Recovery Reflections: Faith, God, and a Higher Power

About these reflections

The notes below were written by a sponsor in long-term recovery from sexual addiction, mostly to the men he sponsored, and published on our earlier website. They are personal testimony rather than clinical guidance, and the voice is explicitly Latter-day Saint — which reflects both the writer and a large part of the community we serve.

If that is your language, you may find these unusually direct. If it is not, the underlying patterns still translate: powerlessness, the search for something larger than yourself, learning to forgive yourself, and the discovery that another person was never going to be the answer.

Take what serves you. Leave the rest.

On resenting God

Do you insist on staying stuck? Do you resent God for not healing you sooner?

For most of my life I was less conscious of my resentment than you are, but I still felt alienated from Him. I withdrew in subtle ways — going through the motions of prayer, more thinking-through than talking-through with a caring Being. I could not understand how, after all that thought and effort, nothing was resolving.

For most of my adult life I felt abandoned to a situation I thought could not be reconciled. What I wanted — romantic love — looked impossible if I was also going to keep my commitments.

When I started recovery in earnest, the resentment surfaced properly. Then I could not understand why God had not led me to the tools of recovery decades sooner. Why did I have to be in my mid-forties, after losing nearly everything?

What I can say now is that I have come to feel His goodness steadily since — and to suspect that the kind presence I thought was absent was stable and sure the whole time. I can also see far more clearly my own part in maintaining the conflicts I was blaming on Him.

On learning to pray again

Prayer is complicated for a lot of people in addiction. Either it went badly before, or it feels like God stopped listening some time ago.

Sometimes the old concept of prayer — the approach, the attitude, the idea of who God is — has to be rebuilt before a real connection becomes possible.

I thought I knew how to pray. I have learned that I mostly learn it in the doing of it. Even outside formal prayer I try to speak to Him through the day and watch what happens — what works in my attitude and approach, and what does not. In the meantime I take it on faith that He hears me despite how imperfectly I am communicating.

I need a great deal of prayer through the day, mostly to counter the creeping pull toward resentment and toward seeing myself as a victim. It reconnects me to something healthier and turns my attention toward loving other people instead of managing myself.

On self-forgiveness

I struggled with this for a long time.

What I had to learn was to trust that God would see to it that I got stronger, as long as I did my part and followed a program. And that in the meantime I was loved and acceptable to Him despite my imperfections — imperfections He was working on, in His own time and way.

You may find, as I did, that the moments when you are doing well are exactly when the accusing voice shows up, telling you it is not good enough, that you are still lacking. That is a voice to surrender, not to believe.

Listen instead for the quieter one telling you that you are good, that your efforts are seen, and that you no longer have to live beneath your privilege.

On finding a Higher Power

When I first got sober it made me feel better, as they say — which meant I felt the anxiety better, and the depression, and more resentment than I knew I had in me. Everything came down at once and I could barely move.

I kept the praying honest, and there were small packets of sunshine from time to time.

But in reality, my Higher Power in that period was the 12-step group — men with long-term sobriety in it. It was the first time since high school that I had been honest and open with a group of men, and it put something back into my soul. Like a rusty machine finally getting some oil.

That mattered because God was still essentially a cosmic servant to me. I knew He was there, but I was not relating to Him as a son. He was more like the person responsible for both the good and the mess, who could now please come and clean it up.

Eventually my prayers shifted toward "what would you have me do," and became less about me. I started to believe — slowly, and still with some reluctance — that He knows me personally. There is a depth and a joy in having a God who actually cares about you as your Higher Power. And the meetings are still important, as a reminder and an affirmation of it.

On your wife not being your Higher Power

I am grateful for this addiction, because indulging it is death, and not indulging it requires me to come to God every day.

Having done that for a while, I now value what I get from Him far more than I ever valued what lust gave me at its best. With that, I no longer feel the need to take a drink of it.

You will not thank me for this, but I am glad about what is happening between you and your wife right now, because it is exactly what your spiritual transformation requires. The fact that she seems harsh, and that you believe she is not trying to reconnect, is a nearly perfect crucible for what you are ready to work on.

Here is why. At the core of most men in sexual addiction — and a great many men generally — sits the belief that the free and unconditional love of a beautiful woman will heal and save them, and that this love, represented by sex, is the most important thing in life.

The fact that she can still drive you to distraction, while you see yourself as the one giving and giving and making all the effort, is evidence that the belief is still in place. She is threatening something central in you, and you are working with real futility to appease a god who cannot fill you.

On what you are actually looking for

There was always something about certain women that fit a particular template I had somehow built. It set off a kind of mystery I wanted resolved — as though this person held some missing element that had to do with my feeling whole. As though she was going to save me.

Men who are attracted to men will recognize the same thing with a particular kind of man: that this one, with these characteristics, would make everything complete.

When I am disconnected, I still feel it. I still notice the pull to check whether the woman in the next car or across the store has that certain quality in her face or form — the one that could have saved me.

The relief, when it came, was in reading that we receive a fullness in Christ, and that He completes us. The mystery turned out to be pointing at something else the whole time.

On seeing other people as people

Recovery has made my thinking more flexible and more accurate — better at reading my emotional and relational surroundings. The physical analogy is having the lights on so you can see what is actually on the path.

One specific change: my sense of being separate from other people has softened.

Talking with young or immature believers of every stripe — Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Muslim, militantly atheist, strongly conservative, strongly liberal, people who identify hard with their class — I keep finding the same emotion. Not just trust in their own group, which is fine, but a sense of being fundamentally different in their humanity from everyone outside it.

As a Latter-day Saint, I found plenty of justifications for that tendency in myself, as I am sure others do within their own frameworks. In recovery it softened, without my having to give up anything real in my beliefs.

That emotion makes other people less than human. I have come to dislike it in myself. And I have come to think its roots are in obsessiveness and narcissism rather than in God or in anything I actually believe.

A clinical note

Two things worth adding.

First, on depression and anxiety. One of these reflections describes them as bodily and chemical events that do not carry accurate information about who you are. As encouragement in a hard moment, that has real value. As a clinical statement, it is incomplete: depression and anxiety are treatable conditions, and treatment — therapy, and sometimes medication managed by a prescriber — is appropriate care, not a failure of faith or of recovery. If either is persistent, please have it assessed.

Second, on shame. There is a meaningful difference between a compulsive pattern and distress arising primarily from moral conflict about your own behavior. Both are real and both deserve help, but they respond to different treatment. The ICD-11 diagnostic criteria for compulsive sexual behavior explicitly exclude distress that comes solely from moral judgment. If you are not sure which you are dealing with, that is a good reason to get an assessment rather than assume.

Our clinicians work with faith as a resource rather than a problem, in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. Start with a free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420 or text 801.997.8760.