Dov Speaking to the Barcelona "Easy Does It, But Do It" meeting on August 9, 2023
The Daily Reprieve
Barcelona Meeting - Dov
[Music] Hello and welcome to the daily reprieve, where we provide essays, speaker meetings, workshops, and conferences and podcast format. We are an ad-free podcast. If you enjoy listening, please help us be self-supporting by going to Donate.thewreprieve.com and drop a dollar or two into the virtual basket. Please consider donating monthly by clicking the Donate monthly button. However, one-time donations are always welcome. Just click the Donate Now button. Now, without further ado, this episode of the daily reprieve. [Music] Okay. Thank you. It's so nice to see some one friend. I don't want to call you out. I don't think it's nice, but I miss you. I haven't seen you in a long time. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm grateful to God to see familiar people from my home group meeting. Where to start? Yeah, Nancy asked me for a topic. So, I opened my big trap and I suggested a really simple topic because there's not much else that's necessary. It kind of helps me keep things simple to keep things focused and simple. There's a lot of, I speak with a lot of newcomers grateful for that. They say that having grandchildren keeps you young. I've heard old people say that. I have grandchildren and I don't think they're keeping me young. I think they're making me old, but I enjoy them a lot. But I think I understand the idea of what they're getting at. It's listening to people who are new pre-programmed people sometimes a few times a day and remembering exactly how I felt again and remembering it again and remembering it again. I fear a time that would come where I don't go to meetings and don't meet newcomers or anyone else because all of us are newcomers in some way, in some aspect of our recovery. There's very important, really big stuff. I know I didn't even start to touch seriously until my seventh year sober and working the steps and some things just didn't register for a long time. That's just me. For other people, I know I've heard speakers say these deep things that really helped me tremendously and they introduced them. How long has this person been working this program? They came in two years ago or a year ago and I'm thinking, "Holy it smokes." People are different. People progress at different rates and what's harder is for me. I just got a phone call. I hope that doesn't mess up my connection to the call. Please tell me if there's a problem. That's keeping me young in a way, I guess, helping me not forget and think to myself, "Oh, I got this." A lot of times, I listened to newcomers. I've slowly found myself listening harder and harder to people in meetings, taking them more and more seriously, I guess, because something tells me that a person who's sober for 30, 40 years, usually, I don't think they usually became that way five years ago, 10 years ago. When did they become a person who could have a long, continuous, progressive kind of spiritual life? When did that happen? I've come to believe that not everybody, but a lot of us, I think, had that very early on. We were broken in some way already in a good way. In other words, our ego was broken or something holding us back was at least cracked early on and the light was starting to come in, even if we didn't get sober right away or we didn't hold on to our sobriety, we held on to something. That something is what distinguished those who stuck with it, from those who didn't stick with it. I started taking Tai Chi about six months ago, because of various reasons. Two people started the class about two weeks after I started, and then they both left, and then one person came, and he's still in the class now, and the teacher said to us, "Well, so-and-so left, so now I guess you guys can say we've seen them come, and we've seen them go." I guess he felt like that was something to be proud of. I don't know, but it was kind of cute. I've been in my home group since the first essay meeting. I sat down, I remember where I sat in Timonium Presbyterian Church. I sat down, I remember where I was sitting, I remember most of the people who were there, and they said, and they got around to me in the circle, and they said, "Who are you?" I listened to the couple of intros before and started to realize where I really was, who I was with, and that this was something vastly different than anything I had ever done before. I said, "Hi, I'm Dov, and I'm in a lot of trouble. I need a lot of help." I can't forget that. The people who were there, I haven't forgotten most of them either, and I've seen them come, and I've seen them go, and many of us have seen others come and go, and I think that I'm not being elitist. I don't think it's necessarily anything better, but there was something I believe that most of us who stuck with this had, even from the beginning, not necessarily that I'm staying in this meeting, but that there's an answer here, and I'm not going to let go until I find it. I remember a time that I was in a hotel room in Switzerland on a trip with my family. My father, who passed away 12 years ago, used to take us on these trips, which I thought was really, really smart, and I was in this hotel room, and I'm used to American TV. I turned on the TV a couple of times in Switzerland, and I realized, "Whoa, these guys have some different censorship standards here." I was sober about five years, 10 years at the time, it was the first trip to Switzerland. I