I got married with only one week of sobriety in Sexaholics Anonymous. I had just started working with my sponsor, and he said that it might be a good idea to postpone the wedding until I had more sobriety and recovery—but he understood that it was shortly before the wedding and canceling would have been difficult.
Although I am not married, I have lived as if I were—not to any living breathing human being but to FEAR. Just as my addictions seemed to help me to cope with the dysfunctional world in which I grew up, Fear seemed to help me to manage and control my addictions.
A few years into my recovery I found myself periodically delving into some very negative emotions. These incidences were sometimes triggered by things like dealing with difficult people, having to make difficult decisions when there seemed to be no good options, and trying to cope with marital difficulties.
After my last act out, I have come to wonder if I am addicted to emotional pain. For an addict pain, along with most human instincts and feelings, can be skewed by a strange mental twist. Is pain that place of comfort or familiarity that I am inexplicably drawn to?
My name is Tom M. I have been in recovery and sober since December 2007. Recently I had a phase when many things bothered me. I was mad at people at work, my wife’s requests didn’t make sense to me, things at church annoyed me, and the list went on and on.
By the time I was five I already had a developed capacity for sexual fantasy. I imagined having sex with the biology skeleton in the kindergarten classroom.
It was July 31, 2015, and I was in the shower. Without warning, in the space of about a minute and a half, three different lust images came through my thoughts. Soon after I let the first one go—20 or 30 seconds later—here came another! Soon after I let that one go, there was a third!
My natural tendency is to vacillate between pride and shame. Maybe I hit moments of humility somewhere in between. It occurs to me that both pride and shame are dishonest states of being, while humility is completely honest.
Part of me knew from very early on that I was a sexaholic. Part of me didn’t want to admit that or accept it. Part of me wanted to be rid of “the addict.” Part of me wanted to give into that and just enjoy my acting out.
By the grace of God and the fellowship of SA, I have been sexually sober since August 1, 1985)—something for which I am frequently but never sufficiently grateful.
