Faith – Jacob The Addict

Step Three

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)

Step Two

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)

My Letter to God

Hi, my name is Jacob and I’m a grateful, recovering sex and love addict. I’ve been sober over ten months. Thanks for visiting.

First, allow me to offer my apologies for being absent for the last several weeks. There has been too much going on to post regularly. However, I recently completed my work for Steps Two and Three. I’ll write a bit more about that in another post, but thought I’d share part of the work I did in that effort – the most important of which is my letter to my Higher Power, whose name is God.

Here’s the letter:

Dear God, the Holy One of Israel, the All-Sufficient One, Father of Mercies, Jehovah,

I first learned about You through my experiences with Mom and Dad at church. Sunday school stories taught me about the Bible and the heroes of faith throughout it. I came to view you as an old – though stately – grey-haired being with a long beard, sitting on a gold throne – far away in Heaven. You were very distant, and I suppose I thought that Your holiness required that.

I had very positive experiences at my Mom’s church – a small-town Presbyterian church. The people were friendly, and the minister was very kind and generous toward me. One of the men in the choir used to give me peppermint lifesavers when I stood behind Mom in the choir during services. Those memories are very warm and comforting.

At my Dad’s church – a very conservative evangelical church a few miles outside the town we lived in– the people were more distant. The preacher was harsh. The sermons were always about Hell. I never liked going with Dad to church. I wanted to go with Mom to her church.

When Mom gave in to the pressure to leave her church and join the church Dad attended, I was stuck. Our whole family went to the church of Dad’s choosing. There was not a lot of love in those churches. There was a lot of judgment. I learned that if you didn’t measure up, you were doomed.

I came to see you as an angry God, Who was always watching for the tiniest slip-up in me. Any failure put me on the express train the Hell. I spent many of my childhood years fearing You – not honoring You; just being utterly terrified of You.

In my tweens, I started to understand the real difference between right and wrong. I guess that was an initial understanding of the concept of sin. I reached the “age of accountability” as that fellowship called it. This left me with the (accurate) understanding that my sin had separated me from You. I felt like You were VERY angry with me (a “sinner in the hands of an angry God”) and that, had I died in my sleep, I would have certainly awakened in Hell.

I spent several years terribly afraid of everything because death from any cause would have led to eternal torture. I look back on those days with a huge amount of stress, maybe even some ptsd (BTW, I can’t use the all-caps acronym – I reserve that for those who have gone through Hell in service to our nation).

When I was twelve, the fear of death and Hell completely overtook me. I walked down the aisle at the church we attended at the time, and was baptized by the preacher there. I got into the water because I was terrified of You, not because I was seeking a relationship with You. I came out feeling that I had escaped Hell by the skin of my teeth. I was saved – at least for the moment.

Then, I’m certain it was only hours or days later, I failed at something. I cursed, or lied, or talked back to my parents. And there I was again – a sinner in the hands of an angry God. Baptism had washed away all of my prior sins, but now what? I had to say a prayer of repentance or, had death come, I would have awakened to the grinning face of Satan himself.

For the next umpteen years, it was much the same story. Constantly failing – at worse and worse things – and hoping that I could do enough, be right enough, say prayers enough, go to church enough or do something enough to make things right with You. Your love was conditioned on me doing everything “right” and doing it the “right” way. If I did all the right things in the right way, maybe – just maybe – you might let me into Heaven.

I got pretty good at doing the right things the right way: I went to the “right” church, read from the “right” translation of the Bible, did worship the “right” way, gave 10% of my salary away, hung around with the “right” kind of people, judged those who didn’t do things the “right” way, and was always “fine”. I taught Bible Class and served as a deacon and an elder.

Oh, yeah. And I lived a double life as a sex and love addict.

So, there was a self-righteous me that got very good at doing the right things and feeling pretty good about it. Yet always wondering if I was doing enough to earn Your love. And there was the addict me, treading farther and farther from the core value system that I (accurately) learned from those around me.

The self-righteous me started doubting the “do enough” system two or three years ago, but never could figure out what to do with it. And the addict me was saying “Fuck it. Just do whatever you want. You’re screwed any way you look at it.”

Then I hit bottom. You know the story. Life was spiraling out of control, and I didn’t care about anyone or anything but me.

As it turns out, discovery was the best thing that ever happened to me. It made me realize how broken I am. And how broken I will always be – at least without You.

