1. Write a history of your sex and love addiction beginning with the first time you can remember related events. Discuss how many partners you have had, what medical/psychological attention you have sought for the problem and your attempts at controlling your behaviour.
[redacted]
Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation. Then, and only then, do we become open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be. We stand ready to do anything that will lift the merciless obsession from us.
It's a loss of growth and spirit.
"This is what I want to do," I thought, "So I will do it!"
2. Read Step 1. Discuss and reflect upon the effect sex and love addiction has had upon you over the years. Do you truly see yourself as a sex and love addict?
Exactly which book is this question referring to? Big Book? 12x12? SLAA book? Step 1 where?
Anyway...
I've been using masturbation and increasing amount and variety of porn for most of my life to comfort myself.
I've always had my heart on my sleeve and involved in very small emotional fantasies with women. These were almost never acted on - they were just part of an increasing pattern of sexualisation and objectification. Although at this point I'm not identifying as a love addict.
Almost every day for 36 years.
Magazines: Penthouse, Hustler, Hardcore
Videotapes
Internet
Newsgroups
Websites
Camgirls
Since I've lived alone there's been no upper limit and have found myself doing it for up to 3 hours at a time.
There were fairly frequent (once, twice a month) trips to strip clubs
Since C and I ceased to operate as a functional couple:
massage parlours
call girls
brothels
$30K+?
I'm clearly a sex addict.
I'm wondering now if THAT's what's wrong with my life?
I've always had my heart on my sleeve and involved in very small emotional fantasies with women. These were almost never acted on - they were just part of an increasing pattern of sexualisation and objectification. Although at this point I'm not identifying as a love addict.
3. Re-read Step 1. Discuss and reflect upon the following ideas found in Step 1.
• Critical nature of our disease.
• Progressive nature of our disease.
• The need not to push someone until they are ready
Critical
Saps energy, drive, and stamina
Is an easy comfort, creates weakness
dissipates
it's an energy hole
Progressive
Advance from porn, to harder porn
advance from porn to sex workers
always an increase
Bottom
In order to make the commitment to change, your understanding of what is at stake must be complete.
Some lessons have to be learned. Powerlessness is the first step. Your understanding and relationship with power must be ready to change, forever.
Forever.
You must be able to equate:
- honesty with sanity
- vulnerability with courage
- humility with purpose
- outwardness with self
4. Discuss and reflect upon the fatal nature of our disease as seen on page 24 paragraph 2 in the ‘Twelve & Twelve’ AA Steps & Traditions Book. In this discussion, reflect on how at the very least the disease has diminished your life.
Addiction is giving away life. It's a turning-away from God.
It's a loss of growth and spirit.
The downward spiral of addiction has a single endpoint: death.
I've squandered my time, my energy, and my money chasing a illusory comfort.
Mental obsession, fear, addictions - a sad story that leaves my gifts and my purpose on this planet checked at the door while I stare cross-eyed at fantasy women who care nothing for me.
5. Read chapter 2 in the Big Book (‘There is a Solution’). Discuss and reflect upon the idea that your discipline or lack of it has played an important part in your life.
I had no spiritual grounding of any kind.
I thought that my needs and wants were what directed my life. And that my life was a tool that I used to gratify my desire.
As my desires became addictions and compulsions, I also failed to understand that I was NOT my addictions and compulsions.
"This is what I want to do," I thought, "So I will do it!"
I've never had discipline or restraint around energy or power of any kind.
At some point it cease's being about self-discipline or lack of it. In matters of control we were powerless. We had ceded control of our lives
Money, time, oversharing, desires. I've squandered continuously.
The elimination of our drinking was but a beginning.
Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend on constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs.
So many want to stop but cannot.
We have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionised our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows, and toward God's universe.
6. Read Chapter 3 in the AA Big Book (‘More About Alcoholism').
This chapter is about the subtle insanity of addiction, and about self control and self discipline are powerless.
