What does it feel like?

When I use another person to get the euphoria of my sex and love addiction, I am also allowing myself to be used in return. And there is no high so high in using that it can balance out the pain and humiliation of being used.

I want to write today what it feels like to be used. I do it because I want to get it out of my head and truly look at it.

I must write by example ...

First example, there's a man in recovery who was such a close friend to me in my early days in the program. When I needed to cry, I called him. When he needed to cry, he called me. We could be honest with each other and we could share at a level only two people could who had known the demonic feelings of having had our childhoods stolen. But we were not ready for that kind of intimacy with a member of the opposite sex, and what was a friendship turned into a love addiction, for a short while a sex addiction, and then into only pain, then resentment, then a note:
"Rae, I'm not sure what's happened between us, all I know is that without it, I am incomplete. I am sorry if offended you in any way. I love you very much."
And thus started my flurry of responding, waiting for his response, texting, waiting for his response ... needing even a crumb, hearing nothing, feeling sad, even more resentful. I know him well enough to know that on his end, he couldn't handle a friendship that did not give him the choice of isolation. And I had not, still have not, let go of the resentment that prevents me from having a friendship with him that does not involve enmeshment and a "savior" mentality. The last conversation we had ... all I could do was try to solve his problems, as if he weren't a full grown man, with as much recovery as me.

Next example:

I used my last acting out partner to help me feel adored and special and I also used him to help recreate the idea that I would never be quite special enough. He was truly more interested in transexual males than women -- but he couldn't admit that completely, and he used me to remind him that he really did like women. After all he was married and very "devoted" to his wife. We both used each other to pass the time and enjoy doing fun things together like see movies, go to plays and have dinner.

Next example:

I guess one has to expect when they keep a public blog about their recovery from sexual addiction, that there will be unrecovering sex addicts who will find it and want to engage in conversation about what sex addiction has meant in one's life. This happened to me recently, and while the intial contact gave me no reason not to respond to the reader, by the second e-mail my response was against my better judgment. I felt my temperature rising, my desire to engage in discussion fervent, and thus flew a string of e-mails that while tempered, grew gradually more sexual in nature. By three or four e-mails I knew I was dealing with a regular old addict, just like me with the same justifications for his behavior and mine as well. I began to feel uncomfortable but said "Keep the questions coming." That's that part of me that sits in one seat and lets the addict take charge while I watch, my hands tucked under my legs and my lips persed together. In the end I was able to stand up and say ... "Enough!" and walk away. I was using him for a hit, he was using me. We were both anxious to know where it would lead ... but for me, I was hoping that this was a test of my sobriety, and as it turns out, the part of me that wants to stay sober was stronger than the part that wanted to act out. I was thankful, grateful actually, and humbled.

So, what does it feel like to be used? For certain, it feels familiar. At some level, I suspect it even feels justified. After all, I do believe at a deep level that I am a bad person. Being used hurts, it makes me cry and feel unimportant. It contributes to the thoughts that I'm not really worth being treated with respect. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, for me to trust anyone who says they care. I feel very alone, because after all, didn't I bring this on myself by using them in the isolation of my disease? It makes me feel angry because some part of me knows I DON'T deserve this. And it makes me even angrier that I have nothing to justify my anger with, because I was an equal partner in the using. Those who reject me, at whatever level, make me feel as if I'm not enough. I take it personally, which means my ego is in the way. The healthy truth is ... their disease is no more about me than mine is about them. But it is not easy to see that when the disease has a face and a voice (or at least an e-mail address and a name).

I don't guess I was looking for answers here ... just the opportunity to own my feelings. More will come, I have no doubt. Getting them out of my head and out in front of me helps me to sort them out.

Feeling sad and looking back

A year ago today I wrote this: My State of Mind

A few days later I wrote Emotions vs. Thinking, which I consider to be a reflection of the beginning of my deepest level of understanding of myself to date.

