For the love of FRICK!

In the face to face world, I’m the only atheist in recovery I know besides my husband, and he doesn’t go to meetings. In the online world I’m on the same list-serve as two other atheists who are sex addicts. Both men. There’s 21 members over at the Atheist Nexus form for atheists in recovery (here). That’s a big group, mostly alcoholics and drug addicts. Then there’s this guy Chris, whom I don’t know but I read this page of his over and over while I was coming to terms with my conversion to atheism. 

 

Recently someone commented on one of my posts. Comments are so validating! The commenter, bukabuddah, really touched me. The whole comment is here but the part that really got to me is this:

“For the love of FRICK! (not the word I actually used but close enough to allow me to express without being offensive)

I just want to be clean and sober and not engaging in addictive behaviors. I believe that I need a group of other like minded people to accomplish this daily goal. Hence, my problem. Must I deny my true beliefs and rational reality to have a support group!?! I am hoping that this post will bring me some much needed support and love from people who are simply trying to live free like I am.”

I’m really lucky. I belong to a group that doesn’t give me grief for being an atheist. Ever. I’m also lucky because I knew and loved the people in my group before I became an atheist. In other words, I was a full member of the group with a strong sense of belonging BEFORE I became an atheist. I knew I was accepted in a way I don’t think would have been possible had I come in the door an atheist.

 

You cannot do recovery alone.

A few days ago, Rae pointed out to me that I’m giving away my power in the post where I complained about not fitting in because I’m an atheist. When I read that I thought she just didn’t understand what it was like. I phrased it a little differently to myself in my own head. Bad words were involved.

But that comment has been nagging at me. She said the only person who isn’t at peace with me is me. Of all the nerve!

I really was feeling left out and all alone. And angry too. But now I’m wondering,  is it possible that I’ve been suffering from terminal uniqueness? That loneliness that happens when you sit by yourself with your head down contemplating how much different you are from every person who passes by?

Thinking about how vast the universe is renders the whole atheist in recovery thing moot because in that moment, it just doesn’t matter. The awe I feel fills up all the cracks and there’s no room for feeling shut out. There’s no room for anything but awe and gratitude.

Thinking about myself is absolutely a necessary part of recovery. I need to understand what triggers me, how to stay sober, how to take care of myself. All of that requires a degree of introspection and it helps me stay sober. But like everything in life, introspection can be overdone. When it devolves into navel gazing I get the opposite of numinous, which is isolation.

It’s imperative to have others in your recovery. You cannot do it alone. 

Let me repeat that. You cannot do it alone. 

Because no matter how smart you are or how many books you read, you cannot see some of the mistakes you’re going to make. 

It’s like the TV show, What Not to Wear. It’s always a shock to the people when Stacy and Clinton go through their wardrobe. And so far I haven’t once seen someone react to that with pleasure. They know it’s for their own good. They’ve seen the secret footage where they look horrible. And they still argue to keep the clothes that don’t look nice on them. They’re often snide and downright mean to Stacy and Clinton. Those two remind me of good sponsors. They don’t back down and they don’t sugarcoat anything. But they genuinely care. That’s obvious.

Almost everyone cries before the hairdo and makeup day. Letting go is painful. But afterward, people clearly look and feel beautiful and they thank everyone for caring enough to help.

In recovery we say that our friends care enough to tell us our slip is showing.

Most of the leaps I’ve made while trudging this happy road of destiny have come on the heels of cursing some jerk who had the temerity to point out that my slip was showing.

Being an atheist in recovery

Click on the pic to follow the album cover to the twilight sad’s myspace page. It’ll open in a new window and the song that goes with this album cover, cold days from the birdhouse will start playing. An apropos image and song for this post.

I am sick, sick, sick of all the god shit that I hear in recovery. It’s like being in an office where everyone is laughing at a dirty joke – a sharp reminder that you’re different.

Because I’m an atheist in recovery I feel a responsibility to bear witness to the fact that belief in God is not necessary and that despite all appearances to the contrary, atheists are welcome. I want them to know that recovery is freedom, not brainwashing and that you don’t have to self lobotomize to get better.

