I want to share a story with you, just to make the point of how a group like this can change or encourage others. One guy started in our prison group at the second meeting, almost six months ago. He came into the group with a huge chip on his shoulder, and he made it clear to all of us that he didn’t care how anyone felt about him. He was just doing this for himself and no one else.
Our recovery calendar page today says, “Gratitude turns problems into blessings, and the unexpected into gifts.” I am grateful for the reminder how important gratitude lists have been to my recovery from sexaholism. During the first several months of sobriety I wrote gratitude lists daily. My sponsor told me to put twenty items on it per day.
I recently had a major awakening about lust in my marriage. It happened one morning after a night during which I had wanted to be sexual with my wife. In the past, my desire would quickly turn to lust. I would feel as if I was about to explode if I did not have her. Sex was not optional. That night had been different. As I wrote in my journal about it the next morning, I understood why.
If I think about it, life is kind of like walking a tightrope. It’s not easy. It can be dangerous. Still, if I practice, if I use a balance pole, if I have a safety net — it can be done without causing undue harm either to myself or to others.
The first recollections of my addiction are from the summer of 1961. I would be nine in August and I had just moved to a new subdivision. The only other boy in the neighborhood was four years older than I, and he was pretty lonely, since his parents both worked. We began to spend time with one another, and since he had a house all to himself, most of our time together was spent there.
Dear ESSAY, I am one of the twenty-five inmates, here at Adrian, MI, that Keith S. wrote about in your last issue. Thank you, Keith, for so many things.
Although I had owned a computer since 1994, I never once ventured into the murky seas of lust-driven Internet surfing — not even through four years of graduate school during which I spent hours doing online research. Not until June this year. This proved to be the final straw that led to acting out after thirteen years of sobriety.
I was a pornography addict working for an internet service provider who developed video over the internet. This was a blessing (if you ask my sponsor) and a curse (if you ask me). Like a drunk who went from hard liquor to beer, I shifted from hard core to chats, from chats to personals, and then from personals to on-line games with chat capabilities.
For over 30 years I had pretty much controlled and enjoyed my acting out, or at least (in my pre-recovery, delusional thinking) thought I had. Nine quick and horrific months after gaining access to the Internet, I was in a sex-addiction therapy group and had become an active member of Sexaholics Anonymous.
As I sit here on the New York City subway, I have seven years in the program and one day of sexual sobriety. Triggers of every kind surround me and it seems impossible for me not to lust. Add this all up, and it equals just one thought in my mind — FAILURE!!! And that is exactly what my disease (my addict, the devil, whatever I call it) wants me to believe.
