Addicted to Recovery?

20 Jul 2013, 6:53 PM

I have, as of late, found blogging to be quite therapeutic. However, I have noticed something in the way I work with the blogs. Let me explain this week. . . .

This is day seven of being sober. I am looking forward to beating my old record. That will happen on Tuesday. I understand that being away from temptation is paramount to overcoming it. I was away from home for this past week. I am home now and temptation is easier to succumb to here. Here I am alone. Here I make the decisions. Here I do not need to worry about someone looking over my shoulder. Here I can dance around the living room if I wanted to and nobody would know or care.

The point is, I was sort of protected when I wasn't here. I had mentioned to Stephanie that the desire of the addiction is still there but the longing has gone away. It's true, I do not want to commit the sin, but the thought crosses my mind. When it crosses my mind, images appear and a plan on how to carry it out. It is rather annoying.

I will have the entire plan mapped out piece-by-piece within seconds of the thought coming into my mind. Such a thought came into my mind this morning while I was getting ready and another later in the day. Thanks to prayer to avoid just this, the Lord saw fit to help me by erasing those thoughts from my mind for me. Though I did not have to think of them anymore, it doesn't erase the fact that I entertained the thought for a split second. A split second is all it takes most of the time.

Well, at any rate, I decided to avoid the whole thing by playing games and reading other recovery blogs on my iPad. I did this for several days actually, during my free time.

I read blog after blog. Then I would visit the history I wrote on my own blog. It finally occurred to me what I was doing. I was reading them over and over as a way to re-live the experience. So was I becoming addicted to recovery blogs? Somehow I think I was. In my own blog I would skip specifically to the most awful portions I felt the most uncomfortable with writing the first time. Were they actually a favorite memory I am not willing to give up? Is this why I am revisiting it? Or am I revisiting in order to realize how far I've come since then? Why was I reading other blogs?

Was I using them to help me overcome mine or using them as a new form of written pornography? People do put their stories on their blogs and some are more specific than others. Personally, I detest the words/terms pornography, masturbation, fornication, and sex-with-self. I never like to use them. At times it can be necessary, but they remind me of . . .me. I do not like to associate them with myself even though they've been there for two-thirds of my lifetime.

I would love to celebrate with others' recoveries. I wonder though if I am using their experiences to cover up my left-over urges by devouring their words and living it out in my mind. This is precisely why I did not like the book Clean Hand, Pure Heart. I had a hard time reading someone else's experiences written so plainly which were so close to my own. Perhaps I can give that book another try. I find comfort in the blogs. But I must know when that comfort becomes too close to danger. Stepping over that line can be the end of this season of soberness.