This is the #SLAA Online Group website.
This is not the official SLAA website.

Best Viewed Sober

Welcome to the
#SLAA Online Group

of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
on StarLink-IRC.Org IRC


 

Tools of Recovery:

This Recovery Tools section is divided into five major pages:

“Best Advice: A compendium of advice for overcoming sexual dependency... as related by the addicts themselves.”  ©1990 Patrick J Carnes, Ph.D.

reprinted with permission Fri-6-September-2002. (not SLAA conference approved)

Number 1 — Developing Twelve Step Support

  1. Find people with significant recovery to learn from.  If you cannot find people and groups in your area, call national fellowship offices for long distance contact.  Also, each fellowship has national conferences every year at which you can meet people.
  2. Remember that Twelve Step support is essential.  Twelve-Step support lays the foundation for the repair you need to do and sustains growth.
  3. You must use the phone.  Overcoming fear of using the phone is critical if you are to stay in touch with group members and sponsors. It is okay to call as many times as you need — even many times in one day or in an hour.
  4. Be patient.  Going through the stages takes time.  There are no magic solutions — only time and constant use of the program principles.
  5. Go to meetings consistently.  Find groups that are right for you and make a commitment to them.  Remember, you are building a support network for yourself.
  6. Use your sponsor(s).  A sponsor is someone who knows the detail of what has happened to you and coaches you on using the program.  You can ask for a temporary sponsor.  You can have more than one sponsor.
  7. Use program literature.  Find program material.   Study them.  Ask about whatever you don't understand.
  8. Maintain contact outside the meetings.  Often more happens outside the meeting than in it.  Groups often adjourn for coffee or supper.  Some have standing breakfasts and lunches.   Some offer retreats and open meetings.  Participate in the life of the fellowship by going to these events.

Number 2 — Telling Others About Your Addiction

  1. Be careful: tell only those you trust.  This was far and away the most frequent comment.  Addicts say that in deciding whether to tell someone, the key criterion is this: how much do you trust that person.
  2. Wait.  Even after having decided to tell someone, take time to think over your decision before actually going through with it.
  3. Know your motives.  What payoffs do you seek?   Do you want support or are you looking for approval?
  4. Do it if you can help others with the same problem.  Sharing with people who need to be in the program or who already are in the program helps them and the group as well as yourself.
  5. Remember, it is not necessary to tell many people at all.   You don't have to tell — even when people ask or pry.
  6. You must tell your therapist, family, and the people closest to you.  It would be unfair to them if you did not share something this significant.  Besides, these people are all vital to your healing process.  You might consult your therapist about appropriate points to make in talking with your family and friends.
  7. When in doubt, check with your sponsor and your group.   They can provide the support you need to make safe decisions.
  8. Mistakes will happen.  All addicts tell someone they later wish they had not told.  It is okay to make a mistake.

Number 3 — Avoiding The Extremes

  1. When in doubt, check with your therapist, your sponsor, or a group member.  Living in the extremes is part of the old addictive mold that the Big Book of A.A. calls "cunning and baffling."  Addicts and co-addicts need ongoing input from others to keep in balance and as a check on their own deal.
  2. Be clear about your needs.  Many addicts emphasized that recovery offers human and spiritual resources to help people understand what they need and want.  Take care of your basic needs of hunger, rest, and support.
  3. Make balance an important goal.  Figure out boundaries that help you maintain balance.  Make those boundaries your priority.
  4. Learn to do kind things for yourself.  One addict told us, "Now I see a better way: we need to be more gentle with ourselves."
  5. Develop self-awareness.  Be an observer of yourself by using meetings, journals, and meditations.
  6. Work on the old hurts.  Your feelings will become important guides to the balance you need.
  7. Act "as if."  At first, not being in the extremes will seem awkward and unrewarding.  In order to distance yourself from your fear, pretend that this is okay.  Ask your sponsor about the Third Step.
  8. Leave cyclic, destructive relationships.  Avoid partners and friends who persist in old patterns of escalation.  If they are not committed to pursuing balance, you must take action.   Leave or at least separate from them until your recovery is solidified.

