The Gift of Healing
In the early recovery stages, the pain of my addiction was excruciating. Today I want to pay it forward, as others did for me. I discovered 12 essential keys that have contributed to my personal recovery.
Working the Steps: A New Pair of Shoes
At a convention recently, the speaker had a powerful message about comfort and change. Change often feels unnatural. We always revert to what feels comfortable.
The Fourth Step
Thirty years ago in SA I had an awful experience working on my Fourth Step. I focused solely on my defects of character and acting out behaviors. As I wrote I reacted in shame and acted out sexually. I couldn’t connect with any hope that I could get well or notice the hand of God working in my life. I was worse off after completing my Fourth Step than I was before I started it!
Free As a Bird
As a young man, he experienced the bondage of lust. Even becoming a priest didn’t solve the problem. But he came to SA, and found a new freedom when he got sober at the age of seventy.
True Surrender
I just finished a two-hour working session with a sponsee at a coffee shop. We were upstairs, mainly deserted, only one couple at the far end, who looked like they were down on their luck. I used the restroom and headed out when I noticed the gentleman that was upstairs coming down the stairs. I realized I had left my brand new cell phone on the sofa that he had just passed. I went and checked and it was gone.
Shame And The Fourth Dimension
Okay everyone. Wow! I’m Harvey A., sexaholic from Nashville, TN. I’ve been sexually sober thirty-three years and ten months. But there is someone in this room who has more sobriety and who is a pioneer of pioneers. To be a woman, and the oldest in sobriety basically, and to break these frontiers, Sylvia, would you stand? [Applause]
Willing
Are you willing to do what it takes?
God Grant…
I find the first two words of the Serenity Prayer crucial for me to focus on and never forget: “God grant.” It is another example of how God does for me what I cannot do for myself. I am powerless; He has all power. It’s also one of the early steps in learning some much needed humility, recognizing that this isn’t all about me, nor is my progress of my own doing.
Come On — Admit It!
When I was acting out, I could hide behind the wall of Internet anonymity. That anonymity gave me license to go where ever my addiction wanted. That anonymity allowed me to act out without being exposed, attracting real partners, or engaging prostitutes with the illusions that this method was somehow okay.
My Story About Anonymity
I came in fearful and trembling as a newcomer to SA. My first meeting didn’t really happen. I arrived fifteen minutes early and the door was still locked. So I sat in my car to wait and watched as one, two, three, four, five men arrived, one at a time. No women. I was too frightened to go in.
