Part Four – Starting Over

 

By: Cameron Sprinkle

I’d never driven more than a couple hours by myself before, and I’d certainly never done it feeling like my entire life was hanging in the balance. 

About 500 miles later I finally made my way into the mountains of North Carolina and at long last saw the His High Places sign out front. Pulling in I knew that geographically this was the right place…but I was anxiously wondering how long it would take for me to assess if this huge decision I’d made was the right one or not. 

I stepped out of my car to find a thin, grey-haired man in a sweater vest standing with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting patiently to greet me. He wore a subtle but convincing grin on his face. 

He said, “You must be Cameron.” What a comforting sound to hear your own name in a foreign place.

Before I really knew what was happening, he was hugging me and telling me that he was glad I was there. I didn’t have time to decide how I felt about that before he began to help me unload. He grabbed one of my bags and carried it for me as he led me inside to the beautiful 5-bedroom cabin, and up to my room upstairs. There he unexpectedly but gently took hold of my two hands in his and prayed a simple but genuine prayer for me, that God would give me the peace of knowing that I was in the right place. He then smiled at me and said, “I’m glad you’re here” before excusing himself to let me settle in.

I peered out my doorway and watched him walk back down the stairs before closing the door to my room and fell back onto my bed. As I hit the mattress it finally hit me: I’d made it to my safe, healing haven. I burst into tears of exhaustion and relief, crying for just a few moments before realizing that I still had more bags to unload, at which point I collected myself and headed back downstairs. 

I was introduced to the counselor personally assigned to me for my two-week stay, Richard. I’m amazed at how perfect a fit that Richard was for me…yes, I was a criminal who had committed an egregious crime, but I had actually committed it because I was horribly insecure, emotionally under-developed, and fragile. So beating me with accusations–however true–was never going to change me.  

During the aftermath of my confession someone I previously trusted accused me of enjoying all the attention. Did I need attention? Absolutely. I was devastated and terrified, and I’d nearly destroyed myself and everyone I cared about after years of being hopelessly and secretly miserable. Did I enjoy the attention? You have got to be kidding me. I wanted to die. That’s like watching someone bleed out as paramedics try to revive them and saying that person was being self-centered.

I definitely needed help from someone who would be honest with me. But I didn’t need a drill sergeant. I didn’t need someone glaring at me and telling me that my childhood didn’t matter and that psychology just creates excuses, and that I needed to accept that I was just liar and a manipulator. This, too, actually happened. Trust me—if shame was going to fix me, it would have fixed me a long time ago. 

God knew what I needed. I needed a loving, comforting, smart, experienced, truth-speaking, warm, verbally affectionate, counselor with Holy Spirit power. So God gave me Richard. He was such an incredible blessing in my time of greatest despair.

In the deepest part of my heart, locked away in a safe where no one would find it, I found the fractured foundation that I’d built my life upon: God doesn’t truly care about me, and I can’t completely trust him. I realized that he was the one ultimately responsible for my trauma, because he could have protected me from it, and he didn’t. And because of that, he got shut out along with everyone else with the inner vow that I’d made when I told myself that I couldn’t trust anyone but myself. 

This was my break-through moment, and I completely fell apart. I felt betrayed by the God that I had loved for so long. I screamed at him with an intense, maniacal fury that painfully tore my vocal cords, demanding answers to what I now know were the central questions that had crippled my security and faith in him: “WHY WOULD YOU GIVE SUCH A SENSITIVE BOY TO A DAD WHO DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HIM?!!? WHY DIDN’T YOU GIVE ME THE SAME EARS YOU GAVE EVERYONE ELSE!??!”

I called Karissa on the phone and bawled as I relayed my most painful discovery of all: God could have prevented all of this. Despite all the grief and pain I’d put her through, she compassionately listened and offered her thoughts on why God might have allowed these damaging things to happen to me as a child. 