It also begins to point the way toward a spiritual solution.
jaywalking, milk, attempts to try on own
...the curious mental phenomena that parallel with our sound reasoning there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink...
7. Discuss the following ideas:
• The deception of others is nearly always rooted in the deception of ourselves.
• How does this relate to your sexual relationship history?
• What have we done in the past due to sex and love addiction that reaffirms this idea?
Self-knowledge and self connection is needed in order to understand how and why to connect with others. I'm not sure I would say it this way though - I would say that guaranteed truth for others is necessitated by truth of one's self. Or that the correct relationship with others
My sexual history is primarily private - and was something I began when very young - i knew i was doing it often but had no moral reason not to, i figured I wasn't hurting anyone. I didn't realise what a time and money sink it was becoming, and how it was warping the rest of my life.
Unaware of what it was doing to me, I was necessarily unaware that it was affecting others.
I never understood how C was affected by this. I felt the addiction had nothing to do with our relationship and discounted her requests to stop acting out.
8. Re-read Step 1. Discuss and reflect upon what the knowledge of Step 1 can do for you. During your reading underline and note words and passages that are meaningful to you. Why are they important?
Admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable.
Step 1 is about power, its misunderstanding and misuse, and the effects of that in our lives.
We early on discovered coping mechanisms that unknown to us were squandering our personal power by lending it to people places and things that in their own had no power. Those things were the flames, we were the fuel. As the flames got bigger, they consumed more and more of us until we were powerless over the consumption - and we were the things being consumed.
The misuse of our power in this way also weakens us because we become dependent on the people, places and things, and don't face pain and fear healthily.
Step 1 is also about sanity
If we misuse our power in a self-centered, self-directed way, we are almost always incapable of avoiding a downward spiral. It's because our power, when turned inward, is almost always less than needed to keep us whole. And when we identify that gap, we stuff the gap with people, places and things. As those things consume our power, they actually increase the size of the gap, so our lives become smaller and smaller. As we have less power and resources and attention to direct to engaging with life, we begin slipping on important things.
It's about the realisation that something was wrong, that something had been traded away without our full understanding - that a boyhood pact had become unravelled.
9. Read Step 2 in the ‘Twelve & Twelve’. How is taking of Step 1 a necessity before taking Step 2.
It's been found that a bottom must be reached, and that someone is ready to accept a form of power not their own. They have to admit powerlessness and defeat in order to make room in their hearts and lives for something more.
The addict must face the reality of his addiction and that he/she is NOT able to run the show here. Recovery is about misdirection - about stripping away layers of defective and defunct ego-driven ideas about what it means to be a person and connect to a deeper source, a deeper imperative, a deeper reality.
10. Discuss and reflect upon the effectiveness of H.O.W. from your personal experience and from what you have observed in others. Could what you have experienced emanated solely from you? If so, why had it not happened before?
The process of taking SLAA seriously and getting a sponsor has resulted in some quality sobriety for me.
It's been difficult to understand and grasp what HOW is due to the difficult nature of compiling documentation.
However, it seems to provide a structure and clear lines that are already helpful to me - even in the first slip I had, it was clear that the line between what was permissable and what was not was critical in helping me avoid acting out.
I'm finding the ongoing 30 questions to be a valuable meditative tool for addressing addiction, powerlessness, and recovery.
I can't explain the feelings I'm having except that I feel strongly that I'm on the right track to wholeness.
11. Read Chapter 4 in the AA Big Book. Discuss and reflect upon the concepts of Honesty, Openmindedness and Willingness. How are these tools of growth in the H.O.W. programme?
Willingness opens the door.
Openness clears away assumptions.
Honesty is both the lubrication and the engine that powers recovery. Without honesty - which then gathers up acceptance and humility, the addict cannot face his addiction or life. There can be no hidden life, no secrets, no separate realities, just the one reality of God.
