Sleepless nights

(The following is a personal post from one of our group members.)

I was remembering an incident a couple of nights ago when I could not get to sleep.  Eventually I got up and turned on the computer. I checked my email accounts, and spent some time writing a few responses and then some posts to an online recovery group. Eventually, feeling sufficiently tired, I headed off to bed.

My wife had been asleep through all of this. I ever so quietly opened the door and did everything I could not to wake her.

And at that moment a thought occurred to me.  I had done this same thing so many times before, this sneaking back to bed after having been on the computer in the middle of the night. But this time was different. This time was in recovery, because this time I was still sober.

When I was still trapped in my addiction, I would have been sneaking back into the room feeling oh so guilty and ashamed. I would have been doing everything I could so as not to wake her and have her wondering what I had been doing. My motivation would have been to hide and deceive, to not be caught.

But now it is all different. Now my motive is good. Now I am not thinking of myself at all. Now I am only thinking about her well-being, trying my best to not wake her so that at least she will have a good night's sleep.

For me, the joys of this program are in watching how God is changing me as I surrender to His will for me, surrender my selfishness and resentment and a lot of other character defects, and ask Him to change me.  Working the Steps with a sponsor taught me how to start doing that.

"It works if you work it."

Slipping

(The following is a personal post from one of our members.)

Some time ago I was talking with my wife about some things I was experiencing while working the program. Based on my prior experiences with slipping (aka relapsing), I knew I was in no position to try to fool myself or anyone else (her included) and make a claim to "never go back out there."

Instead I simply said, "I'm only ever one bad choice away from a relapse." And it doesn't even have to be a big choice or an obvious choice. One subtle, little choice, and I can be on the road to a relapse. And because I'm a sexaholic, that choice will be an "easy" one to make. That's been my past experience many, many times, and I don't doubt it can happen again.

I'm told by the old-timers that all I have is a "daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of my spiritual condition." Here it is in context:

"It is easy to let up on the spiritual program of action and rest on our laurels. We are headed for trouble if we do, for [lust] is a subtle foe. We are not cured of [sexaholism]. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition." (AABB, p. 85)

So what really matters in the end is my "spiritual condition." I've got to continue to ask myself, "Am I currently in right relationship with God and others?" (cf. Step 10)  "Am I growing spiritually in conscious connection with God?" (cf. Step 11)  "Am I trying to help others and sharing about who I really am and the story of what God is doing to change me in all areas of my life?" (cf. Step 12)

But without working the first nine Steps of the program with a sponsor, there wasn't any way I was going to know what the last three even meant, let alone do them.

I sincerely believe that if I am in continual right connection with a "loving God" that "could and would if He were sought,"  relapse simply won't happen. But if I walk away from that connection and start to once again "rest on my laurels" and believe I can do this on my own, then that "one bad choice" has already happened, and I'm on my way to that relapse, because I'm on my own.

Lying to Myself - A Personal Story

(The following is a post from one of our SA members.)

Before working the Steps of the SA program, it was so easy for me to lie to myself.  There was so much of that kind of dishonest thinking revealed in my Step 4 inventories as I worked through the 12 Steps with my sponsor.  My sponsor taught me that I lie to myself primarily in four ways: illusion, delusion, rationalization, and justification.  Making decisions particularly when I'm rationalizing and justifying my bad plan of action, is just going to make it more likely that I end up regretting a relapse.

I now surrender any thought of doing anything that even has a whiff of lust.  I'm powerless over lust.  If I purposefully put myself into situations in which I'm entertaining the possibility of acting out, I will indeed end up acting out.  It's what I do, because I am a sexaholic.

The bottom line for me today is that I seriously do "desire to stop lusting, and become sexually sober."  That's the only requirement to be a member in SA, and there isn't any point to not taking that commitment seriously.  So that means I must be honest with myself and surrender to God those lustful thought I used to entertain while I was trying to tell myself that I could handle them.