Eventually I had it out with God on my own, and I felt like he spoke to me through the Holy Spirit. This is the part that gets hard to explain, because it’s supernatural. But I felt like God gave me his own answer as to why I had to be raised by the two exact parents who raised me, and it satisfied my heart, and I accepted it. And regarding my hearing loss, I felt like he said, “Yes, Cameron. Your ears are different from everyone else’s. You can’t hear what everyone else can hear. But one day…you will hear things that no one else can hear. I gave you special ears, and they will give you great power one day, for my purposes and my glory.”

When you’re wounded as a child, you must become like a child again to be healed.  

Child Cameron couldn’t understand or accept it but adult Cameron did. The parts of my childhood that seemed cruel or unjust were acknowledged by my Creator and revealed to be more than oversights or neglect. God was actually there with me in every terrified, lonely moment, and it broke his heart, too. And my ears weren’t defective. They were special ears. He told me so himself.

With those two central questions answered, I felt like I got back the last locked-off piece of my heart. Then I was finally able to give my whole heart to God for the very first time in my life. 

That was just one of my many powerful, healing moments that I experienced in my two week stay at HHP.

Week one was about letting God heal the wounds of my weary, broken soul and I emerged with a renewed relationship with God and a better understanding of what had been so broken in me for so long. 

Week two was about tackling the Goliath of sex addiction. 

During the day the program consisted of morning and afternoon sessions one-on-one with my counselor, and two sessions of watching DVD teachings. During the second week they had me watch a DVD series called The Conquer Series, and combined with the deep spiritual healing I’d just experienced, it changed my life. Because this was the first time in my life that my addiction made sense to me, and it was the first time in my life that I truly believed I could undo it and live a full, free life. 

 The church has historically had just two answers for addiction: “get accountability” and “surrender it to the Lord”; then when these singular things don’t singularly work, the addict is left even more hopeless. But here I learned that trauma and addiction recovery is holistic, meaning every part of your life needs to be addressed and brought to full health. And they gave a plan for that. I bought into it intellectually, because it all added up.

One of the coolest things I learned about it is the way that God’s word aligns with what we’re learning about mental health. 

The secret to beating addiction? Changing your mind. Literally. 

Here’s an excerpt from John Piper’s “Desiring God” website explaining what repentance is:

“Two things show us that repentance is an internal change of mind and heart rather than mere sorrow for sin or mere improvement of behavior. First, the meaning of the Greek word behind the English “repent” (metanoeo) points in this direction. It has two parts: meta and noeo. The second part (noeo) refers to the mind and its thoughts and perceptions and dispositions and purposes. The first part (meta) is a prefix that regularly means movement or change. So the basic meaning of repent is to experience a change of the mind’s perceptions and dispositions and purposes.”

(Note: that’s exactly what it means to grow in mental health) 

“The other factor that points to this meaning of repent is the way Luke 3:8 describes the relationship between repentance and new behavior. It says, “Bear fruits in keeping with repentance.” …Jesus is demanding that we experience this inward change.” 

So in order for me to truly repent and change, I had to change my perceptions, dispositions, and purposes, and then keep living and operating out of that new belief system. 

I came home with my new beliefs and my recovery plan and put it all into action when I got home. I’d love to say that it went super smoothly and I was flying high from there on, but it was rough. I was basically starting over with a new heart, but with Child Cameron’s emotional maturity level and worldview. And my brain was still addicted. But I felt like I had a choice for the first time in my life. And that was amazing. 

Karissa came back from His High Places and summoned me to watch as she retrieved her wedding ring from my nightstand drawer and tearfully put it back on. I knew there were still going to be lots of walls up in between us for a long time, but seeing her choose to fight made me break down and cry. I had hope for our marriage again. 

Part of my recovery plan was what we called the “No-90”, in which the goal was 90 days without any sexual activity whatsoever, not even with Karissa. This gives the brain a chance to learn that it can survive without the chemical rewards of sex. This was very difficult, but I am so glad I did it. I celebrated it each morning by updating my day count on the bathroom wall with a dry erase marker, and I encouraged myself by writing scripture and other things that God or others had said to me. 

