A Journey of 90 Meetings in 90 Days

Attending solution-focused meetings and working on his first step inventory gave him different feelings and helped him better see the depths of his addiction.

September 11th

This morning in the meeting, there was a powerful atmosphere among the 25 participants. Someone shared a recognizable anecdote of my own disease: when another person shares about his acting out, which differs a lot from the one listening, he tends to be envious.

Saturday noon

I reviewed my First Step notes. It stirred up a mixture of emotions: gratitude towards my sponsor who insisted to write everything down as open and detailed as possible, with all the sexually explicit details (which we cannot do at meetings); gratitude because he was willing to hear all of it, word by word; unrest, lust and recall stirring up all these sexual memories; and fear by reading the extent of my disease. I started making it into a short version.

We had a meeting in a church building with about 60 people. I spaced out when I spotted several attractive ladies, more so when I heard that most of them only had a few days to a few months of sobriety. My sponsor encouraged me to make three to four calls a day, in order to learn to use this tool. As a man shared at a meeting about using the phone: “If you want to swallow a frog, don’t look at it too long!” Meaning that if you want to phone someone, don’t think too much about it, don’t look at it, just do it.

The few meetings I followed until now have given different emotions:

• disillusion on hearing the lust and emotional hits that people with years of sobriety still seem to experience, while I thought they would have this thing nailed;
• I hear through them the depth and extent of the disease;
• people here are very straightforward, which needs some getting accustomed to because they just say what goes on in them in any given moment, and that can be a lot of anger, unrest, uncertainty, etc.;
• fear and disorientation because each of them is such a powerful mirror, which is confronting me a lot with my disease;
• strength;
• gratitude.

To be continued…