Emotional growth or emotional injury?

I was walking my dog through the neighborhood yesterday when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a dark, heavy feeling. It seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a feeling of heaviness, like great grief in my chest and stomach and it felt like there was a weight upon my shoulders. The air seemed close and quiet.

I can't say I've ever felt like that before.

As far as I know, it didn't start from some though, it was just a spontaneous sadness. The feeling came so suddenly, I couldn't do anything but just stand there on the sidewalk.

"What is this?"

Life has been a little different for me since the first of the year. I've been practicing less control really, which means that I feel like I've been open to things. Part of this is just taking the time -- a pause -- to feel my feelings. So I paused, even in the face of this dark wave.

What I experienced in that pause was unsettling. I'd never really felt that bad about just being before. The only equivalent feeling was when I learned my grandmother was dead when I was an adolescent. This was completely out-of-the-blue. Because I couldn't peg it on something made it more unsettling, I think.

So I stayed with it. The mystery of it helped me to stay with it, because my mind had nothing to latch onto. The first thought that came to my head was "I've never felt this bad before." And truly, I haven't. The second thought was, "Is this reality now?" There have been some unique moments of serenity and its opposite in these last few months. And I was wondering: "Is this what I have to put up with when I feel my feelings?"

It's an odd question for me, a deep question. My native inclination is to strenuously avoid negative feelings, to stuff them. Lately I've had a looser grip on my emotions; letting things play out. But really, do I really have to face that level of discomfort? Is that how it's going to be? And furthermore, is that normal? There's always been a fear that if I really let my guard down, if I really jumped into life and let it wash over me that I would be drowned. If I've been afraid of my feelings, I think this experience was just what I was trying to avoid.

Is yesterday the new normal for me? And if so, will I learn to adjust to it? Or will I eventually get well enough adjusted to living my emotions that I don't have those large waves? You know? When you damn yourself up, you can expect a few floods, right?

Or did I crack?

Did one of the supports that holds this whole wild carnival of me together just crack and give out and give way? And is that a good thing, or a bad thing? If my life were destroyed, broken and irreparable, would I cease to be? Or would a new me emerge from the wreckage, like a snake sloughing its skin? Or was it just a touch of the blues on Wednesday afternoon?

So much of my life in recovery is walking into the dark.

The next thought was, "Is this depression? Is this what depressed people feel like?" The blanket of sorrow would be pretty much what I would imagine depression to be. I certainly wouldn't want to work or do anything if that's how I actually felt all the time. I was very worried yesterday, early, that I might feel like that all the time.

I'm pretty proud of my response to it. First, I just stayed with it. I didn't reject the feeling and I didn't reject myself. I didn't panic and try to direct my mind to something -- anything else to forget the feeling. I stayed with it. I walked home, my dog as happy as ever, and let myself in. While I didn't have any thought of acting out (for which I'm grateful), I immediately called my sponsor. He was there and we talked. During the talk I recalled some news I got earlier in the day that may have contributed to the event.

I described it as a "panic attack" to my sponsor. He shared his experience with things like that. It was good to talk with him because I trust him and I know he cares about me. My wife came home at about the same time and we talked too. It was good to open up to her. I have a tendency when I'm sick to get very childish, demanding and pathetic. I didn't do that. I didn't resent her for not dropping everything and making poor me the center of her universe. The aspiration to be present has a lot of unintended positive outcomes.

So, am I going insane or am I maturing emotionally? Both? I guess I'll find out.

In the mean time, I'm feeling better today, definitely better, although I still don't feel very good. I lived. I feel like a shipwreck survivor today: groggy, on edge but very relieved. How many more of those will I experience? I don't know. But I guess I know that I can be okay during and after. That much I've learned.

And that's okay for now.

Your higher power is who you think is in charge

Being a practical addict is sometimes an uphill battle. I want things to make sense. When things don't make sense, I want to reject them. One big obstacle is the concept of a higher power. I've developed a working relationship with my higher power in a practical way that works for me.

It's a slow process and it comes down to this: what am I willing to believe today? I have not had a great thunder-strike realization about God. I'm trying not to stand in the way of that happening, but I'm also not waiting around for it. I can't afford to wait around for me to completely accept a concept of a higher power. I could die before then, or at least live miserably before then. I don't think that's my higher power's will for me. So I need to find a concept of a higher power that I'm willing to believe in today.

