Abstaining from sex for more than two years was an essential step for Rachel Resnick in coping with her addiction.

Question: What role has bisexuality played in your life?

Rachel Resnick: Well, I think it’s gone through different phases, right? If we go back to that was so great that you brought up the Yale years, because that was a really interesting time, that was when I first felt that you could experiment, but I always felt more on this, you know, if there’s a spectrum. I mean, I love sex. I’m very open, I think sexually and I feel very lucky I don’t have any molestation or anything like that in my background, because I think that’s like [ugly], at least I don’t have that, speaking of Dickensian. But I always fell more on the spectrum toward heterosexual, but there was openness and there was, for me, I lost my mother to suicide when I was 14 years old and having had a rapture with her from the get-go, because of her issues, I think that there’s no question that this mother-daughter yearning and unfulfilled relationship played into the dynamic with other women, and that’s not the case for everyone. I became involved with this woman, and I believe that one of the aspects of it that was so different texturally was that I was learning to love myself as a woman and being open to a woman and that goes back to all those cultural stuff we’re talking about and women having this cultural double bind, I also fell in love with the woman with a person, but there is no question that that added another texture and dimension that was incredibly powerful. It was like coming to terms with being a woman and celebrating that.

Question: Was your celibate phase an important development for you?

Rachel Resnick: Certainly, after this experience, absolutely, yeah. I’m not saying that everyone who would want it or could deal with it but there was an openness that was absolutely a gift of recovering and I had two and a half years of celibacy, not intentional before that. I’d been about almost 4 years sober from, you know, again, it’s tricky when it’s you’re not stopping relating to other people, so it’s not as clear cut. I haven’t had a cigarette since, I haven’t had a glass of wine, but I have not felt that [fuzzy] thing in the same way, and I make different choices. But I needed two and a half years, who knew, of pretty much like because the sex really triggers me. I felt like I need two and a half years just to detox and it’s also about pattern. A lot of people make the mistakes that I made in their 20’s but they don’t keep making them, so I didn’t figure out that I was actually addicted to this until I was in my 40’s and had to face “Woh! What happened to having a child? Were of all these decades gone?” And that kind of brought it to the fore.

Recorded on: September 30, 2008.