Reading informative and sometimes challenging books on the subject of addiction can really aid in the recovery process. In my work with sex addicted men and their significant others I often recommend books that have really touched me personally.
One such book is actually called Addiction and Grace and its by a psychiatrist Gerald May.
Let me share just a few quotes to maybe whet your appetite to read further:
“Addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest truest desire for love and goodness. We succumb because the energy of our desire becomes attached, nailed, to specific behaviors, objects, or people. Attachment then is the process that enslaves desire and creates the state of addiction.
“If we do not fill our minds with guilt and recriminations, we will recognize our incompleteness as a kind of spaciousness in to which we can welcome the flow of grace…We can think of our inadequacies as terrible defects, if we want, and hate ourselves. But we can also think of them affirmatively, as doorways through which the power of grace can enter our lives. Then we can begin to appreciate our inherent, God-given lovableness.”
When May speaks of addiction in attachment terms, he is not referring to it in the psychological sense of the ability to form healthy connections with other humans. Difficulty forming healthy human attachment is the subject for another time.
Finally, in the second quote I reference, one could substitute addiction for inadequacy. Our addictions are trying to hide or mask our inadequacies. Mays reference to grace through acceptance of our humaness speaks to me of the transformations I see so often in my work when addicts stop needing to be perfect and allow themselves to be good enough.