Recognizing Sex addiction

Realizing the truth about your sexual and love addiction is the first step towards recovery, this at times takes years to establish and get to know your true self identity.

It will harm everyone who loves you and cares for you, they will talk with you and point out your wrong doings, and even stage an intervention that might take several times to accept.

Last thing about recognizing the sex addiction is that there will be relapses and there is no magic pill in the road to recovery.

My experience has been long, I have noticed these trends after summer of 2007 and wanted to change my ways, I didn’t know where to start and how to overcome them, I originally thought that when I find someone I will stop my ways and settle down.

The speed dating and anonymous activities continued till 2008 when I meet someone who really meant a lot to me, but at this stage I was so deep in my own lies and deep in my addiction that I couldn’t commit, and was willing to let go of the relationship.

After the relationship was over I was devastated and enrolled myself into SLAA classes “sex and love Addiction Anonymous” http://www.slaa-ontario.org/.

I went to these classes for almost 6 months; through this course I was tough a lot about actions and how to monitor myself, also tools to combat the addiction, also seeing a therapist twice a month as well it helped with talking about my situation and keeping me in check

I truly believed I was cured and called my EX to get back together, I was afraid I might slip and put myself on anti depressant medication that reduce my sex drive, but with all of these I slipped again in fall of 2009 and relationship was over, I relapsed and with the intervention that was done I went into depression and fearing loneliness I attempted to act out but couldn’t bring myself to go through them most of the time.

I’ve attempted to reach out to my EX, and I know I have hurt him a lot in the past year and he is human and deserves better than this.

My road of recovery from today onwards will consist of going back to the basics of SLAA and the therapist and continuing my medication of anti depressants,

My name is ….. and I am a sex and love addict, my bottom lines are seeking sex only in a committed relationship and not going through wanted ads and cruising online. And I have two days on my abstentions
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Little bit about SLAA
The group goes through the twelve characteristics of sex addiction and twelve steps of recovery as listed below.

The Twelve Characteristics of Sex & Love Addicts
1. Having few healthy boundaries, we become sexually involved with and/or emotionally attached to people without knowing them.
2. Fearing abandonment and loneliness, we stay in and return to painful, destructive relationships, concealing our dependency needs from ourselves and others, growing more isolated and alienated from friends and loved ones, ourselves and God.
3. Fearing emotional and/or sexual deprivation, we compulsively pursue and involve ourselves in one relationship after another, sometimes having more than one sexual or emotional liaison at a time.
4. We confuse love with neediness, physical and sexual attraction, pity and/or the need to rescue or be rescued.
5. We feel empty and incomplete when we are alone. Even though we fear intimacy and commitment, we continually search for relationships and sexual contacts.
6. We sexualize stress, guilt, loneliness, anger, fear and envy. We use sex or emotional dependence as substitutes for nurturing, care and support.
7. We use sex and emotional involvement to manipulate and control others.
8. We become immobilized or seriously distracted by romantic or sexual obsessions or fantasies.
9. We avoid responsibility for ourselves by attaching ourselves to people who are emotionally unavailable.
10. We stay enslaved to emotional dependency, romantic intrigue, or compulsive sexual activities.
11. To avoid feeling vulnerable, we may retreat from all intimate involvement, mistaking sexual and emotional anorexia for recovery.
12. We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them, then blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.

The Twelve Steps of SLAA
1. We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take a personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to sex and love addicts, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.

There are many tools and methods available from the group as well, such as peer help, weekly meetings, books and pamphlets.
I suggest this for anyone who is recognizing the signs of addiction and is willing to break the chain of repetition and addiction.
I hope this blog helps you with my experience as well as the group help
Have a great start of 2010 perhaps you as a reader will make removal of sex addiction one of your New Year resolutions.
“Keep coming back”