I spend a lot of time with this. I’ve written a booklet about atheists being welcome, I explain ad nauseam that it’s a spiritual program, that the steps are a way of changing. I’ve submitted articles for publication and offered my two cents to other atheists whenever the subject of addiction comes up. I even have a little form letter that explains how I work step 3, steps 5-7 and step 11 for the mildly curious. I write in much greater depth about how I reconcile the spirituality of recovery with the reality of my atheism for those addicts who are truly frightened that they’ll have to drink the kool-aide to recover. There is a group that keeps something I wrote on hand in case an atheist comes to them seeking recovery. How cool is that?

But as I type this, I think there’s a very real chance that I’m completely full of shit. I’m at the water cooler but instead of dirty jokes, it’s god talk. Maybe it’s time for me to stop pretending that I fit in. After all, as I just read in an article, the fellowship of recovery is not for everyone.

And about that, I feel very sad. And I hate crying over something so incredibly stupid. I know that crying is a necessary part of life and that it’s important to acknowledge feelings, but . . . but it feels weak to cry and pathetic to want to be in a club that doesn’t really want me.

Now if things follow true to form, I’ll feel sad for awhile. By the time I upload the illustration for this post, I’ll feel better. I’ll log off, go wash my face, and things will be fine. Later, I’ll be cranky. I’ll notice that someone left a half empty can of soda on the floor by the couch. Maybe the dog will bark. My husband will definitely do something to pluck my nerves. But eventually I’ll remember that I’d rather feel strong and angry rather than weak and sad.

I want to really belong and not wince every time somebody goes on a tirade about how the original edition of the Big Book didn’t shy away from using the word God or whatever anti-atheist shit they’re spouting at the moment. I won’t act out. And I don’t need to figure this out today; after all, it’s been an ongoing theme for me.

Time to upload the pic and wash my face. That’s the next right thing: putting one foot in front of the other on the path of Happy Destiny.

A sober mind.

I got to thinking today about how important my inner mental landscape is to my outer sobriety. I think it’s what makes sex addiction so difficult to recover from and for the record, I think it’s totally unfair. I can induce the production of every chemical that courses through the body and brain just by thinking about sex. So can you. Those of you who are sex addicts probably don’t need proof of this, but just for fun, let’s do a little experiment.

Sit back, relax and imagine a lemon. They have such a nice clean smell even before you cut them! You’re going to roll it around on the counter, pressing down with your palm. Then slice it in half from end to end. Slice it again and imagine taking a nice big bite out of the wedge.

Is your mouth watering? I’m sure you get the point.

To be sober in body, I have to be sober in mind.

I’m not a huge fan of romance novels; the older I get the less patience I have with poorly written books, but there are some authors I really like. Nora Roberts, for example. Besides the fact that I greatly admire the effect she’s had on the entire genre, the sex scenes are just not . . . conducive to solid recovery from sex addiction. I like her mystery series, the ones she writes under J.D. Robb. I (usually) skip the sex scenes. How strange that I don’t find them toxic but I have to completely abstain from everything Anne Rice has written. Obviously the books she’s written under her pen name are off absolutely limits, but vampire stories should be okay. Except they’re not. I have less trouble with the blatantly sexual scenes in an R-rated movie than I do with the strange intertwinement of sex and death that goes with the vampire genre. To a much lesser extent it’s why I don’t really like the Twilight series. La petit mort aside, I need to be on the side of the force where sex goes with life, not death. Beyond that, I’ve got to agree with Stephen King on the quality of writing. But most importantly, that whole theme of bad boys being saved by love makes me want to hurl. Girls, if a boy tells you he’s dangerous, he’s telling the truth. Leave. 

Interestingly, I don’t notice many random sexual thoughts when I’m doing well. I don’t go around with my mouth watering constantly the way I used to. It’s when I’m not doing well that I seem to be plagued by the desire to fantasize. I don’t walk around with my mouth watering the way I used to, thank goodness. It only happens when I’m trying to stuff some emotion or I haven’t been taking care of the basics (eating, sleeping, exercising).

But even when I’m doing everything right, I’m vulnerable to moments of no defense. Like it says on pg. 43 of the 4th edition of the AA Big Book: “The [sexaholic] at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink [of lust] . . . his defense must come from a Higher Power.” 

