Day 681
"You can't fix a spiritual problem with a physical solution,"
or so says the preacher at a church I recently attended. It seems right to me; I was raised that you have to have the right tools to fix a car or build a cabinet or unclog a drain. So my question is whether sexual addiction is a physical problem with a spiritual solution or a spiritual problem with a physical manifestation. I'm sure there are other ways to convolute the fundamental question, but this is one that I think we all struggle with from time to time in addiction, as well as in recovery.
I think the answer lies in correcting the underlying assumption that the opposite of addiction is sobriety; it is not. The opposite of addiction is community. Regardless of the biochemistry of addiction, we don't have a pill or procedure for 'fixing' it, so even if the primary cause is a dysfunctional brain, we need tools and solutions from a different realm. Community is that space, and I believe community is one of the most important creations of our Higher Power for all good things, not just 12-Step programs.
Addiction is a disease, and I am a sex addict. There are medicines, like my Damn Happy Pills (anti-depressants), that help get me to a place where I can make better decisions, but it's still up to me to make those better decisions. That process from clarity to sobriety would not have been possible for me without my SAA community; I was in active addiction for many years while only taking the meds.
One could argue that God could have 'fixed' me through direct divine intervention. But even there, it seems all of man's failed attempts to understand his creator suggest that our Higher Power prefers to exercise His interventions through each of us, through community.
–JR
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