It is interesting that I had forgotten what my therapist had said when I told her I felt insane. What I wrote in My State of Mind is almost identical to how I feel today. I have had such difficulty after returning to work. I have trouble concentrating, I can't focus and I wonder how in the world I'll ever hold down a full-time job. It is not that nothing has changed within me in a year, I can look back to where I was a year ago and realize that at many levels, I'm not nearly as "insane" as I was then -- stuck in the middle of an affair that was driving me crazy and moving to a new place, not knowing what it was I wanted or needed to do, trying to please too many people and having no clue how to please or take care of myself. I know there has been growth, and I know that for some reason that growth has had to be very, very slow.

I dropped my husband off at the airport last night for him to go on a three day business trip and drove back to lay in the arms of another man. I was exhausted from the drive through the snowy conditions, but I had already told this man, who travels to our area once a month, that I would see him. My codependency far outweighed my sexual addiction in this scenario, though I would say my love addiction was in full-swing. I couldn't seem to bring myself to have conversation with him, though he's a great conversationalist. Instead, I simply engaged him sexually -- honestly deep down wanting to be finished and to go home. It is not that I dislike this person nor is it that he gives me a high. I was just there ... going through the motions, not uncomfortably, but without feeling. I ultimately faked an orgasm so that he would stop his efforts to bring me there, and two silent tears fell from my eyes, as I pulled him to me and asked him to hold me. I felt comforted there in his arms, as he slowly drifted off to sleep and I got up, kissed him goodnight, and went home, feeling empty and uncovered.

Today, I have chosen not to beat myself up over the events of last night. They serve as a reminder that this addiction is no longer serving me. Yes, I am still drawn to it -- because it has become a way of life, but it has no return. Or I should say, the only return is emptiness and pain, a far cry from elation and euphoria. In AA,they say recovery messes up a good drink. That's for sure.

Happy to be on the journey.

The truth

I talk a lot about recovery and searching for wholeness and all that on this blog ... and that is honestly what I am reaching out for. But I need to say something honestly and get it out of me.

I think if I were not married I'd fuck every man I could and have one hell of a time doing it. I would hopefully be less inclined to married men than I have been in the past -- in my addiction I can believe that we are "just helping each other out." But without a husband and as many social "expectations" to live up to, I could see myself moving to a town where I knew no one, where I didn't care what others thought of me and just have one hell of a time. All of this because I constantly feel that I am fighting against my addict -- that part of me that just wants to go out and be wild and free. I feel conflicted in my acting out because I am married, because I could be found out, because I could hurt my husband who I love.

I know intellectually that I would feel just as empty using men and being used in that way as I do now, that the conflicts and the feeling used would be no less ... but every now and then this thought goes through my mind. The magical thinking lets me imagine that "At least there wouldn't be so much inner turmoil."

These thoughts make me worry, Do I stay married just to prevent myself from going hog-ass wild? In some ways, I think that's the reason I got married. I had started to do just what I had described above. I was becoming very promiscuous before I met the man who would become my husband. And then there he was he was so stable, so secure, so safe, so interested, so unaware.

Anyway ... I said it, my piece of truth. In some ways I want to take it back, erase it all and hide it. I fear judgment and anger over what I've said. But I'm only as sick as my secrets. Moving past this secret to a point where I love myself more than this, where I can find joy in some freedom other than this ... that is what I want. I do want the internal turmoil to stop. I hate fighting with myself 24/7. It's depressing, it's frustrating and it's tiresome. It's why I have to surrender one day at a time.

A hurtful story

I dragged myself to my therapy appointment this morning, kicking and screaming. I tried to do everything I could to put it off. I don't think that it was just the therapy appointment ... it was just that feeling of isolation that made me not want to show up for life, much less the appointment today. But despite my best efforts, I went and I shared. I told her how horrible the past couple of days have been inside my head and how frustrating it is to want to curl up in a ball one minute and then excited about decorating my house for Christmas the next.

After I posted here yesterday, I went through the painful process of getting myself out of the house and to the store to buy the final part of my husband's anniversary gift. When I got to the store I found all the Christmas stuff on sale half off and started buying up stuff to decorate my house for our guests next week. These are the same guests that honestly I don't want to entertain at Christmas. But ... I will and I will do it graciously.

