Addicts’ Best Advice: Developing Sobriety and Healthy Sexuality

1. Pick an extended period of celibacy. The top priority for most addicts is to experience a period of celibacy. Celibacy helps the person clear out unmanageability, to feel more alive again, and to reclaim repressed memories of childhood abuse experiences.

2. Be patient with yourself. Gentleness, kindness, and self-care are watchwords. To change after years of compulsion is a huge task, and you’ll make mistakes. As one addict observed, “Don’t make self-love contingent on abstinence.”

3. Accept yourself as a sexual person. Sexuality and sobriety are, as another addict advised, “possible, and not a contradiction in terms.” Sex is not dirty and shameful. You must distinguish between your addiction and your sexuality. Sobriety is about addiction, not about sexuality. Your sexuality is to be embraced, not denied.

4. Work on boundaries. Boundaries give you clarity about your sexual self and help to reduce shame. As guidelines, they serve as a bulwark against denial, obsessive thinking, and relapse.

5. Keep others current. Always keep others in your program informed about happenings in your sexual life. When in doubt or when confronting something new, check it out. Have no secrets, and avoid becoming isolated.

6. Understand that things will change. Your vision of your sexuality will change dramatically with time in recovery. You will need to allow yourself that process.

7. Accept the imperfect. The search for perfection in relationships and sex cause many addicts to discard relationships before they recognized their potential. The search was futile and the losses real.