Being an atheist, naming that higher power God doesn’t work for me. Instead, I think of it as aligning myself with Reality. Think of it like this — healing isn’t your job. Staying as healthy as possible is. But even then, you’re not going to avoid every wound. When you are wounded, if you care for yourself properly, you’re going to make it easier for your body to heal itself. It doesn’t really matter what you call the healing power. Whether you believe it’s God or the immune system, as long as you clean the wound and bandage it properly, it’ll work.

Be here now.

“To be open to the world in which you find yourself, to be able to experience wonder at its magnificence, is to begin to admit its reality and adapt to it. Be here now. It is to place yourself in relation to it, to say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still. To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe.”

Page 204-205 of Deep Survival.

One of the things that bothers me about my involvement in 12-steps is the amount of religious stuff (okay, okay, spiritual stuff) that I hear. Usually I practice a live and let live attitude and just ignore it. I’m not the atheist apologist for the 12-steps. However it does get on my nerves when people start to rant that “. . . God is in the Big Book” and therefore they’re not going to apologize for talking about Him. Blech. Big Book thumping, just like Bible thumping leads to a direct shut down of critical thinking and that’s not where I want to go.

But I digress.

What I meant to talk about was how I’ve gotten away from “conference approved literature.” It’s not that I think those books or readings aren’t any good, quite the contrary. It’s just that I’ve changed. I’ve grown. And the books that appeal to me now are different, which makes sense, right? I’m different. 

You know that old adage about the three blind men in a room with an elephant? One says the elephant is like a broom with a flexible handle. The second says the elephant is like a rough leather wall. The third says no, the elephant is soft and flexible, like a well worn leather jacket. I don’t remember exactly how it goes, but you get the idea. They’re all right and none of them are right. Books like Deep Survival can be an asset to anyone’s recovery because they help you get a different view of the (recovery) elephant. 

Click on the cartoon below if you want to read a poem that was based on the original folktale.

 

The blind men and the elephant. Poem by John Godfrey Saxe (Cartoon originally copyrighted by the authors; G. Renee Guzlas, artist).

Recovery for Atheists: Deep Survival

Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales is one of my atheist recovery books. It’s a major part of my program literature.

I have a lot of program literature from a lot of programs. I’ve read the Big Book of AA, the White Book of SA, the Green Book of SAA, the Basic Text of SLAA, several times each. I don’t own the Basic Text of NA but I few years ago I borrowed a friend’s copy and read it too.

I also have a shelf full of other recovery books too, as you can see by the picture. There’s nearly everything Patrick Carnes has ever written – the workbooks are on another shelf. My copy of A Gentle Path Through the Twelve Steps is in the car along with my White Book and Green Book so I have them if I go to a meeting.

Recovery literature is meant to be read over and over again so you can glean deeper truths. As you change in recovery, how you understand what you’re reading will also change. That’s how I read this book, Deep Survival. I’ve read it so many times now, but each time I gain new insight into myself and my recovery.

Here’s what I read last night about hope and humility, which are step 1 and step 2 in the twelve steps.

“Callahan knew that few castaways made it past a month; but significantly, he knew that it was possible. He knew something every survivor must bind to his heart with hoops of steel: Anything is possible. Callahan began solidifying his resolve. ‘I’ve got to do the best I can,’ he told himself. ‘The very best. I cannot shirk or procrastinate. I cannot withdraw . . . I have sometimes fooled other people. But nature is not such a dolt.’ He had adopted the attitude of humility so important to survival.”

And here’s something about prayer, one of the biggest problems atheists have with meetings and working the steps.

“Struggling to achieve that essential state of grace and poise, she began praying to keep herself focused. Survival psychologists have long observed that successful survivors pray, even when they don’t believe in a god.”

Being a sex addict is bad enough. It’s scary to go to a therapist and reveal what you’ve been doing, even if you’ve been caught and your secret is out. The thought of going to meetings is scary too. All those perverts sitting together in a room – is that really the club you belong in? And if you’re a woman it’s even more surreal. Is this recovery or my favorite fantasy come to life? Will they be dangerous? Sexy? Disgusting? I’ve been there, done that. No t-shirt, but I do have the chips and medallions to prove it! If you’re an atheist it’s beyond surreal. There’s all the Higher Power stuff and somebody’s sure to say that’s NOT a euphemism for God (yeah, right) and there’s the praying and I don’t care how many people reassure you that it’s not a religious program, it’s a “spiritual” one, it’s creepy. Their hearts are in the right place but it still comes across as a strange sort of culty political correctness.

