Surrender

Yes, free will is something that is necessary for recovery but so is surrender. I ammust surrender my right to feel this way, surrender my right to be pleased, surrender my right to lust, surrender my right to be lusted after, surrender my right to be right, and the list goes on and on.

No matter how terrible it may be, I have to surrender my right so that I can recover, possession is the addicts weakness, as long as I feel I have a right to possess I am possessed by lust.

Under the Mercy,

MS

Journal 20070701

Tonight, I went to my weekly meeting. Tonight one of our members gave his first step. I know that this was hard for him to do. It took up most of the meeting and his recounting encompassed probably over 30 hand-written pages. This step was a recounting, a disclosure, of how life had become unmanageable by lust. It is amazing how deep his hurt had become. How much pain had he experienced in his life. How lust had overcome him. Many people I know and popular culture would have you think that all of these activities: pornography (still and video), fooling around, masturbation and yes even some people prostitution; are all perfectly normal and legitimate activites for people to partake in.

This realization hascome to me that those of us in the meeting are sexaholics. Just like those working steps in AA are alcoholics. Their are many people out their that are drunks that are not alcoolics, alcoholics go to meetings. Many people in our society are sex drunks, sex addicts, they just haven't admited that they have a problem. Their are people I know that sexual fulfillment is how they feel loved or how they find meaning in their life. They do not see the bigger purpose and that sexual fullfillment comes out of their intimacy with another. Being "intimate" isn't about laying someone down, spreading their legs and ravaging their body so that you have a pleasurable experience.

This is not to say that one can be in the fruits of intimacy in one moment and then something can change or happen that makes them begin to lust. I have had that experience and it was hard to surrender it. WIth his mercy and the true love of my wife I was able to get to that.
I love you, my dearling.

And to those out their struggling, keep coming back it works if you work it. And you are worth it.

Under the Mercy,
M

step+one 12+steps sexaholic sexaholism alcoholic journal lust intimacy

Lust Versus Intimacy

One of the biggest things addiction to lust, more commonly know as Sex Addicts or Sexaholics, does to a person is it makes them incapable of sharing with anyone else who they really are. It could be due to embarrassment, shame, guilt or a variety of other reasons but the sex addict disconnects and begins to connect to the unreal to make him or herself feel real or whole.

Don’t get me wrong, at times the Sexaholic can connect with other people very well. I have personally experienced many times that I connected to those around me; the problem was a small period of time that came afterward when I would have self-doubt. That self-doubt is about the other person not connecting with the real me, with what I really wanted, the pleasure, the lust, the acting out. In reality the other person had connected with the real me, the cripple, the part of me that I allowed to define me that was not the real me.

I was ashamed of the things I had done in secret, those were the things that I kept to myself and never shared with anyone else. If I had ever shared them I would have risked my status as a person, the funny thing is that it increased the addiction, allowed it to have more control over me and made the risk greater, I just thought I was controlling it.

The answer to the problem is sharing oneself, your true self. I had to learn to share all of me, who I am and the addict. The true me was on the inside, I was scared of the acting out and the addiction, the things that I had done in my life or fantasized about. I was beginning to let the addiction define me; I was losing my life and my identity.

The sharing of ME is where intimacy comes into play. Lust, the addiction, was where I took from others what I wanted of them as an object and took from them what I wanted for me. My conscience was withered inside me but it made me feel bad in what small ways it could, because I never felt quite right about having used someone, be it internet pornography or any other way of acting out.

I had to learn to integrate myself and be honest with those closest to me. I had to learn how to share myself, this is intimacy, the SPICES of life (Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Sexual). This began in the group. This began by sharing all of who I was in the group. I came to learn to share myself, my sins and my successes, I learned it didn’t kill me for others to know how bad I was. I have learned to replace old patterns with new ones. Instead of internet pornography, I share some of myself here. Instead of using the internet in secret I am here with my daughter across from me working on her schoolwork and my wife a little further beyond her.

Instead of lusting after women, I attach feelings to them. They are someone’s little girl and I know how I would feel about someone who treated my little girls the way I have treated others, even though the little girl in question is a “consenting adult”. I am surrendering myself and amazingly it has been given back to me.

Under the Mercy.

Lust	Intimacy
Avoid Consequences	Accepting Consequences
Protect Self	Make Self Vulnerable
Opaque	Transparent
Share Part of Self	Share Whole Self
Take	Give
Conquer	Surrender
Self-Centered	Other-Centered
Reacting to Feelings	Attaching Feelings
Secrecy	Honesty

sex+addiction sexaholic sexaholism lust intimacy step+one secrecy 12+steps meetings journal

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