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.