1 Year in 12 Steps Sex Addiction Recovery

This week marks 1 year since I finally admitted I am a sex addict. I am not “just a guy with a bad porn habit”
This was a seizmic shift in my consciousness and self identity: when my denial finally cracked and I could see my life had been falling to pieces for a long, long time.

I go to free anonymous online meetings regularly in SAA and SPAA.

To quote the SAA Green Book:

Understanding Denial​

One of the most dangerous aspects of our addiction is our inability to see it for what it is. This difficulty recognizing what we are doing, how serious and risky it is, and how much harm it causes or might cause, we call denial.

Denial conceals the awful truth of our addiction by convincing us that what we are doing is not that bad or dangerous, or that other people or external circumstances are responsible for our behavior. Usually our denial is subtle. We may remember acting out, but we deny the pain of acting out, the consequences, the risks, or our inability to stop. Unfortunately, this often prevents us from seeking help.

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To break out of this denial is almost impossible. For 2 reasons:

1) the PMO addiction feels good. It was my go-to solution for life’s problems; my heroin of choice. Inject here. I don’t know how to do life without it.
2) I am a control-freak. I pride myself on my independence, getting out of hardships, and recovering from other addictions on my own “willpower.”

For this reason, I needed to “hit bottom.”

Hitting Bottom​

For many of us, the spiral of sexual addiction led to what we call hitting bottom. To hit bottom is to reach such a low point—mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually—that we break through our denial. The depth of the bottom varies from person to person. For some, it may have taken the form of an external crisis: we lost our career, our partner left us, or we were arrested. For others, it came in a moment of despair, with the realization that if we didn’t stop, we were going to live a miserable, lonely, nightmarish existence. Or we reached a point where we felt we might die if we acted out much longer.

For me, my bottom was these things:

• Night terrors
• Insomnia
• Muscle twitches
• Daily panic attacks (bad ones)
• Anhedonia
• Brain fog
• Inability to concentrate on complex tasks
• inability to read or type correctly (missing words, misspelling)
• Nerve problems
• Vision problems
• Headaches / migraines (needing ice packs after binges)
• Back pain
• Depression
• Hopelessness
• Paranoia
• Suicidal ideation
• Poor hygiene/fungal rashes in my groin
• Stains on my shirts and clothes
• Erectile Dysfunction
• Extreme social anxiety
• Narcissistic thinking
• Self-victim complex
• Adrenal depletion
• Screwed up sleep/waking hours
• Relationship/ intimacy avoidance
• Shame
• Recurring thoughts of hurting self and others
• Self-hate
• and much more

It was a complete spiral into the abyss of living hell. I acted out so much I got PIED, and still wanted to keep acting out. I couldn’t get any activity down there anymore…
…but I still blamed myself. While I was finally willing to ask for help, and do whatever I had to to get sober (willing to go to any length), I still thought it was all my fault:

Understanding Addiction​

Sex addiction is not just a bad habit. Nor is it the result of poor self-control, a lack of morals, or a series of mistakes. If it were something we could stop on our own, the negative consequences would be enough to make us stop. Many of us tried to cure ourselves with religious or spiritual practice, moral discipline, or self-improvement. Despite our sincerity and our best efforts, we continued to act out. Our behavior eluded all rational attempts at explanation or correction. We had to face the fact that we had a disease, and that we could not stop the addictive behavior by ourselves.

Finally understanding this as a disease, has been a game-changer. It removed so much of the shame and self-hate for my failing “willpower.”

Finding Recovery​

For all of us now in recovery, there came a time when we realized that we simply could not keep on living as before. Our denial cracked and we felt the full force of our unbearable situation. We saw that we were at the end of our rope, and that all that was left was the knot. To continue to act out seemed impossible, and yet not to act out seemed equally impossible. We knew we had to change, even if we didn’t know how. Out of this despair, we came to Sex Addicts Anonymous.

Since going to meetings every day on Zoom, for the past 1 year, things have been really turning around.
I fall asleep easily now reading a book. no more night terrors. My sleep schedule has me up and refreshed at 8am.
I am so much more present for friends and I can actually listen now.
I spend lots of time outside and in the garden. I talk to people all the time and am far more social.
I enjoy cooking and food, music, art, and life like I never did before. At least not in over a decade.

I still have hard times, and yes, even slips. But it’s not my life anymore. It’s a old way of living and an old part of me that is shrinking every day.
I plan my future, not my suicide. I plan to go outside, not what videos I can discover.
My health has improved in so many ways I can’t even fathom, stuff that simply seems impossible. But here I am.

So if I talk about 12 Steps a lot on this forum, it’s only because of these things. It has given me my whole life back.
I work a holistic recovery, and NoFap is a huge part of that. But without 12 Steps I was completely lost…
6 years on these forums of near-constant relapse can attest to that.

Here’s to another year in recovery — who knows where I’ll be then? ) and a list of my recovery benefits (so far).

(P.S. people have asked me for links to the recovery meetings – they are added now to the top of this post)

By cleaningupmyact

Source: 1 Year in 12 Steps Sex Addiction Recovery