don't remember what year it was, actually, but and some of the daughters of the people who owned the hotel, it was a family-run thing, were like prancing around the dining room, and I was driving me nuts, and I just excused myself from the table. I didn't like venous schnitzel anyway. It was like leather, so I'm not used to that. I excused myself upstairs, and my wife probably knew at the time why I was leaving, and I went upstairs to the hotel room, and I sat down, and I knew if I turn on this TV dead, so since then, even before that, I had made up in my head, you know, I'm not turning on TVs in hotel, motel rooms when I'm alone, at least. I'm not going to be the one to turn it on, ever, period, and I haven't turned one on yet, and even not in Europe, and I went up there, and I sat on the bed, and I opened up my big book, and I flipped to how it works, and I started to skip the first couple of pages, because that's just Bill doing his pitches, you know, and I got to the step three part, and I said to myself, you know, the answer's got to be in these pages over here. These next like two pages, the answer's got to be here. I'm not getting up from this mattress until I find the answer, and the answer wasn't, I desire to chase one of these girls and proposition her. That wasn't the question I needed an answer to. The question I needed an answer to was, why is living so unbearable for me right now? And what can I do about it? Like, what else is there? What's the answer to that problem I'm in? I can't stand being alive right now. Whenever I lust, I can't stand being alive. I'm not sure if it's the chicken or the egg or they come at the same time, but one goes hand in hand with the other, and I didn't get up from that mattress until I found the answer, and when I felt like, okay, I found this piece that I needed, I went back downstairs in time for dessert, which was really cool, because the dessert was pretty good. Anyway, so that kind of brings me to my topic. Let me just say this. When I act out, I won't get too graphic on this. I don't know what you're used to over there, but in this meeting, but, but, excuse me, when I act out, I use pornography and masturbate myself, and lie about the places I go and establishments that I frequent. I lie about that for two reasons. Partially, it's because I'm ashamed and afraid of being looked down on and all that stuff. I want the freebies that come with being respected by my family. I want sex with my wife. She's not going to be very happy to be close to me if I'm messing around, obviously. I hide that. Also, I want to feel some self-respect. If they know about it, then something makes it more true. I don't want them to know about it, because it's like some funky thing that's part of my life and whatever. I don't know. It's a double life, and I've made peace with it. I built this wall between me and me, and I figured out how to do that early on, I guess. Maybe that's what distinguished it as an addict from Nanak. I don't know, but, but I figured that one out a long time ago, and I knew if someone else, a third party, I'll call it a third party here intentionally, knows the me that presenting and is respectable and helpful and kind and useful and all this responsible and all that, and that they can trust. If they knew that me, and also the me that's doing all these things in secret that I'm hiding from them, that I'm actually paying more attention to, that I'm actually sacrificing more for. I'm a religious guy. I know. If someone says that they're religious, to me, that means, to me, three basic things. One is that they're consistent about their practices, relatively consistent. They do like things on a regular basis and the same kinds of practices. There's some consistency in their behavior. They don't show off about it, because then it's not spiritual. It's just trying to get something from somebody else. And number three, they sacrifice for it. It's valuable, so I sacrifice for it. I might spend time, money, take risks, whatever, lose a couple of things that I could get, but I give them up in order to do my religious. And that's exactly what I do with acting out when I act out. I sacrifice for it, because I take big, giant risks. I'm consistent. I never go, but so long without it. I know I need it again and again. And did I say keep it hidden? I keep it private. I don't show off about it, because that's going to ruin it. So how does showing off about it ruin it? Because when you know that there's a dichotomy, that I'm a liar, that I'm a fake, when you know that, it makes it real. And I can't reconcile it then. But I can, but you can't, and I know you can't. So I have to keep it hidden. And that's the magic of a meeting. When I walk into that meeting and I started admitting who I was, that was the beginning of the end. So if a person thinks that they can recover from the comfort of their own home by reading the big book, good luck to them. There's nobody that I tell the truth about me. So the reason that I want to keep the truth hidden isn't just because I want to keep the respect that I have for mothers because of that, but it's because I don't want to face myself. Because I know that if this person who knows let's say my wife knows the truth about me, both me's. It's a third party. They will not reconcile those two. They know they cannot be reconciled. They know I'm a fake. Me, I've worked it out using complex nuclear physics. I have figured out a way to work this, this conflict out, this