The first time in a recovery group.

Keep your eyes down. Just don’t make eye contact with anyone and it will be ok. They won’t see through my façade if I just keep staring at this one spot in the carpet. If only they knew what I was struggling with, they wouldn’t let me into this group, they wouldn’t want to know me.

The meeting begins. What’s this? People are introducing themselves…but not just their name, what they’re struggling with as well. They’re going around the circle, each person closer to me who shares, I’m both becoming more confident and more terrified. Terrified that very soon it will be my turn to speak, but encouraged by the honesty of each person. Just a few words, I think I can manage that. “I’m powerless over pornography!” There, I said it. I said it aloud and I haven’t been expelled. I am not an outcast…there just might be hope for me yet.

Someone stands up. They begin to share their story. So much pain, so much destruction – first experienced by them, but then inflicted by them on to others. The same pain I had been inflicting but had never connected with…not until now at least. They speak of hitting their rock bottom, their barrel of lies was empty, it was time to come clean. Then hope and sobriety along the rough road to recovery – this is not yet my story, but it helps me believe that someday it can be. I do not have to be bound forever to despair. Thank You God for fellowship; that I don’t have to do it alone, there is a way out.

At some point, without realising, I was no longer burning a hole in the floor with my eyes. I was seeing faces…faces of hope, faces that have tasted freedom.

We stand together and bow our head’s in prayer “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”

Keep coming back? Yes, I will!