In Hungary, SA was founded in September 2019. We currently have three weekly meetings, two online and one hybrid, but there is real interest in Monday’s hybrid meeting in Budapest. Participation activity varies—members come and go—but we have about six to eight returning members. The meeting types are varied and include free sharing, SA White Book reading, AA Big Book reading, and speaker meetings. It is a significant step forward that the Hungarian translation of the SA White Book has been completed. It is waiting to be printed. It will take time for SA in one small country to become known alongside other S-communities that have been operating in the country for 30 years. The Hungarian SA is a member of the South East Intergroup (SEI). Good relations with the Slovakian SA community should be highlighted.

I started attending SA Hungary in September 2019. Before that, I went to another recovery S-community for more than two years, where my sobriety was established, but I could not get any serious recovery results. SA has given me new hope with its strict bottom-line expectation and its lust concept, which is about how living out sex addiction itself is just the tip of the iceberg, just one manifestation of a more general deeper illness of the whole personality.

Now that after three years of SA with stumbling, compulsive relapse, but with constant active meetings and Step work, the sobriety gift has been given (I have been sexually sober for six months now), I am even more intensely confronted with the character defects that I have escaped from for many years.

SA’s intense spirituality injected honesty into my religious denominational practice and made my relationship with family members deeper, more sincere (though far from passionless), and less paranoid.

I am given tangible tools in SA every day in moments of temptation and negative thoughts by avoiding the second look, by making instant calls, by leaving voice messages, by applying surrender so that I can always admit my helplessness, kneeling down and surrendering to the Higher Power, in my case, God.

Through prayer, the object of desire is humanized and I give it something instead of exploiting a created person. (The seriousness of my illness is that I wish for hundreds every week, but I hope my prayer will bless hundreds of people. This is how God turns disadvantage into advantage.) The concept of surrender was new to me compared to the other S-community, because I was fighting there, I was battling illness, and I didn’t yet understand the truth of the paradox that I had to surrender, step back in my own story in order for God to enter my life and do for me what I cannot do for myself. The egotistical problem solver cannot do anything for himself.

Over the years, the SA program has become a major part of my life. My previously “sideline,” secretly-handled problem has become mainstream (daily meetings). The real connection with God, the recovery program, my family, and my religious practice keep me sober. Of course my real recovery, my continued peace of mind, is still much more than just staying sober. I learned this in SA, but at least I can experience temporarily the peace and relief that applying the program brings in times of negative feelings, thoughts, and sexual temptations. Please God bless SA, the Hungarian SA community, both local and intergroup.