Withdrawal
A newcomer recently asked how long withdrawal from lust could possibly last, and I want to share my personal experience, strength, and hope on that topic from my current vantage point of one year sober.
A newcomer recently asked how long withdrawal from lust could possibly last, and I want to share my personal experience, strength, and hope on that topic from my current vantage point of one year sober.
In the summer of 2001, I spoke with women in other 12 Step fellowships who identified themselves as having SA issues. At the time, only two women were active in SA groups in San Diego. Other women were reluctant to come to SA because the fellowship was mainly men. I began to think how lovely it would be to gather all of these women in one room so that they could hear that other women have similar issues.
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.
Hi, I am Judy, a sexaholic. I live in a small town in North Idaho. When I was six months sober, God and I started a meeting. It was small, but it lasted for three and a half years, and was instrumental in my sobriety. Then the meeting folded, and I was without a face-to-face meeting.
The other night I had a dream which stripped my lust of its pastel pink and purple euphemisms. I have avoided the word lust in my litany—preferring to tell myself that I crave “an affair of the heart”—further dressed up by such phrases as “out of my deep loneliness and chronic disconnection from others, I have sought soul mates, persons to join me in (at worst) the warmth of romantic fervor.”
Are you struggling as a lone woman in a meeting room full of men? We know how scary that can be! We need to be accessible to the newcomer as well as the old-timer woman. What can we do to help?
O God, I ask Your help Divine Whenever I must go online. I tell myself that I love art, Their sculpted forms; my heavy heart.
This topic really challenged me. I have heard people say that one of the things I have to do in this program is change everything about myself. Well, I have changed many things. I have walked through changes with my heart pounding, knees shaking, and feeling physically sick.