When I was eight years old, my mother would ask me (her only child), “Will you help me by drying the dishes and stacking them on the counter?” I enjoyed the activity and felt I was part of the team. She would also ask, “Will you help sweep the stairway?” I remember this task as being fun because, as I swept from the top step to the bottom, the amount of debris that accumulated to the bottom kept growing. Both of these jobs were effortless, and, in my naturally isolating mind, they were “mine to do.” Helping was a service that provided rewards of self-satisfaction and contribution to the general welfare. I could see that I was part of a happy home, and that my help would help. There were many other tasks, but those are the first requests I remember.

I also learned at a very young age that my help in doing unassigned chores was important to my family. My growth as a responsible person required that I help out. As I got older, more and more chores were assigned to me, and I never felt angry about them because I was reaping the freedom that comes from responsibility.

Things started to get complicated, however, when I was 13 and I found that lust, sex, and alcohol were the “in” things with other friends my age. I did not need to help any more. While I enjoyed helping as a child, I was slowly growing “into myself” (or so I thought) with the discovery of sex and alcohol. What tremendous excitement there was thinking about the next escapade!

My new friends actually were sex and alcohol—and the classmates I hung out with either enhanced these adventures or I dropped them as associates. If I needed sleep, I had a choice of options, and the options seemed perfectly normal. I rationalized that, if I just drank myself to sleep every night, I would be an alcoholic, and if I were to seek satisfaction sexually every night I would be a sexaholic—but with both options, I would be neither. That made perfectly good sense to me at the time.

For decades afterward, except for the responsibilities of my job and marriage and parenting, I found many new and different ways to isolate. Watching sports on TV was a wonderful experience that did not require other people, and that gave me chance for me to get into my “zone” and forget about the pressing issues that were building up in my life.

Eventually, my wife and children were all in some sort of trouble and I had to closely analyze my practices to see why everything was falling apart. I went to AA and found that it was a spiritual program, and I thought that I could use some spiritual uplifting. (I had been a regular church-goer every Sunday my whole life.) But after I did the Steps in AA (and subsequently in SA), I realized that the problem was not only that I had become powerless over alcohol and lust, but that I had really become powerless over myself.

Both of my sponsors (in AA as well as SA) were urging me to get involved in service, and I did not really see the fruits of the fellowship until I started doing service for others. I was told:

• If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.
• If you want what you haven’t gotten, you will have to do what you haven’t done.

As examples to me, both of my sponsors were active not only as sponsors but also as meeting leaders: organizing new meetings, always bringing the program of fellowship and sobriety tools into every meeting, getting to meetings early to set up, rearranging chairs, and putting literature away at the end of the meetings. Other members contributed by organizing new meetings, serving as Intergroup Representatives or Regional Representatives, or presenting at speaker meetings.

I started small, but soon I found my place in the recovery world like they did. And somewhere in the process, I found the same joys of peace and serenity that I knew as a young boy helping with my family. In fact, today I know that every member at every SA meeting is a family member in the Twelve Step fellowship, and we find that the Twelfth Step is a living reality: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to sexaholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs” (SA 208).