double life. I'm not happy with it. I haven't worked it out perfectly, but I'm working on working it out. Don't interfere, please. I'm getting this. But if a third party knows, they say, what the F, what do you, what? It makes no sense at all to them because it doesn't make any sense because I'm a fake. So that's what I can't tolerate. I got to keep it private. Because if I let it out, if I show off about it, I ruin it, just like religion. I ruin it because it's my religion. It's my power greater than myself that restores me to insanity. And as long as I'm not sober, this program isn't going to really avail me much because I'm going to keep running to my higher power without even realizing it. And I mean lust, in my case. I'm not an alcoholic. But if I had multiple addictions, I'd have multiple opportunities. So like when I look at lust in, let's say Bill writes about lust in the 12 and 12 is one of the seven deadly sins. He's talking about it as a character defect. I'm not talking about desire when I talk about lust. When I say I concede to me in or myself that I'm unable to successfully use lust, that I'm powerless over lust. What I mean by lust isn't desire. What I mean by lust is erotic adventure, getting in, involving myself in any kinds of erotic adventures and discovering that that's not the same as sex with someone who was supposed to have been having sex with as part of something bigger than sex in discovering that it's huge. Because it makes sobriety like it makes the drug clearer to me like, what's the drug? And it's not desire. Desire is a character problem. That's part of gluttony and all that stuff. So my drug that I'm powerless over is engaging in erotic adventure. When I engage in erotic adventure, I have an allergy that kicks off and I become this person that hates you and you're a pain in the neck. It doesn't matter if you're my own son or daughter or if you're my boss who gives me my job, my supervisor who pays me, it doesn't matter. You're a pain in the neck. I have to navigate my way around you. I have to learn how to manipulate you. I have to manipulate things. It's always, I live in damage control mode constantly. Or at least keeping everyone off my back. Don't interfere in what I'm doing. This is big stuff. I'm having a good time. So building this wall and doing this living is double life. It's nuts. I'm nuts. So I'm not surprised that the second step doesn't say, came to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sobriety. If it said that, a lot of people would leave the program. Like it says later on, if this program's only about being sober, I don't want to have a part in it. What is that? Like step six, four or five or six or something or seven in the 12 and 12. Because it's got to be about something much bigger. Because when I act out, I'm not just a sinner, I'm a nut. Like nothing really, nothing that's real, really fits with this thing that's grabbed most of my attention, most of my hard work and sacrifice and most of my character. Because keeping it private, being consistent and sacrificing for something, that's the best of my character. And that's the best of my discipline and character. And I take those powers and I put it into my acting out. And it's just so what I get, what comes out of the computer, the other end of the meat grinder, is it doesn't even resemble hamburger. It's not even a life. So I'm glad the second step says, well, the first step, I'm powerless. I'm unable to successfully use my drug. And when I do use my drug, what happens is I act like a nut and I destroy anything like an adult life, which makes the adult bookstore like so ironic. It's always like adult. Anyway, it's like the opposite. So then I'm glad that step two says right away, oh, the solution is let's go on a path leading to sanity. Oh, okay. Because sobriety isn't the problem. The problem is sanity, sound living and sound thinking. So then it embarks on this whole bunch of steps that have nothing to do with drinking or lusting, meaning, you know, engaging it. This has nothing to do with engaging in erotic adventure anymore than it has anything to do with drinking. None of the steps, it's 11 and a half steps have nothing to do with drinking, really. Thank God for that. Because they're the answer, not the problem. Five minutes, thank you. So Sandy Beach famously pointed out he distilled out what he got from like Chuxie and what's his name? Clancy, I guess, and from his own experience that the alcoholic, or this is in my case, this exoholics problem isn't erotic adventure. And what it does to me, that's not my problem. My problem is sobriety. I cannot stand sobriety. When I'm not well, I cannot stand sobriety and the whole program, 11 and a half of the steps, is about getting well so that I can tolerate life without having to drink, without having to, you know, act out my antics. And that's really the whole thing, this cleaning house. Maybe the Oxford group saw cleaning houses having inherent value because they were, you know, a religious group, which is great. But Bill and even Bob obviously realized it's not the question of what they're doing. It's the question of the motive. You know, people, I'm doing it because my alternative to that is drinking and dying, is acting out and dying. That's my alternative. You guys, you know, the rest of the guys in the Oxford group, your alternative is being a sinner and hating yourself, you know, or it's going to hell. I don't know something. But not, you know, whatever, not