Recovery Game

Recovery Game download

In the words of Elder Russell M. Nelson:

“Addiction surrenders later freedom to choose. Through chemical means, one can literally become disconnected from his or her own will" (in Conference Report, Oct. 1988, 7; or Ensign, Nov. 1988,7)

All too often there is just “one story” that is told about people in the Church who are trying to recover from addiction. That story goes something like: “So-and-so was addicted to such-and-such and did it nineteen times a day for seventeen years straight. Then they saw the light and stopped cold turkey and never looked back!”

As awesome and true some of those stories are, as someone who taught people who were chain smokers and porn addicts the gospel, I found that “one story” to not be helpful to many people in giving up addictive patterns. As someone who has struggled with addiction for many years, I have found that “one story” has caused a lot of misunderstanding towards my situation.

The point of the game is to help cultivate understanding for how the battle with addiction is fought--not necessarily how it’s won. In doing so I wanted to emphasize couple of things: 

Although one is not clinically insane, addiction is madness. Logic is sometimes abandoned to satisfy the cravings you feel. What seems like a great idea, not bad idea, or a flat out awful idea will fluctuate  and change from one moment to another.

I reflected this in deceptively named options. One may have thought that their choice would lead to not relapsing, but indeed they were unaware of what that particular choice would result in, and would have to try to remember where they went wrong, and make corrections in the future. As they progressed further and further into recovery, there would be fewer deceptive choices, reflecting that the addict was learning his or her addictive patterns better.

 

No matter how overpowering the feelings may be, relapsing is always a choice. Gordon S. Bruin M.A., L.P.C. explains this in his book, The Language of Recovery by describing the functions of the prefrontal (the portion which houses the moral center of the brain) and limbic system (which houses the survival and sex drive of the organism). While the limbic system takes up a far more massive portion of the brain than the prefrontal cortex, the motor commands of the limbs reside in the prefrontal cortex. No matter how strong the urge is the limbic system can never control the body without first getting permission from the moral center of the brain.  

I reflected this in my game by making the player choose options. The choice to avoid a relapse may not have been on the page where the only relapse choices were available, but somewhere in the line of choices you made a choice that cornered yourself into a relapse. 

Addiction sucks. Recovery from addictions is possible, but it requires a lot of consistency, perseverance, and self examination.