Number 4 — Developing Sobriety and Healthy Sexuality

  1. Pick an extended period of celibacy.  The top priority for most addicts is to experience a period of celibacy.  Celibacy helps the person clear out unmanageability, to feel more alive again, and to reclaim repressed memories.
  2. Be patient with yourself.  Gentleness, kindness, and self-care are watchwords.  To change after years of compulsion is a huge task, and you will make mistakes.  As one addict observed, "Don't make self-love contingent on abstinence."
  3. Accept yourself as a sexual person.  Sexuality and sobriety are, as another addict advised, "possible, and not a contradiction in terms... sex is not dirty and shameful."  You must distinguish between your addiction and your sexuality.  Sobriety is about addiction, not about sexuality.  Your sexuality is to be embraced, not denied.
  4. Work on boundaries.  Boundaries give you clarity about your sexual self and help to reduce shame.  As guidelines, they serve as a bulwark against denial, obsessive thinking, and relapse.
  5. Keep others current.  Always keep others in your program informed about happenings in your sexual life.  When in doubt or when confronting something new, check it out.  Have no secrets, and avoid becoming isolated.
  6. Understand that things will change.  Your vision of your sexuality will change dramatically with time in recovery.  You will need to allow yourself that process.
  7. Accept the imperfect.  The search for perfection in relationships and sex cause many addicts to discard relationships before they recognized their potential.  The search was futile and the losses real.

Number 5 — Beginning a Celibacy Period

  1. View it as a time-out, not an end.  A celibacy period will provide you pace to refocus on other needs.  It is not a sentence, not the end of your sexuality.  On the contrary, celibacy will make you fully aware of your sexual self.
  2. Work through commitment issues with your partner.  The decision to be celibate will affect your partner.  Respecting your partner means involving him or her in your thinking so you can commit together to the celibacy period.
  3. Get support from therapist, sponsor, and group.  You will need their guidance and help to maximize the experience.  Being open with those in your network will help you implement your plan.
  4. Expect that it will raise issues.  For many, this change is drastic and places life issues in sharp relief.  Make this a goal and not a surprise.
  5. Understand that resistance is typical.  You may experience anger and resentment at first.  This isn't surprising.   We seldom embark gracefully on any ordeal that involves significant change and insight.
  6. Prepare yourself to experience new feelings.  The new feelings that emerge will be guides to parts of yourself you need to reclaim.  As uncomfortable as these feelings may be, they will serve as significant allies in helping you become all you are.
  7. Plan active tasks to enhance the experience.  Select a specific step to work on, follow through on assignments from your therapist to help you accept nurturing and develop spiritual and sexual awareness, and keep a journal about the experience.

Number 6 — Resisting Addictive Cravings

  1. Develop Spiritual Strategies.  Whatever strategies you choose to help you connect with yourself and the rhythm of the universe — meditation, yoga, or prayer, for example — need to be deepened, strengthened and practiced.  Number one on almost everyone's list is the development of a spiritual base — a calm center which helps you resist turmoil on the periphery.
  2. Decode feelings.  Sex that is about addiction and not sexuality is usually accomplished by feelings of shame, loneliness, fear, pain, and anger.  Always check for these feelings.  Remember that to act out a feeling sexually does not resolve that feeling.   If you cannot decode your feeling, consult with a sponsor, a therapist, or a group member.  [...]
  3. Avoid trigger situations.  Identify situations, persons, and circumstances that can trigger addictive responses.  Respect your powerlessness, and avoid those triggers.  Remember, when in doubt, don't.
  4. Forgive yourself for slips.  If a slip occurs, turn it into a learning experience.  Be gentle with yourself.  Your shame will cause you to beat up on yourself, and that will make you even more vulnerable.
  5. Work on nurturing yourself.  Exercise.  Walk.  Eat well.  Rest.  Enjoy a massage, baths, and safe indulgences.  Seek out nature, music, art, humor, and the companionship of good friends.  Find time to take care of yourself.   Make your living space a cocoon for your transformation.  Buy yourself a teddy bear.  You deserve this treatment.
  6. Avoid keeping cravings secret.  Keeping your cravings secret will add to their power.  When you feel like acting our, go to people you trust so you are not alone.  In general, secrets are about shame, and shame always makes you more vulnerable.   Secrets will keep you from others in recovery.
  7. Find alternative passions.  Seek hobbies, sports, and activities you enjoy.  Cultivate these parts of your life so compulsive patterns in working, obsessing, or acting out compete with activities and interests that are rewarding.  Alternative passions become new arenas for growth.
  8. Acknowledge your choice.  Avoid the feeling that you are a victim.  You are powerless about your addiction, but you are in charge of your recovery program and your lifestyle.  In most areas, you have the choice which can help you achieve the balance needed in your life.  Be proactive instead of reactive by acknowledging to yourself and to others what your choices are.