being useful. Okay, that's good. But for me, it's worse. But none of these steps have anything to do with drinking or preventing me from drinking. It's preventing me from hating life so much that there's no viable alternative for me. So the problem that I've never, my problem, as long as I was sure my problem was drinking and religion, since I'm a religious guy, religion plays into that and it encourages us, and I'm not putting religion down. Like I said, I love religion. But but religiosity frequently encourages us to look at the problem as the drinking or the acting out, because it's a sin, etc. And that's, and it's true. Fine. I believe it's true. But that's irrelevant. Because my because the drinking, my acting out is really only surfing the purpose of being my solution. And my religion obviously didn't provide that solution. And neither does yours if you're here. Neither did yours if you're here. So if I come to this program in order to finally be religious, you know, that's fine. But the process is secular. The process is self honesty. And self honesty is something that even an irreligious person should be able to do. And that's the gift of this program is breaking that wall down, having you, my third party see both of me embracing boats, all of myself, and saying, I'm not trying to away from anything anymore. I'm accepting myself exactly as I am. That doesn't mean I'm condoning anything. But I'm accepting myself. I'm not running away from myself anymore. I'm not running away from life anymore. I'm running toward accepting things, you know, as they are. So the first step, but I'm going to finish with this, the first step acceptance is I admitted that I'm powerless over lust, meaning I'm not able to constitutionally, unfortunately, maybe unable to successfully use erotic adventure. And that's just the way that it's that it is, and it probably will never change. And I'm more powerless now than I used to be when I first came into the program over erotic adventure. That doesn't mean that it's harder for me to go walking in the street. No, it's a hell of a lot easier for me to go walking in the street. But I have less power over not desires, because desire is not my problem. My problem is engaging an erotic adventure. If I engage in erotic adventure of any kind, for even the shortest amount of time and that time is getting shorter and shorter. And it's also expanding into other things that are semi erotic to me, you know, like lying does something to me that acting out used to do to me in the old days for any reason. So there's this joke in my family. Oh, Abba, that's father, that's me. He hasn't lied in 20 years. You know, I said that a bunch of years back and my, you know, when like, you know, are you lying? I said, no, I haven't lied in 20 years, you know. So my wife knows what I mean, but I'm not living a double life. So, so that's, that's, I hope that's helpful. It's really just there's nothing else to me in this program. As far as staying sober and God and the miracle of sobriety and all that, as far as I'm concerned, in my experience, God's role in my sobriety itself, in the, in a sobriety from the drug, I'm saying the actual sobriety itself, God's like, what's God in there is, is, is because I have become so used to lust being erotic adventure, being absolutely essential for me. And I can't live without it through all the years of my acting out, it was about 20 years, that when I let go of lust and surrender it because of my recognition, I can't have this, it's going to destroy me. There's something wrong with me. I can't use it, whereas other people can, obviously, and it doesn't do this to them. I'm not saying it's right for them or wrong for that's not my issue. That's what I mean by secular, but, but I happen to believe as a religious person, it's sinful, but that has nothing to do with my problem and has nothing to do with my solution. But I, I forgot where I was, I, when I surrender it, that is, that is a loss. That's, I will go through a process of grieving, and that process of grieving might last a second, it might last a minute, it might last until I relapse. Okay, I need God to help me with that pain. Okay, that's where I need a miracle that I can live without this, that I can actually walk forward that next step without this. I can take a step forward and I'm, and I don't, and I can actually leave that drug behind me like roadkill and just keep going. That's a miracle. I need God for that. And at first I needed you for that. I needed to have sober sexaholics that I could look at and say to myself, yeah, I'm, I feel like I'm going to die without this. I'm turning my back on it because I admit I have no choice, but I feel like I'm going to die without it. And I had you to look at, and you showed me a smile. And you said to me when I walked into the room, you're not going to die. Like Chuck C says, you rocked me to sleep. You showed me, you're not going to die. You're going to be all right. You know, you can choose to leave it alone, and you're not going to die. That's what you told me, you became like a higher power. That didn't work forever. I needed God. And, and I carry God with me wherever I go. And like I said, but in the beginning of my little talk, I've seen him come, I've seen him go, right? I've seen people leave the program under really bad circumstances. And I've seen people kill themselves. I've seen them, but I've known them too. I've seen them destroy their lives. Also, I've seen people leave because