12. Discuss and reflect upon the concept of insanity as it applies to us in H.O.W.
I used to think of insanity as a biological defect - like if your neurochemicals were messed up or if you had brain trauma. I figured that a healthy biological brain would necessarily be sane.
Not so.
Now I define insanity as selfishness. As closed-off. As disconnected from life and from God. For me at any rate, being self-centered creates a vortex, like a room of mirrors, that twists off to insanity and unhealth.
Insanity is not black and white. It's subtle and gradated, and it begins as soon as you disconnect with your higher power and intention.
13. Discuss and reflect upon how we use the substitution method of accepting the presence of a Higher Power. How have you looked for substitutes all of your life? Are you still looking?
Chapter 4 is largely written trying to convince people that there is such a thing as a Higher Power. I don't need convincing. In the early 90's I went to AA for the first time and IMMEDIATELY grasped the core thing that AA offers - that your HP is yours alone, and that no one else can tell you what it is.
So Bill goes through a few routines about substituting anything greater than one's self as a higher power.
But yeah, I've been making other things my higher power my whole life - trying to fill the Higher Power hole in my life with other things that weren't capable of filling that vast space, and so eventually broke down or were insufficient or wore out.
after 2.5 years in AA, and a year of continuous sobriety, I understand about addiction a lot more. I still take my will back, and still make things like sex my higher power when I am stressed out or anxious. It's my desire to grow away from that.
14. Discuss and reflect upon the following concepts available in Step 2:
a. Belief means reliance, not defiance
b. Defiance is an outstanding characteristic of every sex and love addict. Refer to page 31 in the ‘Twelve & Twelve’ AA Steps & Traditions Book.
It's about putting yourself in alignment with God and with a life that is not under your direct control.
An addict's defiance of God can come in many different forms: From defiance to an unexamined conception of God that is flawed, to "taking your will back" even when you do accept a higher power.
It is defiance for an addict to reach for his/her DOC instead of staying vulnerable and in pain, which is the field of action in which God works.
As I understand it here the defiance refers to a competition with God, usually a God that comes to us from outside and that is established to be active in the same realm as man. The Judeo-Christian God has human motivations, emotions, and intentions, and of course triggers defiance.
But this defiance stems from a misunderstanding of God and God's power.
If you accept God not as a thing, but a quality or property or attribute of life, a "missing essence" that is meant to correct for self-centeredness, you can start to understand questions and statements like
"Where is God in this?" "Let Go and Let God" "God acts through other people"
15. Re-read Step 2. Discuss and reflect upon your childhood exposure to any religious concept. On a two columned balance sheet, list on one side your negative feelings and on the other side your positive feelings as they relate to early religious experiences. What conclusion do you reach when you reflect on the balance sheet?
Parents were largely agnostic and did not talk much about religion. I got taken to a baptist daycare at one point when I was 7 or 8 or 9 and they had all the kids crying and accepting Jesus up at the front.
Mostly god and religion were about judgment and control. About accepting these unreasonable, unprovable things. I didn't understand how something as important as God and all these statements about him and all these amazing actions attributed to him were unprovable, and if he acted in History in the past, why wasn't this also the case today?
I didn't ever have any positive religious experiences as a child.
Negative
Control
Judging
Angry
Irrational
Positive
Conclusion: there's only negative, mate.
16. Read Step 3. Create another balance sheet. On one side list all the reasons you can for believing in God. On the other side list all the reasons for disbelieving.
Believing
- Its not a question of belief. I have contacted something that I am happy to call God. I don't know how large it is, and I haven't allowed it to be as big as it can be in my life (I'm afraid), but I know it is there.
Disbelieving
- Not a problem
17. Re-read Step 3. Discuss and reflect from the following quote “Faith alone can avail us nothing”.
This is addressing that a belief in God is insufficient if you still have self-will and are taking control of your life and addressing your needs through self-sufficiency.