I've made a lot of progress in accepting the reality of a higher power in my life. I'm not going to get into the particulars on this post, or maybe any post. I realized last night in a meeting that I keep my concept of a higher power pretty sketchy. I think that's practical for me, because I have a tendency to tear down the things I construct. Negative skepticism. My experience so far and my expected experience for the rest of my life is that God will be revealed to me only partially. I need to keep my attention on the fraction of my imagination that has faith rather than the fraction that lacks faith. It's hazy now and will forever be a little hazy. So, I need to be at peace with the haze, with the doubt.

But back to the point at hand, my first toehold into having any faith in a higher power is this: my higher power is whoever or whatever I believe is really in charge. It's a simple question: What is the ultimate authority in my life?

The practical aspect of this for me is that I can start my faith in a higher power without having to believe in anything supernatural. Even a complete atheist -- which I'm not -- has a concept of the ultimate authority. No one believes there are no rules. You can deny Noah's flood, but you can't deny gravity or death or the sweetness of a lollipop.

When I reflect deeply on what or who is really in charge, it exposes the fact that I have been living my life under the control of some false gods. The primary false god is me. I have found anxious refuge many times in the belief that I am the ultimate authority. I say anxious, because being my own higher power is a miserable experience. I am a jealous god and my subjects are very uncooperative.

The other ultimate authority has been my parents, or more broadly "other people." I seem to have this chorus of clucking Presbyterians continually holding judgment over my thoughts and actions. This higher power, while moral, consistent and fairly accessible, has not been particularly humane, at least not towards my native inclination to fail to take faith at face value.

My relationship to a higher power has developed through reviewing my preconceived notions of ultimate authority. I take up the idea, reflect on it and accept what I can believe and discard what I can't. This initially doesn't leave me with a lot to believe in. But for me -- and this is very important -- I don't get a lot of spiritual traction by giving lip service to something I don't believe in. So, rather, I have pared down my faith to just that little bit I can believe in.

From that little beginning I can build a faith that is appropriate to me. I don't have to fit myself to another's faith, no matter how exquisite. That didn't work for me as a child and it doesn't work for me now.

So, it's about making faith work for me. I'm a very imperfect vessel, and today I humbly admit that I have an imperfect solution. It's a slow process, but it grows and builds within me and without me in a natural way.

Personal inertia works for recovery as well as addiction

My outlook, my habits, my way of life developed over many years. This did not happen over night. In the case of my addiction, years of selfish and destructive behavior. That is the way I lived. And living like that, that's how I expected to live. The habits became ingrained.

Habitual behavior establishes personal inertia. The definition of inertia is the tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. We usually understand inertia as staying still, but in physics, it means that something in motion will stay in motion. This is true in space more than here on earth, so it takes a thought experiment to understand it. If you were driving your car in space (where there's no gravity or friction) and you took your hands off the wheel and foot off the accelerator, you would continue to go in the same direction forever at the same speed. You'd travel on and on because of inertia until some other force intervened.

So, as an addict, I built up a personal inertia to keep doing addictive things. There was a momentum that continually suggested options that would reinforce my addictive behaviors. The cycle. There were other forces working against the addiction, of course: my wife's feelings, my basic need to make money, my shrinking self-respect, etc. But these forces were weaker than the personal inertia of my addiction.

So then I hit bottom, right? Unfortunately, everything didn't stop for me when I hit bottom. My personal inertia kept me going, and keeps a lot of addicts going. Maybe we don't feel the same way about our addictive behaviors, but we keep doing them. We've taken our foot off the accelerator, as it were, but the car keeps moving.

So, how do we get moving in the right direction? The first way is to take our foot off the accelerator. Gratefully, there is a lot of anti-addict friction in our universe. But the brakes will only stop us, they won't get us going in the right direction.

What can get us going in the right direction is recovery work, of course. Recovery work can turn us around.

The problem is, you start your recovery work while you still have a lot of addiction momentum. And it takes a long, long time to turn it around. It takes an enormous amount of effort to reverse our trajectory. One dilemma is we tend not to notice how much our little effort is working against our large inertia. It does not seem to make much of a difference. I'm personally sure, though, that it does make a difference. Every little bit helps, so it's important to do recovery work every day. It adds up.

Amazingly, it's also been my experience that when I do my small part, my higher power will do the rest. There is a multiplier effect to working in the direction of God's will for me. I am truly powerless over my addiction, the inertia is too great, but with God's help I can get better. God's will for me, as best as I can understand it, is for me to be healthy, happy and free for my own sake and so that I can be of service to God.

Thankfully, recovery work started working for me long before I recognized the connection to God's will. The same can be true for anyone, no matter their belief or lack thereof.

