Category: Recovery From Addictions

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

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone you loved so deeply but found yourself powerless to prevent that person from doing something that was continuing to harm themselves? Recently, I’ve had to face this dilemma with my partner over his weight issues.

First let me state for the record that I love my partner unconditionally, more than anyone I’ve ever dated before. My attraction to him is on every level, including his size, but lately I’ve become somewhat fearful about that very specific element. For him, those size issues began a number of years ago, when his mother had an untimely passing. During that period of time, he also lost his job and only source of income. To deal with the grief from both losses, food became his coping outlet and addiction where he managed to pack on over 100 pounds of additional weight of which he hasn’t been able to shed much of since.

Although some of my partner’s weight issues are genetic, a large part of them are actually due to mental and emotional stressors, like his mother’s passing, of which he has yet to let go of. While he has just started to become aware of this, he has shown some resistance to fully undertaking the work that is necessary to overcome them. Unfortunately, I continue to face the reality that it doesn’t help for me to point out those areas of work because when I do, it comes off as nagging and control.

While I’ve never been a chronic overeater nor seriously overweight in this lifetime, I have suffered from the throngs of many other addictions. Each of which have held me in their grip until I was truly ready to have a showdown with them face to face. No amount of interference from any outside party, including anyone that was close to me, ever made a difference. I didn’t slow down or stop my drinking or drugging because someone told me I needed to. I didn’t cease my promiscuity because someone told me it was unhealthy. I didn’t quit smoking, gambling, or doing any of the other addictions I was doing because of a single person’s input in my life. The work I did to deal and overcome each of those addictions came from me hitting rock bottom. When that happened, I became willing to do whatever it took to heal from them.

So here’s my deepest truth with this dilemma. I’m afraid of my partner hitting rock bottom with his overeating issues like I did with all of my addictions. None of mine ever ended very pretty. And because of that, I continue to try to prevent my partner from hitting his rock bottom with the one addiction he still faces by commenting on what he eats, how much he eats, and the frequency he eats. This accomplishes nothing more than increasing his anger and irritability towards me and sometimes even more of the addiction itself. What’s funny is that I already know this is going to happen when I act this way towards him. It’s how I would have reacted when anyone did the same to me with one of my addictions. So as I sat on the couch the other night shortly before bedtime and watched him become hungry and eat several weight watchers bars and then desire a salad but pass on that and instead consume a bagel with cream cheese, I felt totally powerless, helpless, and fearful to do or say anything.

That fear is increased even more with the fact that both of my partner’s parents died at relatively young ages in today’s standards with his father having been in his early 50’s and his mother, in her early 60’s. Now that my partner is in his early 50’s himself, my mind has gone to dark places when I see him eating those bagels, or chips, or desserts, or anything that isn’t really healthy for a person trying to lose weight. While he has managed to go weekly to Weight Watchers, his loss of pounds has been stagnant at times much of which is due to him not being willing to let go of some of those cravings and indulgences. Weight Watchers has a set number of points that can be consumed daily and weekly and often my partner will max out those points. It’s hard for me to watch him become baffled when he weighs in and see’s there’s been little change when I know that greater sacrifices are needed for him to get to where he wants.

Given the fact that I understand the disease of addiction, I have had to seriously apply some of that knowledge to what my partner is currently going through. I didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs or smoke cigarettes or gamble or be promiscious because I wanted to. I did it because I had to. The sad reality was that for the longest time I didn’t want to deal with those demons that were driving me to do those addictions in the first place. And I wasn’t willing to do the work that was necessary to let them go because I knew it was going to be painful. My partner has his own demons to deal with which are still leading him to his unhealthy eating habits and increased size. And until he becomes willing to face all of those demons, it will remain next to impossible to reach his desired weight.

I really just want the best for him. I want him to find a life free from those demons like I am trying to find from my own. And I want him to live a healthy life with me for many more years to come. But at the same rate, I can’t make him do the hard work that is necessary to overcome his addiction. I can’t tell him that willpower will never work. I can’t show him that he needs to put God more in the driver’s seat and pray only for His will. But most importantly, I can’t do any of the work he’s going to have to do to get through this addiction and conquer it once and for all.

