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.

Trauma Eggs

One of the exercises we did in therapy when I was in treatment was a Trauma Egg. Here’s a rough sketch of the different parts of a trauma egg. Now let me just say that the therapeutic usefulness of this tool is in the SHARING, not in the drawing. That’s pretty important. Sometimes we have a tendency to nurse our wounds; to stroke and enjoy the pain that wells up when we remember the traumatic events of the past. That’s not going to help you get better, it’ll keep you stuck.

Drawing a trauma egg is the psychological equivalent of getting on the scale before beginning a diet and exercise plan. Sharing it is the diet and exercise part. 

Draw an oval on a large piece of paper - everyone has too much trauma to fit on a piece of notebook paper so use the back of some wrapping paper if you don’t have butcher paper. Put a line about 3/4 of the way up.

1 In the lower corners of the paper, write down a few words that pop into your mind when you think of your mother and father. Since my stepdad was a major part of my life, I included him too.

2 Now you’re ready to start filling in the egg. Using only symbols, no words, draw something that represents a traumatic event. Start with your earliest memories and go chronologically but don’t worry if you get something out of order. Draw a little bubble to enclose each representation as you go along. This should take at least an hour if not longer so make sure you take breaks if you need to.

3 – 5 Now it’s time to fill in the roles you played in your family of origin, the rules of your family, and the mission you feel your family gave you.

It took me two days to finish my trauma egg when I was in treatment and we devoted an entire group therapy session to sharing them. Although I thought art therapy was “touchy-feeling” bullshit, I really got into drawing my trauma egg. It was huge, and filled to the brim with traumatic events. When it was all finished I was nervous about sharing because I was worried that maybe what I thought was traumatic really wasn’t that bad. After all, I’ve never been raped or burned with cigarettes.

It’s like telling a little kid that it doesn’t hurt that much and they shouldn’t cry. That’s what I’d been doing to myself even though I know it’s bad parenting. The better strategy, the one I used with my children is to acknowledge the hurt, but insist on proper behavior. If you have little children, you can see for yourself how well this works. The next time your little one gets a boo-boo and comes crying to you, tell him or her “That hurts! That hurts a lot! We have to stay calm and take care of this boo-boo.” Then help the child wash and bandage the wound. Even toddlers can muster the self control to take care of themselves when they don’t have to cry louder to convince you that it really does hurt.

That group session was a strangely freeing validation. My mantra had always been that I had no reason to be unhappy. I had a good childhood. I wasn’t abused, I wasn’t raped, nobody burned me with cigarettes. I honestly thought it was a mistake to bring all that history up. I didn’t want to turn in to a victim, forever whining that if only I’d gotten what I needed as a child then I’d be able to be happy. I was telling myself to shut up, quit crying, it isn’t that bad, it doesn’t hurt.

Instead it was a clear look at my perception of what happened to me with a group of people I trusted. They agreed that some really bad things have happened to me. They said that it must have hurt. They felt sad that those things happened to me. 

The rest of my recovery has been washing and bandaging the wounds. And healing.

When I decided to write this post, I went looking for my trauma egg. I wanted to take a snapshot to upload so you’d have a good visual of what one looks like. But I can’t find it. And you know what? That’s pretty cool. I’ve lost my trauma egg. hehe.

For a more detailed description on Trauma Eggs, buy The Betrayal Bond by Patrick Carnes. It’s an excellent book, read the reviews, particularly if you want to understand why you’re attracted to someone who doesn’t treat you well.

Whiskey in my milk.

 

So here was today’s brilliant idea. I could download an erotic “book” from audible.com to listen to during my workout.

wtf?

For those who read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, there’s a story about a guy who’s doing really well with his AA program. He’s sober and been sober for awhile. So one day while at lunch he orders a whiskey with his lunch. He has some vague notion that since he’s drinking it with milk, it’s okay. Healthy. Because everyone knows that milk is good for you.

I like to listen to audiobooks while I exercise. Everyone knows that exercise is good for you, right?

