My name is Bill W. and I’m a sexaholic. My sobriety date is November 26, 1995. Until I was 73 years old, I was a chronic relapser. My addiction was costly. I ended up a disgrace to myself, my family, my church, and the religious order to which I belong. I lost my license to function publicly as a priest. Some two and a half years into sobriety, I was accused of sexual abuse on national television. That 24-hour news cycle was the lowest bottom I ever hit. Believe me, the taste of that kind of shame is bitter.

So how has SA helped me in my recovery? What have I received from the many meetings I have attended during the last 17 years? I always knew that what I was doing was wrong, but still I would act out. I spent most of my life wrestling with this addiction. When I was 19, I read something by a saint that described me: “I am a piece of bent iron that must be bent straight.” I was bent by lust. The lust in me was using a perfectly natural function (sex) to serve its own unnatural desires.

In the past in my struggle with lust, I would use the time-honored spiritual exercises of my religious tradition. All this spiritual activity helped, but I still masturbated and from time to time acted out with others. In the 1960s I went to a psychiatrist three times a week for two and a half years. This was helpful, and I had a couple of years of sobriety. But I was never free of the fear of falling. I always felt as though I was walking on a narrow path along the edge of a cliff—afraid that the ground under me would give way. And it did give way, over and over again.

In the mid-1970s, my spiritual director happened to be an AA old-timer working as an AA counselor at a rehab center. I began to see that my lust addiction was akin to alcohol addiction. I asked him to be my sponsor and tried to work the Steps with him. I took the first three Steps to the best of my ability, but still I kept relapsing. My Step Three effort to surrender never seemed to work. What was I doing wrong? Only when I started attending SA meetings and reading the White Book did I find the answer. One sentence jumped out at me: “Fellowship is where the action is” (SA 158).

My Third Step surrender needed something extra. I needed what I call a “Third Step Reality Check.” For me, the Third Step means “surrender plus.” The plus is what the White Book says: “Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings…. That’s what they told me. ‘Just keep bringing the body.’ ‘Work the Steps, work the Steps, work the Steps, work the Steps, work the Steps.’ Going to meetings and working the Steps. That’s how I did it. That’s how I learned to let ‘the grace of God enter to expel the obsession’” (SA 158).

Whenever I read those words, the English teacher in me cringes. They are too many words—redundant to the point of boredom. It all sounds corny. But working the Steps and going to meetings is what has worked for me.

In 1996, I went into a rehab center for five months and attended a Twelve Step meeting every day—150 meetings in a row. At my very first SA meeting, the speaker was a priest who held an important position in my church. He said that he had once travelled to a convention in a distant city, had acted out in the men’s room when he arrived at the railroad station, and was immediately arrested. I was astonished. Not that he had acted out, and not that he’d been arrested—but that he had the humility and guts to speak about the incident in public.

My second surprise was that there was no crosstalk from others in the meeting. The speaker did not have to defend or explain himself. It was enough to just bring that secret to the light. All the others in the room had only to listen, not give advice. There was a moment of silence, and then somebody else spoke up matter-of-factly about a different topic, or about something going on in his life. I learned two things right then: (1) There is safety and wisdom in the “No Crosstalk” rule, and (2) a Twelve Step meeting is a safe haven for a lust addict like me—in fact, it’s a kind of sanctuary.

I soon learned that I am only as sick as my secrets. I have to bring my lust behavior into the light, no matter how shameful. I pictured myself standing in a ballpark at night with all the floodlights on, emptying my pockets and turning them inside out, exposing my all of my most shameful secrets—everything—for all to see.

In the past, whenever I acted out, lust was soon swept away by a storm of guilt and shame and a desperate resolve never to masturbate or act out again. My sense of guilt was always so strong that my conscience forced me to go to confession. Going to confession after the act was fine, but it was not enough. For me it was “Too little, too late.”

At meetings I learned I had to do something I found much more difficult. I had to get current, come clean, and bring lust to the light whenever it flared up. I had to get current in my next meeting—or better—call someone in the fellowship in the midst of the lust attack.

