About two years ago, not long after finishing the Steps with my sponsor and having the spiritual awakening promised in Step Twelve, I decided I could manage my own life. I became complacent, making fewer phone calls, going to fewer meetings, becoming less active as a sponsor, and reaching out less to my own sponsor. I was in school at the time, and things seemed to go okay for a while. One of the first signs that all wasn’t well was my constant and often overwhelming anxiety that I wouldn’t get my schoolwork done on time. I deepened this fear by procrastinating, a defect rooted in the false belief that I wasn’t capable of doing good work. By the end of the semester, I was living in constant fear and worry. In my preoccupation, I often declined my wife’s requests for quality time, or, when we did spend time together, I wasn’t present. I was becoming self-obsessed, but I couldn’t see it.

When the semester ended in December, I crashed. I didn’t know what had hit me. I felt lost, crazy, alone, and scared. I couldn’t think clearly. I didn’t eat much. I had great difficulty relating to my wife, or anyone else for that matter. Without realizing it, I had made school my higher power, and now that higher power was gone, leaving a spiritual vacuum that quickly sucked me in. All winter I struggled, trying to figure out what had happened. At times I felt a terrible despair that the Steps had not worked, that I had been fooling myself about my spiritual experience, that nothing had really changed.

I switched sponsors, got back on some non-prescription antidepressants, and began working out. But I stayed depressed. I talked to my new sponsor about my depression—a lot. His approach was to examine with me how well I was working my program. We identified my failure to reach out regularly and check in with others in the fellowship, especially those who had worked the Steps. So I started making more phone calls and talking to those people about my depression, but it didn’t help. It’s not that they weren’t helpful. I got a lot of good suggestions from them. The problem was my focus was on myself—how to get me well. I would try their suggestions and then closely observe my mental and spiritual state for signs of improvement. If depression were a Volkswagen, my self-obsession would be diesel fuel.

One day, after I had been in this state for several weeks, a newcomer showed up at our meeting. As I often do with newcomers, I called him a few times after his first meeting and encouraged him to find a sponsor. After a week or so, he asked me to sponsor him. Though I had been the one to call and pester him about finding a sponsor, and though I knew from experience that the people I pestered usually asked me to sponsor them, I told him I would need to think about it before agreeing to work with him. I reasoned with myself that since I was already sponsoring one person, I didn’t have time to work with another. I decided to call my sponsor. “Do it!” he told me. “You have time.” So I did—reluctantly.

I asked my new sponsee to call me every day, and he did. One day he called to tell me he was beginning to see how self-centered he was. As I listened, I remembered a passage from the Big Book that talks about self-centeredness (62-63), so I got it out and read some of it to my sponsee, sharing my own experience with self-centeredness as well. After we hung up, I noticed I felt pretty good. This was not a new experience for me. I learned early in my recovery that the most effective and fast-working antidote for depression is to reach out in love to another person, whether through prayer or a phone call. This tool has saved me many times from my own destructive thinking. I had not forgotten this. Several times over the couple of months I was depressed I tried praying for others or calling struggling friends, and it worked just as it had before, lifting the fog and internal pressure of self-obsession. But the effect was only temporary. I found that only a couple of hours or so after making a phone call or praying, my depression would return.

I began to despair because it seemed as though these once powerful and simple spiritual tools had lost their potency. But the problem was not the tools. Using these tools during a deep depression was like taking aspirin for a headache that was caused by not eating. What I really needed was not a pain reliever, but food. I had been starving myself spiritually for months by living a self-centered, supposedly self-sufficient life, and when I started feeling the pain of that kind of living, I popped a pill, spiritually speaking. Prayer and phone calls—useful as they are—didn’t cure my depression because, by themselves, they were not enough to make up for the way I was living on a daily basis.

I began meeting with my sponsee every week after our Thursday meeting to go through the Steps. Many times I did not want to stay after the meeting; I felt I had nothing to give. But I noticed, to my surprise and relief, that almost every time I left the meeting after spending an hour or so with my sponsee, I felt pretty good. I especially noticed the improvement when I told a story from my own experience. I told him about how I finally quit trying to change my wife and started focusing on myself through the Steps, and the wonderful results of that in our marriage. I shared with him about how fear steals from me and from the relationships I participate in. Sharing my experience, strength, and hope reminded me that the program does work, that I had made progress.

One day, in late February or early March, I was driving home from school when I suddenly realized my depression was gone. At the time, I couldn’t account for its disappearance, nor did it really matter. But a little later, as I talked with my sponsor about my rediscovered sense of peace and well-being, he directed me to the Big Book, where Bill writes about his first 18 months of sobriety: “I was not too well at the time, and was plagued by waves of self-pity and resentment. This sometimes nearly drove me back to drink, but I soon found that when all other measures failed, work with another [sexaholic] would save the day. Many times I have gone to my old hospital in despair. On talking to a man there, I would be amazingly lifted up and set on my feet. It is a design for living that works in rough going” (AA 15). I had found the solution to my depression.

As I write this it is late spring 2011, over two years since I was depressed, and life has never been so good, so full of joy and love and purpose. I have not been depressed since I got back to the program, especially carrying the message to others. I was even able to come off the antidepressants about a year ago without any setbacks (though I did this gradually and by talking with my wife and sponsor). I’ve certainly had moments or even days when the old symptoms of self-centered living return, but today I take action quickly. I pray for others. I surrender my fear and obsessive thinking. I keep making calls to check in and to reach out to those who still suffer. And of course, I meet regularly with my sponsees to pass on what was given to me. I’m grateful that just for today I have the willingness to work the program and so receive God’s gifts of happiness, joy, and freedom.