It was July 31, 2015, and I was in the shower. Without warning, in the space of about a minute and a half, three different lust images came through my thoughts. Soon after I let the first one go—20 or 30 seconds later—here came another! Soon after I let that one go, there was a third! That one went the way of the first two. They followed close upon each other, but they were all different images.

I know it was July 31, because August 1, 1985, is my sobriety date. If I stayed sober until midnight it would mark 30 years of sobriety. I allowed myself a little smile there in the shower. My sponsor tells me to thank God for lust thoughts and impulses: they’re reminders that I’m not cured—that I still need God every day, every minute.

My mind goes back to July 1985. After decades of despair—of obsessing and acting out in ways destructive to myself and others—I was feeling hope that July. That feeling of hope came about in a way I never could have predicted. A man had approached me after an open Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that I attended regularly and started to tell me about his problem with masturbation. That’s not the sort of after-the-meeting fellowship talk I ever would have expected. Why had he picked me to reveal his problem to? I wondered if he was trying to pick me up! Nevertheless, I responded cautiously that, yes, I had that problem too.

Then he told me that there were people who called themselves sex addicts and held Twelve Step meetings. For the first time, I realized there was a name for me besides “pervert.” I was an addict! I had been trying to figure it out for myself over all those years and never got anywhere. Now I had an explanation for my insane, out-of-control thinking and behavior. Now I knew why I had continued to go to A.A. meetings for ten years, why A.A. was one of the few places I felt at home—although I’m not an alcoholic.

The only meeting of sex addicts my informant knew of was 100 miles away. I got directions from him and started making the 200-mile round trip every Wednesday night. Now this was not a Sexaholics Anonymous group. They were not affiliated with any national fellowship, but they used materials from SA and from another “S” fellowship—or from whatever source the leader for the night decided to bring into the meeting. Likewise for their sobriety definition: each member decided on his or her own definition. I was confused. I was used to A.A., where the fellowship established the definition.

I prayed to God for help. I asked, What is sobriety for me? It came to me that I already knew the answer. During the previous ten years attending A.A. meetings I had seen the change that chemical sobriety brought to alcoholics. They had what I wanted. Now, they said that the first drink made them drunk. What was my first drink? Sometime during those years, I realized that it was sexual fantasy that made me drunk. I would get a sexual image or thought—what I often call a “fantasy start”—and build a story from it. That was my first drink. I would be drunk with lust before I even thought about masturbating.

But if fantasy was my first drink, I just knew I was doomed to fail at sexual sobriety. I had been trying to control those sexual fantasies for years and failing miserably; they simmered and bubbled in my head from first waking until I fell asleep, and I’d wake during the night to fantasize and masturbate myself back to sleep again. But that July, from the time the man Twelfth Stepped me, their frequency had declined.

Then, near the end of July, I experienced a period of four days with no sexual impulses whatever—such as I could not remember ever having experienced before. I took this as an answer to my prayer, as a sign that I must surrender sexual fantasy if I were to be sexually sober. So I embraced failure. I picked up a white chip at the next Wednesday night meeting and told the group I was going to try to surrender each fantasy start as it came.

From that evening, I have not acted out. I was not freed from sexual thoughts and images; my perception is that God let me see the lust thoughts for what they were as they appeared. He let me see them coming. Before, the thoughts and images tumbled around in my head helter skelter, and I couldn’t separate myself from them. Now I could spot them from the start.

When I picked up that white chip, I didn’t say I would stop masturbating, yet the desire to masturbate soon left me. Sexual fantasy truly is my first drink.

Early in my sobriety, when I would become aware of a sexual thought or image, I had a choice. I could engage with it and build a story in my head, or I could let it go. Prayer helped me to let it go.

What if the lust came back? What if it threatened to overpower me? I would make a phone call. To the sexaholic who answered, I might say something like this:

“I just got a flashback to an acting-out episode, and I want to grab hold of it and build it into a story. All my experience tells me that if I do that, it will make me insane. I’m calling you as a witness to God that I’m powerless. This call is a prayer to God for surrender.”

Until this day, that has worked every time. It has kept me sober.

Making the phone calls was not easy at first. How did I make it easier? I practiced. That’s right, I forced myself to keep making calls until they got easier. It’s a matter of habit. In my acting-out days, I lived in habits of insobriety; now I cultivate habits of sobriety.

The lust hits come far less frequently these days. That’s an important part of my message today: it gets better. I still make phone calls. I call newcomers. I call members who are struggling. I call to maintain my emotional health.

I’m not cured of my addiction. One night recently, during the period when I was composing this essay, I awoke from a sexual dream. It was powerful. In the first brief moment of half-consciousness, it seemed like lust was the only thing that existed in the world. I slid out of bed onto my knees—because I’m in the habit. I asked God to give me the willingness to surrender lust. Then I got to my feet and, in the dark, went to the computer and clicked on Skype. I called another sexaholic five time zones east of me, where the morning was well advanced. It was a call like I had made hundreds of times before. After I talked with him for a while, the world felt like it was back in proper proportion. I was a sex addict starting another sober day.