Number 7 — Developing a Spiritual Life

  1. Use the Steps.  The Twelve Steps are a proven recipe for spiritual wholeness.  Remember that the program started with the realization that without the spiritual component, recovery could not happen.  Decide that a spiritual life is essential, not an option.
  2. Find guides.  Listen to others share their spiritual experiences and ask how healing happened in their lives.  Brokenness, failure, and tragedy have helped many find parts of themselves they had not known.  Most also started with anger or fear, skepticism, or detachment.
  3. Separate religion from spirituality.  Many come with "baggage" about religious institutions that damages or constricted their growth.  Resentment about these experiences can cast shadows over genuine spiritual development.  Organizations and institutions are not ends in themselves, but are instead designed to help you have a spiritual life and build a spiritual community.  Use only those which help.
  4. Connect with nature.  Spirituality starts with a sense of wonder at our existence and at the wonders of creation — other living things, the oceans and mountains, forests, deserts, and weather.  Go for a walk.  Watch stars.  Take care of a pet.  Notice your body.  Play with children.  Then connect these miracles with what you see around you.
  5. Make a daily effort.  Key to spiritual life is constancy.  Daily rituals that anchor your sense of stability help you achieve incremental spiritual growth.  Then when leaps of faith are required and stress overwhelms you, a reservoir of accumulated strength awaits.
  6. Find ways to promote reflection.  Spirituality is about what is meaningful to you, what gives your life value.  Inspirational writing, daily meditation books, liturgy, prayer, journals, yoga exercises, and letter writing are the kinds of things that need to be part of your daily rituals.  These also help you make sense out of special spiritual events.
  7. Surrender.  All inner journeys start with an "emptying" of self — a fact reflected in religious traditions.   Addicts begin recovery with an admission of powerlessness and live their lives according to the principles of "letting go."   Serenity, according to the prayer, is doing all you can and accepting that that is enough.
  8. Heal the sexual/spiritual split.  Much damage has been done to sexuality in the name of religion.  The result inhibits progress on both planes.  To heal, start by acknowledging that sexuality is about meaning and that spirituality is about meaning.   Search for common areas between the two.  Be gentle with yourself about old, tortuous conflicts.  They are not about you.   They never were.

Number 8 — Enhancing Sexuality

  1. Make a sexual leap of faith.  Sexual change is gradual, not sudden.  You have to trust and believe that it will happen.  (This most often-used phrase in this area of advice was "let go and let God.")  Attempts to do otherwise and control outcomes will destroy sexual experiences.
  2. Sustain sex with intimacy.  Sexual vitality comes from relationships.  The challenges of closeness renew sexual interest and deepen the meaning of sex.
  3. Talk before, during and after.  Verbalizing, passion, needs, and fears are perhaps the best ways of facilitating sexual intimacy.
  4. Overcome sexual shame through affirmation of each other.   Couples that did the best emphasized the strategy of mutual affirmation.   Compliment your partner.  Affirm all the positive things you can see about his or her sexuality and about your sexuality together.   Don't stop.
  5. Respect boundaries and limits.  Building trust helps heal the sexual wounds of the past.  Both partners need permission to say no without fear of reprisal or abandonment.  Give profound respect to the other's vulnerability and wishes — even when you don't fully understand them or approve of them.  Remember, trust is the goal.  To seduce, manipulate, or test your partner's boundaries is extremely destructive.  Healing will shift perspectives and boundaries.  Breaking the trust again may lead to irreparable damage.
  6. Pay attention to feelings.  Addicts and co-addicts learned to sexualize their needs and pain, yet their needs remained unfulfilled, their pain unattended, and their sexuality stifled.  Attend to your feelings.  You might have to begin by just labeling them.  With time you will get better at sorting them out.
  7. See sex as legitimate joy.  Abandon the grim rules you learned that kept you in addictive and co-addictive obsession.   Have fun.  Play.  Within your sobriety plan and your boundaries, allow for spontaneity and experimentation.  Your recovery principles carve out an area of safety so that you can risk yourself sexually in new, positive and rewarding ways.
  8. Take care of your body.  Physical health is basic to sexual health.  Exercise.  Eat good food.  Sleep well.  Limit the use of drugs like alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine.   Do these things and you can trust that your body's responses will be limited only by your mind.