Unlike the guy in the story, I realized how crazy this sounds before going on a bender, before I slipped.

But damn. It pisses me off. And I’m so f-ing horny I could peel my skin off.

Hungry? No.
Angry? Yes.
Lonely? A little.
Tired? Yeah, but not really sleepy, just cranky.

Sometimes recovery is like taking care of my toddler-self. Although I’m throwing a fit for candy, what I really need is to do my exercise, eat dinner, and go to bed on time.

Labels are defining

 

Sandra L. Brown, M.A.  is a psychotherapist in North Carolina. She runs the Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and the Public Psychopathy Education Magazine. The website is here.

I wonder how different my life would be if I’d gone there instead of a treatment facility for sexual addiction. At the very least I would have had a lot more proof of what happened, which would have come in handy when it came to paying for everything.

My initial interview with the doctor when I showed up at treatment was absolutely awful. In hindsight, I can understand that he was seeing me as a perpetrator who had brought down a good therapist, after all that’s how I presented myself. I was a bad, evil woman who precipitated the downfall of a decent therapist. That must have hit a few buttons for him. It would have been nice if someone had bothered to check my story, since my I’d precipitated exactly nothing. My former therapist was still going merrily along seeing patients and pocketing the money he was supposedly turning over to his order. Oh well. Nobody checked and I was treated like the sexual predator I’d confessed I was.

The interview left me absolutely prostrate. Well, duh. I was a battered woman, not a sexual predator. And I needed safety and reassurance, not help in seeing how destructive I was. You see, with addicts, sometimes they need help understanding that what they’ve done has caused harm to others because they’re in denial. They minimize. That doctor was treating me like an addict, not like someone who’d barely survived an abusive relationship with a therapist. He didn’t know, but it still hurt. A lot.

It’s confusing. The entire time I was there, I was treated as an addict. Well, duh! That’s what you get treated like when you go to rehab. I got diagnosed with all sorts of stuff – practically the whole DSM IV tossed salad of personality disorders. Labels are defining. So when I failed to engage in the therapeutic process, it was due to my personality disorders and my addiction. Not because I’d just come from an abusive therapeutic relationship of 3 years. 

I’m guessing that this other place would have picked up on that. Not necessarily because they’re so much better, but because by going there, I’d have claimed a different label. 

Would I still have problems with sex? Probably. Would I still be a sex addict? I don’t know. I don’t think so. After all, it was the abusive therapist who diagnosed me as a sex addict. So I think I’d still be me, but maybe I’d probably label myself differently.

If you have the time to browse through Sandra’s website, I think you’ll find it’s time well spent. It’s always interesting to see how things look under a different label.

But here’s an important point, and the one I want to really focus on: I got better. No matter what my label is, I am better.

Think about that! It’s pretty fantastic! Even though there were a lot of things wrong with my diagnosis and my treatment, even though I probably got the wrong label and the wrong treatment, I got better. We have an amazing capacity for healing. I was in a safe place with people who truly wished me well and tried hard to help me get better.

Whatever your label is, you can get better too.

Addiction is . . .

Here are today’s words of wisdom from my current recovery reading. This is on 

page 203 of The Survivors Club by Ben Sherwood. 

“The truth is that I am not prone to accidents,” she writes in her memoir. “I am prone to jumping on the back of a horse and riding until the rush of wind in my ears erases the screaming and name-calling between the two women I love most in the world. I am prone to going to the stable rather than asking my (ex) husband if he can please take that . . . bong out of his 

mouth. I am prone to panic over when I’m going to get paid for my last freelance article and whether the check will arrive before the phone bill is due. I am prone to fly off the handle. I am prone to be sad for reasons that I don’t really understand. I am prone to want to see myself bleed rather than admit I’m scared. Accidents are just part of the deal.”

” ‘Accident-prone’ is not a description of my character,” she has written. “It’s a state of mind I enter” Survival means mindfulness. To live well and dodge bad luck, you need to focus on the “state of mind of good possibilities,” Sam tells me, “or the state of mind of safer possibilities.”

