Sex and Recovery

It’s what got many of us into recovery and it’s a marker of how far we’ve come. Sex. Pre-recovery we did it with too many people, the wrong people, the wrong gendered people or it was bad when we did it because we numbed out or didn’t have enough sense of self or self-esteem to get what we needed. In early recovery we may still have done it with the wrong people (the cute guy in our home group or the married guy who was 13^th stepping.)

We finally found our way to women’s meetings where it was safer to talk about sex, sexuality and relationships. We made women friends in recovery who were in similar life stages: wanting to date, newly divorced, new baby at home, perio-menopausal or post menopause, (“Where’s my Estrogen?”) We could talk and learn about sex and sexuality as it changes over the course of a woman’s life and we could apply principles of recovery to those stages. (Ambien? Really?)

Some of us found that the booze was hiding a different sexual preference, and some of us found that booze was covering up long buried traumas and past sexual abuse. If we stayed sober thru that hard stuff we did come into—or out, as the case may be, the sunlight of the spirit in our sexual affairs as well.

That’s healing.

This month our magazine, The Grapevine, has a cover headline that says, “All About Sex” and feature stories about healing in our sexual lives, and some of the sexual issues that face us in recovery—and in our meetings. Read the one called, “Confessions of a 13^th Stepper”.

We endeavor to practice these principles in all our affairs. Yes, all of our affairs.