A few days ago, a columnist I generally like wrote a satirical piece on sex addiction rehab (one I won't link to here, due to its triggering nature). He's a liberal columnist, so the comments were populated with lots of LOLs and virtual eye rolling at the concept of sex addiction as a creation of the religious right: people who are uptight about and don't know how to enjoy sex. There was lots of mocking of the "higher power" concept, lots of atheists sneering at the superstitious nonsense that is God.

Of course, the conservative flip side of the "sex addiction is a joke" coin is to sneer at therapists: people who are forever trying to write off weakness and lack of willpower as "diseases" in order to bilk people out of money.  Either way, treatment for sex addiction is seen as misguided and useless: so called "sex addicts" either "just" need to loosen up and learn to accept and enjoy their sexuality or "just" need to have more willpower and moral fortitude.

And either way, as someone married to a sex addict, it can be both hurtful and maddening to feel the world is ringed around us in a circle, pointing and laughing, saying that we've been duped when, for the first time, we feel we're seeing clearly. It's one of those things that is likely to draw me back into that crazy place I used to occupy: where, like a six-year-old, I yell "NO!" at someone else's "Yes!" only to have them yell "Yes!" back at me in an endless cycle; where I feel panicked and crazy, as if someone's telling me the sky is red when I see it's blue; where I spend my time and energy fruitlessly trying to convince someone else that they're wrong so that I can feel right again.

I wanted (desperately) to pull out my credentials and yell into the comments section, "Mark and I weren't some crazy, uptight religious fanatics who just couldn't embrace our sexuality!  And I'm not some uptight, frigid wife who can't please her man!  I was a really good atheist who really loves sex!"  As if the columnist, or any of the commenters, would read that and suddenly say, "Oh, some random stranger on the Internet says that wasn't her experience. Now I've totally changed my view on sex addiction!" rather than, "I bet she actually sucks in bed and her husband is an asshole."

Deep breath.  Step 1.  I am powerless over other people.  I am powerless to change their perceptions of me.  And trying to do so anyway makes my life unmanageable.  Followed by Step 2.  Help from that much maligned higher power.

I didn't leave the comment.  I stopped reading, made the column disappear in a flash of electrons with the click of my mouse and I did something I never used to do before.  I prayed.  "God, let me see the world through your eyes.  Let me not be threatened by people whose experiences are different.  When I mock others, I am usually scared and hurting.  In every place that this columnist and his readers are scared and hurting too, open their hearts to love and peace.  Help me on my journey, and help all of them follow the path they need to, so that we can find love and understanding for each other."

In the past, I wouldn't have prayed because my God is not a separate being who controls the world, but I've found that prayer isn't (as I used to think) some useless, crazy, superstitious ritual predicated on achieving results with the help of a supernatural power.  Prayer is a tool I use to ground myself, open my own heart and let go of my own pain, fear and anger.  Prayer is a way of connecting to my higher power, my better nature, my Buddha nature, the God part inside me.  Prayer is a way of feeling love and compassion and connection to others, rather than distance and anger and fear and resentment.  When I pray for someone who requests my prayers, it connects us, and lifts us both up.  When I pray (quietly, secretly) for someone who doesn't request it, it helps me love and forgive.  I've learned that even if prayer never produces any tangible results in the world, it's not useless -- not to me -- because the purpose isn't to change the world to get what I want, it's to help me be in line with and at peace with what is.

Earlier this month, I decided I was going to set aside one day each week for spirituality and health, a sort of personal Sabbath.  I picked a day of the week and made some rules for myself and set about my spiritual experiment. This week will be my fourth "Sabbath," and while three weeks is hardly enough to see substantial change, I have noticed some interesting things.

1. It's hard to break out of my routine and not do my usual work. It's like the first time I sat in meditation and was there for about fifteen seconds and thought, "Ok, is this over yet? Can I get up now and do something?" I feel like there are all of these Really Important Things I should be taking care of and I get anxious and jittery about them. Which brings me to...
2. There are no Really Important Things that I must do right now.  When I turn my computer back on on Thursdays, the world hasn't ended.  There haven't been thousands of items clamoring for my attention.  Everything was just fine waiting a day, and in fact, very few people even noticed that I was off-line at all.  In spite of this, I still worry that this is going to be the week that there really will be something earth shattering in its importance dropping into my inbox.
3. I use sugar to self-medicate my stress.
4. I haven't felt any closer to God. And because of this, I've realized that I expected to have some transcendent spiritual moments on my Wednesdays, especially given that I am spending much more time in prayer and meditation than on a normal day.  But I haven't experienced those moments.  So far my Wednesdays have felt like any other day (minus sugar and electronics).  I'm not making a judgment on that, just sitting with it and noticing what my expectations were and what the reality is.
5. The day after my Sabbath is wonderful. So far, while my Wednesdays themselves have had difficult moments and have lacked anything overtly transcendent, they have acted as a reset button for my habits and my week.  The day after I'm a little more relaxed and a little more likely to do little things to take care of myself that I overlook at other times.

