Cross Addiction or I Didn't Cheat.........We Only Made Out

So as I talked to clients about cross addiction last week and some things occurred to me. Cross addiction is pretty sneaky, as is our addiction.......period. It is why we say addiction is cunning, baffling and strong. My addiction is in the back of my head: running on a treadmill, lifting weights and doing research on the computer trying to figure out how to get back back into the front of my head where it was before.

My addiction does not like to be an occasional desire I struggle with. My addiction was much happier when it was a compulsion and I always gave in. It liked to be an obsession that I constantly battled. Now that it is not in the forefront but on the back burner it constantly looks for ways to get me to crack the door. If I open the door just a smidgen, then my addiction can kick it off the hinges and invade my life again. It is not content to be a passing whimsy I have on rare occasions, it wants total control. It wants to be the only god that I worship.

There are many ways that my addiction hits me head on. I may walk by a car at Wal-Mart and see someone snorting a line. I may see someone shooting up in the car next to me at a red light, like one of my friends did last weekend. It may even use a movie where it shows me how much fun drugs are, or music that glorifies partying and drug dealing. Next it uses a television show that tries to depict how evil drugs are by showing how they have negatively impacted someones life. To get the point across, it shows them shooting up. FYI, seeing the register is the biggest trigger I know. Stop showing it!!

Those are all very in your face triggers. That is the strong side of our addiction. That is why my addiction is on the treadmill and lifts weights. But my addiction has another side. It is the cunning side, the one that sneaks up on me like a ninja then whacks me with one of his weapons. One of the main weapons in the addiction arsenal is cross addiction. So what is cross addiction?

Cross addiction is simply us finding a replacement for something we were once addicted to. Say we quit using drugs, bet we begin binge eating. Maybe we used to be an alcoholic and we have stopped drinking, but started smoking marijuana. Our addictions range from drugs to alcohol to food to sex to shopping to shoplifting to chaos and everything in between. When I quit doing drugs, I began drinking. If you fast forward to several years down the road, I would wake up with the shakes at 5 in the morning and have to drink to get the shakes to stop so I could go back to bed. But I could justify it.

You know, alcohol is legal so I am not doing anything wrong. In fact, I can control my drinking sometimes. I could never control my drugs. That was how it started. Alcohol lulled me to sleep. It snuck up on me, then clobbered me on the head. It allowed me to put myself in a very uncomfortable situation, then it took advantage of me.

Here I am in a relationship with sobriety. I was not in recovery yet, but I was sober. I cheated on my sobriety with alcohol, but I could justify it. Imagine you are in a relationship. You go out with another person, but you justify it to your partner. "Are you seriously jealous? All we did was held hands and talked. Okay, me might have kissed a couple of times. What's the big deal? All we did was make out. It's not like we had sex!"

That is what I did when I started drinking. I did not see it as a problem at first. It was harmless. We just sat on the couch and talked. But over time, the relationship deepened and I needed to take it further and further. It advanced from talking, to hugging, to kissing to sex. I need to remember that if I am truly in a relationship, cheating is cheating. It does not matter if it is a kiss or sex, one is as bad as the other. Same is true with sobriety.

A relapse is a relapse, whether it is your drug of choice or not. That is like justifying cheating by saying, "We might have slept together, but I don't even like her." So you risked losing your recovery for something you didn't even like? That is the least thought out reason I have ever heard of. Instead of finding ways to cheat, say no. IF YOU HAVE TO HAVE IT, YOU PROBABLY DON'T NEED IT. Cheating is cheating. I would not accept it from my wife, and I will not accept it for my recovery. Neither should you!