July 2007 Lust Questionnaire, Adelphi, MD

My initials are L. A. I’m powerless over lust without God’s help.

My journey to sobriety and progressive victory over lust has been challenging and victorious. In 1989, I came into SA after years of endangering my life and freedom by cruising public acting-out places and hooking up anonymously with men. I dove into the program, went to lots of meetings, got physically sober, and felt tremendous relief.

I thought I was sober.

After three years of physical sobriety, I left the program, believing that walking with God would be enough to keep me clean. I moved abroad and accepted a stressful job that consumed me. After seven years of white-knuckling sobriety, I lost it on a visit back home.

I was so exhausted after seven years of that job that I knew I needed to move back to the States. But first, I took a five-month vacation in Europe and Africa, during which I returned to some pre-SA cruising behaviors. I considered myself sober because I just watched others but did not physically act out myself. When I finally got back to the US, I felt insane and desperate. I crawled back into SA. I claimed those five months of “vacation” as sober time.

Finally, I had a check meeting and saw that claiming sobriety in light of what I had been doing was producing deep self-hatred and suicidal rage. I reset my date. I felt relieved; I had a renewed sense of my own integrity and God’s presence with me.

I realized that I had never understood lust and didn’t know what or how to surrender. I had only known that I could not have sex with self or others (except spouse, which I didn’t have) in order to stay sober. But I was not achieving progressive victory over lust.

I had to reconsider what sober behavior and progressive victory over lust looked like for me. I had to add “not taking a willful drink of lust” to my bottom line. And “progressive victory” became the willingness to keep adding to my bottom line as God revealed where lust was still lurking.

It seems that I wasn’t the only SA member reflecting on progressive victory over lust. In planning the program for the July 2007 Live & Let Go Convention in Maryland, the Convention Program Committee grappled with the question of what the SA fellowship considers sober. We designed a lust questionnaire and offered it to the attendees to complete. In all, 176 of the 300+ attendees responded.

I was personally struck by the responses to Question 12, in which over two-thirds of respondents said that they considered unsober behavior to include willfully looking at porn, willfully lusting after others, willfully fantasizing, willfully lusting after self, and willfully provoking lust in others—even when there was no physical acting out.

Other SA members might have different reactions after reviewing the data, and may be interested in reading and freely discussing the questionnaire results at meetings. It may also be valuable for the fellowship to engage in a broader dialog about what kind of sobriety will lead us to the deeper recovery we in SA are really looking for. God and SA saved my life. I pray they will continue to save others.