement, to look at him. He had been washed clean and given a new heart, and I knew they would see that in his face. I told the people that what they saw was evidence that the Atonement of Jesus Christ could wash away all the corrosive effects of sin.
"That was the only time he ever rebuked me. He told me in the darkness outside the trailer where we had been teaching that I should have told the people that while God was able to give him a new heart, He had not been able to give him back his wife and his children and what he might have done for them. But he had not looked back in sorrow and regret for what might have been. He moved forward, lifted by faith, to what yet might be.
"One day he told me that in a dream the night before, the sight in his blind eye was restored. He realized that the dream was a glimpse of a future day, walking among loving people in the light of a glorious resurrection. Tears of joy ran down the deeply lined face of that towering, raw-boned man. He spoke to me quietly, with a radiant smile. I don’t remember what he said he saw, but I remember that his face shone with happy anticipation as he described the view. With the Lord’s help and the miracle of that book in the bottom of a trunk, it had not for him been too late nor the way too hard."
I have been told that to master a great skill, such as piano or painting, requires ten thousand hours of concentrated effort. I do not know where my good friends got that statistic, but we will just assume that it is true for a minute. If you spend eight hours a day, EVERY day, practicing at some skill, you will come away with ten thousand hours after 3.42 years. If you practice forty hours a week, skipping weekends, you will reach ten thousand hours in about 5.2 years. If you spend four hours a day, skipping weekends, you will get to the magical ten thousand hour mark in 9.6 years. I can hardly think of anything that I have been that committed to for that much time, except perhaps things like driving, brushing teeth, and studying the scriptures. Mastery is illusive because devotion is rare. We witness the fruits of it in concert halls, art galleries, and athletic competitions. It takes nascent talent, yes, but that talent must be cultivated.
Assumptions
Assumptions can become blind spots for us. It is very easy to assume that other people think the way we do, that they have the same skills, motivations, feelings, beliefs. Only when they act or open their mouths do we see the internal differences between us and those around us. It is easy to assume that someone is able to do things easily because we can do them easily. But why are such abilities part of our skill set? They became a part of our repertoire because we took the time and chances to develop them.
The men in the Church have been counseled to date more. Dating requires a level of social competence that is becoming more rare, thanks to video games, pornography, and other consuming activities that dominate early lives of boys. If a boy spends ten thousand hours looking at pornography and playing games online, in isolation, will he be able to interact well with the opposite sex, develop healthy relationships, and get married? His growth in these areas will be stunted. The general assumption is that social interaction is as easy and natural as breathing, "it's just what we humans do." But extreme cases of feral children, boys and girls raised without human contact, indicate that without extensive social experience a person will view other people as aliens from another world, and lack sensitivity to the nuances of protocol, etiquette, body language, deportment, and on and on. In my opinion, pornography, video games, movies, and other obsessive, isolating, massively time consuming activities produce a diluted version of this feral child effect by robbing the developing mind of the thousands of hours of social interaction needed to train the brain. Impaired ability to interact socially, especially to date, court, and marry, are the results.
Solutions
There must be a way to overcome this deficiency for those who have been so robbed of precious opportunities, but I can only think of one or two possible solutions. One is to learn to swim by jumping in the water. If your social skills are at a 6th grade level, now is the best time to improve them. Jane Austin's fictional heroine, Elizabeth Bennett, recommended practicing social skills, and that means using women around us as our clinical material. Awkward outcomes notwithstanding, this is among the reasonable solutions I can see. The grace of God is another thing that comes to mind—assistance beyond personal ability.
I remember trying to starting a fire in the fire place with my father looking on. He said I was doing it wrong, expecting flames from newspaper to light an enormous log. He showed me how to use paper to light twigs, and use the burning twigs to light chopped pieces of kindling, and larger and larger pieces, until there were big enough flames to ignite full-sized logs. I have often thought of this as my only parental training in the realm of dating and courtship. Start small, as acquaintances, then friends, then dating, then exclusive dating, then courtship, then engagement, then marriage.
Elder Ballard recommended young men to consult with their fathers about how to succeed in dating and courship: "Courting seems to be a lost art. Rediscover it. It really works! Ask your fathers—they know!" (Fathers and Sons: A Remarkable Relationship, Oct. 2009 Gen. Conf.). I believe that while there is an epidemic deficiency of learning and social skills among the men and boys of the current generation, I still believe what Nephi taught is true—when the Lord gives a commandment, he also prepares a way to keep it.
