October 2022 – Jacob The Addict

Hi, my name is Jacob (not my real name) and I’m a grateful, recovering sex and love addict. I’ve been in recovery for about a year and sober a little longer than that.

My last post was about Step Two of the Twelve Steps, which says:

Step Two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

In that post, I wrote about realizing that I couldn’t tackle my addiction alone and accepting that I need a Power Greater Than Myself to take over. I wrote a bit about trust and how few people there were in my life that I felt I could share my struggles with. I closed with writing about having enough trust in God to let Him in.

But now the rubber must meet the road. Step Three says:

Step Three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

I am to the point where I know that God CAN help me with this addiction. But getting to a point where I can trust that God WILL help ME is a completely different task. That’s what it will take to facilitate a legitimate decision to turn my life over to the care of God.

When you’ve spent your entire life wondering who you could trust, that’s hard. And when your view of God has been that of an angry God, it’s even harder to let go and let Him lead.

Thankfully, my view of God has changed tremendously as a result of my ongoing recovery and the unpacking and self-reflection involved. With a Loving God in the picture, it becomes easier to surrender. But it still takes a tremendous amount of trust to turn things over to Him.

And that’s what Step Three is about: surrender

Surrender has always carried a negative connotation for me. Vanquished armies surrender. Cornered bank robbers surrender. It suggests a person or group that once had power yielding and giving up that power to someone else. It seems to be a weak and shameful kind of thing.

In my addiction, I thought I had power. I had control over my actions and my life. I didn’t need anyone else … except for the purpose of sex. I was in control. And control, I did. I controlled people. I controlled situations. I tried to craft everything to meet my needs. And I didn’t really care about how that impacted others.

The reality is that I am a control freak. I used to spin that in a positive way. Things in my span of control were generally done well. That was good, right?

But I worked very hard to never let people see the dark side of that control – the dark side of me. That side of being a control freak is not pretty. As I said above, I controlled situations and people for my benefit and/or pleasure.

In reality, I was out of control. My life was chaotic and unmanageable. I over-controlled the few things I could in an attempt to cover for all the other areas where I was losing control. My sanity was slipping away.

Deciding to give up my control to the care of God means that there must be fundamental changes in my life and how I view the world around me. I must surrender my control – the control I thought I had – and let God take over.

While I’ve completed Step Three with my sponsor and have turned control of my life over to God, I’ve struggled with leaving it in His hands. That’s nothing new and is what got me here. I’ve been surrendering to God, then taking everything back for my entire life.

So, this idea of permanently surrendering my will to God is new and it’s a bit scary. But thanks to my ongoing recovery, my Twelve Step group and my “tribe”, this time things can be different. My rational brain knows that God is faithful and will never leave me, nor will He stop loving me. Now, if I can just get my heart and my head to stay in sync!

As always, thanks for visiting.

Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)

Hi, my name is Jacob (not my real name) and I’m a grateful, recovering sex and love addict. My sobriety date is unchanged since my last post. I’m past one year of sobriety.

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged here. Things have been busy, crazy, enlightening, sad, joyful, stressful … all in all, remarkable. The past year has been the best worst year of my life. There is so much to share, but today I’m going to focus on Step Two.

If you recall, it took me a long time to get to Step One, powerlessness. Admitting that I’m powerless over this addiction took accepting that admitting powerlessness wasn’t a cop-out or a “hall pass”, i.e. “I’m powerless over this, so why even try to stop?” It’s far more than that.

It’s about admitting that my attempts to control the things in my life and deal with this addiction have resulted in disaster. Powerlessness is about surrender. Giving up control. Admitting that my attempts have been unable to control anything.

If I’m powerless to fix this or deal with my addiction, now what? Where’s the hope? Is there any? Or am I just doomed to live a self-destructive life?

Step Two of the Twelve Steps speaks directly to this:

Step Two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

I’ve read that the definition of insanity is “doing the same things over and over, expecting a different result”. That also defines addiction. Doing over and over things you don’t want to do, each time expecting that thing to “fix it”.

With powerlessness comes an understanding that I can’t fix it. It’s going to take a Power greater than me to affect any real change in my life. It’s that simple.

I believe in God. Always have. I responded to “the invitation” when I was 12 years old and was baptized for the remission of my sins.

Actually, I was terrified of Hell and wanted to escape God’s wrath. I knew right from wrong and realized that I had sinned, violating God’s holiness. I knew I needed saving. But I knew nothing of a real relationship with God. After all, how do you have a relationship with an angry, distant Being who finds pleasure in striking sinners dead?

So, while I’ve always believed in God, I’ve never really known Him. And I’ve never really trusted Him, other than to destroy me if I stepped out of line. I’ve been afraid of Him all my life.

Step Two says that I will come to believe that God can restore me to sanity. I firmly believe that God can do ANYTHING. I have always believed that. The problem for me, however, has always been “why would He do something for ME?”

That makes Step Two all about TRUST. Trust that a Higher Power will do something for just for me, something that I can’t do for myself. It means trusting God, when I’ve been unable to really trust anyone in my life.

The step workbook I’m using asked me to list all the people in my life that was able to trust in my formative years. The prompts suggested the following categories: parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, teachers, coaches, ministers, etc. I pondered that question for hours and the list I came up with consisted, in its entirety, of only three people: my two sisters and my high school English teacher.

Just those three. Mom was unpredictable. Dad was absent. My aunts and uncles were dysfunctional. My minister was judgmental. My Boy Scout Leader was an escaped Nazi war criminal. There was no one else I could go to.

So I stuffed my fears, frustrations and anxieties and started looking for love – in all the wrong places, it seems. Looking for someone to soothe my inner pain and make me a whole person. And when a woman was not available, porn and masturbation filled the void.

As I’ve mentioned, that approach didn’t solve any problems and made things much worse. My life had truly become unmanageable.

So, now I’m faced with the reality that I need God more than ever ( actually, I’ve always needed Him this much; I just wouldn’t see it). How do I trust Him enough now to let him help me?

As I’ve written previously, I’ve come to understand that God loves me because of Who He Is and not because of who I am or am not, or what I do or don’t do. With an understanding of His unconditional and unrelenting love, I think I can do it. I now find myself wanting a relationship with Him, rather than trying to run away and hide.

It’s been a long road, but I now firmly believe that God can and will restore me to sanity. It’s not something I can do for myself. I now see Him working in every facet of my life. From the insight He has given me into what makes me tick, the many fellow travelers that He has placed in my life and the daily help of His Spirit to stay away from addictive behaviors, He is changing me.

And I haven’t even gotten to Step Three! That will be the subject of my next post.

As always, thanks for visiting.

Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)