I used to think that the feelings of emptiness and loneliness I so often experienced in early sobriety were key amongst the triggers so inexorably leading me back to my drug — whether in sex with myself or to yet more of the same old relationships. Nowadays I am coming to see those feelings for what they really are, a sure sign that I have already acted out. Those feelings are not the cause of my acting out, but the result of it.

Here’s how I have just spent a weekend away with a group of young people that included two young women. Sensing trouble, I studiously stuck with the men, carried out tasks with the men, and socialized with the men to the point of rudeness towards the women (or so it seemed to my addict self!). But as I departed, those familiar feelings from the past were there again. Being sexually sober, I also knew that in that condition I was in danger; as my sponsor would say, “just an accident waiting to happen.” I managed to get to the phone, and poured my heart out to a fellow SA. In the “pouring” I thankfully noticed the self-pity that the alcoholics so rightly warn us against. Instead of honestly grieving my lost years, my lost innocence, here I was, resenting the fact that as a recovering sexaholic I can no longer socialize like other so-called normal folk: poor, poor me!

Honest grieving seems to be the doorway for me towards viewing my sexaholism with humor and compassion. I find that until I can look on each and every aspect of my disease in this way I simply am unable to look on myself as a sexaholic with loving acceptance, let alone do the same for other sexaholics. In my self-pity around those young people that weekend, I was still giving my addict-self free rein to determine how I feel for its own ends, because it knows that is the way that leads back to more acting out. Honest acknowledgement of what I am really feeling seems to be what breaks the power the addiction has over me. And it is talking to another sexaholic that seems to reopen the door to such honesty, every time. Alone I seem to be incapable of seeing myself clearly enough.