Page 23 of All the Way to the River
L et me pause here for a moment.
Let me catch my breath, in this current place and time.
As a sex and love addict in recovery, I define a “clean day” as any day where I have not used another human being—not as a stimulant or a sedative; not as a badge of honor or a bodyguard; not as an emotional-support animal, a sleeping pill, a sex toy, a babysitter, a parental-replacement figure, or a good-looking trophy; not as some infinitely wise Delphic oracle who is here to answer all my most challenging life questions; and certainly not as a mirror that I can stare into, searching for evidence that I am lovable, attractive, worthy, normal, respectable, special, desirable, valuable, irreplaceable, adored, secure, or good .
Being a sex and love addict in recovery does not mean that I can never experience sex or love again; it only means that I have to be sober about it—and there’s a plan in place for me around that, when and if the time comes. We will discuss that plan later in this book.
But being clean and sober (for me, at least) also means that I choose not to use drugs or alcohol anymore.
Not in any form. Drugs and alcohol only make it easier for me to act out in my primary addiction.
Whatever lazy, ineffective guardian I have posted at my internal Gates of Good Sense takes one sip of booze and instantly starts waving everyone through, not bothering to read anybody’s credentials or check IDs.
Thus, intoxicating substances are inherently dangerous to me.
And to paraphrase Rayya: They don’t get me anywhere near where I want to go, anyway.
Most of all, as I have learned over the past five years, being sober within a program of recovery means that I must be very, very careful about what I’m thinking—and that I must never let my thoughts go unexamined or unreported.
Protecting my sobriety means that every day I must reveal the truth to somebody about what is actually going on within the sealed-up, locked-down nineteenth-century mental hospital that is my mind.
And addiction is a disease of the mind. It’s a disease that wants nothing more than to get me alone in the darkness of my head so it can kill me.
And the way it starts killing me is by filling my consciousness with a swarm of grim and sinister thoughts about what a worthless piece of shit I am, how terrible everybody else is, how badly I’ve been mistreated and misunderstood, how many unforgivable mistakes I’ve made, what a horrible place this world is, and how much I deserve instantaneous relief from all this suffering.
I believe that every human struggles with such destructive and demonic thoughts, but in addicts, these thoughts quickly become both uncontrollable and unbearable.
Once the thought storm begins—driven, as the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says, “by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity”—I’m doomed.
My addiction will think me right into hell, and then it will try to convince me that the only sensible way out of hell is to use something or somebody as a drug, to act out in some manic way, to grapple for control, or to die.
And those dark voices are always warning me to keep the torments of my inner life a secret.
If Satan existed, he could scarcely do better at seeding pain and destruction than to hide himself within the human mind, saying things like “You’re a failure and a fuckup, nobody understands you, you deserve some escape, you should probably just go drink something, or overeat, or spend a bunch of money, or fuck somebody, or take command over someone else’s existence, or blow up your own life, or just kill yourself— but don’t tell anybody I said any of this . ”
(Satan: translated from the Hebrew as “the accuser”—a shadowy internal figure I know all too intimately.)
The best way I can stay ahead of the hellscape of my addict brain is through radical honesty within the bounds of trusted, sober fellowship.
I’ve got to talk my thoughts up and out of my mind every day and put them right out there in broad daylight, where they can be seen, shared, and tested against reality by people who care about me and who understand the nature of addiction.
As part of my ongoing recovery, I have to (no, I get to) check in with my sponsor every day and turn over to her my latest batch of fears, fantasies, and resentments.
But I also get to share my painful thoughts and feelings at meetings and turn them over privately within my sisterhood of fellow recovering sex and love addicts, too.
One of my best friends in the program and I exchange phone calls a few times a week that always begin this way: “Okay, sis, here’s the one thing I don’t want anyone knowing about me today. ”
Because that’s how you stay sober: You have got to let somebody know the things you don’t want anybody to know.
Otherwise, your shadow self will keep running the show from the dankest corners of your mind, growing ever stronger in the darkness, poised for any opportunity to strike and take you down once more—and perhaps forever this time.
After all, as they say in the rooms of recovery: “Addiction never rests; it only waits.”
When I look back at Rayya and Liz in 2013 (Rayya pretending she’s still sober, Liz pretending she isn’t in love with Rayya), I am overwhelmed by a longing to slip through a portal in time, sit the two of them down at a table, and say, “Listen, you guys—you really need to tell somebody what’s up here.
You’re both living secret lives, and it’s gonna take you down.
This level of concealment, this level of denial, these attempts at self-control, these desperate acts of self-medication, all this using —it’s not sustainable for either one of you.
You’re both gonna crash if you don’t come clean. ”
The thing is, though, Rayya already had a community filled with fellow recovering addicts who had loved her for years, and who would have gladly received her admissions of shame and fear and helped her to process her overwhelming desire to drink.
They could have guided her back to the principles of the program—back to the acts of service that keep us sober; back to a position of humility and surrender.
But Rayya had pushed all those people away in order to chart her own path.
And the last thing you ever want an addict doing is charting their own path.
She had also pushed away the God of her understanding.
In fact, during those heady years of success and secrets, we had both let drop any connection to an intelligence greater than our own.
And addicts don’t do well when they lose contact with a higher power—because then they start believing that their own demented thinking is the most supreme intelligence in the universe, and that’s never a good idea.
What comes to mind now is a pair of poignant letters that were exchanged in the early 1960s between the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In his letter, Bill W. (as he is known in the rooms) thanks Jung for an incident that had occurred thirty years earlier.
A suffering American alcoholic named Rowland H.
had come to Switzerland to meet Jung in person, begging the great doctor for relief from addiction.
Jung had apparently worked with Rowland for many months, but Rowland kept relapsing.
At last, Jung had determined that he could do nothing more for this man—that the poor fellow was beyond the reach of medical or psychiatric help and was likely soon to die.
When Rowland asked in anguish if there was no chance for rescue from his alcoholism, Dr. Jung mentioned that there were cases on record of addicts being saved by powerful experiences of spiritual awakening.
Although such spontaneous experiences were rare, they did sometimes occur.
And so Jung recommended that Rowland H. go find himself a religious community, join it wholeheartedly, and “hope for the best.”
This same Rowland H., now desperate and humbled, soon returned to America, where he joined something called the Oxford Group—a collective of spiritually minded individuals who had come to believe that fear and selfishness were at the root of all human suffering, including the suffering of addiction.
The members of the Oxford Group had banded together not as a religious body per se—for there were no dues or fees, no hierarchy, no scripture, no bylaws—but rather as an “organism” of individuals from a multitude of religious backgrounds who had given up completely on trying to manage their own bewildering existences and had “surrendered their lives to God.”
That was the plan: to have no plan anymore but God’s plan.
It was quite a radical idea. And what made it even more radical was this: The founders of the Oxford Group had come to believe that God’s voice could be heard not through the reading of scripture, nor by listening to sermons, but only through quiet contemplation and a deeply private inner listening.
In an era when such practices were unfamiliar to the West, these people were basically talking about meditation.
The Oxford Group was encouraging its members to become, in essence, mystics —listening for voices deep within themselves that could guide them through the torments of the world. Voices that only they could hear.
And the wild thing is: It worked.