Month: June 2013

I once thought that serenity was unobtainable for me. That was because its inherent definition was the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled, and for the longest time, I had none of the above. Angry, unsettled, and very much troubled would have been far better descriptors of how I usually lived my life. This past year all of that has changed and I’ve come to the conclusion that my amount of serenity is in direction proportion with how much of my will is turned over to the care of God.

Up until I quit drinking and drugs, I can safely say I probably had a zero percentage of serenity in my life. During those years I lived in constant fear around my sexuality, I had many ups and downs from the amount of substances I put within me, and the only moments of peace I felt were when I’d manage to go several days clean and sober.

It wasn’t until I put down all the alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes for good that I experienced my first truest taste of serenity and that day came on June 11th, 1995. In that first day of complete sobriety, I actually began my journey of turning over my will to God. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my entire will. Over the years after that date, I always kept a percentage of my self-will in an active state by acting out in other addictions. In doing this, the same pattern held true with experiencing little serenity. As I engaged in other addictions like gambling or sex and love based ones, I’d go back to feeling those crazy highs and lows and would feel everything but the state of being at peace. In contrast, the moments that I invested more into my spiritual path instead of living in self-will with those substitute addictions, I’d feel a much greater sense of peace within.

Self-will and free will are essentially the same thing and as a human being I am given the ability to live in it all the time. When I’m doing anything addiction based, I’m doing just that and using it to its absolute max. In those moments, I couldn’t care less about anyone or anything else and any ability to feel serene becomes next to impossible. When I move away from all those addictions and invest myself more in selfless behaviors, spirituality, and loving everyone equally and without judgment, my serenity seems to become much greater.

I have eighteen years now of being completely free of all alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes and over a year now from the rest of any other addictions I have suffered from. It’s become so much clearer to me today that serenity can be felt in any given moment. I once thought the clearest picture of serenity was that of a Buddhist monk who meditates for most of the day. While that’s one level of becoming serene, there are other levels as well. As I work out of my life all those troubled areas that my free will got me into, I am able to experience serenity in things that I wasn’t able to before.

The idea of driving around in almost standstill traffic and being able to remain calm was unthinkable for me not too long ago. Now I’m able to and can even smile when people are honking their horns or flashing their lights at me because they feel I’m going too slow for them. The thought of sitting through an AA meeting filled me with dread for a large part of the first seventeen years of my sobriety. Now I look forward to going to them and am able to sit still and listen to the speaker much easier. And the concept of spending any time alone at all brought out great fear within me for most of my life. Now I enjoy being by myself more than not and find I am making even greater strides in my ability to experience serenity when I do so.

This ability to feel serenity continues to evolve as I grow closer in my relationship to God. The more I’ve turned over those parts of my will when I’ve gotten caught up in being angry and unsettled, the greater I have found serenity all around me. Ironically it always was there, I just wasn’t able to see or feel it because of how caught up I was in my own self will. On the days I choose to live in that self will, I often miss experiencing how serene a thunderstorm is, or a squirrel eating a nut close by is, or a cat purring on the floor next to me is, or the beauty of a garden nearby is, or watching my nephews giggle is, and so much more. But on the days when I choose to live entirely in God’s will, I can find that serenity can be found in even a drop of dew on a blade of grass.

The truest test of my serenity though has been when I’m able to remain calm and peaceful even in the midst of when one of life’s storms happen such as someone yelling at me, or when I’m running late to something, or if things aren’t going the way my ego wishes for it to go. I’ve seen progress in all of these areas but I still have many more avenues I need to work through. I know now that when I feel angry or unsettled, that it’s just a sign to show me there is more work for me to do in letting something go before I can experience serenity in it.

The bottom line is that the easiest path to a life filled with serenity is one where I’ve become willing to let go of my self will. It’s one where I’ve turned over my will to the care of God instead. And it’s one where my life experiences a lot less ups and downs and a lot more of that state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

There are countless addictions that someone can get caught up in throughout their lifetime. Some are more destructive than others and I have suffered from many of them. My alcohol and drug addiction wreaked havoc on my mind and body greatly. My cigarette addiction halted any ability for me to remain athletic. My gambling addiction screwed up the ability for me to stay financially stable. But there’s one addiction, sex and love, that affected me on a spiritual level and I believe that it was the most deadly of all of them.

Sex and love addiction is something that people in general don’t like to talk about. It’s one that seems to make most people squirm when I bring it up. I’m not sure if that’s because I am not shy in talking about how it affected me or because of people relating it to their own behaviors. What I do know about this addiction is that it affected me so badly, it took me by surprise when I finally figured it out I was even suffering from it at all.

Human beings are born with the desire to love and be loved. Romantic love is just one facet of it. Most people will look for that type of love at least once in their lifetime in the hopes to find a companion to spend their entire life with. At the same time, on the quest to reach that goal, sex is usually thrown into the mix. And I don’t know of anyone who deep down really doesn’t like sex. Most people seem to want it more than not and many often crave the sensations it brings. For a person that falls into the throngs of a sex and love addiction, there’s a fine line between what’s considered healthy and what’s considered not healthy.

Let me first define for clarification purposes what an addiction is as I think it will be helpful for the purposes of this discussion. It is when one engages in the continued use of a mood altering substance or behavior despite any adverse consequences. On the sex and love level, being addicted to one of them can be hard to identify because the drive for them is really within every one of us. On the contrary, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and gambling addictions come from consuming things that our bodies weren’t born with programming to seek after them. I think it might just be easiest to explain though how sex and love addiction affected my life rather than go into some technical mumbo jumbo from what I have learned in the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) program. While I have learned a lot from SLAA and am grateful for that recovery program, I have found it’s easier for people to connect when I share my own story with this addiction.

