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Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

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New 3-Day Intensive Program in San Antonio

I’m pleased to announce the opening of our new San Antonio office. Take 2 Counseling (https://www.take2counseling.com) has just opened and is offering the same treatment model that we offer in Houston and in the Canadian Rockies.

Dr. Chris Gulde and Karen Gulde are two outstanding therapists who bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to this new practice. Both left very successful careers (as a physician and an attorney, respectively) to devote the rest of their lives to helping sex addicts get free, partners heal, and relationships be restored.
Dr. Chris Gulde is a CSAT. Karen Gulde is an ATPBS (Advanced Training in Problematic Sexual Behaviors). Additionally, Karen has received certification in treating partner trauma by APSATS.
Both Chris and Karen are certified in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and have developed a trademarked couples treatment model called R.E.A.L. (Reconnecting with Empathy,
Awareness, and Love) that has been used with couples who have addressed other issues such as addiction and still find it difficult to connect and reestablish intimacy.
Congratulations Chris and Karen on your new practice.
For more information, please visit them at www.https://www.take2counseling.com.
Dr. Magness
   
 Hope & Freedom specializes in Three-Day Intensives for Couples to lead toward the restoration of the relationship. Each Intensive is custom tailored to the needs of the couple. Only one couple will be present and I will personally conduct your Intensive.
For more information and to apply for acceptance in this program…

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How our Thought Life Affects our Health and Wellbeing

Originally posted at: https://sundayeveryday.me/2016/05/23/our-thought-life-affects-our-health-and-wellbeing/

by Lisa Hunt-Wotton

Depression is often the result of over thinking, our minds create problems that initially didn’t exist.

We exercise little discipline regarding the negative thoughts that run round and round in our heads, causing us anxiety and fear.  We don’t stop long enough  to realise that these thoughts are negative, they just are.

What if, I could have, I should have, I didn’t, if only and the list of toxic thoughts goes on and on.

“Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies” (Phil 4:8 The Message Bible).

The apostle Paul wrote this to the Philippians over 2000 years ago.  The ancients knew that meditating on good and noble thoughts were the best thing for our health and for us to live in harmony.

Today  I want us to understand the power of our thoughts and know that it is possible to change and renew our minds. Paul tells us to “Think on these thing” – what is good, pure, beautiful, noble, reputable.  It is a spiritual discipline that we must all take time to learn to master.  It is a spiritual discipline that has a powerful effect on our  emotional and physical health.  Dr Caroline Leaf is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in Communication Pathology specializing in Neuropsychology, teaches on toxic thought life.  This is what she says:

75% to 95% of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of our thought life. What we think about affects us physically and emotionally. It’s an epidemic of toxic emotions.

The average person has over 30,000 thoughts a day. Through an uncontrolled thought life, we create the conditions for illness; we make ourselves sick! Research shows that fear, all on its own, triggers more than 1,400 known physical and chemical responses and activates more than 30 different hormones.

There are INTELLECTUAL and MEDICAL reasons to FORGIVE!

Toxic waste generated by toxic thoughts causes the following illnesses: diabetes, cancer, asthma, skin problems and allergies to name just a few. Consciously control your thought life and start to detox your brain!

Medical research increasingly points to the fact that thinking and consciously controlling your thought life is one of the best ways, if not the best way of detoxing your brain. It allows you to get rid of those toxic thoughts and emotions that can consume and control your mind.

Change in your thinking is essential to detox the brain. Consciously controlling your thought life means not letting thoughts rampage through your mind. It means learning to engage interactively with every single thought that you have, and to analyze it before you decide either to accept or reject it” (http://drleaf.com/about/toxic-thoughts/).

Toxic thinking literally ‘wears down’ the brain and the rest of the body.

The Institute of Heartmath discusses an experiment titled “Local and nonlocal effects of coherent heart frequencies on Conformational Changes of DNA.” This study showed that thinking and feeling anger, fear and frustration caused DNA to change shape according to thoughts (that is thoughts with their intertwined feelings). T

The DNA responded by tightening up, becoming shorter and switching off many DNA codes, which reduced quality expression:

We will feel ‘shut down” by negative emotions and our body feels this too. What was really exciting about this study is the fact that the negative “shut down” or poor quality of the DNA codes was reversed with feelings of love, joy, appreciation and gratitude!

The researchers also found that HIV positive patients with these positive thoughts and feelings had 300,000 times the resistance!

A lot of our thinking is dominated by situations and people that we cannot forgive.   About two-thirds of the teaching of Jesus centred around forgiveness.  Richard Rohr says that:

“One of the most powerful of human experiences is to give or to receive forgiveness…when we forgive, we choose the goodness of the other over their faults, we experience Gods forgiveness…and we also experience our own goodness…this is a coming together of power, both human and divine”.

Throughout the next week why don’t you take the time to record your negative thoughts.  Write them out on a post it note and put it in a private place.  Next to the negative thought write out a positive or good thought and begin to rewire your brain.  Take the toxic thoughts and replace them with a good or noble thought.

Maybe you need to weigh up the choice to forgive, to release yourself and the other person from your pain.