So, my therapist asked me a bunch of hard questions this morning, things I didn't want to answer and things I feel inept to answer about what it is that is holding me back, causing me to sabotage myself again and again. I don't know the answer. I don't connect to the emotions I am trying to avoid. It's hard to even find them. But then she started asking me about trauma and traumatic experiences. I repeated the story of how at age three my stepfather called me into the bathroom and asked me to touch his penis. That same year or maybe the next he locked me in the family's underground cellar and told me I was going to have to sleep there all night because I had been bad. He walked around outside making noises like a panther or an angry lion to terrorize me. My future sexual abuse all seemed pretty "routine" ... I don't really connect to the trauma, except for one incident. It is horrible to relive and when I told the story today I thought to myself, "I don't want to have to tell this story to another therapist ever again."

I told the therapist that I always knew when the molestation was coming. I never had to guess. I felt it coming. It was no different that day when I was 8 or 9 years old, my stepfather was doing some plumbing work underneath the house (there was no basement). He asked me to crawl under the house with him to help him. I knew immediately that was not what he had in mind. He told me that he was going to teach me something new. He then began to stroke himself and told me that when he told me to to put my mouth over him. He said some stuff was going to come out and that I was not to spit it out. He wanted me to learn how to swallow it. I remember being terrified of the whole thing, but followed what I was told. When he came in my mouth, the taste was bitter and I couldn't hold it. I spit it on the ground almost involuntarily. He told me, "I told you not to spit it out." He said it sort of angrily, but not with the same voice that I was usually spoken to "in the light of day." He didn't beat me or hurt me. I just felt his disappointment in me and I felt like such a failure.

I often wonder if the men I act out with knew what fuels my enthusiasm for giving oral sex ... would they still be willing to enjoy it as much?

No matter what was done to me, it does not give me the right to use other people, and other people's husbands to fix my stepfather's mistakes. I continue to build the shame and guilt.

How stubborn?

I've been thinking for some time of writing a letter to God. It would start something like, "Dear Lord, my life is an absolute mess. I have no idea who I am or how I got here, all I know is it sure doesn't feel like the me I want to be or even the me I know. I don't feel like I can go on like this ..." It's when I get to this point that I start that old familiar mantra, "I know, I know, I HAVE to turn my will and my life over to God. I have to give in to God's will for my life and be sober enough to listen for it." And the old Southern gospel hymn of my childhood begins playing in my head, "I surrender all ... I surrender all, all to you my precious Savior, I surrender all."

But then that little voice .. the scared one, the one that thinks it can fix anything ... the one that just will not give up, kicks in and says "Yes, but ... " and "What about?"

The "what about" today is a man I've had an ongoing relationship with since summer. He was the one holdout in that series of five letters I wrote a few weeks ago saying, "I'm done for good, I'm focused on my marriage." He is the one I left the door open to and the one who walked back through it last week. As Gomer Pyle says, "Sooprize, Sooprize, Sooprize."

If anyone wants to believe that addiction, sex and love addiction is not a disease of the mind, tell me this: what good is a limp-dicked (literally) man, who can only describe love as "the L word" and has far more attraction to transgendered men than to women themselves to a female sex & love addict 16 years his junior? Yet, somehow, for this person and my obessive thoughts about how I can make him love me enough, I can't give up my stubborn will. Insane much??

So, I prayed this morning for the willingness to be willing to turn my life over, shed a few tears and prepared for a job interview I have later today.

A picture of disease

Anyone who is lucky enough to have no idea what sex and love addiction looks like, but for some sick reason wants to know ... go see the movie, "Love in the Time of Cholera." The book is actually better ... but the disease just ooozes out of this motion picture. It's the story of a man who at a very young age falls madly in love with a woman whose father has other plans for his daughter and she marries someone else. And while the man never gives up his undying love sickness for this woman, he goes about keeping a diary of all the women he sleeps with while he waits for her husband to die. At last count, the number was up to something like 621.

At one point in the movie, the man's uncle sums up sex and love addiction very well, when he says that the man's father on his deathbed said his only regret was that he could not die for love. But, the uncle says, "That didn't stop him from fucking every one in sight."

