Before working the Steps, I thought humble meant humiliated. I thought it meant being embarrassed, feeling less than, angry, and losing my self-respect. If a task was too big for me, I was too small to be worthwhile. I learned that I was less than I should be, that there was something wrong with me.
Before recovery, I tried to appear squeaky clean. I tried to hide my mistakes and my whole shadow side. Nothing was ever my fault. I would point out someone else’s weaknesses as a smokescreen, but I never drew attention to my own. I was alternately in denial or in despair about my character defects and the hopelessness of my life.
We recovery folks have a lot of dirty words. Surrender is definitely one of them. Yet I glibly renew my intention to surrender to God each time I do my daily renewal. So what do I know, or need to come to know, about surrender?
You write to me that the group you started and tried to hold together is gone.
Before recovery, whenever I tried to stop acting out, my life went insane. I started doing stuff that was so strange that I thought I was literally losing my mind. I’ve since learned that what I was doing is not all that uncommon. I simply couldn’t cope with living without acting out.
Six years ago my life was a sewage pit of porn, masturbation, promiscuity, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and dozens of other things I thought I absolutely needed to get through the day. I would get sick of what I was doing. My wife and my boss threatened me. I would swear that I’d never do it again. And yet, despite my best intentions, my best efforts, within days (or at most weeks), I was back doing the same things again and again.
How many sexaholics does it take to change a light bulb?
I work in a building with three elevators. Because it’s an older facility, sometimes one of the elevators isn’t working. Usually that’s not a big deal; it just means waiting a few minutes longer to get upstairs to my work area. The other day, however, I came to work to find that two elevators were down.
Here is a practical tool which helps me turn my eyes, my thoughts, my mouth, and my ears in the right direction in the morning, pointing towards my recovery rather than my relapse.
Yielding to lust warped my mind tainted my vision tore my heart bent my soul.