Make the choice now to be free from these negative thoughts that are causing toxic reactions in your emotions and in your body.

Love Lisa.

About Dr. Leaf

Dr. Caroline Leaf is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in Communication Pathology specializing in Neuropsychology. Since the early 1980‘s she has studied and researched  the Mind-Brain connection.  During her years in clinical practice as a Communication  Pathologist she developed tools and processes that help people develop and change their thinking and subsequent behavior. Her scientific Science of Thought techniques  have transformed the lives of patients with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), learning disabilities, emotional traumas and released the potential of thousands of young students and adults.

Change in your thinking is essential to detox the brain. Consciously controlling your thought life means not letting thoughts rampage through your mind. It means learning to engage interactively with every single thought that you have, and to analyze it before you decide either to accept or reject it.

If the work here is meaningful to you, you can partner with me in a very real way through Patreon.com.

Patreon allows me to get support for the work that I do on this blog.    Patreon allows people to financially pledge to support artists, writers, musicians, and other creative people. Sunday Everyday has been on line since the first of February 2015.  Since that time I have been doing this in a volunteer capacity.  For the blog to continue I need your support.  You may want to give the amount you would spend on a coffee and muffin once a month or you may wish to pledge $50.00 a month or more.  Every bit helps.

Please help support my ministry and magnify my voice by pledging.

Thanks for considering.

Love Lisa

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Digging Up What i Threw Away

Originally posted at: http://intentionalwarriors.com/2016/05/15/digging-up-what-i-threw-away/

by james tarring cordrey

When i read the most recent post by Ethan Renoe the other day, Porn and the Doughnut Man, i got thinking about a really embarrassing event which involves picking through the trash, that happened when i was in the throes of my compulsive sexual behavior.

In Ethan’s post, he talks about offering free doughnuts to a man who is picking through the garbage looking for something to eat.  The man turns down the offer of freshly baked doughnuts and continues rummaging through the trash.

Ethan muses about the symbolism and meaning of that exchange, and how it relates to the offer of the Gospel.  How many times, Ethan wonders, has he been just like that man picking through the trash, turning down something good that is offered freely in favor of rubbish.

The picture Ethan paints immediately reminded me of a slightly different scenario from my life that involves porn and a trash can — or more specifically — a dumpster.

Back when i was regularly acting out in my addiction, i would buy porn videos. i would buy one at a time, and i would dispose of each one immediately after watching it. i was nervous that if i held on to the videos and built a stash i would get caught, so i always found a trash can or a dumpster and threw the videos out.

The visit to the trash can at the end of my acting out was just as much a part of the ritual of my addiction as the build up to the purchase was. There was a twisted poetry about it. At the end of the episode of pleasing my addiction, my physical action finally matched what the whole experience had been from the start: wasteful.

There was this one time that it had a new low, and the metaphor was all too real.

i watched a porn video and threw it in a dumpster in the alley behind my apartment. Feeling disgusted, i walked away from that experience with various promises on my lips:  That’s the last time; This is over; i can’t sink any lower, so this has to be where it all turns around; i am dead to this; now that i have gotten this out of my system, i won’t need porn anymore, and on and on.

The guilt and shame and self-reproach were thick for the rest of that day and the next. But the day after that, i was remembering parts of that video that i had really liked; parts of the video that were “so good” i wanted to see them one more time before really quitting porn for good.

And so, i climbed into that dumpster and clawed around for the video until i found it.

i found it.  Fortunately, there was not that much trash in the dumpster, so i managed to only get slightly dirty.

It would have been more fitting, perhaps, if the dumpster had been full of banana peels, coffee grounds, half-eaten fast food, dirty diapers, and all manner of nasty refuse. Nevertheless, the reality of what i had done was significant. i had been so desperate for porn that i had climbed into a large metal container of garbage to get it.

i don’t even think i debated with myself whether to do it. i just did it. There was no internal back-and-forth conversation of:

i’m going in there.

What? You’re crazy.

Before i knew it, i was in there with the trash.

i remember coming out of the dumpster and immediately what came to mind were the lyrics from Addicted by The Juliana Hatfield Three, which starts out with these lines:

i think i’m addicted / gotta have it everyday.

i think i’m addicted / i’m digging up what i threw away.

There it was; someone had written a rock song about me. The lyrics mocked me. The self-hatred kicked in all over again, this time with even more venom.

i know what it’s like to choose the garbage of porn — and the porn of the garbage —over life, freedom and sanity. What i didn’t know then, but i do now, is that what i was really looking for in that dumpster years ago wasn’t porn at all.

i was actually looking for life. But there was nobody in my life who would help me figure it out.

If Ethan Renoe had walked past with a box of doughnuts while i was fumbling through that dumpster years ago, i would have done the same thing that the guy in Ethan’s story did: refused the offer and turned back to the trash.

Truth be told, everyday some version of that scenario plays itself out, regardless of the fact that haven’t looked at porn for a long time. There is an offer of goodness and life for free that gets presented to me, and there is some form of trash that beckons me.

It’s crucial that i leave the trash in the dumpster and stop digging up what i threw away.