Don’t Let the Bees In: One Common Path to Relapse and How to Avoid It
By Tim Stein, MFT, CSAT
October 25.2012
Let’s talk about not letting in the bees. One of the ways that I see people who are sex addicts relapse is they make the mistake of thinking that their addiction is a “thing” on the other side of the door. You’ve been an addict for a long time and there is a draw that your addiction has. It’s not uncommon for addicts to, in some ways, miss their addictive behaviors. It’s almost like they have a longing for it. They start to think about flirting with their addiction, and again, they think that their addiction is this “thing” on the other side of the door. They think “I can go over, and I can just crack the door a little bit with my addiction, and I’ll just keep ‘it’ on the other side of the door and everything will be fine.” When they do this, they are entering into the grey area of their addiction. This kind of behavior is a slippery slope and they are using the justification that “I can just crack the door, and I’ll leave my addiction, that ‘thing’ on the other side.”
What the addict doesn’t realize is that their addiction really isn’t a “thing.” Their addiction is more like a swarm of bees, and even though they have just cracked the door, that swarm of bees, that is their addiction, comes flying through the crack. Now they have got this swarm of bees in their head that is going to push them back into their addiction for quite a while, and it’s not like it’s a “thing” that they can just kill, smash down, or put a boundary around and be good. It’s a swarm of bees and every bee is an addictive thought. Every bee is an addictive image in their head. Every bee is an urge to go back and flirt with their addiction again. It takes a while for the addict to smash as many of those bees as they can. It takes a while for that swarm of bees to die out and not be constantly active in their head. It takes even longer for the last of the bees to not periodically become active in their head again. This process of letting the swarm die out can take anywhere from weeks to months. That is weeks and months of struggling with addictive thoughts and urges.
When an addict cracks the door to flirt with their addiction and lets that swarm of bees into their head, they are setting themselves up to struggle with their addictive urges for a significant period of time. So there’s a very important piece for every sex addict to recognizing; every time that you go to flirt with your addiction, every time you go to crack that door open a little bit, you need to remind yourself it’s not a “thing” that you can keep on the other side. Your addiction is a swarm of bees and every time you go there, you let them in your head, and then you are going to struggle with holding your boundaries that maintain sobriety. Holding your sobriety is going to be a challenge because you let the bees in and it takes a long time before the swarm dies out. Don’t let the bees in! Keep the door shut!