they were okay without the program. That's okay. Obviously, I have no truck with that. But I've seen terrible tragedy happen as a result of leaving the program. And I've stayed here, and I'm not superior. I'm just I consider myself lucky, and I'm grateful to God for that miracle. I'm off. But, but, but, but, but it was my choice to live. And thanks for letting me share. Thanks, Daniel. And, oh, thanks so much. It was wonderful to see you even remotely. And that you're, you're, you're, you're what you're at to say. I love listening to you. I have from the very beginning, what you said about the, what, what about the two features of, of myself? I, I, that certainly was true for me. I had my illness and, and my acting, a compartmentalized. Hey, I didn't, it's the words that I use. I didn't want you to see it. I didn't want anybody to see it. For the reason you said, because if you saw it, then I would have to look at it, and I didn't want to. There was compartmentalized that I, I had one self that I wanted to be respected and so forth. Just as you said, the other self was, was I considered to be a terrible person and alienated from God. But this program has given me back sanity in a sense that, and that you said that, I don't have to do that anymore. Oh, thank you very much, Angela, for time. I don't have to do that anymore. I can be a whole person, and I can actually acknowledge the, and, and recently I've tried to acknowledge more specifically the, what the, what the fantasy was about, which I always had great shame about. So thanks for letting me share with you and thanks for being here so much. Thank you, Jimmy. Hey, we're still open for, for questions or shares. We'll have a minute. Nancy, go ahead. Yeah. Hi, Nancy, member of this program. Thank you so much from for agreeing to speak at the last minute. And I was especially struck by a comment that you have made to me in our back and forth. When I said, thanks, people, I had to serve at such short notice. You're responsible. I'm so short notice too. So it's not much of a difference, which I really appreciate. I wonder if you could go more into, like the previous questions said, these two sounds. I'm not sure. I guess maybe sometimes I'll use the word the addict reading that part of me. Anyway, thanks so much. Thanks. Well, I think a person can look at psychologists, I'm sure are trained in like pretty deep understanding of, of people and how we work. Philosophers probably have a, you know, if they're good, they probably have a window into some kind of philosophical understanding of like what's going on, you know, schematically, like it's parts of the person or the soul or whatever. But for me, there's like two, there are two aspects to it. One is incredibly gross and just very practical physical, very concrete. And that's just lies, you know, that things that I do that contradict other things that I do. You know, I've invested myself in certain things in life. And then I'll do things that contradict it, like a person who's, who's building a business, and then gambles away large amounts of the money that they're working their butts off trying to create through their business and having meetings and, and you know, motivating their employees and everything. And that, and they're gambling off tons of money on the, on the, on the other side of it. And I don't think it's, it's like an evil person would be a person who is, who has created a business in order to feed their gambling habit. I don't think that gambling addicts do that. I think that gamblers are gambling addicts or people who wish that they weren't doing this, probably, at least a lot of the time, and they don't even understand why they're doing it, really, because they realize how stupid it is. And like, when it comes to lust, I'm really stupid. It's, I don't mean it as like to make fun of myself. It's sort of like there's a Calvin and Hobbes comic where, you know, the tiger guy Hobbes is really actually smarter than Calvin. Calvin's kind of a dopey six-year-old, but, and like the tiger is sort of like his adult side sort of in, you know, sometimes, and, and, and he wants to trick Calvin, the kid wants to trick the tiger. So he puts a peanut butter sandwich on the ground with a, with a rope thing. And you see, you know, he's talking about the tigers talking about how smart he is. And then you see him in the next frame, hanging upside down from a tree, eating this peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And he says, but when it comes to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, we're awful, stupid. You know, tigers are awful, stupid, you know. So when it comes to lust, I'm, I'm, I'm awful stupid. And, and a country dicks so many things that I am truly invested in doing, and it doesn't even make sense to me. So that's kind of that double me and, and, and, and people who love me, who see that might give into their, you know, selfishness and just get angry at me about it. But if they really love me and they're not so self-centered, they're gonna just feel so shocked and so confused, because they do know me and they know that I'm investing myself in two opposite directions. And it just, just a terrible, painful enigma. So that's, you know, so I mean, if I admit that stuff, like Roy talks about the public admission, public aspect of admitting a first step, and help, and how valuable it is, if I do that, so breaking that wall, I'm causing, it's very, it's, it's traumatic, really, because I'm seeing, you