I’m grateful that I was led to SA about a year before I got married. Otherwise, I believe I would be in a horrible place today, and my family might have been torn apart. But even though I found SA before I got married, my behavior caused my family much grief. I still had a lot of maturing to do and a lot of denial to break through. Today, seven years later, things are slowly improving, and that has brought me much happiness. I’d like to share one aspect of my recovery that has left me amazed at how what used to baffle me has become a gift.

When my oldest stepdaughter was around 13 years old, I had a few years of physical sobriety but was in complete denial about my inner recovery. I was filled with pride about my sobriety. I would think, “I’ve got this thing figured out. Let me tell you all about how recovery works.” I was mostly blind to the lust and objectification I was directing toward my stepdaughter. After going through her parents’ divorce, she needed a healthy father figure to lift her up, not an angry hypocritical lust addict to do further damage. She needed a healthy connection. She needed to feel safe and protected, and not fearful toward her new stepfather. But lust is what I brought to the table at the time.

When she was younger, she would push my buttons just to make me mad—or at least that was my judgment of her behavior! That judgment gave me an excuse to hate her. We chose to live disconnected from each other. We lived in the same house but didn’t speak to each other for three years. If we did connect, we yelled and hurt each other verbally. I thought maybe silence would be better than yelling. It wasn’t. The disconnection created a vacuum between us that allowed lust to come in. I have since learned that lust can be an act of hatred, so it makes sense that lust and hate traveled together within me.

One day, when I was reviewing some home videos to see what I could overwrite, I found about five minutes of video where my stepdaughter had left the camera recording in her room without knowing it. Instead of turning the video off to protect her privacy, I sneakily watched the whole five minutes. Thankfully, there was nothing inappropriate on the video, but there easily could have been. It was like peeping through a window. By doing that, I put my stepdaughter’s safety and privacy at risk. She was no longer safe in her own home.

She once told my wife that she had a “creepy feeling” around me whenever I looked at her. She felt lust coming from me. The lust I indulged in during those few years gives me great pain to this day. I cannot fix what happened. I am completely powerless over the wreckage of my past.

During all of this, I thought I was sober. My shame-fueled denial was so thick that I could not see straight. My wife could tell something was wrong but since I was “sober” and “going to meetings,” she doubted her own instincts. We began attending a couple’s therapy group for sex addiction. I quickly took my five-year chip out of my pocket in that first meeting—just to show everyone how healthy I must be! “I could really help these people,” I thought.

After some lengthy and rigorous individual therapy, my denial began to crack. At first I thought our therapist was out to get me. I thought he wanted to destroy my marriage and family by making me sound worse than I was. I thought I would die because of the pressure. My assignment was to make another inventory of everything I had done during my marriage. I made the inventory and included everything, even my lust toward my stepdaughter—my wife’s precious little daughter.

The plan was to share this inventory with my therapist and wife together. Instead, my wife woke me up one night and demanded that I share the whole thing with her immediately. She felt that I was doing something to put our children in danger and she couldn’t wait another minute to hear it. I read it to her. She told me that I needed to leave the house. We had two younger daughters at the time and I didn’t know what to do or how to say goodbye to them.

We worked out a schedule of visits over the next few months. The children had an early bedtime, so they didn’t know that their daddy didn’t live with them anymore. I experienced recurring thoughts of suicide. I was again powerless over my life and its wreckage. I had no choice but to surrender everything to God. There was nothing left for me to control.

I felt so alone during those months. I felt that God was far off, and I doubted my every move. Maybe His distance helped me work through my denial more quickly than if He had coddled me through the hell I needed to walk through. I counseled with my sponsor, group, therapist, wife, and God to know how to validate my stepdaughter’s creepy feelings about me without revealing anything to her that would cause further damage. I cannot express how impossible that amends seemed to me. I had to surrender it to God just like I had to surrender everything else during that time.

God worked miracles in my life. He allowed me to make awkward yet very careful amends with my stepdaughter. He provided about an hour for me to drive her to the airport one day. At that point, we were speaking again and our relationship was beginning to heal. I was healed just enough for me to apologize again for being a jerk and to let her know very generally about my addiction, without including any details about her. I also explained how being immersed in such an addiction affected those around me and how it kept me from maturing. This amends was tailored by God specifically for my stepdaughter and me at exactly the right time and place. A heart is an impossible thing for me to heal—only God can do that. And He did, for both her and me.

Now, a few years later, I have a younger stepdaughter who has turned 13, and while both my wife and I have some anxiety, anger, and flashbacks from years ago that are still healing, things are different this time. Recently I heard my older stepdaughter tell her younger sister that if her biological dad ever lets her down, “Our stepdad is a good guy and will be there for you.”

God turns the most impossible and horrific situations into gold for me when I let Him. I don’t know how or why He would do this for me except that He must love me more than I love myself. If I can just get out of His way, He works wonders. He makes me walk through fire and then comforts and heals me on the other side. With Him, nothing is impossible.