Number 9 — Beginning to Date

  1. Heal first.  Wait for your program to stabilize.   Take the time you need to work through celibacy, to develop support, and to understand your addiction.  Most who took this time felt it was the "greatest gift" they could have given themselves.
  2. Take time to be known.  You have plenty of time.   Aim for friendship.  Avoid urgency.  Enjoy yourself.
  3. Be selective.  Only date people in whose presence you feel most like yourself.  If you find yourself slipping into shame — feeling the need to defend yourself or seek approval — consider it a warning.
  4. Share you plan.  When dating becomes steady, share how and under what terms you want to be sexual.  Elicit from your partner his or her reaction to this as well as his or her intention and values.
  5. Share your recovery.  Tell your partner about your history so you are not carrying a secret.  These are two critical things to remember here: 1) If it is not safe enough to share this fact about yourself, it is not safe to be sexual; 2) If you are sexual before your partner knows your history, it may be perceived as a betrayal when he or she does find out.  If your partner accepts you as a recovering person, your fears of abandonment will dissipate.  Seldom did we hear about addicts who were rejected for sharing their recovery if they did it up-front.
  6. Do pre-dates and post-dates with others.  Before and after dates, check it out with others, especially if they have any anxiety.  No one does it perfectly.  Everyone makes mistakes.   The real problems arise when you cease to share your process.
  7. Remember: This is a date, not an encounter group.   Acknowledge your feelings.  If you feel anxious or awkward, say so.  Watch the intensity, however.  You do not have to tell your life history or share childhood pain the first evening.  Trust should be incremental, not instantaneous.  Build up some history with your date — spend some time together first.
  8. Beware of cosmic relationships.  Intensity is not intimacy.  Fast-forwarding the future — as when, after a very brief courtship, you are certain you have found "the one" — can be a fix for the emptiness of the present.  Life mates are not determined in two days, even two dreamlike days.  Many addicts spend one night that takes years to untangle.  There are magical evenings, however.  Enjoy them.  Listen to your intuitions.   Trust history and recovery.

Number 10 — Solving Conflicts

  1. Work for win-win solutions.  Shame-based couples tend to look at all issues in terms of right and wrong, and to see all conflicts as ending with a winner and a loser.  Search for solutions that make each partner a winner.  Seldom is there just one way to do things.  Find the alternatives.
  2. Use the Twelve-Steps.  Stop the fight and share with each other what Step you need to use in connection with this problem.   Use the tools your recovery gives you.
  3. Agree on times to work on problems.  Fighting when you are tired and depleted is counter-productive.  Agree that it's all right to talk about the problem at another time that's acceptable to you both.  Have a rule about times of the day when intense issues need to be tabled.
  4. Avoid dramatic exits.  Threatening abandonment is great drama, but also destructive to those whose history is filled with it.  Remember, shame is about abandonment.  If you need time-out, ask for it.
  5. Focus on the issues, not the history.  Shame-based couples do not resolve things because they keep escalating the conflict by adding in other unresolved problems.  Cut down on the backlog by concentrating on the current disagreement.
  6. Avoid cheap shots.  Partners know each other's vulnerabilities.  Fighting is an act of trust and an invitation to intimacy.  Do not sabotage it with demeaning, disrespectful, or expletive comments.  Support, do not exult, when your partner admits an error.
  7. Accept issues and feelings of others.  They are realities for the other person, even if they seem alien or unreal to you.  Validating your partner's experiences will add dramatically to your ability to solve things together.
  8. When stuck, consult with others.  Therapists, trusted friends, sponsors, other couples — all can be resources.   If as a couple, you have no one to talk to, you do not have the resources you need.  Find support for your relationship.

Number 11 — Resolving Trusting Relationships

  1. Give a lot of time.  This was universally seen as the most important piece of advice.  Phrases like "patience," "go slow," and "one day at a time," were very common.   This reflects the old Al-Anon wisdom: "nothing major the first year."
  2. Be willing to lose it in order to get it.  Both partners have to resolve not to give up parts of themselves in order to keep the other from leaving.  If you can fully be who you are and your partner does not leave, you have something.  Fidelity to self is the ultimate act of faithfulness to the other.
  3. Restore self first.  Do the repair work that you yourself need, and your perceptions of the relationship will change dramatically.  Most people's unhappiness in the relationship is about themselves and not their partner.  You have to trust before you can trust the other.
  4. Accept the illness in the other.  Start by acknowledging at the deepest level of yourself that you both are powerless and fully involved in the illness.  It is as hard for your partner as it is for you.
  5. Admit mistakes promptly.  Avoid blame.  Work for honesty and accuracy, not for proving what is right.  Self-righteousness inevitably kills intimacy.
  6. Share spirituality.  Explore ways to be spiritual together that are simple for the two of you.
  7. Use the "amends" Steps.  Reverse the blame dynamic by taking responsibility for pain you have inflicted on the other.  Do what you can to make up for it.  Use Steps Eight and Nine as a model for daily living with your partner.
  8. Remember, it's never going to be perfect.  Just as the "ultimate partner" does not exist, neither does the "ultimate relationship."  Accepting human limits in ourselves helps us in being generous with our loved one.
  9. Be with other recovering couples.  Attend open meetings together.  Join fellowships of couples.  Go on couples' retreats.  Socialize with couples.  Support other couples.   Have couple friends.
  10. Have fun together.  All work on recovery with no play makes for great intensity, not intimacy.  Closeness comes from shared common experiences, including the fun ones.  Remember, play is, in its own way, and act of trust.