It All Begins With A Story – Part 2
We hope you enjoyed Part 1. It was a bit of a rocky road but not nearly as tumultuous as the wild ride of recovery. Please do not be discouraged by the course we took to emotional and spiritual health. Every turn we took did not need to be taken. Every lesson did not need to be revisited as many times as we did. We hope that your critical review of the “road less traveled “we took will inspire you to do it differently than we did. Our two favorite recovery promises are “we will not regret the past” and “no matter how far down the scale we have gone we will how we can be of service to others”. If our mistakes serve you then they were worth it. Part 2 continues with John’s entrance into recovery.
Our Story Continued…
John
My entrance into the recovery rooms was nothing out of the ordinary for a typical alcoholic of the early 70’s. I had no money, no education, tons of debt, no employable skills, no promise for the future, a small junkyard of damaged autos, and a huge wake of broken hearts and promises. The only difference between me and the other alcoholics I met was that I was eighteen and the average age in the rooms at the time was 60 years old.
The drinking and drugging stopped on January 1, 1971 and by the grace of God and the 12 Step support I receive on a daily basis, that chapter will remain closed. However, my imperious pursuit of love and romance did not stop when I put the cork in the jug, in fact it intensified into a reign of terror that would have led to my getting kicked out of the recovery rooms if the Traditions would have allowed it
You often hear someone share at gratitude meetings that “my worse day sober is better than my best day drinking,” as a reminder that no matter how bad things look, life before sobriety was more intolerable, but that was not true for me. Some of my sober days were worse than my worse days drinking because I continued to objectify women and worshiped at the shrine of the perfect romance. One of those perfect relationships gave rise to my discovery of“prayer and transportation”. I know what you are thinking … this guy has lost his mind or as my children often lament, “he is older than he thinks”. I must say both are right or at least I have misplaced my mind. But for sure I am old. I would be glad to tell you the back story for “prayer and transportation” but it is a little weird and I would like you to anticipate it, so write me at jleadem@leademcounseling.com and I will send you the back story. Most of the amends that I would one day need to make would be grounded in the behavior associated with what, at the time was called womanizing. I know it today as a love and sex addiction.
Elaine
At the age of eighteen, I entered the 12 Step rooms doubting I could ever change and certainly did not believe that I could do this with a room full of strangers promoting the use of spiritual tools as the way to freedom. I was even less trusting of the smiling faces that seemed to show up at every meeting I attended. The wall that I had built around myself was reinforced with sarcasm and defiance – no one could help me and besides I took great pride in being able to take care of myself – not to rely on anyone! Relying on others was a recipe for disaster – or so I thought. Surprisingly, I stayed in the fellowship, but I was vehemently opposed to dropping my guard and becoming vulnerable. What I couldn’t see initially, but eventually was able see over time, with the help of some pretty awesome women, was that my very best efforts to protect myself had failed to insulate me from the violations of others or disrespect for self that I had developed. The obsession to use substances to alter my mood was removed early and the relationships I formed in the recovery rooms encouraged me to make the changes in my personality through the steps that allowed me to imagine a life without revenge and the prospect of love. The women in my support group became my parents and extended family members. The other young people I met encouraged me to live in union with others rather than at war with everyone and in defiance of the God I had thought had abandoned me in the woods when I was raped as a child.
The help I got from the members of the recovery community and the practice of the first three steps in my life helped me to remain drug free, but I was still hiding out from an admission of powerlessness over alcohol even though I did not drink. That 1stStep would not come for many years. I managed to avoid facing that addiction and the acknowledgement that I had turned out just like my alcoholic parents until my untreated love and sex addiction nearly claimed my life.
John and I met in the recovery culture and I saw in our relationship an opportunity to rewrite the way the story of my life would end. He was not the perfect man, in fact he openly talked about his flaws. He was certainly not the man that my childhood heroines rode off into the sunset with. He did not worship the ground I walked on – heck he seemed to be whole without me. I recoiled from his claim that, while he loved me, I would always come third in line, after the 12 Step fellowship he had come to know as family, and after his relationship with God. I don’t know why I did not run from the relationship immediately, perhaps it was because the old timers had warned me not to leave before the miracle happened or perhaps it was because we were brought together to promote continued healing in each other.
John
My untreated love and sex addiction brought me to a bottom that I had never known with addictive substances. Perhaps it was because I had been dry long enough to know better and besides the havoc I was wreaking could no longer be credited to intoxicants. I had spent 3 ½ years shooting romantic fish in the recovery room barrel and my last catch had tried to kill herself after our breakup that I had fashioned was for her own good. You know how that story line goes.
