Sex and Love Addiction: Working Through the Steps
As an individual who’s on the road to recovery from sex and love addiction, I have a confession: working the steps has been an exercise in humility. My recovery fellowship is Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA). It’s a program based on the 12-step model pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. This article is about working the steps and about two of them in particular: Steps Two and Three. I’m writing this because I’m almost 100 percent certain that I’m not the only one who has struggled while working the steps. Here are the steps I’m talking about, written out in SLAA language:
- We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood
God.
You see, my problem is that I’m not religious—and even though Step Two clearly states “… as we understood God,” I have to confess that in my heart of hearts, I do not have an understanding of capital “G” God. If you’re struggling with sex and love addiction and you can relate to what I’m talking about, please understand that contrary to what some people may think and contrary to my doubts about the “God” aspects of the 12 steps, my issues with “belief” and “understanding” do not mean these steps cannot work for me. My issues do not mean that I cannot benefit from taking each and every step, and they most certainly do not preclude me from making a full and healthy recovery using the 12-step model.
Steps Two and Three: A Personal Understanding
After spending weeks turning myself inside out with semantic gymnastics around what I did and did not believe, I finally asked one of my recovery partners—who was acting as my temporary mentor and who had told me he was an atheist—what I should do about my issues with Steps Two and Three. He summed it up perfectly when he said, “Your personal issues with the existence or non-existence of God are irrelevant. What’s important is your recovery. Work the steps. Just do it. Just find your way in and don’t worry about it.” That day it all clicked—I found my way in. Here’s how I did it:
Step 2: I realized that “a Power greater than myself” was right in front of me: it was the program itself. It was my fellowship. It was the collective power of every person who has ever sat in a meeting and said the words, everyone who has ever shared and everyone who has ever contributed to the wealth of experience and knowledge present in every single SLAA meeting.
Step 3: This may sound like the corniest thing in the world, but my ability to take this step has everything to do with a popular song from a recent children’s movie, a song called “Let It Go.” Yes. Elsa’s song from Disney’s “Frozen.” Yes, I’m serious. Once I’d given myself to the fellowship, to what I understood as the collective strength of SLAA, it was easy to let it all go and to believe that as long as I worked the steps, as long as I did my work on my recovery on a daily basis, as long as I let go of my ego and my will and gave over worrying about the result, then whatever would be would be. I put the outcome in the hands of something greater than myself.
Risk, Humility, Honesty
I’ve just done two things that grown adults should probably never do in public: 1) Brought up God in front of total strangers outside of church, and 2) Admitted that a Disney musical gave me the coping skills I needed to get through the day. The important thing—the thing I learned in meetings—is that if you can’t be honest, if you can’t take risks, if you can’t be humble, especially in front of your fellowship and especially in recovery, your road will be long and lonely indeed.
In plain language, without the coded phraseology of the program, Step Two taught me that I needed help, and the help had to come from outside myself since everything I’d tried up to that point, everything that came from my little island of one, had not worked. Step Three taught me that there are some things in life of which I cannot control the outcome, specifically the outcome of my recovery. Speaking for myself, I’ve learned that there are times I just have to do my hard work, go to meetings and trust the process. After all that’s done, there’s nothing more to do. I have to sit back and be like Elsa: I have to let it go.
By Angus Whyte