Back from PA

I'm back from a weekend trip to PA where hubby and I visited some old friends and enjoyed a nice getaway. I have gone back there numerous times since we moved away ... and this is the first time I felt relatively untriggered by the lure of old haunts. It's true that many of the places we went or talked about conjured up images of my past addictive behaviors, but they didn't linger in my mind. They simply passed through.

It could be that I am finally moving on from all that started there or it could be that I've started other "memories" elsewhere. I don't know. But I was glad the sting was not as sharp and that we were able to have a good weekend together with friends.

Tonight is the first SLAA meeting of the group that I am helping to get started. I keep telling myself that I have been physically sober for awhile now and that everything will go OK. But I know honestly that I am not emotionally sober, and it is in desparation for full sobriety -- I want my life back -- that I start this meeting. I am reminded of the saying in program ... "We don't work the steps to get sober. We get sober so we can work the steps." God, help me.

Today

Sometimes I think it would be better if I wrote here every day ... but some days I'm too wrapped up in my disease, other days I'm doing my best to run from it. In an old post -- from July 2004 -- I write about my parallel lives, and say that someday I hope me and Rae meet. So, sometimes I don't write here because I am totally out of tune with which life I am leading: the successful business woman (who, by the way, has recently decided to launch her freelance career), or the sex, love and food addict with depression who sometimes can't get out of the house, or only gets out to have sex with a stranger or two.

It's funny, along the way, I have had a lot of people who read this blog or in the recovery rooms and even my therapists warn me about the dangers of meeting strangers from the Internet. At one level, I always know they are right, at another, I think people would find it interesting to meet all the people I have meet online and in person. I've been lucky that I've never (yet, due to the grace and protection of God) met a real whack job, though I have met a few people who have wanted to do disgusting or humiliating things to me, or vice versa -- wanted me to do those things to them. I have been "fortunate" to have met some very interesting people. A lot of men who are lonely in their marriages, those who are simply wildly horny and as obsessed with sex as I am, and some genuinely nice people who don't know what they are looking for. I've had some amazing conversations, made some good friends, and even been inspired by some of these people I've met. They range from highly successful executives and business owners to blue collar, financially strapped husbands, who just need a little relief from the day to day stresses of life. Some of them, I feel, take bigger risks than me, and I often tell them so. Read my post from earlier this month, where I wrote a letter to one of my "suitors" who had sent me erotic pictures of himself using his real name. He responded with indignation and threatened to use "all his resources" to protect himself. From what? Me? I am not the threat.

A number of you have read my blog for some time ... some of you probably feel sorry for me, others may think I'm a self-righteous whore. You may wonder if I ever think of the wives and the families that are being impacted by my continuing to live in my disease. The answer is yes. It feeds my need to hate myself. I used to think of them a lot more. Now I often only think of the men, and how I use them ... and often toss them away, leaving them feeling rejected and worthless and used. Again, it feeds my need to hate myself. (By the way ... I welcome all comments and questions. Sometimes i can't see my own stuff as well as I can see the stuff of others.)

In the dynamic of my parallel lives, there is a part of me that actually likes many things about myself. This diseased self, I am afraid I will always hate who I am. It reminds me that my mother used to tell me, "Love and hate can't dwell in the same heart." I was talking today to a man I met yesterday. This was our second meeting, and after our first, he told me he felt guilty. Today again he feels guilty ... feels that he has let down himself, God, his family. Like me ... he has the civil war inside his head.

A letter to help someone else

Dear D,

I have given a lot of thought to the letter I am about to write. I write it out of understanding, not judgment.

You put yourself at a major risk this week when you sent me those erotic photos and video under your real name. (Name removed), Louisiana, to quote you is a "small town." And sometimes the United States is even a small town. As it so happens, you sit on a committee (according to a 1 minute Google search of your name) with a long-time friend of mine.

Had another person, a poser or even worse, someone insane -- been on the receiving end of those photos, or for that matter someone who was actually in (your town), this could have been disastrous for you. I'm pretty certain you probably have a wife, otherwise you would be online at night. Even if you don't ... I know you have a good job, and a good reputation, and if you were telling me the truth, a daughter.