know, one might say, yeah, I know I did all that. Sure, I just told it to you, but, but seeing that I'm the same person and I'm going in both directions is really kind of nuts. And it's kind of scary. And just seeing it calmly, matter of fact, Lee is, is very different than trying to figure it out or, or, or excuse it or anything else. And that's, I think that's what I'm talking about. And at the very least in the first step, I can accept that, yeah, that's what I'm gonna do when I start using my drug. When I start using my drug, I will become that crazy, even if I'm sober as a dead man right now, I will do that. And we see people who have been sober for, you know, dozens of years start where they left off and crash and burn horribly sometimes. I think Chuck C begins his new pair of glasses talks with two people who he had recently buried, won sober like 18 years, won sober like 20 years, because he says there something got too important to them. And they ended up having to drink again. And they just destroyed themselves very quickly. So my disease is probably progressing. And that's okay. I mean, it's, I can't be afraid. I can't walk around in fear. I mean, it's the way it is. Thanks very much. Yeah. I don't see a hand up. So I think I'll jump in there with a question, though. First, thanks once again for being here on such short notice. And my question is, at the beginning of your share, well, my question is generally about disclosure. But at the beginning of your share, you were talking about a third party knowing all of you, you know, both sides of you. And I know when we walk into a meeting, you know, we break down that wall and people see the dark side of us. But I'm wondering in terms of disclosure, in your world, like your wife, other people who might not necessarily be in the program are very close friends, or what kind of disclosure you've done in your life and any cautions or any advice in terms of that. Yeah, thanks a lot. I think there's something magical that happens in the rest of my life when I have one place where there are people who would not otherwise know about both sides of me, but now do, like something something magical does happen in the rest of my life where nobody else knows about both sides of me, excuse me, business, church, most of my family, but the neighborhood, like they don't they don't know all that, you know. So you might think, well, you know, what good does it do then? But but it does. It's it, it, it's sort of like me. Now I can say to myself, I don't have to do that stuff and be a fake to this person from now on, at least, you know what I mean? It's whereas before I kept saying to myself, from now on, I'm going to be okay, you know, like, now it was always like tomorrow, you know, or is like from now on, I'm going to be clean. And I never was, you know, but once I had one place where I really broke that wall down, I can't take credit for it. I should take some credit for it. I think all of us should. And I don't think it's bravery. I think it's just just caring about ourselves enough. And we did that. You know, we we found friends and we we use them properly to admit the truth about ourselves and give them a place to do the same. It's so it's so beautiful. So like once I do that, then everything else in my life is sort of like infected in a good way with that, you know, it's what's the better word for that it's sort of it just absorbs through the rest of the rest of my relationships and everything. But the disclosure, I'll give you an example. My oldest daughter asked me, where do you go every Monday night? And I said to her, she was 22, 21, when she asked me. And I said to her, well, what have I told you until now? And she repeated verbatim what I told her when she was seven years old, because she asked me when when she was seven, where are you going? And I said, and I knew at the time something in me, I just knew I couldn't lie to her and say, going to the park to exercise, you know, I couldn't lie to her. I told her, I'm going to meet with some friends to learn how to be a better husband and a better father. Does that mean anything to a seven year old? I mean, a seven year old knows what a husband and is a seven year old knows what a father is for sure. So something made sense to her, she didn't know how I was being a better but she knew something, I'm working on some kind of thing in me, you know, and then I want to be better than I was than I had been. So okay. And I said to her, so what did I tell you when she told me that line back? And I said, so it's true. That's where I'm going. And she said, but I want to know more like why and what's it about? And she caught me off guard. And I realized that if I tell her the answer to this, I might be okay with it. But my wife might not be because it's her daughter too. We're still married, you know, so obviously, I mean, if divorce wouldn't change that either, I hope, although in obviously in many cases, it does. But but but I would hope that parents confer about things that are going to affect what do we say in the traditions? Every meeting's autonomous, except it matters that affect essay as a whole. It's the same thing. It's putting the traditions in our life. So, so I conferred with my wife about it. And I said to her, hey, she asked me this, what are you, what are you comfortable with me telling her? And my wife, and I thought she was going to say, just tell her whatever you want to. But she said to me, I would want to know if my father, and