You need to go through withdrawal in order to become a whole person.
Withdrawal must be experienced for you to realize that potential for you and your life which has been stored there so long.
The end result is the same: addictive and emotional behavior, on a daily basis, stops.
Regardless of which pattern is yours, it has to stop.
No matter how powerfully your thoughts and feelings are tugging at you to continue indulging, you cease acting on them.
It is this point when you finally stop that really signals the start of your recovery in SLAA, and the day on which it starts is your personal sobriety date.
This process of increasing awareness led inevitably to a final surrender of the whole addictive pattern, and thus we were launched into withdrawal, and sexual and emotional sobriety.
We were striving to be honest not good.
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.
We were, within ourselves, expending as much energy as most people do who hold down full-time jobs and maintain active family lives. In fact, most of us were 'working' far harder than we ever had before.
How would this translate into personal relationships or careers? We did not know. But what we did know was that the externals would eventually develop around this inner foundation of wholeness, and come to reflect our inner state.
Wherever ambiguity is present, the potential for reactivating sex and love addiction is present, too.
When external challenges did occur, we felt ourselves thrown back into having to devote all our energy, once again, to abstaining from addictive behavior at a 'bottom line" level.
Perhaps the most important principle here was not to deny ourselves that we were, indeed being severely tested.
Six signposts that withdrawal is coming to an end:
1. A growing awareness that we were now quite seasoned at dealing with temptations on a regular basis.
2. We were now no longer concerned with how much longer we would have to abstain from sexual or romantic entanglements.
3. More awareness of personal relationships with children, spouses, lovers, partners, friends, siblings and parents.
4. We began to have new energy available to invest in new, or once abandoned interests.
5. Events or circumstances which provided either motivation or opportunity for us to live out more of our potential as sober people would just "happen."
6. Life tasks, whether personal, relational, occupational or academic, were due to be taken up again.
We had become "beloved' to ourselves.
We knew we had experienced a Grace.
Life's opportunities for growth and wholeness that we were helplessly letting slip by.
...having left life unlived, of having turned our backs on the possibility of fulfilling a meaningful destiny.
...life purpose would be forever out of reach.
We were powerless over an addictive pattern, of which any current, specific circumstance was just the most recent example.
We would engage in such solitary activities as masturbation and claim they were improvements because we were no longer involving others directly in our disease.
Those of us who tried to deceive ourselves in the way we defined our sex and love addiction found ourselves slipping back into the old behavior.
The 'freedom' to define our own addictive pattern could not be used in a self-serving way.
The proof that our surrender was indeed unconditional was that we now refrained, one day at a time, from every form of bottom-line behavior we saw as part of our own addictive pattern.
The possibility of finding some form of faith based not on any specific conception of "God" but rather on the need to find such a faith, was the beginning of spiritual healing.
We could choose to tip our own cup over and let the sickness run out of it.
We could not refill the cup through our unaided will.
The enemy was US.
Some power greater than ourselves would have to do the refilling.
We were to empty our chalice of disease and refrain from refilling it again ourselves.
There were no guarantees.
Undergoing the death of our addiction-riddled self and the rebirth of a redeemed, affirming person.
The time-honored Serenity Prayer became part of our daily repertoire for handling challenging and potentially dangerous situations.
We were still plagued by sometimes prolonged bouts of obsessive thinking or emotional yearning for intrigue and romance, for sexual oblivion.
How deprived we were!
There was no apparent upper limit to the spiritual, emotional and mental well-being toward which we were now moving, even though sometimes grudgingly.
We did not squander our energy in addictive acting out, in spite of severe temptations to do so.
Some of us kept journals, entered into counseling or psychotherapy.
We looked at our non-sexual relationships and often found the same motives and character defects driving us there as well.
Often our normal, right-sized human needs had somehow never been met during the formative period of our lives.
We realized that there was a basic loneliness which had made us afraid to be alone.
While it was not wholly appropriate to blame either our early experiences or ourselves for our behavior as sex and love addicts, we had to accept some personal responsibility for it.
Under the mantle of our new faith we took a hard look at ourselves.
Our Higher Power seemed to require our active participation.
Apparently God was not interested in relating to us as a parent might to some helpless child who was always getting into scrapes.
God seemed to want some kind of partnership.
Perhaps we were supposed to develop our full human capacities, instead of passively turning ourselves over to God as a wholesale protector or a punitive, omnipotent dictator.
We had progressed beyond an overseeing caretaker or parent-like God to the sense of being in conscious partnership with this Power.
This relationship appeared to be structured more along the lines of a conscious adult partnership centered on mutual sharing and cooperation.
I am not responsible for the conditions which created me, but I am willing to try to be responsible for myself.
We enjoyed solitude and were unafraid of honesty and openness with others.
We came to find intimacy with ourselves, intimacy with God, and then intimacy with others.
Sexuality was becoming a barometer-an expression of what was, already, in the partnership. It could be no more, or less, than this.
True intimacy, we found, cannot exist independent of commitment.
I felt that I had tapped some secret, tabooed power which really ran the universe, but which was never acknowledged in the world.
...to experience that hypnotic sense of merging with her and giving my heart away to her from the depths of my soul.
...there was something I needed to establish right away when I got sober from alcohol: that my sex and 'love' life would not have to change!
I'm sure the fact that I could carry on my sex and 'love' life as before helped make becoming sober in AA less frightening for me.
I was no longer looking merely for adventurous sexual experiences, I was searching for a whore/madonna combination, a woman who could give me sexual oblivion, yet speak to my soul.
But physical craving for relief of tension would warp my resolve, and I would find myself with her again.
I had not yet experienced that amount of emotional pain which is needed before change is possible.
With my decision to withhold nothing of what I had done, the tide started to turn. The humiliation which each successive revelation brought me, and every ounce of pain these revelations inflicted, were the overdue accounts from years of a divided life.
Still, by maintaining openness to sharing of feelings and activities at all cost, I was able to gain perspective on just how powerless I was over managing my addictive relationship.
I felt suddenly that I was being pursued by some diabolical force that was using me for it's own purposes.
My life was in the open now, however jagged and disparate the separate pieces might be.
I knew full well that if I were to follow this path the pain of withdrawal would be immense. I realized that, for me, the process involved not simply ending my addictive relationship, but the unconditional withdrawal from the whole pattern of addiction.
Nothing less than going through the death of all that I had been in the world up to that time – of experiencing the dissolution of my former self – seemed required.
It seemed, on the one hand, now that I was a "good boy" I should have the right to demand a kind of high-intensity sexuality which I had prized so highly in my addictive trysts…
Whenever and wherever I am vulnerable, I will be tested.
The fact that I had hit bottom, surrendered, gone through withdrawal, and turned the corner of this addiction, while important enough personally, really meant little if the experience could not be replicated by others.
My own recovery was no longer an isolated, idiosyncratic happenstance.
Still others of us have chosen to be alone for extended periods, beyond what withdrawal in and of itself would seem to call for, because of an inner richness which we have found in the experience of our own solitude.
In all cases the withdrawal process had brought with it a deep and abiding knowledge of our own dignity as human beings.