Step One: My life is unmanageable due to what?

We admitted that we were powerless over lust -- that our lives had become
unmanageable.

This step has two parts that are very distinct in it. When we begin this process it is out of an admission that our lives are unmanageable, but first our lives have to beome unmanageable due to lust. How does that happen?

In my journey of recovery I have met several people that exemplify several different types of unmanageability in life. I have met a few people that had abused children and had dealt with criminal consequences. Some were trying to heal marriages damaged by affairs or strings of affairs. Still others were driven by religious conversions of themselves or spouses.

My recovery was very motivated by my wife's conversion and in some ways what I would call my reversion to the faith. I had lived a wide and varied past and experienced things not uncommon to many teens and twenty-somethings today. I was caught in relationships of fantasy, use of pornography, erotic literature, strip clubs, using my wife as an outlet and masturbation.

These things were my "problem" to be fixed. Behaviors that needed stopping before they escalated further. Behaviors that harmed my relationships with others at the different stages of my life. My wife began to think ill of them, the ones she knew about and as she found out about others. For a time we explored some of the fantasies, for a time that is all they were but after attempting one of the more harmless ones things began to change.

Part of my insides saw a door opening and it yearned for fantasy to become real. Fortunately, the door was closing my wife made a definitive turn down the path of conversion and for that I thank give thanks to God to this day. Pressure from her was a large motivating factor for me to begin my journey to recovery. It is just now, years later that I am realizing that I was only really focusing on behaviors, not acting out, instead of what the addiction truly is, on what had made me a love cripple. That is lust. That is what has made my life unmanageable.

I have to admit this and it is not easy to admit but I am learning day by day to express myself intimately and not lustfully. To give without expectation of return instead of taking with the expectation of getting more.

Under the Mercy,
MS