Why Mirrors are Important in Maintaining Sobriety from Sex Addiction
Timothy D Stein, MFT, CSAT
April 16, 2013
When it comes to recovery from sex addiction, mirrors are important. I am not talking about the kind of mirrors that hang on your wall or reside in your bathroom drawer. I am talking about the people who reflect your image back to you. These are the people around you who can witness what you are doing. The people who acknowledge your struggles and successes and reflect back to you the reality of your actions. They are the mirrors of your recovery program.
When an addictive urge takes hold, your addict brain will start to justify your addictive thoughts, desires, and behaviors. It creates rationalizations that this particular behavior is not really your addiction or that given these circumstances this behaviors is perfectly acceptable. When your addict brain creates these blind spots, you will often start to remove the mirrors in your life. When your addiction takes over, it does not want people around who will recognize what you are doing, notice the addictive rationalization, or burst your bubble of addictive energy. In these moments, you do not want to be seen.
So, part of the road to relapse is often “breaking the mirrors.” This is done in a number of ways. Sometimes you stop attending meetings; you find excuses such as “I’ve already had a meeting this week and I don’t need to go to a second meeting.” or “I’ve got this project at work and I am really busy. I just don’t have time to do this.” or “I am really tired and exhausted so I am going to skip the meeting.” Missing meetings from time to time is not the end of the world but when your addiction is getting into gear or missing meetings becomes a pattern, there is usually something about breaking the mirrors going on; you are eliminating the witnesses too your addictive behaviors and choices.
Breaking the mirrors might be not making program calls. Giving credence to that internal voice that says “I’m having a hard time but I really do not want to talk to anyone about it. I do not want to feel embarrassed about what is going on. I do not want to hear their advice. I can do this on my own.” Breaking mirrors can be the process of finding reasons to discount other people: they are over-reactive, they never really understand, they hold me to unrealistic expectations, or I already know what they are going to tell me. All of these thoughts are a means to an end; they are ways to eliminate people from your life. You are isolating. You are getting yourself away from people. You are pushing people away so that they will not be a reflection to you about what you are doing. All of this makes relapse easier.
It is easier to stay sober when you are connected to others. When your addiction kicks up, go to a meeting. It is a room full of mirrors. You hear other people that are struggling. You hear the tools that other people are using. You hear the hope and the encouragement that is offered by others in the program. You hear that other people in the program have had their struggles and got through them. You start to feel that maybe you too can get through your struggles. When you make a phone call, you are holding up a mirror. You are acknowledging what is going on to other people, you are taking that pain and that struggle out of the shadows where it gains addictive energy and you are bringing it out into the light where it can heal.
When you stop finding justification for pushing people away and, instead, you keep them in your life, they can give you the honest feedback about what they are seeing. They reflect back what is really going on with you. All of those things create honesty and transparency. Keeping your mirrors in place will not guarantee sobriety but breaking the mirrors almost always guarantees a relapse.