I've learned a little more and a little something different each week, so I intend to continue the practice of setting aside Wednesdays for spirituality and continue to observe how it goes.

Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me -- or at least like the me I used to be -- find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of the tiny moments that even the answer "12 Step" holds, there are the signposts along the way: the times when everything shifted and changed, in nearly as dramatic (but not as painful) a way as they did when I found out about my husband's addiction. Sometimes I put those together for myself into some story of change.

When I was young and asked why I had to go to church when I didn't believe, my mother said, "I didn't used to like going either, but when things in my life got hard, I found the rituals comforting. I want you to have some foundation in religion, something you can go back to when you need it." So, standing in the bedroom of our old home, the place we lived when I found out about my Mark's sex addiction, I told Mark that I felt like God was trying to break me, like taming a wild horse. God was going to heap woes on me like some mirror Job, until I was so broken down from famines and locust plagues that I would have no choice but to go tamely back to the church, just as my mother had said I would. But I was not going to be broken by God.

Was it months later or a year? At some point, still weighed down with hurt, having been stung yet again by something Mark had said or done, I wept alone in our room and tried to meditate, when the faltering thought came to me that maybe this was it, maybe I should pray. And a voice inside me told me I didn't believe in God, and I felt comforted by the higher power I couldn't and wouldn't call God.

The years passed, and although I didn't quite lose my bitterness or resentment, I lost my fear that I might somehow end up back in the arms of the church that hurt me. I began to see that having spirituality in my life didn't mean I had to have religion in my life if that didn't help me. I began the search for something to call that spiritual connection, and with my fear of the church gone, my fear of the word God began to leave me too. Intellectually, I began to explore the idea that maybe it was a word I could use as a shorthand for something in my life that was beyond words.

By the time I started working the 12 Steps, I felt I had already come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity and had lost my resistance to the word God. I don't know that I expected much to change, and yet, Step 7 (in which we humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings) shattered me all over again. Prayer wasn't something that fit well with my conception of what my God is and what my God is not and healthy humility wasn't something that had been a part of my experience. And yet, kneeling down in my bedroom facing a wall, hung up on all of these ideas and unable to ask God for help, in a sudden flash like a ray of sunshine breaking through cloud, I was inspired to ask God for help asking for help. In that moment, as I cried and begged for help, I felt something melt away, something new form and my connection with what I called God strengthen beyond anything I ever felt or expected.

So, when I reached Step 12, I had to admit that I had had a spiritual awakening, just as that Step promised. And I went off to carry the message, and started talking about God all the damn time too.

I shared in a meeting recently about my fear around my husband's business trips and how that fear is a reminder to me to connect with my Higher Power. After the meeting a newcomer asked me what I'm going to do now: I mean, he's going on a business trip soon, right? So what do you do now? Check his phone records? How can you make sure he's not acting out in his addiction?

Of course, I had already said what I was going to do: recognize, accept and take responsibility for my own emotions, pray and meditate, work my program, let go. However, as I watched this woman's brow cloud with genuine befuddlement as I repeated this, I remembered how hopelessly inadequate that answer seemed to me in the frantic struggle of those early days. There I was, standing in the wreckage of the-life-I-thought-I-had thinking, "What the hell just happened? And how am I going to rebuild this?" And the "answer" didn't even register as a solution at all. I'd think, "Ok, ok, I know you said something about some useless, flaky spiritual stuff and keep coming back. Blah blah blah. But what do I DO?"

It was as if my home had just been leveled by a natural disaster. Pray? Sit around meditating? That's not any kind of an answer at all. What was that going to do? I knew what I needed to feel better again; I needed my house back or rather a better house, one that wouldn't fall down again. I couldn't envision a world where my happiness was not dependent on that house. And to get that house back, I had to do something: get on the phone with the insurance company, get the Red Cross and the National Guards in, interview contractors, analyze where the structure had failed and build reinforcements to ensure this could never happen again. All the spiritual mumbo jumbo in the world wasn't going to help with that, and there wasn't any God out there who was going to make a new house magically appear with the wave of an invisible hand.

