But for many of us, there's an "emptiness" left. There's still something missing in our lives. For many of us, sexual fantasies still loom heavily in our minds -- far too often for our own good. We might not actually be engaging in sexual activities which are harmful for us, but we're sure thinking about them. For many of us that might be thinking about the "old days" of our acting out and embellishing those episodes with "hot stuff we could have done" to make them all the more exciting. Or we might fixate on those great legs that this guy at the gym has; or the way that number walks and carries himself...
For some of us, true intimacy -- being vulnerable, feeling and acknowledging our real feelings and talking about them, physical closeness without sex -- has manifested from time to time and we feel horribly uncomfortable with it. So uncomfortable at times that we might totally shut it out -- freeze up to "defend ourselves" from it; push ourselves away from it. And sex -- loving, intimate sex with someone we know well and have deep feelings for -- many of us don't even have a clue of what that might be. We've read books and seen movies about "romantic" sex, but somehow we can't see that happening with us. In fact, many of us fear any kind of sex, except perhaps sex with ourselves and our fantasies, for fear of going back to our acting out patterns, or for fear of what is UNKNOWN to us.
So, we've stopped acting out; we're into "recovery", yet there's this void that we can't seem to be able to fill. We are certainly sexual beings -- God gave us that attribute and we have every right to have it -- but somehow that got so screwed up in our lives that healthy sexuality doesn't seem to compute for us. We keep going to our meetings and hear our brothers and sisters expressing much of these same feelings, or perhaps relating how they've slipped, or maybe talking about having intimate sexual experiences which later turned sour out of fear or for whatever reason. And, occasionally, we hear a warm story of a member actually accomplishing an intimate, happy life with another being which includes sex as an integrated element rather than a debilitating addictive fixation or obsession.
But so many of us are still stuck, or so it seems -- and feels. There are times when we wonder if we'd be better off going back to our old patterns. Yet we know deep down that we can't do that and live; that voice inside each of us that we've learned to listen to keeps telling us that and we can no longer stifle it as we used to. Some of us try to reconcile celibacy with our lives, but that horniness keeps coming through -- whether it's our God-given sexuality or our addiction -- and we're not so sure that would work either, and it certainly doesn't sound like much fun. So now what?
The "now what" is going to be different for each one of us, and there's no cookbook answer available. We seem to sense that we just can't sit back and let God, our Higher Power, do it for us, without much of any effort on our part. Things just don't work that way. We're going to have to work and work hard and it will take time -- a lot of it; something a compulsive has a hard time dealing with -- and a lot of effort. But work on, or at, or with what? In what way?
The Program and therapy and and books and church and all that are certainly helpful in trying to sort out all this, but they can only go so far. The answer seems to lie in that Presence, or Being, or Power that many call God, however we and they might understand God. That Presence is always with us, whether we acknowledge It or not -- ready to guide us to the choices that are healthy for us. It's up to us to sort these choices out and surrender to and follow that guidance, or go on our own way bumbling at times -- hopefully learning from each mistake we might make. Somehow we know deep inside that, as we slowly let go of our own egos and let ourselves listen to that Presence, we will be making the "right" choices for ourselves and get ourselves back on the path to a rich, loving, serene, abundant life, including a healthy sexuality.
Nebulous? Yes! Absolutely! But that's the way things seem to work. We've tried it our way, and we all know how that turned out. Now it may just be the right time to try God's way. Let's give it a try. The only thing we have to lose is our misery.