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Turned 35 years old in AA sobriety today.

It’s funny, I felt entitled to celebrate.

When asked what I wanted to help celebrate the occasion , I said “Sex”.

I guess I’ll always be a sex addict…LOL

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Lord,

Help me let people go in my life.

God, I know that my picture is on your refrigerator door…but, so is theirs.

Help me to walk away kindly, but clearly.

Amen 

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Bill Wilson read a book by William James called The Varieties of Religious Experience.

It is a stodgy, dry, brilliant and widely encompassing book done in a tedious late 19th century European style.

But it gave him the most revolutionary line in all  of 12 step, ” Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”

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Even if you are not masturbating, using porn or cheating on your wife. 

Even if you are perfectly celibate. 

Even if objectification, fantasy and intrigue are pretty much at absolute zero in your life…

There is still sexual desire…

The AA 12x12 says: 

“It is nowhere evident, at least in this life, that our Creator expects us fully to eliminate our instinctual drives.  So far as we know, it is nowhere on the record that God has completely removed from any human being all his natural drives.”

So that natural drive is going to stay…

How do we keep it from turning from desire to obsession?

Gandhi has some thoughts:

“I found that complete control of the palate made the observance of the vow of chastity very easy.”

“Fasting is as necessary as selection and restriction in diet.”

SLAA has a positive suggestion:
“Some of us took up jogging, or other exercises that required greater physical effort. These helped to provide a physical sensation of tiredness which could fill the void left by the absence of sexual release, or even replace it.”

So, complete control of my food and greater physical exercise.

Yeah, I can do that …

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HP,

I believe it is your will for me to be chaste today.

According to the Big Book: “Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. It works when other activities fail.”

So, the best way for me to be “reasonably comfortable” practicing Chastity, is to help other men who are interested in practicing finite chastity.

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All Addictions Anonymous has a document they read every meeting called The Ten Points:

1. Completely giving ourselves to this simple Program;

2. Practicing rigorous honesty;

3. Being willing to go to any lengths to recover;

4. Realizing that there is no easier, softer way;

5. Being fearless and thorough in our practice of the principles;

6. Letting go of our old ideas absolutely;

7. Recognizing that half measures will not work;

8. Asking God’s protection and care with complete abandon;

9. Being willing to grow along spiritual lines;

10. Accepting the following pertinent ideas as proved by All Addicts Anonymous experience:

(a) that you cannot manage your own life;

(b) that probably no human power can restore you to sanity;

(c) that God can and will if sought.

I believe all of that, and have practiced it, as rigorously as I could, for 35 years.

I had to walk away from a relationship today, and suddenly a line opened to me, from the Big Book:

“Father will necessarily spend much time with other alcoholics, but this activity should be balanced.”…So I went out an ran five miles.