Tag: Humility

Step 7

Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Character defects and shortcomings are the same things.  I read that Bill W. was told in a writing class not to use the same phrases twice, so he came up with synonyms rather than using the same words across steps.  Someone should have told him it’s ok to use the same terms when talking about the same things when giving instructions to avoid confusion.  🙂

For me, this is the simplest step.  It’s a prayer.  That’s it.  So I take the list I created in Step 6 of all my character defects and what each one gives me, I’m ready to let them go, so now I just need to give God permission to help me rid myself of them.  I go over the list with God just like I did with my sponsor, and then I ask Him to remove them from me.  Or rather work with me to have them removed.  I found that the removal of them isn’t usually miraculous and instantaneous during my prayer.  I get to work on them in step 10.  But at least I’m now prepared to work through them and have given God permission to work through them with me, having done steps 6 and 7.

The “Lust Balloon”

When I entered the program, I acted out almost daily. As I progressed, I would act out weekly, every two weeks, every month, etc.  It seems to me as though I have some sort of capacity to hold lust within me – I’ll call it a lust balloon. Once I have filled this balloon with lust, I feel compelled to resort to my addiction by acting out my addictions physically.

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Step 1

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

As I spend time in meetings and connecting with other addicts (step 0), I find myself beginning to open up. This is because others are opening up, and nobody is judging them or hating them. They’re just understanding them and loving and respecting them. So I begin to develop a growing trust in the group. I open up about the truth of my situation. I’m not sharing graphic details of my addiction, just being vulnerable. Continue reading “Step 1”

Denial and Gaslighting

In my addiction and in recovery, I had a lot of shame and isolation around what I was thinking and doing.  This shame caused me to hide the truth about my thoughts and actions from others (wife, God, etc.) and, more importantly, from myself.  I couldn’t stand the fact that I was engaging in my addictions, and so I started subtly lying to myself.  This is where denial came in.  Before we go any further, let’s define some terms:

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The Wigs

I had a dream about a friend of mine. She was wearing a wig. After a while, she got an ashamed look on her face and took off the wig. There was another wig underneath it. The same process then happened over and over, each time she removed another wig, each time she got slower and more ashamed as she kept taking the wigs off. Eventually, she got to the point where she got to the last wig. It took her a while to get the courage to take that wig off. When she did, she had the most horrible look on her face as she took that wig off and revealed a badly scarred scalp with patches of ugly hair on it. She was so ashamed of it. I woke up but then received the last part of the dream in my mind. She didn’t know it, but that scarred layer was just another wig and if she had removed it, she would have seen her amazing hair underneath it.

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The Bandage

A certain man got wounded and he didn’t know how to take care of the wound. He did not clean it out, apply ointment, or put a bandage over the wound to protect it. After a while, the wound got infected. It was painful and wasn’t very pleasant to look at and so he put a bandage over it. That kept things from bumping into it and kept it from being so unpleasant to look at. This worked for a brief time. After a while, the bandage started to leak and the pain got worse so the man put another bandage on the one that was already there. It worked last time, so it might just work again. After all, it would be too painful to pull off the bandages and clean it out. This continued until the pain and mess became unmanageable. The only option was to pull off each bandage and then clean out the wound, apply ointment, and then put a bandage over the now cleaned wound so that it could heal properly.

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12-Step Meetings

I have been involved with two different 12-step addiction recovery programs for the past 19 years, Sexaholics Anonymous and the Addiction Recovery Program from the LDS church. Both work for me just fine and are based on the same core principles.  Pick one, find a meeting near you, and attend a meeting this week.  There’s nothing to be afraid of!  You’re going to find people there who are just like you in your same situation.

The inherent safety and anonymity of these meetings permits a level of honesty, humility, and faith in Christ sufficient to allow the repentance process to start working within me. The meetings are safe because everyone there suffers from the same addictions that I do. Therefore, I can have confidence that they will not gossip, backbite, judge, or condemn in the same way people might in other settings.

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The 12 Steps – An Overview

I realized that the core of 12-Step programs aligned with something familiar to me from my religious upbringing—a higher power helping me become a better person. This higher power encompassed faith, self-reflection, personal growth, and support from others. Although I had encountered similar ideas in my spiritual journey, I questioned the importance of revisiting them within the context of 12-Step programs. Previous knowledge alone hadn’t freed me from addiction, so why would exploring these principles again in the context of the 12 steps make any difference? However, I’ve found an answer, and I want to share it with you.

Continue reading “The 12 Steps – An Overview”