Bottom Lines Create Top Lines :Experience, Strength & Hope for Sex and Love Addicts

In my addiction, I had no ability to identify how my emotional, sexual and relationship patterns influenced my life. My life strategy was ingrained in my behavior early on in my formative and teenage years.   I was essentially powerless to see my patterns. I was powerless because the way I thought and felt about what I did and what I did in general was of no matter to the consequences I got. As my shame got deeper ingrained and reinforced from the people I engaged with or the actions I took, the more my mental defense grew to shield me from my memories and the acting out went on.   The big book clearly outlines this. When I substitute alcoholic for sex and love addict and drinking with outing out or relationship behavior I relate completely. “The fact is that most alcoholics for reasons yet obscure have lost the power of choice in drink our so called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable at certain times to bring into our consciousness with sufficient ...

A common occurrence I have had in my recovery experience and within the fellowship of SLAA is the awareness of being consumed with thoughts and feelings.   These thoughts may include what I  think about a relationship, what I think about myself thinking about the relationship and what I think and feel about my life. However, this thinking and feeling have only lead me to frustration, acting out behaviors and an addictive process.   So in recovery, my goal is to allow the higher power to come in to stop this addictive process and to let the addictive process leak its way out of my life. However, when I first started my recovery it was important for me to identify what my thoughts and feelings were as I was often consumed with what other peoples thoughts and feelings were etc.  So this was, in fact, a good thing to be aware of and it allowed me to work through my insane thinking of inadequacy and failure and shame and bring in more positive self-af...