I also know what overwhelming, obsessive sexual desire is like ... feeling like no matter what needs to be done in the "real world," no matter what is at risk, you have to get that "high." It feels like you can't live without it. I can see this in you, because you know all the tricks ... You have perfected it all. You know how to find the woman who can address all facets of your fantasy life. You're good at it and you can't live without it.

I also know what it's like to want to be loved and cared for and also to be hurt and used and demoralized. I know all of this, because it is my life too. I am addicted to sex in the same way that men and women are addicted to cocaine, gambling, whiskey and all other vices. I will do any thing for it, that little taste of heavenly high, but it is ruining my life, my marriage, my sanity. Despite all my efforts of trying to heal from years of childhood sexual abuse, I will always find my way to men like you ... who need to control and own and manipulate, because of their own pain ... and make me feel like small helpless child. Or to men like you who need to be used ... so that I can make myself feel like my abuser. It's what made that slap the other day feel so fucking good. I wanted to use you and hurt you and scream "How could you possibly be like every other fucking man on the earth who tells me he loves me just so he can hurt me?" Over and over and over ... I find men like you, so that I can continue to hurt myself.

I don't expect you to tell me your story ... I just wanted to tell you mine, so you would know I understand, and also to send up a cry for you to please get help before, like so many other men I have seen, you get yourself into a holy horrible mess. I am not one to share with you the successes of such help, because I'm clearly in relapse ... but, getting involved in therapy and more importantly a support group for sex addicts saved my ass four years ago. In all this moving, I have let a lot of things go ... and boredom and loneliness are two of my major triggers for the addiction -- thus you found me, throwing out hooks (online). This group www.slaafws.org meets in (your town) and is a place where you can find help and other people like you. For a list of meetings in the area ... send an e-mail to (address removed). It's a completely anonymous fellowship. There are others like it: http://www.sca-recovery.org/ which has online meetings. There is http://www.saa-recovery.org which meets tonight in (your town) at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mary's.

Again, none of this is an attempt to judge you or control you or even tell you what to do. I'm just telling you my story and sharing with you the information I have.

You seem like a very kind and caring man. I am the same. But I am filled with demons that won't leave alone.

My state of mind

Many of my conversations with my therapist focus on what is real and what is not real. I am a person living with PTSD, sexual compulsions and people and food addictions. Those things are a part of me, but they don't define me. They do, however, at times make it hard to see me -- even for me, thus my dilemma with what is real and not real.

So during a conversation with my therapist yesterday I shared that I had felt a lot of depression, cried a lot, felt overwhelmed as time moves closer for me to move yet again to be with a husband who I love, but who does not meet my emotional needs for support. He is someone I cannot be honest with. It's not that I choose not to be, it's when I try to be honest with him, either he turns his head, or I just can't get it out. So, I've given notice at my current job ... and moving forward as if I am going to leave and go be with him, but I have no real desire to go there. I feel like going there will dissolve all the work I have done to get better -- all my work in therapy, all my work to heal from my sexual abuse, all the work I have done to manage life with all the above mentioned issues. I will just go to him, exist with him in a financially secure world, with no emotional support.

As I talked about this in therapy, I described my feelings as two worlds about to collide -- the part of me that has lived in an emotionless marriage, who disassociates from the trauma of my abuse and strained relations with family and friends and the part of me that needs love, support, caring and compassion. My therapist told me that these increasing feelings are real, that my feelings of being overwhelmed is real, and that my pain is real.

I replied, "but I don't feel it as pain." She was puzzled and said, "But you felt pain on Saturday when you laid in bed and cried and screamed, and you felt pain today when you stayed home from work because you were feeling so depressed." I said that's not pain... that's insanity. She smiled and said that my mind was playing some clever tricks ... letting me hide out in the idea that I'm insane, rather than feel pain.

My mind, which is a constant state of civil war, is a source of pain ... it holds memories, it creates chaos, it helps me function and keeps me from functioning. My only key is acceptance. I accept my life, and trust my Higher Power to guide me, pray that I can get out of its way, and have the courage and strength to do the next right thing.