It marks a re-treading of your approach to life, where you isolate, identify and lock on to life's problems and wrestle with them on the floor, always with a nervous glance at the queue of problems that are lined up to wrestly you next. This program suggests that you get out of that game entirely and focus on the breath - that is, focus on the next wisp of god's will.
God's will in your life may not manifest as walking on water and feeding the poor. It may merely be getting enough rest, lighting a candle, or the gift of a peaceful heart. It might be pausing on the way to work to look at the sky. Or letting a special friend know that they mean a lot to you.
The rest of the steps only work if step three is given a "determined and persistent trial". I believe that.
18. Read Chapter 5 in the AA Big Book (‘How it Works’). Write on dependence as you understand it in H.O.W. How can dependence lead to greater independence?.
I've combed through the "H.O.W Literature" (i.e.the How Concept and Tools) and find nothing that discusses the topic of dependence, so just going back to my understanding from AA.
In the rooms we often speak of having felt as though we had a hole in our lives. Something inexplicably missing that left us sensitive and vulnerable to life's experiences, so that we experienced pain, anxiety and fear apparently more acutely than other people (or so we thought).
The hole was a lack of power. We felt we didn't have the energy or strength to face life. It was too much for us.
In attempting to stuff that hole with substances, processes and people, we developed coping mechanisms that seemed to work, for a while. We were able to block the challenging experiences, or distract ourselves from them.
But by coping with life this way, we were using our own power to attempt to block the pain. We were throwing what power we had into this lack of power, and using substances and people for fuel. Soon the addictions and compulsions were consuming ALL our power, and starting burning on their own, and we were left powerless over them. We'd ceded control over our lives to our defective coping mechanisms, and we no longer had the power to manage them or our lives.
Dependence is part of addiction. You become dependent on a substance or process as part of your coping mechanism. The problem is that no person, place, or thing is capable of filling that god-shaped-hole in your soul, and over time you are left with a deficit, which means that you have to escalate the amount, variety or intensity of your dependency. Additionally the dependence on something finite weakens you, it keeps you from facing, learning, and growing. Using anything to compensate for directly facing life depletes and undermines the value of life's experience for you.
The 12 Steps show us a way out of this downward spiral.
By learning to fill the hole with something infinitely greater than your pain, your lack, and/or your loneliness you transfer dependence on yourself and the realm of people, places and things to your Higher Power. But dependence on God has its own dues: God cannot function as a power source unless you are unflinchingly honest about your life. God cannot function as a power source unless you align with motives and intentions that come from outside yourself and from a purity and grace that is beyond your understanding. Dependency on God does NOT block you from facing pain and strife, it is a power source that allows you to face life.
By putting God into the God-shaped-hole in your life, you are beginning to operate from a basis outside of your self-interest. You are putting yourself in alignment with the natural forces of the universe and the opportunities for growth that an open person can recognise.
So you can say that you are now "dependent" on God, but at the same time we say that, we have to start saying that you are now "independent" because your power source is inexhaustible, and working in alignment with the natural order of things means that you are free from slavery to the addictions you've used in the past. You are free from the petty demands of ego and in touch with the deep part of you that is connected with Universal Mind and Wisdom, that knows instinctually the path to grace.
Look at evolution and growth - the universe is clearly moving toward greater order, beauty, and love.
19. Are you a ‘grateful sex and love addict’? Why are you grateful?
Gratitude, along with Humility, is one of the hallmarks of spiritual life.
Grateful that there is a program and support for this problem.
Grateful to KNOW that I'm a sex and love addict, and that there is a solution.
Grateful that as unpleasant as they have been, my addictions have been the key to a better life than I have ever known.
20. Re-read Step 3. ‘I am responsible for only one person's actions’. Whose and why?
In the 12x12?
The only part of Step 3 in the 12x12 that seems to touch on this is the single action of willingness on the part of the addict. This is the only action that they say must positively depend on self-will on the part of the addict.
Outside of the context of Step 3, the wider understanding of the statement is that neither positively nor negatively am I responsible for the actions of anyone else - I can't make them do or behave in ways that I want them to.
However when we talk about actions in recovery, we're mostly talking about the actions that help us retain contact with our Higher Power and help us act in ways that reflect and reinforce what we are striving for in our inner lives. When we act in accordance with thoughts (instead of just thinking them), we make them real and link them with our habits and behaviors so that they are manifest. These are the specific actions that I am responsible for taking - the things that bind my recovery into the real world and make it possible for me to be an agent of God.
21. Discuss and reflect upon the idea that ‘bottom-line sobriety is the most important thing in my life without exception'.
Bottom-line Sobriety in and of itself is only important as an indicator of my spiritual condition.
For me to be the person I want to be, to grow in the ways I want to grow, to act in the ways I want to act, I must maintain a spiritual connection to my higher power that is strong and inviolate.
As long as that connection is there, I will not act out.
As I discover my defects returning, slippery behaviour surfacing, these are my signposts that I'm off the beam.
The difference at this time of my life is that I now know that I am NOT my behaviours, that they are my disease, and that I have vantage point outside of them to notice them, observe them, and outwait them.
My concern is not acting out, but maintaining my spiritual connection, and therefore my sobriety.
It's all too easy to prevaricate, equivocate, rationalise, justify, indulge, and take comfort with regard to decisions and actions and temptations that take me away from God. In these instances I forget the serentity and joy that comes from God.
It is not discipline but rather an allowing of myself to face my need for God unashamed. And to understand that alone of all the needs, this need is STRENGTH, and GROWTH, and RIGHTNESS.
But not my strength, growth, and rightness, I am but the expression of God, if God allows me to be.
My recovery from addiction is the most important thing in my life. But what that means is that God is the most important thing in my life. Recovery is a side effect of the love I share with God.
I can only conclude that modern life is DESIGNED to keep you from God..
22. Discuss the idea of calling a HALT when your life gets unmanageable. Do not allow yourself to get Hungry. Angry. Lonely or Tired
Truthfully, you should be aware of HALT *before* your life becomes unmanageable.
For me this question is about "staying on the beam" which is a critical issue for anyone on a spiritual path.
It is the nature of life to numb, seduce, bore, or hurt you off the spiritual path. You have to have an awareness of when you are vulnerable, and when you are most likely to stray from the path, because all too often, the simple act of straying from the path means you are no longer aware enough to know that you've left the path.
Ironic, huh?
So Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired all all times when your defenses are down and you are physically, emotionally or mentally vulnerable,
I am also trying to understand more about how to tell if I am off the beam.
I am trying to sensitise myself to actions and behaviours that arise when I am not present and connected:
These include
distractedness
anger
lust
selfishness
unmet needs trigger addiction
23. Read ‘A Vision For You’ in the AA Big Book. Discuss and reflect upon the idea that the more you give the more you shall receive.
This is about participating in God's universe.
If we are talking about a spiritual answer to a problem, we have to adjust our thinking and working to the ways of the spirit.
Spiritual matters are not like physical matters in several ways:
Spiritual quality fades and quickly, it must constantly be renewed, rediscovered, and replenished.
It cannot be hoarded or saved up or possessed, it is contagious and transmissible. And in fact it seems to grow in the transmission.
God's sole purpose on this earth is for humans to love one another unconditionally. The divine impulse is for joy, growth, serenity, and beauty. If you wish to align yourself with this cosmic spiritual principle, then you will take part in being an agent of your higher power on this planet. This will tap you into the abundance of God.
24. H.O.W. teaches us a sense of dignity. How have I utilised my new-found dignity in relationship to myself, my family and my friends?
12-step program is a program of self care, of treating your spiritual and soul essence as important, when you may never have before.
After years of letting ourselves down, we begin to keep promises to ourselves and took look after ourselves in a respectful way.