I know my father in the well, great guy, I would, I would want to know if my father were an addict of some kind. But I wouldn't want to know if he wears a heroin addict. Like, I wouldn't want to know that he shoots a heroin because that image in my mind just is too painful for me. So I so if he were going to NA, I would want to know he goes to a 12 step program, but I just wouldn't want to know which one. So like, I can treat that as. And so now here I am with you talking about this, I can say, well, my wife has all these problems, you know, and she's in denial or this or that, I can analyze what she says, but I'm not, it's not my job. You know, my job is to love her and respect her at least. And, and I was like, okay, so I'll try not to cross that line. And I told my daughter that I have some problems, some problems, and I had problems in my behavior. And I have problems in my the way that I am. And I felt like I needed help. And I went to a bunch of folks who I thought could help me. And so far, it's been going pretty well. It is that enough information for you, you know, and she said, yeah. And I said, okay, if you want to know more detail, just tell me so. And then her husband about a year later said to me once, you keep getting these phone calls from people and talking and you and and my wife told me that you go to this group every Monday night, like are you in some kind of program of some kind? And I said, yeah. And he goes, okay. And that was it. You know, so I think that, you know, God, you know, is taken care of what has to be taken care of, I guess. I'm not sure if that answers the question, but my hope and my hope is that what comes out is enough, you know, to do for us to, you know, to be cohesive, to have a family, you know, to be to be okay with each other, to be whole with each other. I do wonder sometimes, like, if I should say to my family members separately or together, whatever, like, do you have any questions that you feel like kind of not to be morbid, like, if I died now and you like, you would have an unanswered question, you don't want to like, you want to know, you know, is there anything you want to know that you don't know yet? And you wish you would ask me about it, but you haven't asked me yet, go ahead. But I haven't done that yet. And I wonder if people here have had that experience and they would like to share that, you know, I'd love to learn. But that's all I have on that. Wow, thanks, a lot of food for thought in there too. Yeah, well, yeah. We have three lined up now. We'll have Iris first, then we have an anonymous question from the chat and then Avi. So Iris, go ahead. Yeah, thank you, Daniel. Thank you, though. Very deep to share and I'm really thinking on what you shared. I will listen to your tape again. And so, yeah, so you got some really bad feedback on your microphone. I'm not sure what it is. Yeah, maybe cut off your your video. Any better is that any better? Yes, yes, it is. Yeah, there was the insect cricket in the background. So yeah, so my question is regarding lust in marriage, because I was lusting after my husband when I came into essay, I came on 25 May 2021. And that is also my sobriety date. And I was confronted by him. But due to, you know, stopping in all forms from every side and abiding by the essay definition, I had no intention to do that. But definitely, I had opposite gender roaming around in the house. Thank you, Angelo, roaming around in the house. And yeah, I was really powerless about lusting after my husband. But I kept talking to my sponsor. I prayed so that I don't objectify my own husband. I really surrendered a lot. And now, after two plus years, I'm 26 months sober now. So I'm over with that. No more lusting. I really respect him. I am trying to be humble with him. So can you talk about, you know, lust in marriage? So I would really appreciate. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You know, I heard an old timer once share about how great guy, by the way, essay, old timer, share about how people talk about sexual foreplay. He considers doing the dishes foreplay and how wonderful that was. And I remember feeling like, okay, but for me, I look at it differently. I look at it as, I'll do the dishes, and then I'll expect sex as a reward for that. So that's like foreplay for me. So I sexualize the dishwashing. You know what I'm saying? And that's not what he meant at all. He meant, like, don't think of sex all the time. Think of being kind to each other, learn how to love each other. And then the sex stuff will happen the way it should. And all that stuff will work out if you focus, if you keep your focus in the right thing. That made a big impression on me. I was, and to me, for the most part, this lust in the marriage is in two areas, has manifested in two areas, I think. So far, at least, that I'm aware of, I might not be aware of a lot. That's the way it is. But one is, is just thinking about sex too much. And, and, and with that, and, and it helps, it helped me a lot to be less in control of certain things that were going on, you know, to take away my control about it and leave it alone. It's impossible for me to learn how to stop manipulating my wife for sex, I think. I think it's impossible for me to learn how to do that by, by not manipulating her anymore, just not manipulating her for sex anymore. I can't do that. I can't just stop doing favors for her for sex. I have to continue doing favors for her, just not for sex. You know, I can't just