For an atheist walking into the rooms there’s a very real feeling that you’re between a rock and a hard place. Either you’re going to drink the kool-aid or you’re going to stay sick. But it’s not true. You can be an atheist in recovery. You do not have to believe in God for the steps to work. Becoming spiritual does not mean you will lose your atheism or your ability to think logically and coherently, that’s the very essence of sobriety!

Regardless of your belief system, Deep Survival is an excellent book that will deepen your understanding of what works in life. “Successful survivors pray, even when they don’t believe in a god.”

Getting current

Photo by Ómar Runólfsson

One of the reasons meetings are important in recovery is they give you regular chances to share what’s going on in your life. That’s important for everyone, but we all tend not to share the difficult stuff, which means we can get pretty far down the wrong path before we realize we missed the turnoff. Often this takes place during the “meeting after the meeting” when we’re all standing around socializing. At meetings, you can find people who care about you enough to tell you the truth.

I haven’t been going to meetings. Not for months. I have a sponsor, I’m active in many online recovery groups, I attend the occasional open AA meeting and I’m very good about using the phone. The drive really long, and since I’m not as desperate as I was a few years ago, I don’t need the meetings – as much.

Clearly, I’ve been having a rough time, feeling lost and all alone in the desert. And although that sounds nauseatingly melodramatic to me now that I’m feeling better, the truth is, I really wasn’t doing well at all. So along with scheduling an emergency appointment with my current therapist, I went to a meeting.

Atheist or not, we all have a need to belong and I belong there in a way that I don’t belong anywhere else. I wonder why that is because you’d think I’d feel out of place there. I’m the only woman. Several of the men credit their restored relationships with Jesus for their sexual sobriety, which doesn’t exactly jive with my atheistic view of the universe. There’s a lot of sharing about the necessity of prayer.

To be honest, part of me does do a big mental eye roll at that, but another part of me, the bigger part, is glad to be in a room where I can talk about masturbation being a gateway drug and not have to argue with idiots who think I’m just sexually repressed. Trust me, I’m not repressed. I’m a sex addict. And I fit right in at meetings because those are my people.

I’d like to share what happened, but maybe in a later post. Right now I’d like to just enjoy knowing that the worst of this storm has passed. I’m not quite ready to assess the damage or start cleaning up the wreckage, I just want to be still and enjoy the fact that I did enough right things that I weathered the storm.

The Desert of the Real

 

Photo by Stephan Geyer

Here’s what the photographer has to say about this photo: [It was] taken on the way to Waffra in Kuwait during a heavy Sandstorm. This couch was abandoned just off the road, in the desert. As you can imagine, visibility was almost non-existant! As as small tidbit on this, colours were not modified, this is as shot on the day!

It wasn’t staged. It’s not photoshopped. There’s no masking filter. Remember the old days when a photo was a moment of Truth? I couldn’t have asked for a better iconic representation of all the metaphors I try to pull together in this post. 

MPJ blogs over at The Second Road. “What if this Person is Lying?” is her latest post. It’s profound. You should read it. 

She says, “I can intuit what’s likely. I can evaluate the evidence I do have. I can do my best to judge the possibilities and probabilities based on what I know. I can learn about things after the fact. But I can’t know The Truth about everything right now.”

This is a spiritual awakening of great import. At least, I think it is. After all, isn’t acknowledging this Truth that MPJ elucidates the very essence of recovery?

It makes me think of The Matrix, where Morpheus says, ”You’ve been living in a dream-world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today.” But for me, and I imagine many other addicts and co-addicts, it’s more like this is the world that has existed all along even though you were pretending it was different.

I believed that my former therapist was helping me. I put myself into his care 100%, holding nothing back, and he was lying to me, right from the very start. You know, in many important ways, a therapist is like a doctor. You allow the doctor access to your private self and trust that he or she will be gentle, that any pain you might suffer is in the interest of your over all health. When I began getting worse, I tried harder. I started going more than once a week. I revealed more. I don’t think a person could have been more emotionally and mentally spread eagled than I was during that time. I trusted that God had led me to the person who would facilitate my healing. I’d been living in a dream world.