Although I am prone to addictive sexual behavior, not accidents, I’ve also had to recognize some important realities, just like Sam has. 

On page 199:

“I am blue-eyed because of genetics; I am math-phobic because of bad teaching; I am redheaded because my hair-dresser stands behind my refusal to accept brown hair,” she writes. But she couldn’t pinpoint the underlying reason for her accidents. 

Interesting, isn’t it? Addiction is a state of mind. So is sobriety.

Some states of mind are more conducive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than others.

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).

LOL!

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.”

What is healthy sex?

There are lots of different, fun ways to have sex. I guess that’s a no-brainer for most people but if you’re a sex addict, figuring out the difference between healthy sex and acting out sex isn’t easy because the mechanics of sex before recovery are pretty much the same as they are after recovery. That makes it easy to lose your place when you’re in the middle of intercourse, especially when the new “good” thoughts you’re trying to think aren’t working for you erotically.

Spouses Need Disclosure

Spouses need disclosure because they have a right to know who they love and what world they’re living in. It’s grossly unfair to pretend that everything is fine when it’s not. As difficult as this is, we’ve got to tell the whole truth. Besides, it’s your only hope of finding long term recovery. If you aren’t going to be honest, you aren’t going to be sober either.

When my husband came to visit while I was in treatment during family week, he made it clear that he really wasn’t interested in knowing what I’d done. Unfortunately, that’s not how recovery goes. Blissful ignorance is the antithesis of recovery. Done properly, disclosure gives you the whole truth but none of the gory details. How many anonymous sexual encounters, condoms, webcams, and affairs are part of the whole truth. Outfits, toys, thoughts, orgasms, and (usually) names are gory details. That’s easier said than done because wanting to know those details is a kind of defense mechanism for some people,  as if the details somehow can delineate the borders of this new world you now inhabit; the real world that you’ve been unaware of.

My husband didn’t want to hear any of this but he needed to. I didn’t want to say any of this but I needed to. Even with help, I don’t think you can be prepared for that kind of pain. It hurt much worse than either of us expected.

The first time I went into labor, I knew what to expect. I read books, went to classes, and learned how to breathe. When the big day arrived, we were a little nervous but more excited than anything else. We were merrily hee-hee-hee-hoo-ing along until that first real pain hit. Ten hours later, we abandoned our goal of a drug free birth and I got a shot of demerol. Eight hours later I was absolutely certain I wouldn’t survive another contraction. Six hours later, after around 40 minutes of pushing, our child was born. The whole thing hurt much more than either of us expected.

The second time around, I was more than a little nervous because this time I knew exactly how much it was going to hurt . But even though I knew what was coming,that first real contraction brought a tidal wave of fear with it. That and incredulity. How could I have been so stupid as to do this twice? How could I have forgotten? 

When you disclose a relapse, you know there’s a lot of pain coming but you’ve got to do it anyway.

I hope I never have to disclose that I’ve lost my sobriety but it could happen someday. After all, I’ve licked the bottle, to use an AA analogy, several times and only by the most technical of definitions have I been able to say I didn’t drink. There are times when I’ve been literally banging my head against the wall because every cell in my body is screaming for sex and I hate, hate, hate that I can’t just jerk off like the rest of the world.

I’ll bet you’re wondering if I’ve told my husband. I don’t tell him every time I want to watch a porn flick or read some dirty stories on the newsgroups; those are gory details. But I do tell about the big stuff. Nearly losing my sobriety is big stuff, so the answer is yes. I told him.

There are many reasons addicts lie about relapses but most of them boil down to avoiding pain. The only reason I can tell the truth because I remind myself that he has the right to know who he loves and what world he’s living in. If I truly love him (I do) I have let him see the real me, regardless of the outcome. Still, it’s like labor the second time around: way scarier because I know what’s coming. I’m sincerely grateful that my husband understands that.