Friends are the people you can think out loud in front of.
As active sex and porn addicts, we typically have very little going on in our personal lives other than our addictive behaviors and maybe a badly damaged primary romantic relationship. But we rarely realize this until we’re sexually sober for a few months. When we are active in our addiction, our compulsive use of sexual fantasies and behaviors keeps us from feeling things like loneliness and isolation. Twelve-Step support groups and other healing-based communities can help remedy this. But we must do more than just go to meetings. We need to reach out to other group members and form friendships. This means arriving early, staying late, and, most importantly, going to fellowship (usually by getting coffee or something to eat after the meeting ends). When this happens, we can talk about recovery, and we can also talk about other things we may have in common – movies, sports, gardening, theater, raising kids, politics, or anything else of interest. In short, we develop much-needed non-sexual friendships that help us heal and recover.
Task for Today
Spend at least a few minutes of purely social time with your fellows in recovery.