Once broken, I was open to different thinking. I am so very, very thankful for Richard Rohr’s book Breathing Under Water for many, many things. The most important one – far and away – is that You love me because of WHO YOU ARE, not who I am or am not, or what I do or don’t do. And second only to that one is the fact that Jesus came to do for me what I could never do for myself – restore my relationship with You.

You have become to me a God I want to know and be with. You always were that God, I just couldn’t fathom it.

But I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to have a relationship with You. I want to spend time with You, but I seldom do. I know that only You can make me whole, but can I trust You to do that? I know that You have forgiven me through Jesus’ sacrifice, but is that really enough? I know that I have to live in Your Light, but what if I mess up again? (it’s funny I wrote that – I know I will.) How do I live as a son of the Most High?

So, I guess it’s up to me to take a step – or leap – of faith and determine once and for all if You will catch me. I know that You have been waiting for me for years, just as the father waited for the Prodigal. My head knows it but my heart struggles.

You are Holy. You are Worthy. You are Merciful. You are Love. I think it’s fair to assume that You are Trustworthy. So, I’ll put my trust in You and see where this goes. Will You be with me every step? I need for You to stay with me, for I fear where You may lead me. I can do it if I know You are there.

As I mentioned earlier, discovery has been the best thing that’s happened to me. It forced me to deal with my own failures. It forced me to deal with my past. It forced me to come clean with my wife. It forced me to find a support system that works. It forced me to deconstruct my faith and start over. It forced me to do a lot of things I never would have done without the pain and embarrassment of discovery. And You are using all of those things to create a better me.

I no longer have secrets to hide. I no longer have something that keeps me alienated from my wife, my family and my friends. I have been freed from the shackles of my addiction. It seems kinda crazy, but freedom comes from surrender. The battle is not against someone or something else. The battle for freedom is against myself. And the craziest thing of all is that I’m learning these things from a bunch of sex addicts!

While there is great freedom, the clarity that comes with that freedom makes it much easier to see and understand how much I have hurt my closest friend on earth, Amy. My secrets and my actions have been devastating to her. We are working on rebuilding our relationship and redeveloping trust. We both need Your guidance and Your Spirit to be with us every day. I pray that my working my recovery and our working together on our relationship will bring about restoration and an even deeper relationship than before.

I have great hope for the future but know that I cannot make a successful future alone. My future must be found within You and Your will. I must surrender myself, my pride and my agenda to Your will – every day. Only in doing that will I find the peace and serenity I desire. (Why is that so hard to do from day to day?)

Father, I ask for Your help in all of the things I rambled about above. But I especially ask for Your help in these specific areas:

Help me fight the daily battle against this addiction and its companion, sin in general
Help Amy as she works through the betrayal and pain I’ve caused her
Be with us as we rebuild our relationship, this time with true intimacy, honesty and oneness
Help me to be open, honest and trustworthy in all of my relationships
Help me to live in humility, knowing that everything I am, everything I have and all that I will ever be comes directly from You
Help me to live every minute of every day in the present and in reality
Help me help others with their struggles
Help me share what I am learning about You and the freedom found within You with others

Fill me with Your Spirit. Fill me with Your Love. Pour Your Mercies out on me, for I am a sinner in need of all of Your Mercy I can get.

Your Servant, Jacob

Deconstructing My Faith – Part II

Hi, I’m Jacob, a grateful, recovering sex addict. I’ve been sober a little over seven months.

Picking up where I left off last time …

My old faith stood in the way of my getting to powerless. That’s because it was a self-righteous faith. The kind the Pharisees had. You know the Pharisees, right? The only humans on the face of the earth Jesus took to task. The religious folks. That ought to tell us something about how God views self-righteousness.

Deconstructing my faith worked like this. I imagined that everything I believed was hung on my “Pegboard of Faith”, each on its own hook. I took each tenant of faith off the pegboard and placed it on a table in my mind. Every one of them. Now, I’m picking up those pieces, one at a time, and looking closely at them.

I’ll pick one up and roll it around with my fingers so I can see all sides of it. Then I’ll put it down and pick up another. I haven’t thrown any of them away yet. I need more time to reflect on them.

So far, only two things have gone back up on the Pegboard of Faith. And I’m not sure either one of them was up there to start with. I think both of them have come to me since I started recovery. And here they are.

First, God loves me because of Who He is, not because of who I am or am not – or what I do or don’t do. He loves me because that’s Who He Is. I can’t change a single thing about God’s love for me. It simply is. That doesn’t give me a free pass to do anything I want, but it does mean that I can’t escape His love.