My story really began when I hit puberty and began to see I was attracted to the same sex. I didn’t have a family I could talk to about this due to their dysfunctionality, so I was forced to figure it all out on my own. Unfortunately, one of the first people I was attracted to, who I was trying to learn more about it with, was to a grown adult who would end up molesting me. Sometimes I wonder if that incident was the catalyst that began my descent into my sex and love addiction. Regardless, I had also discovered masturbation around that time and the wonderful feelings it could bring my mind and body. I soon sought escape from the pain that came from my molestation as well as the craziness that was happening in my family home and at school where I was picked on all the time. Essentially I ended up creating a make-believe world and acted out fantasies often through pleasuring myself. None of them were healthy for me though. Each would recreate my molestation into more and more images of being dominated by a male. The worst part about it was that I didn’t know what I was doing wasn’t good for me. With being molested as my first true sex and love experience, I accepted a lot of what happened during it as the norm in that arena and moved on in my life with those misguided instructions.

As the years passed I would make friends with a guy in high school who was the quarterback of the football team and began to hang out with him all the time. I was very attracted to him and filled my fantasy world with many scenarios of the two of us together. He was quite oblivious to that and the fact that I had begun to feel towards him some of the first moments in my life of romantic love. On a superficial level, I’m sure none of this seems to be out of the norm to anyone reading this so far. But as I said earlier, the sex and love addiction is evasive. What most people didn’t see and what I didn’t take as unhealthy were the hours and hours I spent in fantasy land thinking about this guy. Or the fact that I began to lie, cheat, and steal my way into spending time with this guy while I avoided my life’s normal responsibilities. This was just the beginning to how my sex and love addiction would evolve.

While I never had any intimate connection with that quarterback, it set the stage for many more relationships to follow in its footsteps. Throughout my college years, I would bring one guy after another into my life where each of them became my knight in shining armor. All of them were dominant heterosexual males, usually hyper straight acting, and prone to addiction like behaviors themselves. When I finally garnered enough courage after college to come out of the closet, I would enter a gay world that made it extremely easy to live actively in my sex and love addiction behaviors.

It’s rather unfair how the rest of the “straight” world pigeon holes gay men as promiscuous but on some level there’s a lot of truth to that statement. I’ve found most social situations where gay men congregate to just be places where one can look at the menu and hopefully take someone home for the night to play around with regardless of whether they are in a relationship or not. Because of my many years of brooding friendships with people where I developed those feelings of romantic love towards that were never reciprocated, I was never a big fan of those random sexual encounters. More often than not, I would meet someone I was attracted to and would become starry-eyed with them on my first date and think marriage before sex. All of them were no different than the ones I had previously chased after, except in each of these cases they were gay.

After coming to terms with my sexuality, it took me 17 more years of sex and love addiction based relationships for me to finally see the patterns that came with it. In each of them, I gave up most of my life for the other person. In fact, I’d consume myself with them so much that I usually would be picking out the china sets and curtain fabrics in my brain before even the first date with one of them was over. I allowed all of them to dominate me sexually and to mentally and emotionally abuse me as well. I did everything I could to love them so much that I often reached the point where I was giving up my own love for myself. What made it even worse was that when there was trouble in those relationships, such as arguments and other difficulties, my answer to it was to have three or four other men in my life waiting in the wings who I was just as much attracted to, if not more. I’d spent time on the phone with them wishing my life were different, luring them in like a spider to its web, giving them false hope that they were going to be my next romantic relationship. And when I wasn’t talking or hanging out with those “next in line”, I was on the internet trying to find more of them to line up. And when I wasn’t trying to find more of them to line up, I would spend hours and hours in a row looking at pornographic images where I would create other crazy fantasies in a world that would never exist. The progression of the disease eventually took me to place where I began even chasing after married men, some who were closeted, and some who were completely straight but just liked the fact that someone was chasing after them. In both of those cases, I disregarded many of my own life’s responsibilities just to try to have more time with them. The sad reality was that in this addiction like all my other addictions, I was just running from being with myself and continuing to remain numb from my insecurity and the pains of my whole life.

So as the saying goes, when that pain got great enough, I became willing to do the work to break free from this addiction. That began over a year ago when I turned my ENTIRE will and life over to the care of God. Since then, I have created a “bottom line” list for myself which is what SLAA has someone do who has suffered from a sex and love addiction. Doing anything on that bottom line would mean I relapsed into this addiction. Thankfully, I have over a year now of recovery in that program and I’m grateful to God because of this. It has allowed me to see how much it once took most of my finances away. It has shown me how I gave up all my morals and did what I had to do, just to keep it alive, even when it meant lying to everyone else, including myself. At the worst moment it had me, I have seen now how it robbed me not only of my mind and body, but also my soul.

I have met many others who have suffered themselves from this addiction and they too had found it difficult to initially find recovery because sex and love were so widely accepted as being just a part of every one of us. Some of their sex and love behaviors led them to video sex shops, rest stops, sex parties, sex clubs, phone and cyber sex episodes, extra marital affairs, getting STD’s, having multiple partners, losing their families and jobs, and so much more. The bottom truth in all of this discussion around this addiction is that while pursuing sex and love may be a normal thing in life, if one is chasing after them with such voraciousness like I did, they may have a problem.

If you think you have a problem with this, please know that sex and love addiction is not as uncommon as you may think. It’s just one that many choose to think is totally normally until it becomes too late when life has gotten out of control from living in it. It really is no different than any of the other addictions I’ve battled and found recovery from. To break free from its grasp was simply contingent upon asking God daily to help me stay away from the things that drove me into it in the first place. There is recovery from this addiction. I’m walking proof. SLAA helped me to initially find that recovery and now God is guiding the rest.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson