Category: Christian Recovery

Reflections on Recovery – approaching five years

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This year will mark my fifth year in recovery. I would say I have definitely encountered my psychic shift. It has all been by God’s grace, paired with a willingness to look in the mirror, talk honestly about the inside of my brain, and accept that I was never meant to do this alone.

What has changed recently? If I’m completely honest, my focus has shifted from recovery from to recovery to. I’ve used that phrase for the last couple of years because I knew I needed to move forward into life, shaped by this new way of seeing the world and my relationship to it.

I remain, in many ways, a walking paradox. I am many things at once. I am grateful and feel pangs of remorse on any given day. I wouldn’t change a thing, yet I would give anything for a do-over. These statements sound like they can’t exist in the same space at the same time, but who ever said the very being of a man is bound by the laws of physics?

The mantra of my recovery fellowship is from shame to grace. Many would read that as a point A to point B journey, and I suppose that’s partly true. What that view often misses is that we continue to need grace, and we continue to take inventory. In the Twelve Steps, the inventory begun in Steps 4 and 5 continues in Step 10. This is ongoing.

Every day in recovery is a spectrum of relapse into the illusion of independence. I may not fall back into my darkest hole, but each 24-hour period is still full of cocktails of fear, resentment, gratitude, peace, joy, and regret. I am a tapestry of what the programme calls assets and defects of character.

In The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, the mole says to the boy that one of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things. Every day presents that opportunity to live in freedom. Until I accept that the only thing I can truly count on in this world is the grace of God, my inventory becomes that of a score-keeping Pharisee of self. With grace, it becomes a head-up, self-aware posture that recognises how a word, a look, or a deed affects others.

One of my biggest life skills is the ability to own my own shit before others do. I am still a smiling and loving pile of contrition. Honestly, the day I cease to be so is probably the day I fall back into my old delusions.

If my addiction is wedded to my illusory self, then I see it existing in much the same way Lord Voldemort endured throughout the Harry Potter films. My cycles of addiction split my soul into pieces, hidden away like horcruxes. For me, food, social media, tech doomscrolling, procrastination, and even permitted sexual behaviours can become places where my character defects feel nostalgic for the past.

Here’s a concrete example. Masturbation with the boundary of no porn or unfaithful fantasy is a permitted behaviour for me, yet I often need reining in. The muscle memory to ritualise it is deeply ingrained. With food, I can eat badly, gain weight, and quietly undo the wins of a life lived in recovery. My running, cold plunges, and hunger for outdoor adventure give way to eating at stupid times, buying larger clothes, and chewing Andrew’s antacids like they were named after me.

This week’s contradiction is this: I have desire and lust for my own partner. Instead of stepping out and initiating intimacy, I retreat into fantasy. I end up in another room, jacking off to imagination and euphoric recall of being with the woman I love. There’s something profoundly sad and lonely in admitting that I have all I need, yet still opt for a counterfeit sense of relief. I don’t feel overwhelming shame about it, but it continues to fuel a deep sadness.

When it comes to intimacy, I express love, affection, and longing. Yet years of feeling inadequate and fearing rejection pull me back into nostalgic fantasy, rather than the beautiful, participatory chaos of real connection. Call it what I want, but I’m living in the past, flicking through the “porn magazine” of my own biography.

Even here, there is gratitude. I long for her. I can honestly say I’ve never been so tethered in desire, love and fantasy to my own partner.

So what’s my feedback to myself? My recovery logic differs from that of an alcoholic, where sobriety is black and white: consume or abstain. That binary works for substance addiction. With process addictions, the reasoning is different. Food addicts still need to eat. Gamblers don’t need to gamble. Sex addicts don’t need to be celibate. The issue is discernment.

In SAA, we define our own abstinence. It isn’t fixed in stone, but it must be rooted in honesty. To thine own self be true.

This is why others remain essential to my recovery. I can’t afford to confuse privacy with secrecy the way I once did. Today, my self-reading tells me I am more emotionally open, reflective, and gracious. Yet I am still intimacy-avoidant, and I can’t change that alone or heal in a vacuum.

So nearly five years in recovery? It’s still one day at a time and my recovery is best done less about me and more about we.

This is where we talk , set another boundary and continue to take one day at a time.

God, give me the serenity. Grace always grace!

Honesty is Recovery Theology

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“Only by discussing ourselves, holding nothing back, can we stay in fit spiritual condition.”

— Bill W. As Bill Sees It

Over the last year or two, my Step Eleven, “maintain conscious contact with God,” and Step Twelve, “carry the message to others,” have brought me to a new kind of crossroads. I’ve had to face my need for ecclesia — a spiritual community — in a way that the rooms of SAA, for all their grace and connection, couldn’t fully meet.

I remain part of my home group. The relationships I’ve built there will always be part of my life. I’ll never graduate from recovery, and I’ll always feel the pull of purpose to love and serve in that community. But alongside that, I’ve felt a growing need for fellowship with Jesus people — not in place of recovery, but as a continuation of it.

The Twelve Steps became my map, not only toward healthier living but toward a more gracious and loving vision of the God who still remains mystery. And if one thing has become clear, it’s that God is inexhaustibly loving, forgiving, and kind.

You might think that means I should simply find a church and settle in, and you’d be right — it should be that simple. In my naïveté, I thought I could find a quiet fellowship with a safe, non-triggering environment where I could participate and belong. I met with the minister, shared my story, and we reached a mutual understanding that healing and restoration could include me playing songs during worship.

But the level of disclosure that recovery brings can be a tightrope for some. I shared my full story with this dear brother and was met initially with grace, understanding, and accountability. Yet when my involvement was later reviewed with the wider leadership, we were met with knee-jerk concern and a hard “no.” The decision was made that someone with my sexual sin history could never be deemed trustworthy to serve out front.

To be treated like a potential public risk or dangerous deviant as a result of my transparency left me with a mix of forgiveness and resentment to wrestle through. I do understand the horizontal consequences that come with the chaos we create in addiction — the broken trust, the hurt, the long shadows. This isn’t a pity party or a refusal to own my past and my part.

But this experience taught me something else: that it’s safer to stay under my rock than to risk darkening the door of another “godly community.” My hope wasn’t about taking a stage; it was simply about being welcomed and allowed to participate. The Bible is full of broken people used by God — not because of their righteousness, but because their human brokenness became the very space where grace could shine.

I’ve seen crowds cheer as murderers testify how Jesus met them in prison, and I say yes and amen to that. Yet somehow my own moral failure, expressed through the isolation of internet use, placed me beyond restoration in the eyes of some. Sexual dysfunction carries the most shame and controversy, so it’s two for two.

Isn’t it strange that Twelve-Step recovery communities often demonstrate a deeper understanding of grace than many churches? That experience showed me that my calling lies not behind a pulpit, but in men’s ministry — sharing my once-unspeakable story with the men who sit silently in pews, carrying their shame in secret because the “Sunday best brigade” offers no safe place to speak.

I understand that churches face real challenges in the aftermath of #MeToo and countless historic safeguarding failures. But the cosmic shift of the Cross — the declaration that grace has been extended to all — seems at odds with closed doors and cynical suspicion. The Church was meant to be an ER for broken humans of every kind. If we doubt that, we need only look at the people Jesus sought out.

The great Robert Capon once said:

“Jesus did not come to cure the curable, to reform the reformable, or to teach the teachable. He came to raise the dead, and by raising the dead, to make the whole creation new.”

In Twelve-Step recovery I’ve met men from all walks of life, including ministry. Many found in those rooms the grace and warmth they never found in church — a space where weakness becomes the doorway to love. In a world that keeps shouting “do more, try harder, be better,” they find healing in surrender, not striving.

I believe we’re living in an age where the world is beginning to see that we are all addicts of one kind or another — a planet full of broken people chasing dopamine highs, validation, and isolation behind curated profiles and identities carved by trauma.

It’s time for the Church to become the sanctuary and refuge it was always meant to be — a place where honesty is theology and truth is our currency.

As for grace and forgiveness, they’re already on tap. The flow began two thousand years ago, and that barrel will never run dry. In Jesus, God really has done for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Toxic Virtuosity

On By Basecamp RecoveryIn Christian Recovery, Current affairs, The World OutsideLeave a comment

“If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” — Desmond Tutu

I come from the dissenting left. Not the Instagram left or the Twitter hashtag left, but the historic, working-class, trade union labour movement — the left of picket lines, miners’ strikes, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The left that fought for the vote, for wages, for dignity. That strand of British politics has always been rooted in the simple conviction that the wealth of our economy should be distributed among all levels of society, and that ordinary people should have the freedom to live without being hemmed in, blocked, or diminished by systems of exploitation.

That’s the DNA I inherited. And when I left evangelicalism, I found myself drawn into that heritage through the writings of Tony Benn. Benn connected me with a new sense of identity. Politics, for me, became what faith had been: a moral compass, a cause greater than myself, something to believe in and to fight for.

But here’s the truth: politics became my new religion.

Around the time of Brexit, through to the 2019 election, I threw myself into left-wing politics with a kind of religious zeal. I was radically enthused, mobilised, and consumed by it. Looking back, it was unhealthy.

At the time, I was still in my addiction, still living with deep fractures between who I was in public and who I was in private. Politics gave me a new mask to wear. In public, I projected a virtuous version of myself: righteous, loud, uncompromising. I found others who projected the same noise, and together we created what looked like a new kind of church.

But inside, in the mirror, I was suffering. Alone, I was broken, caught up in secrecy and shame. Politics gave me a pulpit and an audience, but it was all a performance.

Today I approach politics through a very different lens: the lens of my own recovery and faith. When I discuss principles, I begin with humility. I begin with the awareness that I am flawed, limited, and imperfect.

And it’s that humility that seems to have disappeared from politics. In its place, we see something else: what I call toxic virtuosity.

Virtuosity in this context should mean performed with excellence, virtuousness meaning having moral integrity, and courage. But toxic virtuosity is when the pursuit of the moral high ground becomes poisonous. When virtue is no longer about justice or compassion, but about projection — an eloquent performance of righteousness that actually dehumanises the opponent.

We see it in the way algorithms reward outrage. The louder you shout, the more you’re seen. The more uncompromising you appear, the more virtuous you look. Outrage has become currency in the attention economy, and politics has been reduced to the theatre of moral performance.

A case in point: The assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Now, let me be clear: I probably disagreed with Kirk on virtually everything. Theologically, politically, socially, we would not have shared common ground. I don’t think we would have even agreed on what the gospel is.

And yet, in the wake of his murder, what I saw on the left disturbed me more deeply than the reaction of the right.

People were celebrating. People mocking. People are revelling in his death. And these weren’t fringe voices; many were people who would otherwise claim to represent compassion, equality, and humanity.

The mask slipped. The virtuous facade revealed itself as toxic.

Because in that moment, it wasn’t about theology or politics or ideology. It was about a man — a father, a husband — brutally killed. A family left behind. And instead of lament, we saw glee.

That’s not virtue. That’s poison.

Step back and you see the same dehumanisation at a global level.

We live in a time when war economies drive political systems more than human lives do. Where presidents can hoodwink whole movements — including Western evangelicalism — into becoming cheerleaders for atrocities. Where Zionism is sanctified, and suffering neighbours are demonised. Where genocide plays out on our screens, and the response is hashtags and tribal slogans.

Politics has always been about power. But it was also once about consensus, about the building of a common good. Now it is about platforms of influence, outrage and algorithms. And the result? Othering, labelling, hatred, vitriol, threats, violence, assassination, murder.

This isn’t a left thing or a right thing. This is a human thing.

So what does it mean to bring humanity back into politics?

For me, it begins with humility. By recognising that I am not virtuous in myself. That I am flawed, and so are you. That politics should never be about masking our brokenness with outrage, but about meeting one another as human beings first.

When politics forgets to be human, it becomes toxic.

The answer isn’t to abandon principle. I still hold to the principles of the dissenting left — solidarity, justice, the fair distribution of wealth and power. But those principles must be rooted in humanity, or they become hollow.

There is nothing in mankind that is fully virtuous. We are broken, flawed, selfish, arrogant. And when we forget that, when we build political identities that mask it, we slip into toxic virtuosity.

But there is one. One who embodied humility. One who did not seek a platform but washed feet. One who bore the violence and hatred of politics and empire and yet responded with forgiveness.

The story of Jesus is not just a religious story. It is a story about humanity. A story about reconciliation. A love story that breaks through the toxic virtuosity of human politics.

And I wonder — in an age of wars, assassinations, and outrage — whether that is the story we most need to hear.

