First, a little bloglove.
I read Mr. SponsorPants every day he publishes (as a sensible man, he takes the weekends off). He's very good both at writing about the experience of recovery and at calling his own bluff. He's also very, very funny in the right way: his laughter is not mockery, but recognition. It's true humor, the humor of enlightenment.
When I read a part of an entry that addressed 13th stepping, and his older post on the topic, I saw something that I felt needed to be said, and when a comment grew into a blog entry, I thought I'd better publish it here.
It is obvious to me that a lot of people who hit on newbies in 12-step groups are sex addicts in predatory mode. That has been dealt with very well by The Interventionist here.
I want to address an issue that may be more difficult to understand: the issue of the newcomer who seems to be volunteering to be 13th-stepped. Notice I said "seems to be." I don't want anyone to feel they are being blamed, or to blame themselves, for being 13th-stepped. Abuse is always the result of a more powerful person taking advantage of a less powerful person. The one who has good reason to know better carries more responsibility. That is why we have age-of-consent laws.
The newbie who looks and acts ready to take on a sexual relationship may be anything but ready. This is why the responsibility of anyone who cares about the individual, the group, and their own integrity is to examine their own responses and stay away from people who careen in the door hurt and start looking for a sex partner.
A lot of people, both male and female, are addicts partly because they are trying to drown the pain of childhood abuse. Sometimes that abuse was sexual. As many as half of all women have endured sexual assault by the time they are 18. Fewer men report abuse, but at least a fifth of them have been abused. My bet is that the proportion is much higher among addicts.
Mr. SponsorPants takes the eminently sensible position that if consenting adults want sex it isn't necessarily unethical to go for it. He sees that sometimes people reach for sex when they are actually looking for affection, or validation of their attractiveness, or some basic perception of their own worth. All true so far. I would add this: the experience of having been sexually abused makes consent problematic. It also takes those basic needs for human connection and turns them so toxic that they could easily kill.
Sexual abuse survivors are not just vulnerable. They may be seriously regressed. They may have the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old, or a five-year-old, because people tend to get stuck at the emotional age at which they were abused. They may not actually be able to give real consent because they have never understood that they can really say no. They may look as though they want sex, but they don’t know what they want because they have never been allowed to know. You can't tell by looking what age a person is inside. You can only tell that when you get to know them. Getting to know them takes time.
Someone who shows up at a 12-step meeting and leads with sex may be doing so because they don't know how not to be used. If they have been abused early enough and consistently enough, they may believe that their only worth comes through sex. They may believe that everyone who cares for them uses them sexually -- that sex is some kind of payment they have to render in return for any nurturance. They may never have experienced honest mutual caring in any context. Ever. Sound bleak? It is.
No matter how eager for sex this kind of survivor may look, they may be drowning in misery. They may be trying the same old shtick because they don't know anything else, and they don't know they don't know anything else, and they don't even know how miserable they are. They may be hoping desperately that one person, just one person, just once, will look at them and say, "I care about you too much to use you. You are attractive, no doubt about it, and I am going to act out of my genuine concern for you rather than my selfish wish to get something from you." Sure, that's going to be scary for them. It may be an entirely new experience. Sure, they may find another person to give them what they think they need. You can't help that. What you can do is be the one person who throws them a lifeline rather than pushing their head under water one more time -- even if they seem to be grabbing your hand and placing it on their head and begging you to dunk them. You could offer them the chance to have a boundary.
Another possibility among sexual abuse survivors is that the person may not even know how they are coming across. They maybe so dissociated, so confused, so lacking in basic social skills that they think flirting = friendliness and can't understand why people are always coming on to them. This particular variety of survivor may know they are being used and not understand why it keeps happening. They think they are looking for love, and everybody else seems to want sex. They are, in fact, relationship addicts and may be codependents as well. Anyone who 13th-steps them is enabling their addiction.
This kind of survivor frequently identifies as a romantic, falls easily into doomed relationships (and to them, a one-night stand is a relationship) that they call love. As predictably as a romance novel plot, they get badly hurt, whether the connection lasts 24 hours of five years. Frequently, they deal with the hurt by stereotyping everyone in the group where they found their last doomed pseudo-love as a hypocrite. This gives them an excuse to give up on recovery. The sort of person, when 13th-stepped and dumped, may leave your 12-step group after the first sexual encounter gone bad (or, if they are the persistent kind, the tenth or the fourteenth, all the while without addressing their addiction because they are so busy using sex and relationships to avoid recovery) and never come back. In this case, 13th-stepping someone may actually be assisting their suicide, because one of their addictions—the one the group is working with, or the one to bad relationships—will kill them sooner or later.
The person may also be a sex addict in addition to whatever addiction the people in your room are fighting. They may not know that yet. People tend to figure out they are sex addicts long after they figure out they are alcoholics, or meth addicts, or even compulsive overeaters. In a culture that pushes addictive sexual behavior as the norm, it can take a long time to figure out "this isn't working for me and this is just as compulsive as my other ways of self-medicating." The denial can be deeper, and the underlying issues can be much harder to address. Sex addiction therapists don't find it useful to work with people who aren't already clean from other addictions. Getting sexually involved with a sex addict will only enable and worsen their addiction.
If you are inclined to 13th-stepping, have ever done it, or want to do it, or if you are in recovery and beginning to sense that your sexuality feels compulsive—if you keep making bad choices, and your recovery lags where sex is concerned—you may want to have a look at these tests.
The urge to 13th-step is a danger signal not just for the newbie who might be its target, but for the person who feels it.
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