Hi    I've been struggling the last fortnight with obsessing about someone. He's a fellowship friend I've know a while and we've had a safe platonic friendship. That was until we went walking one evening after a meeting. We both shared extremely intimate information about our childhood sexual activity. The next day I woke up with him on my mind and it has been so ever since. I've tried distraction, bottom-lines (no phone calls, changing meetings, no contact); getting support talking to people but keeping anonymity and of course prayer and meditation.         The whole process has brought me to my knees in terms of realising how powerful this addiction is. Eventually I was lucky to read literature on partnerships and how in unhealthy relationships we close things down which was exactly what I wanted to do with him.  In other reading I found stuff on the idea that we close things down when we have attached to someone and we fear abandonment or rejection from that person. This really got me thinking. Had I so profoundly changed my attachment to someone by sharing intimate childhood experiences?         At the time I thought what we were doing was safe, it was reciprocal sharing, something I know I have tended not to do in the past, it was shared with some I knew and trusted.  What I have learnt though is that somehow in the process I bound myself to him. I became enslaved in a fantasy of what we might become that nothing which I tried including prayer was helping me with, though I did find I was spending more time in prayer than I usually would.     Eventually, looking at the process I decided to try to forcibly break out the attachment. I choose to do this by sharing my own childhood details with others. I did this yesterday morning for the first time in a step group that I attend in another fellowship and again last night in a SLAA HOW meeting.  The effect of this has been profound. In my step group it has taken the levels of intimate sharing from others to a far deeper level. In the SLAA HOW meeting it received nothing but a normal response like any other meeting.      It great gift of the responses has been the realization that the shame I was holding I no longer had to.  As for my obsession with this gentle man, I haven't seen him since I have broken the bond of our shared secrecy but I have not found myself thinking of marrying him or having his children. The energy is gone from it and I'm grateful to say he is a friend again.       I have seen through this how truly fragile my recovery is, that each day is a challenge and that if I persist with my recovery I will find some pathway.  I know also that what has carried me through this dark obsessive time without acting out has been the calls to my sponsor, the outreach calls and my Higher Power.       Thank you