I Stand All Amazed

Today in church, for the sacrament, we sang hymn number 193 I Stand All Amazed, and I thought about how wonderful it is that Jesus cared enough to die for me. The only reason I qualify to receive the great blessing is because of my own worth before God.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39)

Nothing I do can ever diminish my worth and my value, and as I have traveled the road of recovery, I have come to see and believe that God loves me. I have no need to feel shame about what I have done in my addiction, and continue to do because of my addiction.

One of the things I did when I started to work to build my relationship with God was look for scriptures that talked about how kind and merciful He is, and it was a wonderful experience. Here are scriptures that I resonated with the most: 

My recovery, I believe, will never end. At least not in this life anyway, so I have to choose everyday what it is that I want: the peace and comfort that I feel by loving and following God (however haltingly I do it), or the misery that I felt for three decades when I was alone on my battle with addiction? I was alone, not because God didn't love me, but because I chose to turn from Him. Now that I have turned to Him every single day, I have hope a better life.

TRUTH

I am a sexaholic, and I have caused great harm. I want everyone to know. I have always skirted around in my journal because of fear of what others my future generations will think of me. Well, future generations, here I am. I am also a liar and manipulator, I am selfish and egotistical, and many other negative things that I am ashamed of. However, I am working to my bones trying to change. I don't want to be the neglectful husband and father I have been, and I don't want to hate myself. I want to be genuinely happy and to make others genuinely happy. I want to be honest and genuine and open. Today I was selfish and tomorrow I will try better to not be that way. I want to do the things that will lead me to where I want to be and to be the person I want to be, so tomorrow I will try again.

Living Amends

 

The hardest part of recovery, I believe, has been to make amends. As I have learned so far, steps 1-3 are about recognizing and acknowledging that I have a problem that has become unmanageable and that I need help. Steps 4-10 are about making it right with those that were harmed by acting out. I believe that I have done plenty of acknowledging the harm I have done (to myself and others), and now I am working to right the wrongs I have done. I believe that the person I wronged the most (besides myself) is my spouse, and she told me recently that I continue to do damage.

During my readings, I came across the true story of a member of SA who had a lot of resentment towards a person in his town and how he reacted negatively to the way the other person behaved. This member relates that he realized he was wrong (regardless of the reasons for his outburst), and then he made amends with the person in the story. Then the book breaks in terms of the addiction, what was happening.

I recently experienced something similar with my wife that to me seemed to be exactly what the book is trying to teach me.

My wife asked me to move my things out of our bedroom into the basement bedroom of our home, then a couple of days later her parents were coming to visit and I didn't connect that I had sleeping in the bedroom that guests use when they come to visit. I had been working and my wife asked me to move my things back to our bedroom after leaving the office. I agreed that I would come home, basically, just to do something that I believed she should do herself because she was the one who asked me to move into the basement. So I arrived home, got the room ready for my in-laws, and left to go to my SA meeting. At face value this sounds pretty run-of-the-mill interaction, except that (and this follows the steps above):

1. The entire time (before, during, and after getting the room ready) I felt resentful of my wife and chose not to say anything. I had (in my head) very good reasons for choosing to stay quiet but...
2. I did not feel good. The anxiety in my chest kept growing and growing.
3. The only way that I could feel less worse was by keeping the resentment red hot
4. I distinctly told my wife that I had received a call from one of the nurses who needed help, so I told her that I was feeling stressed about the timeframe (I think I'm so clever...).
5. Eventually, after stewing about it for several hours, I eventually came clean to her about how I felt. The best way would have been to be open about it right away. I could have been free of the "tyranny of the memory" hours before, and better yet, been truthful to my wife and built up my marriage instead of chipping away at it with dishonesty.

Saying "I'm sorry" is not sufficient for addicts like myself. To make amends I have to demonstrate that I'm changed and can do things in a more positive way. I have to perform living amends. My life is my amend.

Surrender

"...the effectiveness of the whole . . . program will rest upon how well and earnestly we have tried to come to a "decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him." (Twelve and Twelve. pp. 34-35)

This struck me hard because no matter how much I try (and have tried), I cannot seem to consistently connect with God. I grew up surrounded by religion and earnest people trying to (and apparently) successfully making and keeping positive contact with God. I have never been able to do that consistently enough to feel fulfilled. 

I remember being very little and sitting at the dining room table eating lunch with my brothers, and we were taught to say our individual prayers before eating. I somehow learned to just pretend to pay by folding my arms, closing my eyes, and bowing my head, then pretending to pray. I would hold that position long enough to think that I had fooled everybody. I also seem to remember doing that at bedtime when we were supposed to say our personal prayers. Looking back at my life as a whole, those experiences pretty much summarize my experience with building a relationship with God.