The 12 steps and 12 traditions would mean I shy away from commenting on outside issues, but away from the rooms I live in, the outside world.

That world is still suffering, and it needs a message

Hell Jim, not as we know it!

On By Basecamp RecoveryIn Christian RecoveryLeave a comment

I’m proud of my Welsh heritage. I spent my twenties in Wales, and volumes could be written about those years. But now, in my forties, after working the Twelve Steps and realising that God was never angry with me nor cut me off, I feel like I’m finally coming to know who I am and what I believe. For many years that clarity escaped me.

Frank Turner sums it up well:

“All my friends are getting married, mortgages and pension plans

And it’s obvious my angry adolescent days are done

And I’m happy and I’m settled in the person I’ve become.”

I’ve been making peace with a time in my life when I didn’t face the grief and trauma of losing a baby. After years of serial dating and escape through relationships, I eventually darkened the doors of the church.

Like David, I had let my desires dictate my choices, and in my moralism I convinced myself God was punishing me. Within the sheltered community of church, I managed three years of abstaining from relationships, sex, and mostly from pornography. I thought I’d found the formula.

I reasoned that my healing would come the way David’s did — through grief and resolve. I went to the Scriptures and landed on the story of David and Bathsheba’s first child (2 Samuel 12). David fasted and wept while the child lived, but when the child died, he got up, worshipped, and ate, saying: “I will go to him one day, but he cannot return to me.”

I read those words, said a prayer, and told myself that my own loss must have been because I’d lived outside of God’s will. That thinking caught up with me eventually, but it shows how distorted my view of God was. I had cast him as judge, jury, and even executioner.

And yet, that church was still more life-giving than my upbringing. My unconscious distortions about God began to be challenged.

Work during those years meant standing behind the counter of a small valleys high street shop. Because I lived in town, I met most of its eccentrics. One of them was Jesus Jim.

Jim was a friendly man, barrel-like in build, with a stubbly face, flat cap, and a blue vest that read “Jesus Loves You.” Unlike many street evangelists, he didn’t lead with fear. He insisted that God loved everyone so much that he couldn’t imagine sending anyone to hell. “Even the devil himself,” Jim would say, “were he to bend the knee, would be forgiven.”

That was my first brush with universalism. At the time I dismissed it as fringe thinking, but the seed was planted.

The church I attended was an AOG Pentecostal, though it tended to fly under the radar. We moved in prophetic, charismatic streams and had a reputation as a wild bunch. Some big names passed through our little congregation — most pivotal for me being John Crowder. His message of the finished work of the cross and the radical scandal of grace was hard for many to swallow, but in my heart I knew it was true.

It shouldn’t have been shocking, but paired with trance-like ecstasy in the body of believers, it was something to behold. We were swimming in ancient revelation and drunk on the wine of it. In simple terms, it felt like the works-based paradigm of worship was being turned on its head. How do you chase after God when He has already found you? How do you press in when He has already pressed into us? This wasn’t just new language — it was a recovery of unapologetic Trinitarian theology.

I left church not long after Rob Bell got strung up for merely questioning the context of hell. I realised I was somewhere on the universal spectrum, and for the last fifteen years I’ve made a hash of living — but through recovery I’ve reconnected with voices like Crowder and C. Baxter Kruger. Slowly, I began to untangle the knots of my distorted belief.

The great pains of the past, though healed from an eternal perspective, still get triggered in daily life. That’s okay — because now I get to experience the full spectrum of living instead of numbing out. Just today, while watching Private Practice with my partner, the storyline of a terminal pregnancy hit me harder than I’ve felt in years.

When you cry so hard your head feels like it will explode, the language of weeping and gnashing of teeth feels more literal than allegorical. Yet I know, no matter how low I’ve stooped, I was never out of reach or alone.

Now, like Jesus Jim, I’m convinced God’s love is too strong to torment His beloved children for eternity. I believe in the refining, restorative fire of God’s love — a fire that burns the very evil out of us. The Greek phrase translated as “eternal punishment” in modern Bibles is aionios kolasis — literally “age-during correction” or “pruning” — not timoria, which means retributive punishment.

So I suppose that means I am — and am not — a universalist. Not sure about the devil ever getting his bedroom back though.