Likewise, when I first started recovery, I simply couldn't yet envision a world in which the answer to my problems didn't involve having an husband who never acted out again. As long as I could make sure he would never act out in his addiction again, everything would be ok, right? And I could achieve that by somehow doing things the "right" way. In pre-recovery that meant being sexy and passionate and sweet and smart and just generally amazing and perfect enough to fully satisfy him. And when that didn't work, I moved into early recovery, where it meant somehow learning to do this recovery thing (whatever it was) right enough.

And oh, was it annoying when people told me the answer was God, as if God were the ultimate addict to please. I'd tried that game before, the one where God held the key to my happiness but wouldn't give it to me until I did everything perfectly according to some arbitrary and unspoken set of rules. But God hadn't given up the key any more than any of the other people in my life had. That's what made me lose faith in the first place. And now I was supposed to believe things were going to be different? Ha! Those 12 Steppers were deluded! Give up trying to control my husband and try to control God into controlling him instead? I thought to myself, "No, I think I'll stick with controlling him myself rather than handing that over to some non-existent magical being, thanks."

It took years to see that all the flaky spiritual stuff wasn't about changing the world and the people around me to make it all more comfortable for me; it was learning how to be comfortable in the world as it is. My God wasn't going to rebuild the metaphorical house of my life or make sure it would never fall down again; my God was going to help me let go of the pain of losing the house and be ok whatever happened around it in the future. My God doesn't control the things I can't; my God helps me let go of the need to control them in the first place.

Each week we read the promises of our 12 Step program, and my favorite is: "We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us." And I realized, when I saw myself reflected in that look of pain and confusion in a newcomer's face, that I didn't used to know what to do when I was filled with fear at Mark's actions, but I do now, even if it doesn't seem much like doing anything at all. When Mark gets on that plane, I'm going to try to stay connected with my Higher Power: not so that he doesn't act out or so that I can find out about it if he does, but so that, whatever he does or doesn't do, I can stay present and centered in my own life.

A month or so ago, I did something I dread and despise: I took a trip on an airplane. When I fly, the joy is entirely in the destination and not at all in the journey. The flight fills me with terror: terror that escalates if the trip is turbulent or if I'm in a small plane where I can feel just how fast I'm rocketing through the air or if I'm seated away from the window, shut in, claustrophobic, with no reference point.

Of course, all of those things happened on one leg of my most recent trip. I missed my connection and lost my carefully selected window seat, and the folks sitting next to the window on each side of me pulled the shades down and went to sleep leaving me trapped blindly in shivering metal. It was a bumpy flight in a small plane, and I could hear and feel the monstrous rush of air all around us. So I prayed and meditated (or tried to) the whole flight. I must have said the Serenity Prayer six million times. And let me tell you, nothing will give you a new outlook on the Serenity Prayer like saying it yourself six million times when you fear that the next moment will bring your violent, fiery death.

I sat on the plane and tried to breathe with lungs that felt like they were constricted to the size of peas and repeated in my head over and over, "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." I'd the first part really hard: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Ok, I can't change whether or not the plane is going to crash. I can't control the turbulence. I can't control when we land. I can't control whether I live or die. Serenity. Serenity. Come on, bring on the serenity!

Then I'd pray the next parts weakly: the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. After all what can I change? The only thing I really care about is whether or not I die. I really, really want to control that a lot. I could wake the guy next to him and ask him to raise the shade or switch seats with me so that I can have a nice clear view of the engine exploding or the ground approaching at 32 feet per second squared, but that's not actually going to change the thing I want to change. So, back to that first part about the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Stupid, useless rest of the Serenity Prayer.

After a few thousand iterations of this, I started to think about how odd it was that I was in a situation where I was completely powerless to change anything, when it struck me that there was one thing I could still change, the one and only thing I could always change: me. I didn't need the courage to ask for I window seat or the courage to leap up and operate the emergency exit if needed. I needed the courage to change me, the courage to overcome my fear of death, the courage to change the way I perceived this flight.

Oh.

Duh.

So, I started praying both the first and second parts of the Serenity Prayer really hard: the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. As for that last part — the wisdom to know the difference — I gave a little burst of gratitude each time I got to that, because saw I'd already gotten that part this time around. And I kept praying until the plane touched the ground, safe at my destination.