Chapter 14 – How Not to Be Your Own Worst Enemy
In one recovery group that I was a part of, there was an individual whom I will call ‘Bob’ (not his real name). Bob was in his late forties and was a very smart and successful professional, who also happened to have a sexual addiction. This particular group was a Life Recovery group, and we studied the Life Recovery Guide and followed their group principles. Additionally, we studied various other books on the topic of sexual addiction. No matter what book we were studying or what topic was being discussed, Bob was always able to provide chapter and verse on it. He could quote the principles, tell you what each author said about whatever topic being discussed – the guy was a walking encyclopedia on sexual addiction recovery. But Bob never seemed to have any long term sobriety.
As I recall, it seemed that Bob reported having lost sobriety within the last week or so at practically every meeting he ever attended. I eventually learned that Bob had been attending sex addiction recovery groups for about fifteen years at that point, but he still wasn’t seeing long term victory. Now, to be fair, Bob had made improvement from when he started. He had apparently stopped the most harmful forms of acting out that initially brought him to the recovery group, but he was still breaking sobriety on a regular basis to consume pornographic material. What was the problem?
After sitting in many group recovery meetings with Bob, I began to see some of the chinks in his armor. As I continued to gain sobriety, Bob continued on what appeared to be an endless loop of attending meetings, getting a week or so of sobriety, and breaking sobriety again and again. And yet, I noticed that no matter who was sharing in the group, Bob always had the answer to what they were doing wrong or what they should do differently to get better. Now, those of you who are new to recovery may not know, but this is commonly called cross-talk, or working someone else’s program – something strictly forbidden in most twelve-step recovery groups. We are there to support each other, not to fix one another (a lesson for another chapter).
The group leader, to his credit, corrected Bob time and time again. Finally, it got so bad that he was temporarily banned from the meetings for the constant cross-talk. I later learned that this wasn’t the first time Bob had been banned from the group for the same behavior.
Bob, you see, was his own worst enemy. It wasn’t the demons that plagued him, or the temptations that surrounded him, or the other people in his life that weren’t living the way that they should that kept Bob from getting free from his addiction – it was Bob himself. One of Bob’s main problems was pride. He wasn’t a humble guy. Even in the midst of his continued failure to experience long-term sobriety, I never heard him express real remorse or contrition. It was always someone else’s fault. His frequent scapegoat was his wife, how she wasn’t giving him the physical affection he desired (a fact that directly stemmed from his previous behavior in acting out – another fact I learned later). He often mentioned this as an excuse right before he confessed to having broken sobriety again.
So why do I share this story? Bob’s story illustrates something that I have seen played out time and time again in my own life and in the lives of many people with whom I have been in recovery. Time and time again I have seen guys plateau in their program, having made some progress, but then seeming unable to get any farther in their quest for increased sobriety. After considering why this seems to occur, I have come down to two main ingredients: pride and lack of desire.
To put a positive spin on it, I have never seen anyone in a good recovery program who wants to change and who is truly willing to humbly work their program that didn’t get progressively better over time. If you possess the humility to submit to the wisdom of others in the program who have more sobriety than you do and the desire to be free from your addiction to pornography, you can be free.
Time and time again I’ve seen guys come with a particular issue who are given sound advice (which they often ask for) about how to address their particular situation. They implement the advice for a while and achieve great results. Maybe it’s a boundary about not surfing the internet after 6:00 p.m. or something like that. They do this for a while and see a precipitous drop in acting out. They begin to achieve one, two, three weeks of sobriety. Then the bottom drops out. They begin reading the news sites after the wife has gone to bed, and in no time they are reporting that they binge-watched six hours of pornography on the internet. Why did they stop doing something that was working, even by their own admission? I have come to believe that in the majority of cases it is because, deep down, they aren’t yet committed to being free no matter what the cost. At that moment when they are faced with continuing to limit their freedom willingly by not viewing the internet after 6:00 p.m., they decide that they value their freedom to surf the internet more than they value their freedom from addiction to pornography.
Like Bob Dylan famously said, “Everybody gotta serve somebody sometime.” True freedom is only the ability to choose whom you will obey, not if you will obey. Obeying yourself is what you’ve been doing that got you into this mess in the first place. If you want to get out, you will have to choose to obey someone else. Like it or not, you will obey someone. Who’s it gonna be?
When a person in recovery truly hits bottom, they will begin to change and begin a successful journey to freedom from pornography. You can have several ‘bottoms’ on your journey to freedom, but each one is significant and is followed by increased sobriety. Sometimes this sobriety can take a while to manifest, but just ask anyone who has been in recovery for anything – pornography, alcohol – you name it – and they will tell you that they can trace long term sobriety back to a time when they hit bottom. Hitting bottom, simply put, is getting to the place where you want to be free from your addiction bad enough to do anything so that you can be free, and you are humble enough to quit thinking you know jack squat about how to do it. When you get to that point, you are finally ready to heed the advice of others in your recovery group who are farther along than you are in sobriety, which almost always leads to increased sobriety for yourself.
When I first started recovery, I came to that first group a humbled man who was ready to change. I recall saying at the time that if they told me I would get free from my addiction by eating grass, then I was going to eat grass. I followed the teaching and advice from the recovery materials and the group leaders, and I began seeing rapid and significant freedom from my addiction. If you come to recovery with the same attitude and willingness, I am convinced that you will too. It won’t be easy, but it sure as heck beats getting the life sucked out of you and losing every important relationship in your life because of your addiction to pornography. Believe me, I’ve been there, and I know.
I’ve been in recovery for a little over nine years now. I’ve been sober from acting out with pornography for years, yet there are other addictive habits I’ve discovered along the way that needed to be addressed. One particular addictive habit had, until recently, plagued me for the entire time I had been in recovery. No matter what I did, it seemed to keep hanging on. The frequency of acting out in this particular way had decreased dramatically over the years, but it had never been truly vanquished. I struggled and struggled to identify why I had continued to act out in this way. I mean, I had been in recovery for years and seen years of long term sobriety from alcohol and pornography, so why had this little pesky habit still been hanging around?
I’ve thought about this extensively, and come up with a variety of possibilities over the years. Eventually, I realized that the truth was that I had continued to give myself an excuse for the behavior. There was always a reason why it was so difficult to give it up completely. Resist as I might – and I did resist the temptation frequently – I would always end up giving in sooner or later. A little over three months ago I finally hit bottom with this behavior. I finally decided that I no longer cared about the temporary benefit that I was achieving by continuing the behavior at the expense of true freedom. I finally decided that, regarding that bad habit, I wanted to be free from it no matter what. I am happy to report that since that time I have not participated in that behavior. As of this writing, it has been a little over three months since I have acted out in that behavior – by far the longest period of sobriety from it that I can ever recall. I’m not just pulling this stuff out of a hat. I’m living it. I want to encourage you that it works for me, it has worked for countless others – a number of whom I have known personally – and it will work for you if you are ready to humble yourself and work your program in a good recovery group.