The upside of this is if you get going in the right direction -- building momentum towards living in harmony with God's will --you will have positive personal inertia that will make it easier and easier to make the right choices and live free, happy and healthy. What a blessing it is to know this after years of despair. What a blessing it is to share this.

Slowing down is working my program and vice versa

I've been slowing down lately. Walking slower. I've been driving the speed limit. Part of it has been deliberate and part of it stems from a reduction in the desire to get there and a satisfaction with being "here."

The practice reinforces the principle and the principle supports the practice.

My native inclination is to lean forward, to have my attention always on the next thing. There's a certain hopefulness in that, I guess, but when I'm really honest with myself, it stems from a dissatisfaction with the way things are and the way I am. I think that by getting to the next thing or merely getting away from right "here", that I will find more satisfaction in that other place.

I haven't found that satisfaction in the "other place" because, probably, when I get to the "other place" it has suddenly became "this place." Dang! And so I must press on; an eternally hurried pilgrim who never gets to the destination.

Maybe the destination is here. Here.

That's scary and challenging for me, because "here" -- the reality of who I am -- my imperfections, my emotions, my past -- is an unhappy place. I have worked the Steps and I am freed from the shackles of my addiction, but my release has been into a reality that stills seems dangerous and bleak.

I've wished it weren't so, but my wishing hasn't made it better. Nor has my striving brought me closer. All my effort cannot make it so.

If the destination is here, I must make a home of it. I recall as a young man that I would never decorate my room no matter where I lived. My restlessness never let me settle in. But here I am and despite my best efforts I am still me. "No matter where you go, there you are" as they say in Buckaroo Bonzai. I must admit, I'm think I'm settling in more from a feeling of weariness than a feeling that this is the right place. But it is working all the same.

Being here has a physical sensation: I can feel my feet on the ground. I feel a connection to the earth, even if the surface below my feet is blacktop as I walk from my car to my workplace. I am moving, I am heading someplace, but I am not pushing and I'm not being pulled. I'm just making my way. There is an easiness and relaxation to this walking, a fullness. Fullness.

It affects my mind as well. I'm much more likely to stop thinking and look around, and to see familiar things in a new way. I'm feeling my feelings more and staying with them. And sometimes even my mind is quiet. Quiet.

The practice reinforces the principle and the principle supports the practice.

There's an okay-ness to being here, being present. When this moment is enough, I don't need the future -- the next -- so desperately. I feel like I can live like this. What a tremendous relief. Relief.

Relief.

My Daily Practice

I'd like to share my daily practice and some thoughts about each practice.

Morning Practice

Eight Pieces of Silk. This is a set of simple Chinese exercises I learned as a young man. The instructor said I would live a healthy life if I did these twice a day. In typical fashion, I do them once a day. Here is a description I found in this PDF from a Google search. The instructions are very similar to the eight I was taught.

Greeting the Sun. Another Chinese exercise, a basic yoga move, I believe. I breathe in while raising my hands together up the center of my body. When my hands get to my face and my lungs are full, I exhale and push up and out with my hands in a big circle. When my hands come down to my sides and my lungs are empty, I start another inhale and bring my hands slowly up again. I do this eight times to clear my mind and get my breathing right.

Mindfulness Meditation. I sit in a half lotus for 20 minutes. On my best days I spend the first couple of minutes putting my attention on relaxing each part of my body from head to toe. Then, I try to concentrate on my breath, the breathing in and breathing out. It's best for me to concentrate on the air as is comes in and out of my mouth. Other people concentrate on the belly expanding and contracting. When a thought comes into my mind, I try to let it go. If a feeling comes into my body, I try to stay with the emotion, to just live it without judging it. If my cat passes by and rubs against my leg, I will pet her a while. On many days I sit there and worry about my life. I'm not very good at meditation, but I'm willing to be bad at it for as long as it takes. An interesting note: for a few years I did only 10 minutes and did not see a lot of benefit in meditation. Recently I upped it to 20 minutes and I've noticed a big difference. The spiritual lesson is that half measures really do avail us nothing.

Then I get on my knees and say my prayers:

"God I'm an addict and I need help." This is my first prayer of the day. It's pretty basic. This is my first affirmation of the day and it's all about humility.

"God, I can't do this on my own." There's a distinction between needing help and thinking I need someone else's help. It's also an invitation for God to join me today. God is very hands-off if you haven't noticed. God doesn't show up unless you ask him.

The Serenity Prayer. Of course.

The Third Step Prayer. It's from the Big Book, but it's written in King James English! I think Bill and Bob were getting a little grandiose there. I recite it, "God, I offer myself to you..."

