My wife and I were babysitting two of our grandchildren for the weekend. On Saturday afternoon I was keeping my grandson company, lounging next to him on the couch with my legs up on a hassock as he watched his favorite television program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In our suggested meeting format, just before the end we read: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction, not promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, TV, and film.” Sometimes I add: “Please talk to me before you choose to break your anonymity. I made a real mess doing that.”
A paradox is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and might be true. “When we surrender our ‘freedom,’ we become truly free” (SA 81).
I left home at 21 and moved in with my boyfriend. I had been attending college full-time and had two part-time jobs, but I dropped out of school and work so I could spend more time acting out sexually. I felt a lot of shame, so I convinced my boyfriend to marry me. Sometimes we acted out by watching porn. When my husband wasn’t home, I would look at the porn and masturbate. We were both sex addicts, and we raged at each other daily. Lust killed our relationship.
One of the greatest gifts in recovery for me has been the realized hope for freedom. I say “greatest,” because I didn’t believe it was possible for me to have freedom from the obsessions and compulsions of my addiction. As an addict I am powerless over lust, so what hope could I have? As I sat in meetings in the earlier years, most of us were still showing up week after week to report on our latest acting out episodes.
I had an idea in my head. My idea was to plant meetings around Scotland. I thought even if it doesn’t help many SAs in Scotland it would probably help keep me sober. I am grateful that I have been sober from lust since December 2008.
