Recovery – Jacob The Addict

Trauma Narratives vs. God Narratives

Hi, my name is Jacob (not my real name) and I’m a grateful, recovering sex and love addict. I’ve been sober for three years, four months and 14 days.

It’s been over a year since I’ve posted anything here. Things have been incredibly busy, with so much going on that I just haven’t found time to share.

My wife, Amy (not her real name) has been digging deep and unpacking a lot of trauma that I’ve caused her over our many years of marriage. I’m very proud of her for her hard work, but going through the conflict that I avoided all those years really sucks. More on that in a separate post.

At worship last Sunday, one of my brothers shared a devotional thought before communion that really moved me. He is a counselor and shared from his experience working with traumatized people.

Trauma leaves people to deal with three things, he said.

The trauma itself,
One’s feelings about the trauma (if one can dig deep enough to find them), and
The trauma messages (or narratives) that get coded into one’s thinking.

He said that last one is the hardest to deal with because the narratives sre deeply embedded. They includes“I am” statements such as:

“I am worthless”
“I am ashamed”
“I am damaged”
“I am hopeless”
“I am less than”
“I am a failure”
“I am unloved”
“I am trapped”
“I am numb”
“I am alone”
“I am lost”

He went on to say that when we allow God into our trauma, He will replace the trauma narratives with His narrative – if we allow Him to.

As the Great I AM, He is able to replace any and all of my “I am” narratives with His far superior “I am” narratives. His narratives for me include statements like:

“I am loved!”
“I am forgiven!”
“I am redeemed!”
“I am clean!”
“I am found!”
“I am free!”
“I am a new creation!”
“I am His!”
“I am enough!”

I’ll confess that when started recovery just over three years ago, I thought I was stuck with my narratives because they were my narratives. Little did I know or understand that by allowing God in and surrendering control of my narratives He would replace them with His.

I’m still far from perfect here, but making significant progress. His narratives fun through my head far more often these days than my old, trauma narratives.

Just another case of “Let go and let God” in action.

If you have questions or just want to know more about how this worked for me, you can reach me at jacobtheaddict@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading.

Blessings, Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)

Step Four … Finally

(Note to Readers: I wrote this post in August of 2023 but never posted it. I’m posting now, so that I can follow up with an update on my progress.)

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 20 months and sober a little longer than that.

As is the norm, it’s been a while since I have posted a out my step work. I could give you a million reasons, but then that’s what addicts do. They give you excuses for why they aren’t focused on important things.

I posted about finishing Step Three back in October. So that we stay on the same page, I’ll remind you that 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.

Since that post, I’ve been working Step Four, which reads:

Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

It took me well over six months to finish Step Four for a number of reasons:

Recovery fatigue. Even at a relatively easy pace, recovery takes A LOT OF TIME. One or more meetings per week, group therapy every week, individual therapy every other week, making phone calls, journaling, meeting with my sponsor, being a sponsor to others. Note that “step work” wasn’t in that list, because it is on top of all those other things. So, sometimes I just need a break, and step work is usually what gets put off.
The REST OF LIFE. Recovery is extremely important but it can’t be the only thing in life for me. I have a family. I have a job. I have other obligations. And I’m trying to rebuild a life with Amy. Finding the balance isn’t easy, but these other things have to get their share of me.
Step Four is HARD. Maybe this is the real reason it took me so long to work through Step Four. The work that is required is very, very difficult to do. A “searching and fearless” review of one’s life isn’t for the faint of heart. Deep reflection on the moral failures of life is very easy to put off. More about that in a bit.
I’m a perfectionist. Many addicts are. I don’t want to say I’m done with and Step until I’m certain that my sponsor, Dan, will give me a “100” on it. That’s not the way the Steps work, by the way. It’s just how I approach nearly everything in life.

In spite of the competing priorities, in spite of the excuses and all the other reasons I can come up with, I made it through Step Four several months back.

I “made a searching and fearless moral inventory” of myself. I know it’s incomplete. My sponsor and my fellows tell me that I’ll revisit Step Four many times in the future. Each time a previously unidentified “defect of character” rears its ugly head, I’ll need to do a Step Four on it.

There are many ways to work the steps, and at least as many guidebooks are there are methods. The one that I’m using is “A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps” by Patrick Carnes, PhD. Carnes himself is a recovering addict – one of the same stripes as me – so he knows a thing or two about the Steps. But don’t let the title fool you. Don’t think “gentle” means “easy’. The soul work required for Step Four isn’t an easy thing to do, but Carnes provides a gentle a way as possible to do it.

Some methods have the traveler (my favorite term for an addict on this journey) make a list of everything they’ve ever done wrong. The piece(s) of candy they pilfered when they were six, the time(s) they cheated on a test, the time(s) they slept with a stranger, the time(s) they drove drunk, the underreported income on income tax returns, the pills they stole form others, etc. – plus all the lies they told to cover these things up.

However, Carnes doesn’t take that approach. He goes much deeper than what specific things I did wrong. He truly goes after “defects of character”. He had me go through: anger and the misuse thereof, avoidance of responsibility, paralysis by fear, unhealthy risks and self-sabotage, shameful incidents, feelings of unworthiness and more. Carnes also makes you pause to reflect on positive expressions of anger, healthy risks taken and conquered fears. This helps the process from becoming overwhelming.

I think the “make the long list” method would have been easier. That list could have been made with only a minimal amount of shame. Digging into the drivers behind the moral failures is much more difficult and mentally exhausting work. Each time I went back to the workbook, more examples of the real issues came to light.

But Carnes’ method makes the traveler confront these defects of character and see how anger was used to manipulate others, how the taking of risks impacted more people than just me, how self-sabotage killed so many relationships and hurt the other party, and how shame is such a repetitive cycle.

I can honestly say the Step Four was more than just an exercise for me. It made me face my “defects of character” which are now much more obvious to me and are now accompanied by a willingness to face them. That means acknowledging them when they rise up and admitting that I’ve wronged someone when necessary.

It’s gonna take a whole new way of living to overcome these. The kind of living that only God can make possible.

As always, thanks for visiting.

Jacob The Addict (jacobtheaddict@gmail.com)

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)

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