The Seventh Step Prayer. This prayer says a lot about the purpose of the Seventh Step that is not in the actual text of the Seventh Step.

List of character defects to be removed. "God please remove from me my grandiosity, my arrogance, my patronizing and my hostility. Please remove my hostility, anger and resentment towards my wife, whom I love." Funny how I've never really had to update that list.

Prayers and affirmations specifically for my addiction. "Dear God, please remove my breast fetish. I don't need to control women to be okay. Dear God, please remove my desire to look at pictures of women's breasts. Sex is a part of my life, it's not my whole life." These are remarkably effective for me.

Any other prayer that comes to mind. I should probably look forward to what is coming up in the day, but I don't.

Daytime Practice

Spot Check. If anything is upsetting me, I do a 10th Step spot check. I ask myself, "What is my part in this?" I ask myself if there's any amends that need to be made. And then I do them. Promptly admitting my wrongs is very effective.

Spot Prayers. The Serenity Prayer is a good one to throw in at any time. A favorite daytime prayer for me is "Thank you, God, for bringing me to this place." This works for whatever situation I find myself it, "good" or "bad". A prayer I use just before doing something that I'm worried about is "God, I don't know how to do this." It's a great prayer especially when I think I know damn well what to do. Finally, "Thanks" is just a great, quick prayer.

Calling an addict. I try to get a call in to my sponsor or another addict every day. It grounds me.

Bedtime Practice

Gratitude list. I fill out a little list of things I'm grateful for. I actually just started this about a month ago after eight years of thinking it was "not for me". It's been a great month. This one you should try especially if you think it's a stupid idea.

Tenth Step inventory. I have an actual form I've created, a scoresheet. It's good for me to quantify things. I list positive behaviors and negative behaviors and tally which ones I've done during the day. I'll write a whole post on this some other time.

Recovery Reading. I read a little from a recovery book every night. My commitment is to merely open the book and close it. Occassionally that's all I do. Usually I read about a page. The book I'm opening right now is Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.

Spiritual Reading. This is the Bible or some other spiritual, non-recovery text. Right now I'm reading Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance.

There are other things, of course, I do throughout the day (attending meetings, step work, etc.), but these are the things I do every day.

Restoration of Sanity in the Second Step

There are three tests of faith in the 2d Step: faith in a higher power, faith in a process of coming to believe and faith that we can be restored to sanity. The last one is also remarkable in that it says sanity will be restored.

I don't know if I've ever been sane. I certainly know that I was innocent, but I don't really count that. The simplicity of childhood was just simplicity for me. There was a truck and I played with it. There was a Popsicle and I ate it. Once I really started to have to make decisions about my life, I can't say I've been very sane.

But there it is in Step Two, "restore us to sanity". I think there are three stages of sanity in recovery. The first is the insanity of my addiction. The second is the time when my addiction is in remission and now I have to deal with the fact that I still have a lot of problems. The third stage is recovered sanity, where I'm okay and I understand the word serenity and so forth; the promise of The Promises.

I'm squarely in the Second Stage of sanity. There is a book called Stage II Recovery by Earnie Larson and I read it after I passed one year's sobriety the first time. It was a gift from my sponsor. I'm grateful for the care and attention of my sponsor. I may be liberally quoting the contents of that book. If I am, my apologies to Mr. Larsen. Consider it a review.

The belief that there is a basic sanity, a core integrity to me is pretty novel. The religion I grew up in believes in original sin; a basic flaw to humanity. There's really a lot of spiritual opportunity in believing that there is an imperfection, an incompleteness to us, and I'm open-minded enough not to sell it short. I've heard that God enters through our flaws. But the shaming part of me takes the idea of a fundamental flaw and conflates it to: I'm all bad. I can be dissatisfied when the cup is 3% empty. My addiction was the treatment for the fundamental belief that I am flawed. Gradually and progressively, I came to equate my addictive self as the incarnation of that flaw.

Round and round and round. How I had convinced myself that my misery was just the fulfillment of my destiny. I don't think that way anymore and I don't live that way anymore.

The 2d Step is an early one, but what a grand promise. Restoration to sanity. If I have ever been sane, I'm either forgetting that I was sane or I was just to young to have actually noted it. Maybe, maybe the promise of the 2d Step is that there is a basic sanity to me that I have not ever experienced, that perhaps exists, spiritually, and the Steps can help me towards that. That seems reasonable, even hopeful.