I feared that I had become the character described in Chapter 5 of the recovery text, Alcoholics Anonymous, as being “… constitutionally incapable of being honest with himself or others. “I confessed my sins to an old timer and told him of my fear. He gave me good advice and bad advice. The good advice was that there was hope for me because a person who was constitutionally incapable of being honest with himself or others would never pose the question in the first place. Sociopaths, he assured me, don’t walk around wondering why they do not have a conscience. The bad advice was twofold. The first bit of misguided wisdom defined my problem with women as being related to my immature desire to allow them to get too close. Romance and love are great, he growled, but they needed to be kept separate from the business of recovery and he warned that I should never let a loved one meddle in my program. He further encouraged that all was fair in love and war and that I would be better off not making any emotional commitments. He closed by reminding me that “under every skirt there was a slip” as if women would be my undoing.
I was in a world of pain with no anesthesia and sought retreat in the priesthood but that did not work out as I had planned. Convinced by a priest recruiter that I was trying to run from my problem with women, I entered a period of abstinence from romance and sex to find out what was wrong and why it was that my life became so very unmanageable every time I entered a romance. During the 20-month period of romantic and sexual celibacy I discovered that my desire to fill the hole in my spirit with a romance or with sex was virtually the same strategy I had unsuccessfully attempted with booze. I came to understand the deeper meaning of the phrase, “our liquor was but a symptom.” My obsession with women, sex, and romance was every bit as addictive as my love affair with Southern Comfort or Devil Dogs had been. The first 12 Step fellowship for sex addicts was not going to arrive on the scene for another six years so I spent many hours searching the existing recovery rooms for men who understood what I was talking about and wanted something different for themselves.
Nearly 2 years after entering, what I had originally thought was going to be a desert of deprivation, I emerged from the oasis a free man. The Sixth Step work I had undertaken revealed that for me, booze, addictive romance and uncommitted sex were all intended to fill the same spiritual hole. A slip was not to be found under every skirt any more than peace or fulfillment could be secured there. In fact, the problem was not the skirts at all. I had been focused only on the unmanageability I had known as a result of what I put into my body and skirting my other addictive problems for far too long. My obsession was lifted, and I discovered my lifelong mate when I was not even looking – imagine that.
Elaine
Our courtship lasted nine months before we were married in the same church I had fantasized myself a childhood bride twelve years earlier during my Holy Communion. In the personal vows we exchanged John began with the statement: “I cannot promise that I will stay married to you because I have never remained committed to anything or anyone but I will promise I will make a lot of noise if I am troubled or unhappy.” Father Kaven appeared shocked by John’s promise but I understood perfectly well what John meant. I wish I had made the same commitment.
Before our first anniversary I had cheated on him and surrendered my abstinence from alcohol and discarded every recovery commitment I had ever made to him, my God, and myself. He was aware of my withdrawal from the recovery rooms but not the affair. The affair was not an attempt to free myself from my marriage or an angry vengeful retribution against John. I loved him. It was me that was in trouble. Our intimate relationship had awakened the two-headed demon of anger and fear. I was very angry as a child that I was dependent on my perpetrators and that anger was coaxed to the surface by the interdependency that John and I were developing. My fear of vulnerability that I had learned at the hands of my rapist at the age of eight and my other perpetrators throughout my teens was screaming “run for your life.” If you work with trauma cases, you learn that post traumatic memories can be triggered by an equal or greater trauma or feelings of intense vulnerability as had been the case for me.
The demons were in control once more and I experienced a great surge of personal power when I seduced a coworker until I had successfully reenacted the traumatic abuses of my past. I was horrified by my infidelity and felt such self-loathing after the event I did not want to live. Neither of us had addressed the distance that had been growing between us prior to and after the affair because it was assumed that the problems that I was having were my issues to address through my program. John attempted to get access to my pain, but I held him at bay and his support system referred him to the passage that suggests that “acceptance is the answer to” all his problems. We were close, but our programs were not. In this case “acceptance” was contributing to the problems he and I were having.
