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Say Goodbye to Stubborn Sin, Clark Gerhart, MD and Jefferson Scott, 2005, ISBN 1591856256 You’re suffering from some major and recurring sin, and it’s ruining your life. Whether it’s alcoholism, addiction to internet pornography or an inability to forgive others, you have read the self-help books, gone through the 12-step programs, and even attended prayer meetings, but nothing has worked. You are right back where you started, asking God’s forgiveness for messing up, again. Are you destined to be like this? No, but the important thing to remember is that "the flesh" really is rooted in the flesh. This book takes a tour of the human body, showing how the various systems react to different stimuli. For instance, the "normal" settings for your hypothalamus have been altered by sin. So you now need higher levels of pleasure or feelings of self-respect than you really do. Such new "normal" levels might cause a person to play online games for hours and hours at a time, or dress flirtatiously specifically to attract men. Reflexes are not just physical; conditioned responses can be developed around anything that goes to our brain through the nervous system. There’s a fine line between enjoying pleasurable sensory stimuli and living for those pleasurable responses. Such stimuli cause the body to release adrenaline, which causes the "rush" feeling. The body is trying to maintain homeostasis, or normalcy, so it "down-regulates" the thrill sensations for next time. That’s why it takes a larger and larger jolt of stimuli to get that initial "rush" level. That’s how addictions are born. The way to treat this starts with LASTS: Listening, Admitting, Submitting, Trusting and Standing Firm. The author goes into much more detail for each part of the body. This is a really interesting book. If you have tried everything else to be able to stop doing "it", whatever it is, you should try this. For those who might feel weird about the religious aspect of this, if it works, and you are no longer tormented by "it", that’s all that matters. Paul Lappen is a freelance book reviewer whose website, Dead Trees Review, has over 700 reviews on all subjects, with an emphasis on small press books.
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