Recovery Reflections: Emotions, Resentment, and Triggers

About these reflections

The notes below were written by a sponsor in long-term recovery from sexual addiction, to the men he sponsored, and published on our earlier website. They are personal experience rather than clinical instruction.

Their common subject is the thing almost nobody warns you about: sobriety does not remove difficult feelings. It hands them back to you, often all at once, and usually before you have learned what to do with them. That period is where a great deal of relapse happens.

On feeling everything better

Someone in recovery once put it this way, and I repeat it often: when you are sober you feel better. You feel anger better. You feel resentment better. You feel depression better. You feel anxiety better.

Underneath it, though, there is a peace that comes with working the program.

For me it arrives as small glimpses of a new way of being that then fade. Each day I try to spend a little more time in that way of being, and find a bit more room in my heart for what is good.

Training my mind is like training a puppy to come back on task when it wants to wander. It takes patience, and awareness of what wandering feels like, and a willingness to come back to connection.

On surrendering resentment early

I noticed how you described your recovery time after the angry outburst — that you stayed in the light, saw the weakness, and got centered again more quickly.

That is the same process you have been through with the addiction itself, and it matches my own history. Using the tools, relapses of both anger and the drug get contained faster, then overcome, and eventually stop happening. It is a good process to watch.

What I find is that if I stay aware and surrender resentments early, from whatever source, I can handle conflict directly and reasonably as it comes. The alternative is that it accumulates quietly and then spills out as an oversized reaction at some unpredictable moment.

Resentment and the addiction are very similar in this respect. Both have a history that needs confessing and neutralizing through the steps, and both need attention early rather than late.

On inflated emotions

In the middle stretch of my recovery I noticed a distinction worth naming.

Sometimes a thought or an image would produce a brief spike of feeling, and a quick prayer or a wave of the hand was enough to move past it. Other times it went straight from head to heart and lingered in my chemistry well after I had physically moved on.

I got into the habit of surrendering both — but especially the second kind — openly to another person, so they never had a chance to accumulate. Eventually I was surrendering the inflated emotions themselves, which I did by simply texting the letters "i.e." to a recovery friend.

What happened next was interesting. It became less appealing to take the look in the first place than to have to surrender the aftermath. And that small, temporary act of not looking made the emotions themselves far less inflated, and the pull much less compelling.

On street lust

Being particularly aware of attractive people — driving, walking, in the grocery store — and taking a good long look. This is a hard habit for most people and often the last one to go.

What worked for me: when I came across someone particularly attractive, I would say a quick prayer for them and see if that let the moment pass. If I noticed a shift in feeling that lingered more than a minute or two, I called a recovering friend to surrender it.

At first I was calling constantly. I am not someone who naturally enjoys making calls, even though I am always glad afterward. Eventually it simply was not worth taking the look in the first place, given how many calls it produced.

Now, when my peripheral vision catches someone potentially triggering, instead of running the little ritual of checking to confirm or rule it out, I look elsewhere and let myself feel the momentary off-balance. That passes.

On hypersensitivity to unfairness

An addictive mind is unusually sensitive to perceived injustice against itself.

From the inside, it feels like reacting fairly to something genuinely unfair. From the outside — especially to a wife, a mother, or other women close to us — it looks a great deal like acting like a child.

For many men in sexual addiction, lust and self-pity about how a woman is treating us are wound tightly together. You start to notice you can feel the tone of one while being tempted toward the other, in both directions.

As I have practiced letting go of expectations about how a woman ought to feel about me and treat me, lust has moved into the background of my life. And as it recedes, I am more able to keep my attention on being useful, without monitoring whether the person is attending to me sufficiently or seeing me fairly.

When I do need to raise something, it comes out much better from that place.

On the urge to escape

Television series are enjoyable, and my wife and I use them for a bit of escape now and then.

What I started noticing in recovery was that the same emptiness that invited me to disappear into a screen — especially alone — was the same emptiness that invited me into lust. I wanted out of my own head, and I wanted the emptiness filled.

Does that sound familiar?

I now recognize that emptiness as a kind of hunger for God. When I am tempted to fill it with media — and even the news is essentially sensation now — I try to stop, kneel, and ask what He would have me do with this moment. Then listen.

Almost every time I do, something shifts fairly quickly.

On intellectualizing your way out

Some men in recovery are intellectuals, and can be intellectual bullies to their wives and to other people. The habit of intellectualizing regularly gets in the way of their recovery. Their strength becomes their weakness, as tends to happen.

I have noticed that when I move into that mode I can become quite cruel without registering it.

For me it is a kind of intellectual self-gratification — about hearing myself talk and being understood, rather than about the person I am talking to. Recognizing that spirit, and surrendering it, has been a real step forward. It is usually self-justifying rather than genuinely truth-seeking, and you can hear the difference in its tone.

On what you were medicating

As time went on in sobriety, other emotions kept presenting themselves for surrender — resentment, boredom, fear.

Over time, by not reaching for my drug to medicate them and turning elsewhere instead, a calm settled over my mind that I had not experienced before. I also became more interested in and more satisfied by small everyday things.

That freedom and that connection turned out to be the best medication I could have hoped for. No regrets afterward, no crash back into reality, no self-destruction. Only peace.

A clinical note

Two clarifications from the clinical side.

These reflections describe depression and anxiety as things that pass with sobriety and spiritual practice. For some people, in early recovery, that is what happens. For others it is not, and it is important to say so plainly: depression and anxiety are real, treatable conditions. If either persists, interferes with your daily functioning, or brings thoughts of harming yourself, that warrants a clinical assessment — not more willpower and not more prayer alone. Seeking treatment is not a failure of recovery.

Second, the practice described throughout — surrendering a trigger to another person immediately, before it builds — is sound and matches what we see clinically. The mechanism is that it interrupts secrecy, which is what gives a compulsive pattern most of its power. It works whether or not you share the writer's faith.

If what surfaces in your recovery turns out to be trauma, that is common and it is treatable. Our CSAT-trained therapists work alongside program participation in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. Free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420 or text 801.997.8760.