John
As Elaine has told you, we were married after a short courtship but not before I had received a warning of what might be coming in our life together. One night, after a tender and loving romantic encounter with my fiancée, I was awakened by a horrifying scream from Elaine who had just bitten a large hole in my arm. When the shock of the event subsided, and I comforted her though her deep sobbing she told me that she had fallen asleep after our intimate encounter feeling safer than she could ever remember and met up with her rapist in her dreams. The next day, while waiting for my tetanus shot, I thought to myself that something needed to be done to get her some help whether her program was my business or not. I returned home with a firm resolve to force the issue and found Elaine behaving like nothing had happened and when challenged she blocked me with a refrain I had heard from her many times before. The past is the past – let it go! Her position was supported by my sponsor and others. I was to mind my own business. Leave her if I wanted but never butt into a partner’s program. Before the fog of that foreboding night had lifted, we were married and giving birth to a very sick child that was not expected to celebrate his first birthday. Our lives became consumed with the responsibility for keeping our child alive and a career afloat to pay the astronomical medical bills. Many years passed, and we grew closer and closer but never close enough to address the deep traumatic material that lurked in the deeper recesses of Elaine’s spirit until her shame and overwhelming desire to drink forced the secret to the surface one Christmas morning.
Elaine
John brought me to his lap with the statement that he knew that I had something dark to tell him and he wanted to be there for me. He continued with the position that he was tired of having separate programs and the past seemed to be haunting me. I began with the fearful caution that I had been told by my parish priest and support group that the secret was mine to suffer and I needed to take it to the grave. They assured me that I did not have the right to tell him about my infidelity in order to relieve my pain. However, I knew that I would not be able to remain in the shadows any longer and I would either need to leave, tell the truth, or drink again. John will say that he was not sure that anything he knew about me or loved about me was the truth that morning, but he was sure that the answer was in the Steps. He trusted God and the process of recovery and was certain that we would be helped by joining our programs of recovery even if we did not remain together.
The women in the recovery culture who supported my mental health provided the love I needed to remain drug free, but it was a terrible time in my life. I had taken my first step as an alcoholic years before in an effort to avoid a full-blown relapse into the drug induced unmanageability of my teens. I had managed to stay clean and avoid a few close calls with additional betrayals, but I had not done sufficient work on my more resilient defects of character and nothing about the traumatic sexual abuses I had endured and failed to treat my love and sex addiction
I had a great deal of work to do on myself related to the dark clouds of traumatic memories I had failed to keep at bay. I came to understand, with the help of many, that I also struggled with an untreated sex and love addiction that began in adolescence and continued into my marriage. I suspect that John and I would not have had to endure my betrayal had we shared our recovery programs years before. I was unwilling to entrust him with the haunting memories of the many traumatic injuries I endured because those were secrets to be shared with God and a sponsor, but not a husband. He did not have the right to challenge the flimsy reeds of denial and blocking I used to keep the demons at bay. But I was wrong. We shared the same God, we shared the same children and economic resources, and shared the same bed but we had not had the courage to challenge the mainstream thinking, that separate was better. It was not until that Christmas morning that we were willing to be truly IN Love.
May Our Experience Be Of Benefit To Others
We hope that our stories have shed light on pitfalls you might avoid. It would be marvelous if our shared experiences could be of service to others because God has seen fit to wedge the door open to our respective pasts and we continue to learn from them. If we can help in your journey, do not hesitate to contact us.
See our books:
One in the Spirit: Meditation Course for Recovering Couples
Awakening to Your Soulmate: A Decision to be IN Love
Related Article(s)
No Longer in Love? – Perhaps You Need to Get IN
About the Authors
Both John and Shawn Leadem are Licensed Clinical Social Workers in private practice in Toms River, New Jersey.
John has recently celebrated his 45th year in recovery and believes that “service to others is the cornerstone of spiritual maturity.” His professional service to addicted individuals and their families has included the development and direction of addiction treatment services in a full array of modalities from half-way houses to large residential treatment facilities over the past 44 years.
Shawn’s lifelong exposure to the recovery culture and his personal recovery experience has left him with a deep personal empathy for the social and emotional suffering endured by others and a strong faith in a person’s ability to change. He has received his certification as a Sexual Addiction Therapist and as a Multiple Addictions Therapist by the International Institute for Trauma & Addiction Professionals.
Together, John and Shawn have co-authored and brought their unique treatment model of relapse prevention, An Ounce of Prevention: A Course in Relapse Prevention, to residential treatment centers across the United States, they have trained therapists at numerous national and international conferences, and most recently have trained many EAP programs associated with many State Unions.
Copyright, John Leadem & Shawn Leadem, 2018
You are free to copy this article for future reference, to post it on other web sites and to share it with family or friends. If you would like to have permission to include it in a publication of your own you can request written permission by contacting the authors at www.leademcounseling.com.
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