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The Fragmented Feelings of our Fellows

Kyle T.

Conscious contact is the reason all of us came to SLAA. At one point in our acting out, we had a moment of clarity, which usually occurs during a bottom. This is why bottoms are so important. Only when I’m stripped away of everything I think I know, can I see something completely new.

Because of that, I want to talk about pain, suffering, guilt and discomfort as all being points of conscious contact. They may not be tools any of us wants to use or acknowledge, but I believe they are as important as freedom, joy, love and strength.

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A quote I came across the other day, from a French philosopher and fiction writer, follows: “There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of... [God] is forever bound to [God].”

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My experience is when something comes to my consciousness, I can no longer ignore it. One day, I’m not sure when, some unremembered moment in my life, I woke up to the fact that my sexual conduct was immoral. It was going against something inside of me that was trying to stand sturdier. Bill called it making mortar without sand. I was building a structure out of an ideal, but I was unwilling to use the correct materials necessary for that ideal. When this new idea came into my consciousness, a gift from God as you could call it, I was no longer able to turn back to my acting out, though I tried for many, many years. This was my first experience of conscious contact around my disease of sex and love addiction. It was as simple as a thought: I want to be a good man some day, but I don’t think I can continue to behave this way and still be good. I started to feel remorse. I started to feel guilty about what I was doing to people. And then the worst head of the Hydra—shame. I felt shame about the way I was conducting myself. I thought about my parents, my grandparents, my loved ones—they didn’t raise me to be some sexually craven fool.

And so it went with my feeble attempts to remain in sex and love addiction with the new additions of guilt, remorse and shame. I didn’t realize it then because I cursed those emotions, but those were the first gifts of my new conscious contact with God. I was beginning to understand. My inner emotions were signaling something new to me, possibly a new way of life. I could never again eschew them (guilt, remorse and shame) as my previous unconsciousness around my disease had once afforded me. Yes, there was a time when I was able to act out (I’ll say “freely” because I was not yet inhibited by my own conscience). I seemed to “get away with it.” But that all came to an end. And yet, because of my insanity, I tried to reclaim the old glory I once held in acting out. I pursued the same roads, roads which once led me to a feeling of freedom; now all those same roads led to dead ends. I was baffled. What had happened here? I certainly didn’t pray for this—and that’s when I first began to understand the only free gift in life: The Grace of God.

Consciousness is a funny thing for addicts. I won’t talk so much about it as it pertains to Step 11. In the Twelve and Twelve, it says, “Prayer and meditation are our principal means of conscious contact with God.” That is undeniably true, and I try to practice as much prayer and meditation as possible. But what of the other ins and outs of each day? There is so much time to fill. There are so many opportunities to make right or wrong decisions. Consciousness creeps around these decisions not in the way a loving God of Light holds a candle in the dark—but consciousness creeps around these decisions the way a hyena creeps around the dark fringes of a weak animal. I experience conscious contact in the face of the darkness, when I am about to create chaos for myself, slip around a dark corner and let my darker half seize control. I think with all the good work I’ve done, a little self-indulgence can’t hurt—at the very least it will rebalance the scales. And then when I start to pursue one of my little fantasies, conscious contact stands up. It comes the way a shadow is thrown when a cloud passes over the sun; there’s a sudden evil-smelling emptiness I feel, and around the edge of my consciousness slips this evil-looking beast.

I hear in almost every meeting I go to: people struggling with guilt, shame, remorse, self-loathing, self-hatred, fear, panic and anxiety. I empathize. However, I am aware of a more meaningful conscious contact occurring here, that maybe God doesn’t always impress upon us beauty and light and the feeling of freedom—that sometimes God sends different signals from a darker side of life, telling us in a more exigent way that we are embarking down one of those Dead Ends.

I implore my fellow addicts not to turn away from guilt, shame and remorse, but to lean into them. Lend them heft and life—because that’s what they are. When we feel it, it’s the very hand of God turning us away from something, sending trenchant knells throughout our bodies, beckoning us away from some immoral deed or lifestyle. It has to be, because we made a deal with this whole spiritual life, that God is either everything, or nothing. What is our choice to be?

So don’t worry so much about being the guru who can meditate for hours, or the person who goes around “praying for all his/her enemies,” or the avid religious convert,  etc. Worry more about the life you live on the fringes, when the lights are low and choices are nebulous, when something comes into your view that you truly want but you know is wrong. Because that’s where the real faith in God comes out—everything else is merely...practice.

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