Healthy Connections

Before recovery, almost all my connections with women were lustful and dysfunctional.  When I got into recovery, I started disconnecting in those lustful ways from women – largely through surrendering lust and through avoiding people and places.  A few years later, I started to feel a sadness about being isolated away from half of the people around me because of my fears and triggers.  A counselor I was seeing at the time suggested that I try connecting in a healthy way by saying “hi” and getting to know people just as I would a man or someone I wasn’t triggered by.  It is important that I point out that I could not do this earlier in my recovery or these attempted connections would have gone back to being lust-based.

Amazingly, when I said “hi,” the lust disappeared and the anxiety left me as well.  To those to whom I couldn’t say “hi” or that it wouldn’t be appropriate to say “hi”, I would think about going up to them in my mind and tell them “I just objectified you and I’m sorry for that, I hope you have a good day today” without them saying anything back (in my mind) and that helped me as well.  That felt a little strange to do, but it kept me honest and helped me be aware of what I was doing.

Again, I could not do this before a few years into physical sobriety from the addiction, but now I see that through positive healthy simple connections, I can have freedom from the anxiety and temptations that up to that point I just had to wait around for and then let go of when they came along.  It takes a lot of time and complete honesty.  Again, this progression took years and had to be taken in the right order and at the right time, but with each step, I found more freedom and happiness. Years of addiction had really messed me up and it takes a while for God (with my help) to untangle that mess.  I don’t know if I’ll ever run out of things for God to untangle, but that’s OK, because at each stage, from the first moment I stepped into a recovery group, I have had more and more freedom, hope, happiness, and motivation to keep going.