I still remember the warm glow that washed over me the first few times I ever saw a naked female child of God or the first time I accidentally discovered masturbation. I remember trying to draw pictures of the female body in 1st grade that were taken up by the teacher, but I really did not understand what I was trying to make out. Then, I think the first time was a Playboy calendar at a mechanics shop when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. About the same time, I also saw a black and white nude photography book at a photography store. What a beautiful creation! But in my religiously entrenched childhood home, the gifts of innocent discovery and good sexuality quickly got tangled up in tease, intrigue and gut-wrenching guilt. I picked up a forbidden fruit that I did not realize that I would not be able to put down.
Now at the time, I couldn’t have told you that. I knew that looking at porn and masturbating to it and my fantasies over real live girls that I knew – that made me feel alive in a way that I had never experienced before. It was really a spiritual experience – almost like I was being transported to another reality.
But almost from the beginning, that transfiguration was meshed with unrelenting sin and guilt. Not long after I discovered masturbation, I remembered rescuing my mom from the porn she had accidentally turned to on our complicated satellite dish. So one Saturday afternoon, I lied to my family, told them I had too much homework to do to go to the wedding of a family friend, and for the first time, I found adult porn channels. I had hit the jackpot and was off to the races. It wasn’t the real thing, but only teased me with trailers or those looping, green scrambled pictures that let me see some brief image of ecstasy every ten minutes. But I would get up after all the family had gone to bed as a teenager at 2 or 3 am in the morning to spend several hours, watching those deeply inefficient loops over and over again at a little 6 inch TV in the middle of our kitchen – separated only by ¼ inch plywood from my parents and my brother. Surely, they knew.
I could tell oh so much more. But I was already experiencing the amazing insanity of trying to live this double life. During this time, it is not surprising that I also accepted a call to ministry – surely a subconscious attempt to counter balance the depravity I was immersing myself in. Every day on the bus on the way home from school, where I was known for being the most religious boy on campus, I would fight my inner demons who always won. These fights even as a teen often left me with a bleeding penis from hours of masturbating 6-7 times a day. I couldn’t fight it – and the more I tried, the more I was filled with self-hatred and loathing in my attempts to get myself to stop.
When I moved away to college, the caged animal no longer had accountability. I dealt with all the stress of academics, independence and deadlines with binging on pornography and compulsive masturbation. The stress within would inflate to the point of explosion and I was off the races, cruising for hours from convenience store to convenience store or from trash can to trash can looking for that perfect fix. I threw caution to the wind as I learned what was available on this new thing called internet in the campus computer labs. When roommates were gone, I was especially vulnerable. My studies were placed on the back-burner and I can't tell you how many times birds singing at sunrise have greeted my naked, aching self in my dungeon with news that I had to face another school or work day without sleep and with Mountain Dew, lustful images and self-disgust coursing through my veins.
It was during this time, that I first heard about sex addiction. Almost from the beginning, I knew that had to be me. Why else would I continually lie to cover up doing something that caused my insides to rot out even while I was also trying to prepare for a life of service to God and others? I had tried to stop. My old journals reveal a young man who was dead set on stopping – on changing his ways. I would write out covenants with myself – promising to give myself rewards for long periods of abstinence and forcing myself to pay money to anti-pornography groups every time I failed. I read book after book and article after article. I kept a calendar to mark my progress which never exceeded 2 weeks. My roommate even got involved and would leave me encouraging notes when he left – hoping to curb my obsession.
In desperation, I called a national expert on sex addiction. The only thing I remembered about that conversation was me asking him if there was a pill that would fix me. Surely, he pointed me to other more effective ideas, but I was still hoping and wanting a quick fix. I am grateful to say that I drove an hour to my first 12-step meeting for sexual addiction recovery, but when I tried to go back a second time, I ended up at an adult bookstore instead and would never return for another 8 yrs. But I did learn enough that year to know where I could find help when I was finally ready almost one decade later.
My addiction continued to progress for several years. Even though I was very religious, I kept trying to fight it on my own and kept failing. I prayed and prayed and prayed – asking God to remove this thorn in my flesh. While I would abstain for periods of time, the monster always came back with a vengeance, leaving me demoralized and hopeless. While I had always been a “cheap addict”, the time I spent acting out, if spent working for just $10 per hour, could have bought me and my family a $115,000 house by time I was 28 years old. Surely, I had lost control.
Then I met her – the person who I thought would cure me. I had not dated much up to this point. My shame isolated me especially from girls. I froze in their presence. However, when I met the girl who would be my future wife, our mis-connection was quick – and for the first time, the pictures and my fantasies became real. I had finally found what I thought I was looking for. Self-righteous enough not to go all the way, it took me only 3 months to ask her to marry me. Four months later, we were married. Too quickly and without looking for any warning signs, I used marriage as a means to make me feel better about my acting out.
However, it didn't take long for my new wife to catch on. No one likes to be treated as an object. Using romantic manipulation, I tried to keep the fire alive so that I would have my constant supply. As she gradually pulled away from me and understandably no longer wanted to have sex, my resentments towards her and my pity for “poor-me” grew. Our dysfunctional communication and my emotional instability got worse. Once again, my insides began to implode. And it was not long before I was back to fantasy, masturbation, pornography, and even emotional adultery to soothe the beast and help me to cope.
But even the lust eventually stopped working. I couldn't function with or without lust. Inside, I was back in a spiritual dungeon where resentments, fears, and shame ruled my soul. Outside, even though I tried to keep on the holy persona of professional ministry, I was an emotional roller coaster that my wife and even people at church wanted to get off of. I kept telling her I loved her – but I could not follow through with my actions. I didn't have the ability or the courage. I was locked inside myself.
So when an accountability software program sent her a report of 6 hours of my acting out, she had to be the one to confront me even though I had known she would find out for 2 weeks. This was the last straw. Later she would tell me that getting that email and looking at my addiction dead in the eye was like a bomb going off deep in her heart. We later called that event “Ground Zero,” after which our marriage would never be the same. She picked up my 10 year old daughter and 2 year old son and moved back home two state borders away. The illusion of my success was in shambles.
I right away knew what I had to do. Even though I had been to only one SA meeting 8 yrs earlier, somehow I knew that I need to go back there. At that point, my wife did not care what I did. But I knew I needed to change – to get control over this monster if I ever had any hope of getting my family back again and not losing my job which was visibly on the rocks as well. Thankfully, at that sexual addiction recovery meeting, I met a man who not only had 9 yrs of sobriety, but he was also able and willing to show me the program of recovery that had worked for him and countless others. I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel – and I was hurting badly enough I was willing to do whatever he suggested as fast as I could. And within 3 months, I had completed my first 5th step experience. My wife saw the changes in me as I gained sobriety – and by month 5, she and my kids had returned.
I would like to be able to say now that I just kept working the program and that we lived happily ever after. However, somewhere along the way, I forgot the humility and willingness I had when I first came in the doors. I kept working my program, kept going to meetings. I sponsored folks through the steps. I tried to start new meetings and a new 12-step retreat. I was doing plenty of service work and enthusiastically participated in international conventions. I often had the hardest sponsors I could find – I wanted to make sure no rock was unturned in my life. I went to meetings in other fellowships trying to work on character defects. I think I can safely say there was not a person in our area who was working the program any harder than me. But slowly and painfully, my life was once again falling apart.
For all the work I was doing on myself (and even on others), I see now that I was doing so in order to remain in control – to be in charge of my life. I was leaving out the key ingredient to any successful recovery program : surrender. It's hard to let God transform my life, when I am unwilling to let it go. I treated the program as a cafeteria – picking and choosing what I wanted to use and ignoring or procrastinating about the rest. The biggest part I avoided was Step Nine. I short-circuited the spiritual connection promised in Step Twelve. I made amends to my wife, my boss and several others because I was scared to death that if I didn't, I would lose what I thought I had to have.
But there were other non-urgent, significant peas under my mattress that would not let me rest. The shame, guilt and remorse over those harms kept growing and growing – even though the harms themselves have turned out to be rather small. And in order to hide the shame, my resentments and fears in turn kept growing once again. My emotional roller coaster returned – and even though I stayed sober for 4 yrs, I was a dry drunk – a sober man who was still trying to run the show. My wife and others in the program could see it. Not only did I not have a program of attraction, but the result was a program of repulsion. I couldn't pass along what I did not have.
Slowly, I began playing around with lust. Slowly, our marriage began disintegrating. No matter how hard I tried I could not make it work. I was unwilling to let go of my marriage in order to save it. And finally, I lost the very thing I was so afraid of giving up. And with the loss of my reason for working my program, I also gave up my sobriety as well.
For some reason, it has taken me a long time to learn what others seem to learn rather quickly. I thought I could have a spiritual experience as a result of working these steps without working ALL the steps. I thought that if I only worked my program well, then I would stay sober and my life would turn out well. I thought I knew what I need to know – and it would only take a bit more willpower to make my life turn out the way I thought it should. I stayed in charge – and I got what I had always gotten. I went through a lot of sponsors before I learned in my heart that surrender is the key. I can't unlock the promises without it.
Today, I am becoming a different person – not just a sober person. Today, I do once again have 2 ½ yrs of sobriety, but that is not the most important part of my life. Don't get me wrong. As one sexual addiction recovery book states, “Without sobriety, there is no recovery.” Sobriety is the foundation for my recovery. But I have been sober before for 4 whole years – and I was still miserable. I had four whole years of sobriety and still lost almost everything precious in my life because I couldn't be at peace with myself.
The most important part of my recovery today is living each day in surrender – in letting go of the things I can't change (which is everybody else) and having the courage to work on the one thing that I can do something about – me. I am learning to love that me, too. Before I never did that. When I was acting out, I was also destroying myself with junk food, workaholism, perfectionism and most of all, self-hatred. Before, I was so focused on minding everyone else's business that I had let myself become a walking heart attack waiting to happen.
Today, one step at a time, I am caring for myself by giving myself healthy foods, by exercising on a more regular basis, and by drinking plenty of water. This time in sobriety, I have lost 35 pounds – and now weigh less than I did in high school. This summer, I ran and finished my first 8K race (a year ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of running around the block). This time in sobriety, instead of running my credit card up, I paid off $14,000 and now am debt free. This time, I am trying to work a program of attraction – one in which I will attract healthy people in to my life and maybe even into a relationship or marriage. This time, I am attracting my kids to me instead of pushing them away. This time, I don't have to have a lust or love object to tell me that I am ok – whether she is real live person or a fantasy model. This time, I can look people in the eye and stand free – because I am facing the people I have wronged and getting free of the shame that has weighed me down for almost 20 years.
Instead of gossiping because I feel helpless, I am learning that my opinion does matter and am learning to speak the truth in love – to be assertive and direct. I am learning that being happy is more important than being right. And with this growth, I am beginning to be able to trust my heart – what I sense that my intuition and my God are saying to me. While I still regret my past, I am at least at peace with my divorce and mostly free of the fear of people and economic insecurity.
Now I don't want to give anyone a slick sales pitch. My life is not easy. I still struggle with anxiety from time to time. But it is NOWHERE near what it used to be. In the past, I could not stand to be inside my own body. And the emotional hell that I was putting myself through is the one of the major things that is motivating me to keep making all my amends, to stay sober and to carry this message to others. I don't want to go back. And slowly, I am starting to trust that this new drama-free peace of mind just might be here to stay – that my God is indeed doing for me what I was never able to do for myself. Today, I have a hope that is based on experience.