Al-Anon teaches people to detach with love when it comes to caring for someone who is active in any addiction. It’s just so difficult to sit back and let my partner continue to do what he’s doing especially when I see a few positive steps that can be done to overcome it for him. But as the Serenity Prayer states, it is something I have to accept I cannot change. I am doing my best to apply that principle and often find myself needing to pray especially when I trip up and try to do some more controlling behaviors surrounding his addiction.

Thankfully, it seems as if God has answered one of those prayers. My partner finally went to an Overeater’s Anonymous meeting the other night and really made a great connection there. I hope it’s just the beginning to a new way of life for him. I really do. One that will bring him closer to God. And one that will help him reach a healthier weight by releasing the demons of his past. Regardless of whatever happens, I will always love him and will continue to do my best to support him by letting him find his way to his own recovery just like I had to.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard someone speak at a recovery meeting who mentions that they stayed away from AA for the longest time because they were worried it was a cult. I decided to finally look up the definition of the word “cult” on the internet because of hearing this all too often. As defined in one of the sources I looked at, a “cult” is a group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

So now that I have that out of the way, let me get one thing clear, once and for all; AA IS NOT A CULT and here’s why…

First of all, AA does not have specific religious beliefs or practices. Anyone, from any walk of life, can attend an AA meeting and hold onto whatever belief they have, even if they have none. I have had friends in AA that are atheist, agnostic, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Jewish, and more. And none of them have had to alter any of their beliefs to continue being a part of AA.

Second, there are no membership requirements in AA. As they say in just about every meeting I’ve ever been to, the only requirement for “membership” is the desire to stop drinking.

And third, I have never, ever, seen anything strange or sinister being practiced within any meeting I have attended in AA or any other recovery program for that matter. Don’t get me wrong, you might have to come across someone like I have in a meeting, who seems quite strange or possibly has had a sinister past but that’s about the worst of it.

I decided to do a little more research so that one might be able to see some real examples of cults in this world. The following link is to an article which lists the top ten and I encourage everyone to check it out…

Top 10 Cults

Some of the common things amongst cults that I took away from reading this article is that each of them deal with terrible things such as brainwashing, scare tactics, religious zealots, having to donate most of one’s money to it, killings, suicides, and worse. AA is so far from any of this. The main reason why so many continue to flock to AA is simple. It has helped millions of alcoholics and drug addicts find something that no doctor, book, friend, or miracle cure has ever been able to provide…sobriety. The formula in AA to get there is based upon the 12 Steps that Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith created back in the 1930’s. Over the years since then, those steps have helped countless numbers of hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts like me, to find sobriety and recovery from their addictions.

Here are those 12 Steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The last thing I want to address is a question that often arises after reading these steps. Six of them have references to God which could make it seem like AA really is a religious organization or a cult. Again I want to stress, it’s not. The reason why has to do with the 2nd step. It refers to coming to a belief that a power greater than ourself can restore us to sanity. It doesn’t say what that power is. As the steps go on, while that power is written out in them as God, many in the meetings rooms use the words “Higher Power” instead, because of their issues with religion. For some, that Higher Power has been a deceased loved one. For others, it’s been something in nature such as an ocean or a vast forest. And then there are even those who use the AA fellowship itself as their Higher Power. The key is that power can’t be oneself since none of us have ever been able to find sobriety by relying upon ourselves.

The point I’ve been trying to make in all of this is that AA really isn’t a cult. It never has been. And it never will be. It’s not a religious organization. It’s not a place where people are doing strange or sinister behaviors. No one is ever going to ask you to do anything if you should decide to show up. The only desire any of us ever really has is one to never, ever, drink or drug again. If that’s what you want as well, then I encourage you to come check out AA. It has worked for me, and I know it can work for you too.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson