Who am I to talk?

Hi, my name is John and I am a sex addict, food addict, and a codependant.  I also have other cumpulsive tendencies.

My fascination with sex began in middle school probably.  I was interested in it and so were all of my friends.  Although I was LDS, I was desperate to fit in and fitting in meant a lot of talk regarding the opposite gender and what they looked like naked.  One night a friend and I spent a night looking at pn that he had stolen from his next-door neighbor.  A year or so later, I stole it all from him.

When I would meet with my bishop over this time, I would minimize my problem.  It was just pictures, right?  Nothing I saw on cable was rated X, right?  Try as hard as I might, I never actually saw anything “hard-core”.  In talking with my bishop, he came to the conclusion that I was just a teen, with curiosity, not with a compelling need to look at pn.

I eventually went on a mission, stayed clean on my mission, and found the internet when I got home.  It was around this point that the habit went from curiosity to compulsion.  The internet brought unfettered access to things I had never seen, but had thought quite a lot about.  I was hooked from day one.

This continued until I got married, paused for a while during the beginning of my marriage, and then came back in earnest when I went away to graduate school.  In my reading, I have found that childhood sexual abuse is a big factor in addicts.  A second one, and the one more pertinent to me, is suddenly finding yourself in a heavy responsibility, low accountability position.  This is also known as grad school.  I was pretty much allowed to teach myself and, in the fairly liberal college I attended, there were no filters on the computers.  As my stress mounted and my abilities to cope weakened, I turned more and more to pn to bring me calm, peace, and happiness.

That, of course, is ridiculous.  Pn destroys homes, drives families apart, hurts those who watch it and those who produce it.  However, in my warped state, it became my one sure source of solace.  My wife couldn’t be it, because she expected things of me.  My children couldn’t for the same reason.  Pn didn’t expect anything (since so much of it was free for the taking on the internet) and it provided escape from my worries and responsibilities.  Pn was a drug for me.

I talked with a series of bishops about the problem.  We all agreed that it was a bad idea and that I really ought to stop.  They all said that my wife would some day catch me and that that would be bad.  The fact that she never did didn’t really seem to matter.  I dutifully reported weekly to my bishops, who were all kindly men doing the best they could with an apparently repentant serial sinner.  While I wish they had known what they were doing (enabling me), I wish I had known to.

One day, I had a bishop who suggested that I start going to a 12 step group.  I balked.  That was for people with addiction.  I had a bad habit, true, but I would be able to shake it if I really applied myself.  I really would this time, too.  When I returned 3 weeks later, having failed again, I agreed to go.  I didn’t have an addiction, but I would seek help wherever I could find it.

I went to the meeting (it was a local version of AA/NA) and I was floored.  Here were people talking about their problems with alcohol and drugs and the verbs and adjectives were just the ones I would have chosen (only the nouns differed).  All the nouns except one, that is.  I know began to understand that I was an addict.

For a long time at that point I had been using addict to describe myself to bishops.  I would begin the inevitable meeting with, “I’ve been addicted to pn since I was 15”.  What I meant was: I have been looking at pn since I was 15 (earlier even) and I have never really quit except over the course of my mission.  But that isn’t what an addict is.

Have you ever seen the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indy is trying to save his Nazi girlfriend and she is trying to grab the Holy Grail?  He tells her to grab his hand and he’ll save her.  He is well within reach; she could easily get out, but she really wants that grail.  She keeps reaching and reaching for it, in spite of the danger, in spite of reason, in spite of all self-interest.  That is an addict.

I had thought that an addict was someone who would quit if given the right motivation.  If I just had the right set of circumstances (punishments, embarassing moments, and bad luck) I would quit in a heartbeat.  An addict is someone who recognizes all that, sees it coming, watches it happen, and then just keeps on plowing ahead in addiction.  In AA, they talk about reaching rock bottom.  What this means is that the addict has reached a point were they don’t feel like they can sink any lower.  They’ve looked at themselves in their squalor and decided that this simply cannot go on.  With that in mind, some addict seek out their rock bottom in the hopes that hitting it will straighten them out.  What they fail to understand is that there is no bottom.  You just reach a point where you are tired of falling down.

Anyway, I’ve hit it.  Several times.  I am an addict, not because I look at pn, eat too much, or try to much to control my situation.  I am an addict because those things could easily become all I do and I wouldn’t even notice and I wouldn’t even care.  That is what makes me an addict.

Is being an addict depressing?  Not at all if you do it right.  That will be our topic tomorrow.

Take Care