January 2019. There I sat in my apartment in Jakarta high on sex addiction with a new girl every night. What the fuck am I going to do about my finances? I had taken LSD a month earlier and saw my spending habits since I was a teenager hadn’t really changed much. Tripping balls looking out over Margate beach I made a commitment to get my finances sorted. I hope I remember this when I am not so wasted. I did remember and really made an effort to sort through the accounting mess of my businesses. I couldn’t make any headway.
Siting on that couch in my Jakarta apartment with hardly a drop of sperm left in me I remembered DA. I remembered my NA sponsor from 2001. He picked me up in his sports BMW and took me out and bought me lunch. What a cool guy, I thought. A couple months later he told me he had found DA. He seemed humbled. He had almost 100k in unsecured debt and needed to get a grip on his life. He got rid of the car on lease and started driving a much cheaper car. We started going halves in our lunches. He explained to me the tool of record keeping and suggested I try it. I did and over the next few months and was able to work out what I spent and make a budget. Then I gave it away and forgot about it. I moved cities and got a new sponsor, but would keep in touch with him from time to time.
I think I need DA. I thought. It is an accounting problem I need to solve, but the reason I can’t solve it is because of emotional blocks. I don’t even know what they are. I frantically searched online and got some free samples from Amazon about DA. I read these and bought one I can’t even remember. It gave me a start. I had a disease around money. This was both humbling and exhilarating. Humbling because I prided myself on being a good business man and financially manageable. This was false pride. Exhilarating because there was solution.
When I was a deist, a spiritualist even, I used to think it was God and/or the spirits holding back my wealth. I figured there was a good reason for this, maybe I wasn’t ready, but it was frustrating. I now considered the possibility that it was me holding myself back. It was most likely an emotional issue. I was exhilarated by the fact that I might find out what these issues are and if resolved I could live a life much closer to my potential. I committed to DA and started tracking my expenses.
I got sick of reading and then considered that there might be some speaker tapes on line. I searched frantically again and found a heap. I downloaded them and put them on my phone. I did my daily yoga and started listening to them. Woman speaker, skip, woman speaker, skip, woman speaker, fuck do they have any men here. I’m a chauvinist, pray for me. I find it very hard to pay attention to woman’s voices (mum’s nagging) and I rarely get much of message from women sharing. Skip, a man, thank fuck. Danny from New York, living in Bali. I realized I had had dinner with him 18 years earlier in Bali after an AA meeting. He proceeded to talk and told my story.
He had grown up in a middle class family. His parents had money and would use it to show him affection and control him. he was entrepreneurial and had a range of businesses. He would go broke and his mum would give him money. He felt loved. Fuck, as I heard his words while I was in down face dog, it was like getting punched in the heart. He then went on to say how much he had recovered from these unhealthy patterns and was now spending more time on his creative writing, which he felt was more soulful than his businesses. Another punch in the heart.
I got back to Australia, took a dose of azithromycin, and got to work on my DA recovery. I went to the one meeting a week in my city Brisbane and got to work with the steps. At first I felt such hope. The fellowship offered such an amazing range of tools; expense record keeping, spending plan, business meetings, and pressure relief groups on top of all the regular stuff of 12 step meetings. I decided initially that I would have enough to deal with just keeping my records (recording what I spent each day), doing the meeting a week, and step work. I would do the spending plan, business meetings, and pressure relief group once I got the basics sorted.
Now with a spiritual solution to my money problem I was able to tackle my accounts from more than a purely practical angle. I would do my book-keeping and get presented with a problem that would cause my mind to pause. It was the same as what I imagine writers block to be. I would just sit there at my desk with my Pomodoro timer ticking away and not be able to think. In the past this had happened and I would tell myself that I got tired after doing an hour or two of my books and move onto something else, but now I realised I had emotional blockages. I wanted to remain vague about my income and expenses so I could debt. So I could spend more than I earned. Recognising a new cause of my difficulty with my accounts I was able to take a break and deal with the emotional solution – the steps. I would either do some step work or read some stories out of the DA basic text. A ten minute break focusing on the spiritual solution allowed me to get back to my task of book-keeping and no longer have writers block (or debtors block). This was a revelation and evidence that it was an emotional issue since I could do my book-keeping once I applied the spiritual solution.
I asked someone to be my sponsor, but when I started working with him it felt all wrong. I had a lot of resistance working with him. I wasn’t sure if it was my disease or I had the wrong sponsor. I decided it didn’t matter which one it was because I wasn’t going to be able work with him and live up to the deal that I committed to him as a sponsee. So rather than fail I decided to end the sponsorship relationship. I did it via email and he replied very positively telling me to trust my intuition and wishing me luck with a new sponsor or sponsoring myself. This was freeing because sub-consciously I wanted to self-sponsor anyway. I had done that for the majority of my NA/AA recovery. I have since found a compromise where I can use my AA sponsor that is very manageable with money, but doesn’t go to DA.
So under my own sponsorship I went back to step one and decided to answer all 69 questions from the NA step working guide, but in relation to my issues with money. The step work was good and revealing, but my life became a mess. Step one was thrown in my face with sex addiction. I had recently found a sugar dating website where I was getting a lot of attention from young hot girls. Some girls wanted an older (and wealthier man), some girls were just blatant escorts, and many in between these two. I was getting dates and sex like a Rockstar (still not as good as Jakarta), but it came at a cost. The obsession of the getting and using of sex kicked in and I was unavailable for the people in my life I cared the most about. I was unavailable for myself. I recognised (hoped) it was step one in progress.
I finished the 69 questions and moved into the Step 2. After a couple of days the powerlessness stopped. I was driving in my new car that had just been detailed and I realised how I liked nice things. I had deprived myself of nice things for years to afford my addictions. Driving in my new car that I loved I felt that peace of mind. I want to look after my stuff more, I thought. I had already identified that ever since a kid I didn’t look after my possessions and it was connected to my debting. I realised how fleeting the joy of spending money on dates and whores was compared with the more grounded feeling of self-esteem, and respect and enjoyment for my possessions. It then dawned on me that I had lost the obsession with sugar dating, or at least it had been reduced to a far more manageable level.
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