withdraw from things and expect to get better. We get we, what does they say? Practice makes perfect. You know, stopping a bad habit. This isn't about stopping a bad habit. This is about learning how to do it right. You know, so, so we had a little period of abstinence when we were about 12 years sober, I was 12 years sober, and my sponsor suggested a few months of about four months of sexual abstinence. We wrote a contract that was helpful. But what was more helpful was, what was more helpful was getting used to doing things for her and making sure I'm okay going to sleep tonight without any expectations or knowing that there won't be a physical payoff, a sexual payoff, and just getting used to that. And sort of like I was saying, I lost before, like not dying, you know, like not making that a tragedy. And that's okay. That was a big thing, and it continues to be a big thing for me. The other thing, the other thing is, is hard. It's, it's letting go of specific expectations. That's difficult in the bedroom. I remember driving people crazy talking about these things, and it's so embarrassing getting into specifics. It's just so it's so humility. It feels so humiliating and, you know, admitting things sometimes, but it was helpful doing that to the safe people, you know, with people who I was really safe with, not in a public way, you know, very privately with safe people and admitting things. And learning what what maybe I had to have enough room to figure out what loving really is, you know, there had to be enough space where the physical stuff was kind of, you know, I read this book by John something, Chapman called seven love languages. It's a very popular book. It's about how his belief that people speak different love languages, you know, so like, I have one child who if you buy her a present, it's like for her birthday, it's like she'll save it on her desk forever. It's like the best thing in the world. And this is the present that they got me and it's like a big deal to her. I have another one where you buy her a present and you find it like on the floor, somebody stepped on it the next day, she doesn't even care about it. But she'll save a letter that I wrote or or if we have time together, she'll tell me about remember that time we went to the blah, blah, blah together, you know, there's different love languages and some people like physical touch. It means a lot. I have some kids who are they're very big into the cuddling and some that are very not into the cuddling. And the touch doesn't mean much to them. So I used to think that my love language was sex, but it's not that way. Maybe there's something there, but it's really not that way. It's that I didn't have enough space in me to really love because I was all thinking about the physical stuff and the sexual stuff and the expectations were just choking. I was taking all the oxygen out of the room. So I had to leave space for that. And then I could learn more how to love. Believing that my wife loved me was a big thing for me. One day my sponsor, Jeff, said to me after in a conversation, he said, I was complaining about my wife as usual. And he said to me, you know, she really loves you. And I said, what do you mean? And he said to me, you know, she was patient with you and this and this and this situation. And she was kind to you, even though blah, blah, blah. And I said, yeah, you're right. I have no real explanation for that except that she loves me. So realizing that was leaving room space for for love. And the more that's in there, that that doesn't love has nothing to do with with, there's nothing really to do with sex to me. Really love is just love. You know, it's how important that person is to me is the feeling that's connected to love. I don't know what love is, but it's, but it's the feeling connected to it is this feeling that they're important to me. And yeah, this sex is something they can they can overlap, but it's not they're not the same. So I had to leave a lot of I had to get out of the way. What do they talk about in the program, right? About getting out of God's way. It's like here, it's like I'm talking about getting out of love's way because lust is in the way. And it's very difficult for me because I'm convinced that someone loves me when they lust after me. You know, it's very hard for me to make sense of that, but I need to go with faith. And I find I need to go with faith and try my best to to calm down about it, let it go, trust that there's such a thing as love without sex. And then, you know, when the sex happens, it's better anyway, you know, by far. You dove, we're running on time. Yeah, yeah, I'm just going on and on. I'm sorry. Thank you so much. Thank you for your patience. It's good stuff. Thank you, Del. I want to just mention just a line that me and husband also abstained for 14 and a half months as soon as I came into essay. And that really helped. It's a one or two, I would say. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I would like to thank you for listening to this episode of The Daily Reprieve, the best source for experience, strength, and hope for essay members. Please subscribe to this podcast to be alerted of new episodes. Please show your support by donating to The Daily Reprieve by going to donate dot the daily reprieve dot com and choosing either monthly donations or a one time donation by clicking donate now. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for the next episode of The Daily Reprieve. [Music]