One thing I can say for being an atheist: there isn’t a whole lot of dreaminess. At least for me, it’s much more of a desert world. There’s compassion, love, fear, anger, confusion, and wonderment so overwhelming it gives me vertigo, but the dreaminess is gone. There’s no more God who’s magically guiding me along. I wish sometimes I could go back to pretending. I liked being a believer. But I can’t. Because it’s not true. There is no God. 

I’m not sure why I see an image of the desert when I visualize Truth. Maybe because it’s sparse? It’s not really an accurate image since there’s a lot of hidden life in the desert, although, come to think of it, that does work as a metaphor for truths that are hidden. I like that.

<cue tears> I don’t have too many face-to-face friends these days. I used to be very close with two women from Church, but we’ve drifted apart. The last time we had coffee together, over a year ago, they both pointed out (just like the Church did) that although Fr. M. (the former therapist) was clearly in the wrong, I do bear a large measure of responsibility. After all, I wasn’t a child. I am responsible for my actions.

But not everyone agrees. My current therapist doesn’t. My husband doesn’t. 

But I do. My sponsor does. I wasn’t well enough to come home right after treatment, so I went to another program. All the therapists there except one agreed that I was at fault.

I wish I knew the Truth. I wish I knew how much of the fault is mine. I find myself wanting to tell the whole story, leaving nothing out so that people can judge me. And then what? I’ll tally up the votes? I got an announcement a few days ago that there’s an alumni event planned for graduates of my treatment facility. I want to go and see if I can talk to those therapists at the second place, tell them the whole story (again) and see if they might see me differently. It’s not that I want to avoid taking responsibility for my actions, I swear. At least, I don’t think so. I just want to know how much of what happened is my fault.

I need to know the truth. 

But it hurts to tell this story. And honestly, if counting up tallies worked as a way to convince myself that something was true, I’d be able to go back to believing in God. There’s sure a lot more people who are going to throw their ballot in the “God Exists” box than the other one. Even my current therapist doesn’t agree with me on that one. But I need to know the truth.

<cue drying the tears> But hey. Like MPJ says, ” I can’t know The Truth about everything right now.”

Just Ask

It seems like the blog’s been on the back burner since the Christmas season has kicked in – sorry about that folks. But finally the lights are up, most of the gifts are wrapped, we’re getting the tree this weekend and dinner is planned. We don’t do all the church and Jesus stuff, but there’s is a nativity scene that’ll go over the fireplace on the mantle. I bought it years ago when I was a devout believer and the kids still like it, most especially they like teasing me about it.

So yes, my husband and I are atheists and yes, we celebrate Christmas. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. I was catching up on reading the blogs I subscribe to and one of them had a post about sex rehab. The post was interesting, but what really caught my attention was one of the commenters. This person was so far off base in his or her imagination of what residential therapy for sex addiction is really like, it was almost funny. I say almost, because I was pretty ticked off.

There was the typical “there’s no such thing as sex addiction” argument. That’s boring and it’s been done all over the Internet. When I see it, I automatically skip over it. But I just had to refute the postulation that treatment facilities actually enable sex addiction. The commenter suggested that by making sex “bad,” treatment actually makes it that much more alluring, becoming the forbidden fruit, so to speak.

As I was climbing up onto my soapbox in high dudgeon, it occurred to me that I was taking this comment rather personally. Kind of the same way I took the hoopla over the atheist group’s sign in the mall. It’s hard for me not to take anti-atheism personally. See how recovered I am? <smile> After all, how can someone who hasn’t been to rehab know what it’s like? So instead of just complaining about someone’s ignorance, I decided that I’d invite questions here, on my blog.

Are you curious about what treatment for sex addiction is like? Put your question in a comment here and in a future post, I’ll answer them.

Not In My Town … Not In My Blogosphere

Possummomma, a fellow atheist blogger has shut down her blog because she and her family have been harassed. The graphic and post is to show my support for Possummomma and her family. 

Thanks to The Friendly Atheist who alerted me, and The Calladus Blog for telling me the entire story.

Whenever you share yourself and your thoughts in a blog you take a risk – that people won’t agree with you, that they won’t like you. You also risk making new friends and expanding your horizons, something that must have been very important for Possummomma, who was often confined to her home due to a medical condition. I don’t think I’m going to be able to enjoy the show, Jon & Kate Plus Eight again. There are stupid, mean people everywhere, including (some of) that show’s loony fans but the rest of us are obligated to stand up and speak out.