When I got sexually sober things were bad in my life.
I was getting divorced and in my first of five custody cases.
I have journaled in notebooks since 1973, but the two month notebook before and after I got sexually sober, May through July 1990, was stolen by my wife to use to testify against me in court so I don’t have accurate records.
The more time I racked up chaste, the more clear my memory got, and I could remember more and more of my childhood physical and sexual abuse.
It came in waves. It was a shocking, flood of nightmares.
My family thought I was crazy because I was asking them about the things that I was remembering in my “memory floods“.
They wanted absolutely nothing to do with me…None of them.
I was cheating on my wife with a tall, ugly woman who was very in touch with her feelings.
I was so beleaguered with memory floods that I was inextricably attracted to her as a safe person, but being a sex addict with no recovery, I couldn’t stop having sex with her.
It gets worse: the tall, ugly, safe woman ...was my sponsor’s girlfriend.
I had stopped drinking, taking drugs, smoking, lost 50 pounds, and had stopped caffeine… So there was no relief from those things.
I was not in touch with my anger yet, so I was profoundly depressed all the time.
I was very in debt and had a business with eight employees, working sometimes 14 hours a day...completely workaholic.
Also, crazily, going to S meetings, back in those days, where we had no boundaries and no rules, I had heard people share about a behavior I had never heard of, or done before, “phone sex”.
I started doing that with the tall, ugly, safe woman...And felt incredibly ashamed of myself afterward each time.
I had been lying to myself that being orally sexual with this woman was not really being sexual… kind of like ex-President Clinton.
In my recording studio we had put up large mirrors for the groups to shoot video.
When I was “traditionally sexual“ in front of the mirrors in my studio, my moment of truth finally came, and my denial broke...
I could see what I was doing, literally.
I knew that when I went to court, if the judge asked me “Are you seeing anyone else?” I was going to have to lie, in which case I was in danger of drinking again, or if I told the truth, I would lose custody of my daughter.
That was my bottom...
Patrick Carnes says you “hit bottom” and get sober when you are “about to lose something that you simply can’t live without”.
I could not live without my daughter. I loved her so much.
I have not masturbated or cheated on a woman for 30 years since that day.
God lifted me out of the sludge of disease and my life has been devoted to sharing about that salvation since then.
It has been a worthy life and I am forever, humbly grateful.