Self-esteem, dignity, etcetera come from self-care. As I take care of myself and treat myself with respect, that begins to show outwardly. People have remarked that I'm doing well, but they're not exactly sure what it is. I'm finding that I'm attracting the right kind of people into my life, and I'm so thankful for that.
25. What is the importance of giving service in H.O.W.? What is the importance of meetings? How are they both part of my road to recovery?
Closely related to question 23, service is about participating in God's work on this planet, and therefore aligning your actions with god.
Service to the recovering addict reminds you from whence you came, and illustrates to you in a way you could never understand from within yourself, what the disease is and what it can do to you.
Meetings are connection, identification, as well as service. They are the melting pots of sobriety and recovery and help us to remember the things that we've forgotten.
Meetings are solidarity and a reminder that we are not unique, warped, and ugly, but spiritual seekers striving together for a better life.
26. What is the importance of the telephone in H.O.W.? What is the importance of anonymity? How are they both inter-twined.
The telephone is meant to be used as a punctuation throughout the day to pull us back to the reality of our disease and the day-at-a-time, sometimes hour-at-a-time nature of our program of recovery.
Much like the Muslim who prays 5 times a day, these calls serve as a way to reconnect to our higher power and to eachother, to have a voice about the internal struggles we have that we usually cannot reveal in a meaningful way to someone who's not been in the program.
Anonymity helps us heal, it helps us stay real to eachother and slightly detached from the outside world. Much like a confidential therapist or counselor who doesn't know or care about your family and friends and can give you a sounding board, anonymity helps us just be simple with eachother, without much reference to how we fit into the societal matrix.
27. Discuss and reflect on reading and writing as a tool of the programme. Why is it essential to my recovery?
The 30 questions have been an amazing experience layered onto my 12-step recovery. My AA stepwork included some reading and writing, but not the sort of probing questions that are in the 30. As much as I have been confused by some of the terminology of the 30 questions, I have found the introspection and directed reading to be of immense value in uncovering my understanding of the 12-step program. It's almost that I didn't know I already knew the answers to these questions because they had not been asked the right way.
As I've been writing the answers, they've been coming from a deep understanding within me. I've often cried as I've written these notes.
I'm getting a little sad that I'm on question 27 and there's only 3 left.
28.Read pages 569-570 in the AA Big Book (‘Spiritual Experience’ Appendix 2.). Discuss and reflect upon the following:
a. Spiritual growth is a daily commitment.
b. How can I grow daily?
My new understanding is that spiritual growth is the normal and healthy state of existence for a human being. And that it is predicated on behaviours and actions that maintain ones contact with one's higher power. And that the nature of spiritual reality is that it is evanescent, that it is impermanent and must be renewed constantly or it evaporates.
I understand spirituality in a way that is entirely consonant with the approach in the 12 steps. There is an unsuspected inner resource that can inform and power my life if I behave in a way that does not cloud or pollute my connection with it.
I grow daily by
1) daily practice - meditation and prayer and journalling
2) observation - noticing my defects and understand that they signal a loss of connection
3) outreach
4) service
I I
SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.
Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.
In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming “God-consciousness” followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.
Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.
Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it “God-consciousness.”
Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.
We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable.
|
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Step 3 is the fulcrum of the program that provides leverage for the steps to work. This is the vital change that MUST occur in order to free one's self from addiction.
It's not a sudden change. It's a transformation. It will take your whole life.
Instead of reaching for substances, people, behaviours, compulsions, we have to reach for God. We have to be able to conceive of a God that is powerful enough to sustain and grow our lives in ways that self-sufficiency did not.
We have to learn how to let go of the fear and defects we are clutching to ourselves in mistaken assumption that they provide security or ANY answer to our needs. So many of us lacked the character to fulfill those needs in healthy ways. And if we did, we found our addictive nature quite willing to sacrifice character for gratification.
Powerlessness, Surrender, Abdication - then the work to stay in contact, and change.