Lust for me was a kind of mind-altering drug. Whenever lust took over, I went into a trance-like state; a kind of mental paralysis. When I was in that trance, my telephone weighed 20 pounds. But now, if I call someone and get current, the call breaks the trance. I have learned that lust wilts if I bring it to the light. What a discovery!

In the past, lust would fester in the secrecy of my mind and imagination and torment me for hours and days on end until I finally masturbated or acted out with someone. But when I brought lust to the light, it evaporated. I would walk out of a meeting with the feeling that a terrible load had been lifted off my shoulders.

During those months of rehab, I began to see patterns in my behavior that I had not noticed before. I saw how I got trapped over and over again. For example, I had always thought of myself as a compassionate person. Being shy myself, I could easily spot shy people who were ill at ease at public gatherings, so I’d go over and chat and try to put the shy person at ease. Sounds innocent, right? But I discovered that my compassion was actually only a stage on the way to passion. This was not easy to admit—but I learned that what I thought of as compassion was actually a cloak for lust. Being a wolf in sheep’s clothing took on new meaning. I was a sexual predator. Those are ugly words, and quite painful to admit.

I also learned that I was guilty of what experts call “sex in the forbidden zone.” This occurs when people who have power (such as doctors, teachers, coaches, or clergy) take advantage of the trust of those who don’t have power (such as patients, students, clients, or parishioners)—by acting out sexually with them. Because of the nature of these relationships, my violations of trust were a kind of incest. For a clergyman like me, it was also an act of sacrilege—something that cries to heaven for vengeance.

While I always knew that what I was doing was wrong, I did not realize how damaging it was to the women involved. As I attended meetings, I discovered another embarrassing truth about myself. I can quickly get an adolescent crush on a woman. I began to realize that I was actually stuck at the adolescent stage of normal human development. In my 70s that was hard for me to admit.

I also learned that—no matter how much recovery I have—my addict is always (as they say) in the next room pumping iron. For instance, just recently a friend was telling me her troubles: her father suffers from Alzheimer’s, her mother had an operation and then a heart attack afterwards in the hospital, and my friend was overwhelmed trying to take care of them both. I felt a strong urge to hug her and give her a big kiss the next time we met. Thanks to SA, alarms went off in my head and yellow warning flags began to wave. I called my sponsor and put out the fire.

Most of my life, I was a victim of bad habits. A habit is something that makes an action easily doable. If I keep feeding a Golden Retriever, it will grow into my best friend. If I keep feeding a wolf pup, it will grow into a wild beast that will turn on me and rip me apart. I have learned that every time I read erotic passages in novels, watch an X-rated film, stare at body parts or nude images (even in great works of art, paintings, or statues), and every time my eye looks inappropriately at a woman, I am feeding a wolf who lives to tear me apart.

In the past when drunk with lust, I was always on red alert. I was always mounting a kind of land, sea, and air search for what would satisfy my lust. I’ve learned to stop feeding the addiction. If I stop feeding the wolf, the wolf will starve to death.

I discovered I was two people. One was fairly successful in a number of leadership positions. The other was a sexual predator. I had two memory banks: one good, one bad. In recovery, the contents of my bad memory bank began to fade. I was no longer on full sexual alert. My mind, my imagination, and especially my body quieted down. As I grew older, I actually did harm to my body trying to force it to keep up with the lust in my head. I finally learned that my addiction was in my mind, not in my body.

As my body quieted down and I stopped acting out in my mind, I came to realize that important changes were taking place in my brain. I found that when I kept repeating my actions, my brain became wired to perform those new actions easily.

As I’ve kept coming to meetings and working the Steps, I’ve found that good habits are replacing bad ones, and the actions of recovery are becoming easier. Through SA I have begun to experience the birth of a reassuring new hope. If I go to meetings and work the Steps, I’m not doomed to fall off the cliff again. As one wise SA old-timer puts it, “The end to be achieved is to stay in the process.” The piece of bent iron is gradually being bent back into shape.