I have had experiences that led me to believe that He exists and is everything that I have learned about Him. Here is an experience that I had many years ago. It's not like I don't believe in God or have never felt His presence. However, and especially during recovery, I don't feel close to Him, which makes it hard to comprehend the idea that He can help me. So with that in mind, what is there for me to do? How do I move forward in faith that He can help me?

Freakin' Devil!

"At first, all I believed in was my sickness and lack of faith. Soon, however, I was telling myself, 'I hope it's all true.' Then, I began acting as if it were, and faith in the program itself was established" (Sexaholics Anonymous: White Book, pg. 99, Kindle Version).

One of my (and this will be controversial to some) challenges in this life is my natural sexual attraction to other men that I have felt as long as I can remember. For a very long time this was something that I felt ashamed of and thought that something was wrong with me. I have since...still working on it actually... come to accept that these feelings are natural and that what I can control is what to do with those feelings.

When I disclosed (for the first time) my addiction to my wife, I made sure to include the fact that I experience same-gender attraction. We kept on living and working and I continued to struggle with the pornography and same-gender attraction, never really addressing it and how it continued to affect me.

I believe in the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that the way back to my God is to do what He has told me to do, including not engaging in same-gender behaviors. For me that means no sex with other men.

Unfortunately for me, the shame of my sexual addiction, combined with the shame I felt about sexual attraction to other men, meant that for a very long time (a couple decades in fact), I spent time feeding not only the addiction but also feeding my same-gender attraction through the use of pornography (and my other character defects).

Deep down I felt feel afraid that my strong resolve that I feel today to not give in to my same-gender feelings will wax and wane in the future. However, as I have continued to study and work on my recovery, and have very hard conversations, I have come to understand that (and this may be obvious to most) I am in charge of my future. The choices I am making today will reflect the choices that I make tomorrow. If I decide that I want to give in to my urges of lust towards other men, it will be because I made that conscious choice and not because of some external force that is out of my control.

Here is where the devil comes into play: I believe that the real temptation is not whether or not to give in to my same-gender feelings, but rather that I've done enough work to improve my conscious contact with God, or that I can relax a little and become complacent in my recovery work.

I believe that the devil preys on my weaknesses and makes me doubt my future. He sucks.

Weaknesses

In Sexaholics Anonymous I have learned about the idea of leading with my weaknesses, and that has really stuck with me because it seems to me that I have to live with my weaknesses on my sleeves. I am hard enough on myself and constantly remind myself of my failings and I am constantly trying not to let those things get me down, so it's hard to imagine doing those things on purpose. 

That (started) to change for me when I asked AI (I LOVE Copilot by Microsoft...) to help me understand it. The way I understand the concept now, leading with my weakness means that I don't try to hide them in an effort to elevate myself, but to be honest and open about my fallings which makes me vulnerable and open to change. This became applicable in real life just yesterday. 

I am selfish.

I can hear well-meaning loved ones saying: "no Renato, you're not selfish! Be kind to yourself", and that is true. We (I) need to have grace for ourselves (myself), but I believe that it's okay to acknowledge that yesterday I acted VERY selfishly. After acknowledging that to myself it became easier to deal with the sadness I felt. I suppose that instead of using my energy to hide the problem, I focused on letting go of my pride, which took, I think, surprisingly less energy.

New-New-Newest Beginnings

Lately I have been thinking about a lot of different things because I'm at a stage in my life where I need to change. Please allow me to explain.

First things first, I have an addiction. I am a sexaholic. This means that for many years I used sex and lusting to cope with difficulties. Much like the alcoholic or the overeater or the drug addict, the void inside my heart could never be filled no matter how much I acted out. Worse yet, I would inevitably end up feeling worse than when I started. This is the tip of the iceberg. 

After nearly decades of shame and secrecy I jumped into the abyss of uncertainty and came clean. It was the scariest thing I had ever done, and thought that giving it up would kill me but instead made I realized that I am loved and worthy of being loved. I finally understood what it meant to have a heavy burden be lifted from my shoulders. 

The journey has not been easy, and being back on it once more inspired me to write my experiences. My hope is that I can, as we recite during recovery meetings, "be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with [Jesus] forever in the next." This space will be a place where I'll post my thoughts and experiences, and reflect on how I am surrendering and allowing Jesus to guide me. 

I will also share other aspects of my life that may or may not directly relate to being a sexaholic, that shape me into who I am today and where I'll be headed tomorrow.