But then I get caught up in the cycle of self-improvement, the march toward perfection. And there I am always falling short. Perfection is definitely the wrong road for me to take. It is more humane and more effective, actually, for me to accept who I am right now and move from there.

Perhaps I'm confused about sanity. I'm so far from it, really, that I think it's perfection. As an aside, it is almost humorous when people who are having difficulty with getting a few days' sobriety say they don't think they can be perfect. It's funny because I know damn well that sobriety is not anything like perfection. Perfection resides always beyond our reach.

Sanity might just be taking life for what it is. I definitely did that as an infant and probably a toddler, too. And then I grew up. Paradise Lost. So, is maturity, is adulthood insanity? I don't think that's it. There are people who aren't insane and who also are not in recovery. I think for me, perhaps I had difficulty being an adult and being sane. The freedom to make decisions for myself was definitely overwhelming. I didn't know what was good for me, didn't know how to nurture myself. And so I gravitated to insanity: erecting a uniquely skewed concept of what life is that no one else could understand or share. That's actually kind of a hard one to swallow. But there seems to be some spiritual traction there. I'm feeling some compassion for my young self right now. And compassion for my current self too. I was unprepared for the rigors of living.

I have so much to learn about being gentle with myself.

I'm finding reality difficult this week. I guess I've always found it difficult. But I'm not experiencing it as impossible these days. I've come to believe I can find a way to live sanely with God's help. That open-mindedness, the opening to the possibility of restoration is my experience of the 2d Step today. Dear God, it's slow, but like water wearing down a rock in the river, it is working.

Why the Blog?

I've never blogged before on any subject. I guess I did create one blog and one blog post and then I stopped. A big creative block for me is that I am afraid to reveal myself.

I don't know if that block is because I'm a sex addict or whether that block contributed to my sex addiction. For instance, I was originally exposed to recovery because of excessive drinking and drug use in my late teens and early twenties. I got both individual and group treatment and was able to stop. I've wondered since I got into recovery for sex, why am I also not an alcoholic and drug addict?

I think the reason is that those addictions are readily apparent: you can detect when someone is drunk and you can actually observe them using. People generally understand substance problems and know what people with drug and alcohol problems need: help. I didn't want to feel that way, and I didn't want people to feel that way about me. I stopped and I didn't start using again. Some people may think I'm a dry drunk, and maybe I am. Perhaps my drinking (I do drink alcohol, "like a gentleman") and my lack of drugging (completely clean over 10 years) will lead to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. At that point, I'll join my friends in AA and NA. Until then, I'll attend to my current problem.

Most importantly, out of control drinking was readily apparent to me. I couldn't be in complete denial about it. Sex addiction, at least how I practiced it, was a compulsive behavior that I could lie about to myself. It used porn, but I wasn't hanging out in "adult" bookstores. I looked at free porn on the internet, but I never bought it, never became a member of a site. I objectified every woman I ran across, store clerks, tellers, co-workers, but I didn't go to strip clubs. I cruised for one-night stands, made a "career" out of it, but I didn't go to prostitutes. I could lie to myself with my sex addiction. I couldn't do that as easily with actual mood-altering substances.

So I hide out. Part of this blog is still hiding. I'm writing under the name Cecil G. That's not my legal name and I'm not known by that name for anything but this blog. Part of it is that I want to be completely anonymous, even and especially with members of my home group. I don't want to be "the guy who blogs" in my meetings. Why not? First, I have a lot of grandiosity and I don't want the special attention. I also think it would change the tenor of my small meetings if people thought that what they said would end up in my blog.

Incidentally, I don't intend to blog my meetings. I might say "the subject of a meeting the other day was Step 6" or something, but I'll not be providing transcripts, let along quoting anyone. It's a violation of trust to do so. Meetings are sacred places and I honor and appreciate that sanctity.

Another reason to blog anonymously is that I'm not out about my sex addiction with my creative collaborators or my professional colleagues. I just don't think I'd be given the same opportunities if I was out about my addiction with the general public. My closest friends know, my wife and family knows. That's enough for now.

All in all, this blog is an outside issue entirely. I don't intend to use it as a forum for assessing the effectiveness of SAA or SA or SLAA or SCA or S-(fill in the blank). I will say, I wish there were unity, but I am not the person to bring these together, and this blog is not a forum for that action.

I'm also completely disinterested in sex addiction articles, scientific studies on sex addiction or the public's perception of sex addiction. I'm not interested in the sex problems of any celebrity or public figure. Those are all outside issues for me. I don't need the world to get better, I need to get better.

The purpose of the blog is to allow me to honestly express my experience of recovery.

So am I hiding? If I am, I am hiding so I will feel safe enough to share. I hope to be as honest in my writing as I am in my sharing at meetings. Maybe I can be more honest, because at meetings I feel compelled to offer hope to the newcomer. I'm just going to be honest here.

Quote for the day: the truth only hurts if you're living a lie.

The Practical Addict's First Step

I'm Cecil and I'm a sex addict. In the summer of 2001, my wife confronted me when I came home from work.

"Have you been looking at porn on the internet?"

There was a long silence as I considered whether to lie again.

I said, "Yes."

That was the beginning of a horrible four-hour conversation, filled with screaming, rage, tears, bitter silence. The lid was off and the meticulous lie that was my life was known by one other person.

A few weeks before, I had started to understand who and what I was. I couldn't stop my sexually compulsive behavior, which is also called acting out. I understood, sadly, that the biggest source of my problems, both in my life and in my relationship with my wife was my acting out. Before that I thought my sexual behavior was okay, and that I needed to do it no matter the consequences. It lead me to lie to her, filled me with shame, sapped my desire to do anything but selfishly please myself. My addiction was the center of my life.

And what a sorry life.

I had no job and didn't want one. I had been gradually drifting away from any ambition in my life. I had started my own business the year before, an independent consultancy, and had complete failed at it. We were buying everything, our groceries, car payments, everything on the credit card.

I had abandoned all my friends or they had abandoned me. I didn't talk to anyone about my problems.

My wife and I were constantly at odds with each other. The happiness, hope and generosity of our first years had complete boiled away. Were left with only our commitment to each other and a ton of resentment that played out in small and large ways every day. Sometimes we fought over they way we treated each other. Sometimes we fought over a plate of eggs. It was the wound that could not heal.

She traveled quite a lot for her job at that time, out for a few hours then back again at unexpected times. As soon as she left the house, I would pull down the shades and start looking for the perfect image on the web; the image that would set me off just right. How many images did I have to look at? As the years went on the pictures had to be more and more perverse so that the porn I thought was stupid or silly at the beginning was just what I needed at the end. In the same vein, what had first excited me became stale. My addiction progressed downward to more and more outrageous images.

I also was taking enormous risks. I would masturbate while I was driving. I would leave the house and masturbate in a parking lot if my wife were home.

And always I was keeping track of her. If I masturbated in the afternoon, I could not be sexual at night, so when I did masturbate in the afternoon, I would hope she would not want to be intimate at night. Sometimes I would start fights on those nights to avoid having sex. I frequently masturbated in the morning after we had had sex, because the sex was not enough. Whatever I "got" it was not enough. Always needing more.

Years before, I had had a good job. The deadlines piled up because of my lack of focus and procrastination which would "require" that I work evenings. But once alone in the office, I would set myself up to masturbate to internet porn. And then, satiated, I would try to do my work. Around midnight, I would hail a cab that would be reimbursed by my company. So I was robbing my company twice: once by wasting their time and twice by making them pay to get me home. Once home, my wife would curse my company for making me work so late. She would feel sorry for me and tell me that I should get another job, a job where I could be happy. I never told her the truth at that time, keeping everything bottled up.

All this came out that first evening. It all came out because I had been lying to her for six years about my addiction.

Before we were married, she knew I liked porn and was looking at it on the Internet. She asked me then to stop, telling me it made her uncomfortable. I liked her and I didn't want her to leave me, so I agreed. I agreed to stop looking at it. I probably did, for a month or two. But sometime soon after I started again and decided I didn't need to tell her that I started up again. What would be the point, I thought? It would only make her unhappy. It would only cause trouble in our relationship and I didn't want trouble. So lied about it and continued to lie about it.

I became an expert in covering my tracks. I have quite a lot of expertise in areas of my addiction that are of no use to me or anyone else. When I was a kid, my favorite game was hide and seek. I would always hide in a closet, but I'd leave the door ajar. Most kids shut the door tight when they hide in a closet. And most kids, when searching, don't check a closet that has the door open.

That's how I lived my life in addiction. I was playing hide and seek. Except that no one else knew I was playing.

A few weeks before I was discovered, I realized that I needed to make a change. I slowly came to recognize that my addiction, my compulsive behavior was the biggest problem in my life and that it made all the others worse. I had a friend in college who had gone to AA meetings and it had done him a lot of good. So I looked in the phone book and found the local number for Sex Addicts Anonymous, SAA.

I didn't call the number. I didn't want to. I knew I had a problem, but I wasn't willing to go sit in a room with a bunch of people who were either like me or, God-forbid, worse. So I closed the phone book, making sure not to crease the corner of the page. No evidence.

I decided to try and deal with my problem myself. I tried to stop. And I quickly found out that I couldn't stop. I had never really tried before and it was a big shock to me that I couldn't stop. I made promises to myself and I broke them. How could I be beat when I was a big shot? It didn't matter that I didn't have a job, my marriage was ruined, I didn't have any real friends any more and I was completely alienated from my family. I was a diamond in the rough and something would happen one day to make it all seem all right.

But in the meantime I was out of control. And I knew it.

I had never experienced despair like that before. That feeling, that ache in my chest was overwhelming. I came to a complete halt on everything. Everything but my addiction.

I made a new deal with myself. I was really hard up for money, so I decided that I would tear up a ten dollar bill every time I masturbated to internet porn. I don't think I made it two days. I got the ten dollar bill out of my wallet, set it by the computer screen and acted out. Then I tore it up. I went out to the garage and stuffed of the shreds deep into the previous day's trash bag so my wife wouldn't find it, of course. It was agonizing and demoralizing from start to finish. It was insane and I felt insane.

I thought tearing up the bill would be cathartic. I thought it would snap me out of it, that I would respond rationally to the event. Not at all. It was just demoralizing. It just simply reminded me that I was completely out of control.

A few weeks later, my wife confronted me. She said she wanted out of the relationship, that she couldn't take it any more and that this was the last straw. She said I needed help.

I volunteered to go to SAA. I believe she said that she thought that would be good for me, but that I shouldn't expect her to stick around.

So I called the SAA number. It was a Tuesday in June, 2001. I got an answering machine that told me when the meetings were in my city. I went to the next one, which was a Thursday night.

The meeting was in the basement of a church. I hadn't been in a church basement in a long time. Church basements are very square with their old hymnals and felt-covered bulletin boards. I was late for the meeting, so I missed the readings; the reading of the Twelve Steps. I'm sort of grateful I did, because if I'd heard the Twelve Steps and all the mentions of God, I might have got up and left.

I came in late and they recognized me as a newcomer and had a first step. They told me their stories. And I listened. The clearest recollection of that night was that they were telling my story to me. What they had gone through, what they were going through was a lot like what I was happening in my life right then. I had stepped into a room with people I understood and who could understand me.

I shared at my first meeting. I shared like a man with his hair on fire, because I was in deep trouble and in deep pain. I was honest for the first time in many years, maybe the first time ever. I told them the truth about me and they listened and they did not stop me and they did not reject me. I told the truth and I didn't hurt anyone. I'll never forget that. That's how my recovery began.

I left early, because I had another appointment that night. Again, I'm grateful that I didn't hear the Promises and didn't have to join hands and say the serenity prayer at the end. I was in no mood for togetherness or empathy. I'm not saying it would have never come back, I'm just saying it might have. Maybe it's superstition, but I'm so grateful for where I've come out in all this that I don't question the manner in which things fell out.

So I kept going to meetings. I went to every single meeting held in my town for the next three weeks. In the third week I couldn't attend one, so I made a point to apologize to the members of the next group I attended. I genuinely thought people would think that I wasn't sincere in my recovery if I missed a meeting. Nobody had told me to go to all of them. I just thought I should. I had a crazy notion that did me some good at that time: I thought that there were a set number of meetings that I had to go to until I felt okay, and that the more meetings I went to, the quicker I got to that number.

I can honestly say that that number for me was about eight-five. I wasn't cured at eighty-five, but I was okay. I'm somewhere south of one thousand on my count towards complete spiritual enlightenment. I partway believe there is an actual number for that and that meetings count towards it.

That was the biggest crisis of my life. For the first couple of weeks, my wife and I talked every single night from the time we got home until we were too tired to talk anymore. We went over everything. The biggest point of pain was the lying. She thought I was the most honest person that she knew. She thought I was scrupulously honest with her. Part of it was that I was a terrible liar. I have a heavy conscience and I can't hold a lie if I'm challenged. But I can withhold. I can just not say anything; the lie of omission. That's what I had done.

I had put my wife through an insane experience. She thought her life was one thing and it was another. She thought our sex problems were one thing and they were another. The facade has slipped off and the pain, the years of pain was all that either of us could see any more. One night, about two weeks in she packed a bag, a small bag, and headed for the door. I literally begged her to stay with my hand on the knob. I begged her to stay, I promised her that I would get better and that if she gave me a chance and I didn't improve that she could go with out resistance from me.

I'm grateful that she gave me that chance. I'm grateful that I was able to restore her trust in me. I'm grateful we're still together.

Early on, my hope for recovery was that I'd get just well enough that my wife would leave me for some other reason than my addiction. Maybe my dismissiveness or my judgmentalism or just being a bore. I really wasn't in it for myself because I thought I was personally hopeless.

The second step was and is the most important step for me of the first three steps. Once I was aware of my sex addiction, once the bubble of denial was broken, I accepted my powerlessness over my sexual compulsiveness and my sexually compulsive thoughts.

The idea that I could get better, that there was more for me than suffering was truly original. I had lost hope in myself. After I left my parent's house, I tried a lot of different things to get myself feeling right: drugs, drinking, various churches, various philosophies. I even took some classes with an organization that many consider a cult. I started each of these with high hopes and enthusiasm, but none of them made me feel better or made me feel better for very long. Exhausted and demoralized, I came to the conclusion that I was damaged beyond repair. I was just a defective person. And, in truth, I didn't think that most other people were much better off than I was.

I thought that there was no way that I could ever be happy, so the best I could do was try to scratch out whatever pleasure or peace I could from my addiction. This started a cycle of acting out and shame and more acting out. I couldn't be happy. And I couldn't bear to admit my unhappiness. It went on and on.

Step Two held out hope for another way: I could be restored to sanity. And more than that, there was a power greater than me that wanted that to happen for me, too. And...AND... that power would help me get there.

I have a tendency to feel sorry for myself, and that manifests itself in thinking that no one has ever really been there for me and no one ever would. Some of my deepest beliefs are that I'm all alone. The idea that where I'm at right now is not where I always have to be, that there is hope and that the universe is waiting to support me really dissipates those negative beliefs. It helps me understand that part of my problem is I have annointed myself the soul authority on who I can be and how healthy I can be. I don't actually have that authority and I limit myself when I think I do.

The 2d Step, of course, is a God step. I didn't have a good relationship with God when I came into recovery, but I didn't have a bad one either. I was a true agnostic. I've since been practicing open-mindedness. I defined my higher power as the path that I can take to bring me into harmony with the universe. That has served me well. The good news is that it has worked. I'm actually in better harmony today. And that comes from walking further down the path.

The painful past was that part of the path. Today is this part.

Step Three was pretty easy for me once I figured out that I didn't have to make a permanent commitment to it and that I could agree to turn my will over each day and moment to moment. I haven't met a lot of people who took Step Three once and are now completely on God's team 24/7. God bless those people, but they're not like me.

I progressed through the first eight steps in the first year. I got hung up on the 9th step. That one took me about 9 months. Some reasons I got hung up was:

1. A lot of people I needed to make amends to were former lovers. I doubted my virtuous intention in wanting to reinitiate contact with those people. And not trusting myself, I was afraid of what my wife would think of the process. I worked through each person with my sponsor's help.

2. Most of the people I needed to make amends to lived at least 500 miles from where I was living at the time. I wasn't going to just run into anyone. I had to contact them directly and then explain the reason. I only had the courage for a little at a time.

3. I was really afraid that if I didn't experience the promises during the 9th Step that I wouldn't "get" the program.

To explain point #3, the 12th Step begins, "Having had a spiritual awakening...." I was really afraid that I would be the exception, that I would go through all the steps and be the one who didn't have a spiritual awakening. Of course, I would be the exception.

I did have a spiritual awakening. I've got about one eye pried open for the dawn, but I am awake. That's tremendous progress for me.

As far as the other details, I have not been abstinent since my first day in recovery. I've found it challenging to define sobriety in sexual recovery. I have twice relapsed since starting, the first after a year and a half when I admitted a new behavior was actually acting out and decided to reset my clock. The second relapse was a one-hour slip during a very trying emotional time for me in the Spring of 2008. That last one erased five years of continuous sobriety from my bottom-line behaviors. I regret the decision to act out, but I am grateful for the progress I've made since then.

Recovery is a spiritual evolution. It comes in fits and starts. Lately I have been experiencing a lot of positive changes in my outlook. I've been more willing to accept my limitations, I've been able to experience more equanimity in my reaction to day-to-day stressors, I've been more accepting of my wife's shortcomings and more delighted in her strengths, and I've been experiencing more gratitude for all the gifts I receive.

The bottom line is that I have been free from the behaviors that brought me into recovery, and free from the mental obsession that underlies those behaviors. That's the miracle of my life.

I've come by these all honestly, working my program as best I can and letting go of the outcome.

I hope my story has been useful to you and that you find what you're looking for.