We removed all open internet access from my phone and used iPhone’s security features to plug back-door security vulnerabilities that I had found. I went off of all social media, and my phone was really just limited to email, text, camera/photos, and my music. I was pretty much closed off to the outside world since I was working from home, and that helped a ton. 

The boundaries are important. But perhaps more important is the continued development of emotional maturity—and that was actually the most rewarding part for me. For the first time I felt like I was becoming the man I always wanted to be. For the first time I felt like I had control over my emotions instead of just responding immediately. I was beginning to stay calm when triggered by anger or hurt. I wasn’t as defensive of a person. I wasn’t crippled by anxiety when I was overwhelmed by my videography business, and was instead making a list and working through things methodically in a way I never could before. 

Along the way I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and saw a psychiatrist to get on Wellbutrin, which had a huge impact on my life. It didn’t make me do the right things, it made the right things easier to do.

These things didn’t happen overnight. Not at all. The first year and a half was absolute hell. It was like army-crawling day in and day out. There were so many days when we both wanted to quit. But we also kept seeing just enough improvement to believe that maybe one day we could have a normal, healthy marriage, and who knows…maybe even…thrive, one day? 

I’m two and a half years into recovery, and the further I get in to it the more I realize how much more maturing I have to do. And the more sorrow I have for what I did to Karissa and so many others that I hurt. My ability to feel empathy has grown so much. Addicts struggle with feeling true empathy.

I’ll aways be an addict. But the dynamic has reversed. 

Before, I was in a prison cell and my addiction was like a cruel Nazi guard giving me orders from outside, coming in to beat me mercilessly…but now the addiction is in the cell. It answers to me now. But I still have to guard it. And I can still hear it. And the lies start to make a lot of sense to me when I’m hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or stressed, so I have to take good care of myself.

Our marriage isn’t perfect now, and neither is my recovery. I haven’t had a relapse with my addiction yet, but I know I’m still human and I’m not immune to stumbling. I’ll be in recovery for the rest of my life. But for the first time in my life, I can say I’m truly proud of who I am. And I don’t have anything to prove to anyone about my value. My heart is at peace with itself.

Unaddressed trauma is like having your leg broken and never going to the hospital. It heals wrong and leaves you walking with a limp for the rest of your life, never fully able to push into all that God calls you to. Never able to run. Surrender is letting God break the leg so that he can re-set it. It’s so painful, and so inconvenient, and it requires months of rehab and time to heal.

That gruesome process is what I just went through, and it was completely worth it. 

After years and years of searching for answers and begging God to take away my addiction, I finally found freedom when I surrendered and did the hard work. I’m starting to run for the first time in my life, and it’s amazing. It’s amazing to feel unrestrained, to be able to trust my legs.

The true power over my sin began in therapy, when I gathered the pieces of my heart that were fractured by life’s traumas and pains, and tearfully reunited them with the rest of my heart and offered it back up to God and entrusted him with it. The Gospel isn’t that our sin doesn’t have consequences; the gospel is that God joins us in our consequences. God never left my side in this process, no matter how ugly it got and no matter how angry I got with him. And 2,000 years ago a man named Jesus Christ came from Heaven to  join Earth and took the beating that I deserve. Now I get to walk away a free man, and live an abundant life in harmony with my perfect heavenly Father. I’m forever changed because of that.

Karissa receives a lot of praise for the love she’s shown me, and nobody is more amazed by it than I am. You guys seriously don’t know the half of it. I love to see her strength celebrated by others. But I want to make sure everyone understands that she’s not any stronger than anyone else spiritually—she’s just completely surrendered. He is made strong in her weakness. That’s where her strength comes from. And now that I have completely surrendered as well, I am finally growing into the strong man that I was born to be. 

We’re just getting started.