Second, Jesus came to earth to do for me what I could never do for myself. He died to set me free. My death will simply be justice for the sins I’ve committed against God, myself and others. Jesus’ death, however, paid the price of my rebellion and restored me to life.

That’s it. Just those two things on my Pegboard of Faith. Plenty of things on the table to be looked at over time. But for now I rest assured that God’s love for me cannot be extinguished and that the blood of Jesus restored me to life.

Now, what’s on the table? Here are a few things to consider:

Should women be allowed to wear pants to church?
Should a church have any kind of images inside or outside the building?
Can a church support orphans’ homes?
Is it OK to worship with a piano? How about a guitar? An electric guitar? Drums? How about a fog machine?
Can a church have just one pastor? Or should it have a plurality?
Is full immersion baptism the only way to be saved?
Can a church have a praise team or must it be a single worship leader or songleader?
Does the name of the church you attend matter?
Is taking the Lord’s Supper required every week or only on certain days?
Is the multitude of denominations acceptable to God?
Is Wednesday night attendance required?
Can women preach? Or make announcements in church?
Should a church have a kitchen?
What about Sunday School? Is it OK or is it an abomination?
Is it OK to use anything other than the King James Bible?
Can communion bread have salt in it?
Is an “invitation” or “altar call” required at every service?
Must a church have pews or are chairs OK?
Can giving to a cause other than your local church be counted as part of your tithe?
If I say “$@!?%” and get hit by a truck before I can ask forgiveness, am I going to Hell?
Can a divorced person be saved?

There’s a very short sample of the things I’ve heard folks turn into doctrine over the years. Some of those made it into my thinking and I’m glad to have them down on the table where I can see them. I already know what I’ll do with some of those, but others will take a bit longer to come to a certain answer.

But I do know that, even if I don’t get all of them right, the blood of Jesus still makes me whole. That’s already been permanently affixed on the Pegboard of Faith.

Thanks for reading.

Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)

Deconstructing My Faith – Part I

Hi, I’m Jacob, a grateful, recovering sex addict. I’ve been sober for 7 months.

As I’ve told you in the past, I’ve been a Christian since my teen years. And some of you have judged me for saying that. “How can you call yourself a Christian when you are a sex addict?” I’ll deal with that in a future post, but today, I want to talk about deconstructing my faith.

When I came into the recovery journey, I was very self-righteous. I may have had a “struggle” with pornography (the term I used while deluding myself) but I was certainly no addict. And I was MUCH better than those other guys in that twelve step group. In fact, I would go for a couple of weeks to prove that I didn’t need to be there and then go back to normalcy.

However, things didn’t go that way. I quickly realized that I was just like every other guy in the group and that I belonged there. Little by little, my self-righteousness began to fade. It dawned on me that all of those things I did to “earn” God’s grace did not help me one bit in dealing with my addiction.

Little by little, the Spirit began to chip away at my self-righteousness – my attitude, my sense of superiority, my arrogance and my pride. Once that was gone, I was left with nothing of merit.

I hope some of you reading are saying “Well, duh!” at this point because you’re long since realized that you have nothing of worth to bring to God. But for me, all the many delusions of addiction merely encouraged my self-righteousness to try and hide the reality of addiction.

So, I went to church, taught a Bible class, preached occasionally and was even on the leadership board of my church for a while. I did all the right things and said all the right things, I regularly checked all the right boxes and was pretty good, all things considered.

In fact, the Lord was pretty lucky to have me. I had been in church since I was born. I was sprinkled as an infant in a reformed church and baptized as a teenager in an evangelical church. Talk about nailing it! I was about 60% good. So, I just needed Jesus to “top me off” with the other 40%.

When confronted with my addiction and starting to work the steps, I balked at Step One: “We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction…” Whaddaya mean “powerless”? I’m pretty good. I’ve got the Lord on my side. I can’t be powerless. See how hard I’m working? I’ll just try harder.

Except that I’ve been trying to stop my addictive behavior for decades. Time and again, I’ve sworn I would stop only to go back to it – sometimes only hours later.

So, all that “working for the Lord”, ticket-punching and (self) righteousness I had did me no good in battling addiction.

Little by little, slowly but surely, I came to realize that I really didn’t have a real faith to hold onto. I believed in God, but I had a stronger belief in my ability to earn His love. So, my focus was on earning His love instead of living in His Light.

OK, I’ve written you a book but I haven’t gotten to deconstructing my faith. But maybe I’ve laid enough groundwork that you are ready to read “the rest of the story”. That will be my next post.

Blessings,

Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)