I was three months sober, chain-smoking, and eating jellybeans in bed.
Instead of going to the bar to pick up men, I was meeting them down at my local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
“What’s the harm in that,” I remember telling my first AA sponsor, Connie, “I’m being honest, aren’t I? Telling them I’m a sex addict?”
Connie didn’t think I was as cute as the men who fell for this denial-filled pick-up line, “that’s like telling a bottle of booze that you’re an alcoholic and then drinking it.”
Being free of hangovers and depressive immune dysfunctions, I really thought the booze was all that was keeping me from leading my best casual sex and rock n roll life. So, when I invited my old drug dealer, the leader of a popular local metal band, to my home, it didn’t occur to me till mid coitus that it was never sex I was looking for. He kept talking dirty, “ Wow, you’re amazing, your body, wow.” The sex was so awkward, so terrible, I burst into laughter.
I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last time I would have sex with a stranger. After the Metal Head left, I recalled a memory of being a little girl awaking from a nightmare, crying out to my mother. Who promptly came into my room, told me to shush, shut the door, and walked away.
You would think after this revelation, I would have stopped hooking up with emotionally unavailable men. But I couldn’t stop, I was addicted to limerence like I was addicted to booze. Since AA was working, I thought maybe Sex Addicts Anonymous could cure me, too.
I got myself an SAA sponsor who instructed me to write down my entire sexual history and share it with a room full of recovering sex addicts. I never made it to the podium. I hit age thirteen on my sex history timeline, and everything cracked.
At first, I was confused when the memory surfaced of my eighth-grade history teacher’s husband giving me a below-the-belt massage. For twenty-two years, I had internalized the denial-filled words my history teacher used to coerce me to lie down on the carpet. Just relax. Touching in this way is perfectly normal where my husband comes from.
Now that the protective covering that my addictions had afforded me had cracked, the reality of what happened came to the surface. I was processing the sexual assault for the first time, with startling clarity. Spasms of rage and grief shook my whole body. I had trusted her. I had trusted her. Just like my mother, she betrayed me.
That evening, I went to a women’s SAA meeting. Shelley, a married mother of two whose “acting out” behavior included masturbating in her car in I-35 rush hour traffic, shared a story about how she was drugged and raped by her high school boyfriend.
Seeing the direction the meeting was going. I shared my own revelation about my history teacher, “ I thought she had brought me over to her house to smoke joints and drink wine coolers because she thought I was mature for my age.”
No one looked at me when I spoke. I might as well have been confessing my most shame-filled memory to no one. I felt so uncomfortable. So Invisible. I burst into tears.
All through the four months I was a member of SAA, I tried desperately to make friends with the other women in the program.
But as my SAA sponsor warned me, “Sex Addiction is an intimacy disorder. You aren’t going to find a lot of people willing to air their dirty laundry with you.”
Desperate for answers and unsure what to do besides the fact that I never wanted to have unconscious sex again, I decided to go to the AA women’s meeting where I first found camaraderie and sobriety six months prior.
In a room of over forty women, a twenty-something brunette fresh out of rehab burst into tears as she confessed how she took her first drink around the same time her uncle started molesting her.
At first, I felt ashamed for her airing such vulnerable subject matter to a room full of strangers. I dreaded the dead silence that would surely follow this confession. But that was not what happened. Every other woman after that told her own story of stolen innocence. Soon we were all crying and sniffling as we cracked smiles and knowing glances.
And then Raquel spoke. The prom queen who used to shoot at squirrels with her slingshot to deal with the repressed rage of her brother raping her.
Raquel, whose catch phrase was, “You are like G-D with skin to me.”
That morning, she was G-D with skin, to me.
“I know exactly how you feel, sweetheart,” Raquel said in direct address to the newcomer who shared her incest story, “but I also want to say it’s possible to heal from this. I healed with EMDR therapy.”
*
For the first few months of EMDR therapy, things got worse, not better. The therapy, which utilized both sides of the brain to allow the patient to recall traumatic memories without being triggered, brought on intense nightmares and an inability to feel sexual desire without flashbacks of my perpetrators.
But eventually, after months of reprocessing multiple sexual assaults, I stopped walking the streets on high alert. Eventually, I forgave myself for going numb, for not fighting back. It was never my fault. I was a child. They were grown men.
And when I forgave myself, then came the rage, and the images of bashing and bludgeoning the men who had shattered my ability to have any vestige of a normal sexual life. In these EMDR therapy sessions, I reimagined the outcomes. I implanted memories of being rescued before the assaults could take place. I imagined She-Ra from Masters of the Universe in gold armor, on a white steed, chopping pedophile heads off, and my best friend Iggy with his wrestler physique and his green mohawk stomping nut sacks with steel-toed boots.
It didn’t make sense at the time, but now I know that if you change your mind, you change your life. After a year of EMDR therapy, I could have sex with my husband and stay in my body. I no longer felt unsafe walking the streets.
I was sexually harassed by a coworker, and even though it was anxiety-inducing, I stood up to him and took back my power in a room full of men, all watching as he looked down in the shame that was rightfully his. No one has assaulted or catcalled me since.
One day, two years into EMDR therapy, in session, I recalled a memory of a bloody fetus on my bed. My therapist asked if I had ever had an abortion. I burst into tears, and we had to end the session early. The image of my ex-Dean and the feeling of the pregnancy being terminated flashed through my mind all through the drive home.
As soon as I came home, I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down the story of how I met Dean and how he had impregnated me while I was blacked out drunk. After I finished what would later become a chapter in my auto-fiction memoir, it dawned on me that writing about my life as an anarcho-punk, accidental mystic, and a recovered sex addict was a story that I needed to tell.
Writing I Can Only Give You Everything, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. If it had not been for Raquel or the other women and men in AA and SAA, I would have never written this book. I wrote the book for my brothers and sisters suffering from sex addiction and sex trauma. And I wrote this book as I was healing myself. I was standing at a precipice, at the beginning of my recovery journey, and I was terrified. I couldn’t live with my addictions, and I did not know how to live without them.
Now, eight years into recovery, I share my story here. I hope it resonates with you, I hope it makes you laugh and cry and share your story too…
Like what you read? Check these out from my Punk Rock Sex Addiction memoir: Here and Here and Here
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Peace, Love, and Anarchy, your pal,
Border Land Delia-Ann
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