Taking the First Step

Step One: Admitting Powerlessness

I’m in recovery from sex and love addictions. I regularly go to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) meetings, which is a recovery program based on the 12-step process pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I have to make a confession: even though I quit drinking alcohol over 20 years ago and have not had a drink since the day I decided to quit, and even though I went to quite a few AA meetings in the first year of my recovery from alcohol addiction, I was never willing to take Step One. I never admitted I was powerless before alcohol. It didn’t make sense—how was I powerless, when there I was—sober. I’d quit. I looked around the AA meetings, waiting for someone to explain how I was powerless when all it took for me was to stop drinking. No one could do it, so I stopped going to meetings and I never went through the steps.

The Real Moment of Clarity

Twenty years later, when my sexual addiction caught up with me—after I allowed it to cause the end of my marriage and to break up my family, and after I allowed my sexual behavior to hurt those I loved—I ended up back in the rooms. And there I was again: confronting the issue of powerlessness. I held one of the SLAA pamphlets in my hand, and of course the first thing I read was, “We admitted we were powerless over sex.” This time, though, I knew I couldn’t leave the program. Sitting in the meetings, sharing and listening, was saving my life. It was helping me to make sense of things that had been dogging me for decades. I was still unwilling to admit that I was powerless over sex, for the same reason I was unwilling to admit I was powerless before alcohol: I’d quit my sexual acting out. Even though my sexual sobriety was new, I knew it was going to stick: it was life or death. Not life or death in the same way as alcohol, which to me was quite literally life or death, but it was life or death on an emotional level: I could keep tearing myself to pieces, going from one romantic disaster to another, or I could take responsibility, view my behavior through the lens of sex and love addiction and take steps toward a healthy life.

I chose life—but on my own terms. I made a deal with myself: I’d do the steps, but I’d just skip over that inconvenient little first step about powerlessness—because I did not feel powerless. I looked over the steps and decided to skip down to Step Four. I decided I’d take a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. I didn’t consult any worksheets—I just assumed it meant that I’d make a list of what my main personality shortcomings were—it was only later that I realized that this was not at all what was meant by taking my personal inventory. Sure, it was part of it, but not the whole thing. Anyway, I set about making a list of what I perceived as my major faults:

• Selfish
• Bullheaded
• Arrogant
• Won’t listen to other people

That’s when it hit me. The lightbulb went off. Party horns blared; whistles blew. No wonder I won’t take Step One, I thought. I’m too bullheaded and arrogant to admit that I’m powerless. Not only that, I won’t even listen to other people when they give me good advice—I have to learn it for myself, the hard way. I smiled to myself and realized that even though I’d started in the wrong place, that wrong place had led me to where I needed to be: at the beginning.

Admitting Powerlessness: Cultivating Humility

That day I had my first real dose of 12-step program-related humility. I went to a meeting, sought out an old-timer and told him my thoughts. His reaction: just work the steps. Leave your opinions about the steps at the door, because they don’t matter. What matters is that you do the steps. One step at a time, one day at a time. That “aha!” moment has trickled down into so many areas of my life, it’s almost impossible to describe them all. From work, to play, to recovery—the simple ability to admit powerlessness, to reach out to someone and to ask for help, has made all the difference.

By Angus Whyte