So you have to be able to
1) Understand your needs
2) Understand when you are confused about your needs - you transplant the needs into those things that your tools can solve. If you know about sex, you will tend to see your need as horniness and sexual gratification.
3) Understand when you have started to reach for the wrong solution to the wrong need
4) stop
5) understand the right need
6) take it to God
Unmet needs - open to addiction
.
30. Re-read Step 1 in the morning. Review your two balance sheets in questions 15 and 16. Make a sincere commitment to your Higher Power to turn your will and your life over to his care. Then read the following article (see over) and write on the idea that submission is not the same as surrender. Discuss the difference. Discuss and reflect on your own personal surrender.
Interesting question and reading. Especially since a "sincere commitment to turn your will and your life over to God" is an act of will, and the reading says explictly that surrender is an unconscious act.
Submission is a bending of your will to another's. It implies that you are subordinating your will to another's, but that there is ostensibly some conflict of intention, otherwise you would not have to submit.
Surrender takes will completely out of the picture. You are removing the ego-driven goals, pride, boundaries, and defences and allowing yourself to float, vulnerable, within life. It may be the first actual true consciousoness and awareness and acceptance of life that the addict has ever felt. Surrender is freeing in this way.
My AA surrender was enabled by my self-destructive behaviour that landed me in a Travis County jail - my disease and its consequences spoke truly to me for the first time perhaps, and at a deep level this bottom convinced me I was an addict and that I needed help - and that my HP and the program, I believed sincerely, could help me.
In SLAA, in the realm of sex addiction, I'm not sure I've hit a profound bottom, and that worries me. I am trying and practicing surrender, but am still occasionally rolling around in slippery behaviour as my compulsions rattle around trying to trigger me.
I pray that these are but the echoes of decades of compulsive behaviour and infantile coping mechanisms that are in the process of being swept away. I pray that God makes me ready to live an adult life.
And what is an adult life?
- Impulse control & Responsibility - I can evaluate my immediate whims and impulses against the bigger picture and the directions I want to take my life. This requires a spiritual fitness that I have never had before, but which I believe I have now. I am responsible for my actions and their consequences.
- Awareness & Honesty - I understand the difference between what is health and growth for me, and what is destructive to me. I do not identify with my impulses, but observe and choose wisely. I understand personal and interpersonal honesty as the basis of my contract with God.
- Acceptance & Humility - an understanding of my place in others lives and in the cosmos. An ability to be wrong and admit it. An ability to accept and love others as they are.
- Health & Self Care & Self Worth - my bodily, emotional, spiritual and emotional health are priorities that I do not subvert. I take care of myself, without this nothing else can happen, especially self-esteem. I value myself and love myself.
- Outwardness, Connectneess & Love - participating and contributing to life and others and community. Being a vessel for unconditional love.
- Balance, Critical skills, Focus & Decisiveness - An ability to evaluate and prioritise life's events with an awareness that there are limited resources, energy and time in this life. An ability to cut losses and let things go. An ability to focus on the best path forward.
Lord, I ask that my conviction that I am an addict extend from alcohol to sex, and that I not need to replicate my own personal destruction and disaster in the realm of love and sex as I did in alcohol. I feel that I damaged my relationship with the brilliant and wonderful C (although yes she did have her own issues) through pornography and masturbation. And that I violated my own values around loyalty (as a sober person) by going to the massage parlour in the last year of our relationship.
Let my bottom, the thing that resounds and resonates with me through and through be an awareness of the promise you hold for me, the yearning and conviction that this is the life I want, and an increasing wholeness and healing that allows me to follow your path.
Please let me arrest my disease where it is, never forgetting that diligence and awareness and honesty are the price and the contract I am signing for the rest of my life, and that it is a cost I bear willingly and with love and joy.
I'm going to turn over and surrender my stress level
Interesting blog!
ReplyDeleteFantastic! Great work. These thorough and heartfelt answer have helped me greatly. Thank you for your service.
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