8) Reflection

Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

Have you really thought about doing that? My list is very, very long. There are my victims of course, and my partners whom I betrayed with my victims. Then there are all the others. Those I stole from, lied to, berated, humiliated, rejected, judged, and so forth. My first thought was, I can't do that. I really can't. I don't know all of their names. I do know that the underlying logic of my complaint is in line with my values.

This is about letting go. It is about developing empathy and compassion. It is about seeing the impact. A man I know sometimes reflects on the exploitive relationships that comprised much of his acting out and concluded that once you see the harm you have done - looked it in the face - you can't go back to the behavior. Once you have shed the scales from your eyes and released the self-deception that protected you from the damage your addiction did, you can't do it any more.

This step is painful, but it is a healthy and necessary pain, like excising an old wound.

Last, it is important to remember that you are among your victims. In many ways, you top the list.

9) Amendment

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Amends is not repair or apology, although those things may be part of amends. Amends is admitting to others and to ourselves the harm we have done and showing the other that we are changing. It may involve telling the story of your recovery. It may involve articulating clearly what you did and how it was harmful. It is not enough to say "I'm sorry". You need to say, "I used you to gratify my needs and at the time I did not care what impact it had on you." Amends is not about seeking compassion from those you have hurt although it may lead to compassion. Amends is not about seeking forgiveness although it may lead to forgiveness. It is focused on the one you hurt - not you.

Mainly, I think amends is about saying that you know you did harmful things and that you are working hard to change the core things in yourself so that you do not do those things again, not only to the immediate victim you are addressing, but to anyone.

In our addictions we have been sources of unnecessary pain in the world. There is necessary pain. People die, fail, get sick, have accidents, and on and on. There is nothing we can do about that. But as addicts we have been abundant sources of unnecessary pain in the world. The place of amends is to promise that you no longer express or medicate your pain in a way that gives pain to others. Amends reduces the unnecessary pain in the world.

10) Vigilance

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Human beings make mistakes - lots of them. As addicts, we hid our mistakes and lacked the courage to admit our errors. This vigilance is a huge step that binds together letting go of addictive behavior with the deeper personality changes involved in recovery. We recognize that our patterns have led us to conceal and hide to protect ourselves. But we know that to stay healthy we must stay in the true. As the saying goes, you are only as sick as your secrets. Admitting, first to ourselves, and then to others, when we have been wrong prevents the formation of new secrets. It also opens up a feedback channel. Feedback is essential to learning.

This vigilance is a sort of mindfulness. It asks that we become more and more aware of our actions, motivations, impacts, and detecting the crap in our own thinking. Crap includes resentment, self-justification, arrogance, self-denigration, and sneakiness. The vigilance is about making our lives transparent, especially to ourselves. It is a big job. It takes a long time. There is lots of crap in our brains. You decrap your brain by taking inventory one day at a time and admitting your errors right away.

11) Attunement

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.

There are seven trillion possible humans in the gene pool. At the moment there are about six billion of us on the planet. Assuming that a generation is 25 years and assuming that the population remained stable at six billion, that means that we could expect exact copies of ourselves to reappear on the planet roughly every 29,000 years. And then that duplicate would arrive in an entirely different world. That is how unique each of us is.

I think this part about attunement and conscious contact with a higher power is about figuring out what our particular uniqueness is about and what to do with that uniqueness.

I recently heard Wayne Dyer talking about his book, "10 Secrets for Successful Living and Inner Peace". He closed his talk with a lovely and delightful thought that goes exactly to this point. He talked about the metaphor embedded in the words to the children's song, "Row Your Boat." The verse goes, "row, row, row, your boat". Row - move, attempt, make voyages, do your life. And it is your boat you row. Not someone else's boat, not the boat someone tells you to row. But your own once in seven trillion, one in six billion boat. Knowing what your boat is comes to us through conscious contact with the greater whole. Call that what is meaningful to you - God, the universe, nature, the Mind Spring. Whatever. The wisdom source is doubtless the same and wearing many names.

And you should row your boat gently. Not roughly - not quickly - not tirelessly, but gently. Be gentle on your path. Take care of yourself and take care to know yourself, this says.

And row down the stream. Do not row up the stream. There is little progress to be made rowing down the stream. You will get tired and stay in the same place. Make progress. Go with the flow. Go down stream. Gently.

And do this merrily. All the time - Merrily, merrily, merrily. Row, row, row, merrily, merrily, merrily. The Buddhists tell us to go joyfully into the sorrows of the world. Find joy. Not the empty, carnal pleasures of our addictions, but the joy of a full, multidimensional, self-determined life of rowing your own boat. Go into you life in joy.

And last in the verse, "Life is but a dream." What is this telling us? It suggests that there is a depth to experience that may not be immediately apparant. And that life is an easy thing when you merrily row your boat down stream. Life is not a struggle or a trial or and ordeal or a triumph. Life is a dream. Be then a dreamer.

This is how Dyer sees the secret of sucessful living and inner peace. I add a bit to his interpretation of the metaphor by thinking of where the stream ends up. In time it merges with another stream and then another and another still until it becomes a river. And the river runs on, merging with other rivers until it becomes a great river. At last it merges with the sea - the source - the place of joining. And from there, the sea is recycled to rain and snow to begin the cycle again. So the ancient rhyme also positions us at a moment of moving time in the great cycle.

On a rainy night a few years ago a client came into a session with me, grousing about the rain. Now this was a deeply pessimistic man. He did not row merrily. This was also a deeply Christian man. It occurred to me to tell him this. I told him that I did not know how many molecules of water had fallen on him as he walked from his car into the office, but I knew there were very many. I also told him that it was virtually certain that among those molecules was at least one that had been among the molecules of water with which Jesus washed the feet of his decibels. And molecules that filled the lungs of those who drown with the Titanic. And molecules that soothed the parched throats of the hardy folk who walked across Death Valley in 1849, and on and on.

The point is this. There is opportunity in every moment to make conscious spiritual contact with the greater. It takes us out of ourselves and into contact with other people and the greater whatever beyond. That sense of self-knowledge and connection can be achieved in deliberate prayer and meditation. It can be achieved through awareness of nature and others. I don't think the particular method matters a bit, so long as the product is a knowledge of our purpose here and the will and energy to row on that purpose.

12) Service

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other sex addicts and to practice these principles in our lives.

We serve in many ways. We serve when we tell our stories and listen to the stories of other recovering people. We serve when we gently observe to addicts not yet in recovery that there is hope. We serve when we talk with other addicts before, during, or after acting out. This too is about growing our of our egoist selves and embracing the larger community. Most immediately that may mean the community of recovering people. But also the community beyond that. We serve when we model recovery in our families and work places. We serve when we coach soccer or serve Christmas turkey to homeless people. The central points of service are two fold. To do good for others and to do good for ourselves by opening our resources up to others and so overcoming, a bit at a time, the selfishness that is central to our addiction.