Marijuana: Vote "NO" on legalization for recreational use and keep it out of the hands of addicts and people struggling to stay sober.
Is addiction about sex?
Addiction can start in many ways. For many addicts there is some horrific event in our childhood that later renders us without a sexual identity. Those events can be child molestation, incest, rape or mental child abuse involving porn or other adult content not suited for children under age. Until we deal with these feelings we carry our inadequacies into our adult life and look for people to blame for what happened to us.
Once drugs and other substances enter our lives we suddenly feel like we do not have to look at the inadequacy of our lacking identity and drugs help us get the courage to feel more comfortable with people. Eventually we realize that not only do we feel like we do not need to be emotionally responsible for what happened, but that the drugs and alcohol help our sex drive and mask our fear.
For victims of sexual abuse, drugs and alcohol becomes a way for us to cope, at least for a while. Our lives end up in turbulent relationships filled with passion and wild drama. After a while we even create the drama deliberately so we have “a reason to use.” We treat those around us with hostility and anger and we keep drugs in our lives by expressing that we are missunderstood and that we are entitled to shift the blame anyway we want to because "it should be obvious that we are in some kind of pain."
We have never learned how to be sexually and genuinely connected to another human being without drugs and as our addiction progresses this starts to show. We hide from reality and find places where we find people who “understand” us.
For some of us this can mean prostitution and crime, all though we don’t tend to call it that. For some of us this may mean abusive and violent relationships, though we do not recognize the patterns we fall into. So long as we have another name for most drug related activity we are willing to “play the game.” The most dangerous part of that game is telling ourselves we do not have a problem. We can always find a new drug to mask our obvious character flaws, or so we think.
Drug addiction and sex addiction go hand in hand, more for some than others, especially for meth addicts who do meth for the prolonged sexual experience meth has to offer. With sex addiction there is a risk of contracting STDs such as AIDS, herpes, gonorrhea, triccomonis, which can lead to ovarian cancer and other life changing, debillitating illnesses.
Drug addicts are home wreckers, liars and cheats and believe me "we" know it and the guilt over our actions drives us to use. Most of us are not willing to start at the bottom and see that our childhood violators have had so much power over us that we are a disgrace and that our desire not to deal with our feelings has destroyed many lives and has disapointed many people. Recovery teaches us how to be honest and truthful with ourselves and others.
In my experience I felt it was not benefiting my recovery to dive into the most painful parts of what happened to me when I was a child and a teenager. I needed several years in recovery before I was strong enough to take issue with what was done to me. I will never get over it, but being sober taught me that I do not have to give it the power to ruin my life.
Addicts use to fit in, out of loneliness and because we cannot connect to the empty spot in our heats where someone took something away in our youth that we thought we could never reclaim. We all seek to somehow be sexually whole. Lets not do it by violating others and by not giving power to the abusers by reaching for drugs. A very healthy approach to finding the genuine drug free sexual connection is to be abstinent for a couple of years. Drug free abstinence teaches us how to listen to our bodies and follow our true natural instinct.
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