Love. Paul said it was patient and kind. Kahlil Gibran said that without it life is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. The Four Aces called it a many splendid thing. But what is love when it comes to Twelve Step programs, Sexaholics Anonymous in particular? In my opinion there are two kinds of love, equal yet different, when helping people in SA. They are Tough Love and Gentle Love.

Tough Love is helping people, and helping is based on inequality. It is not a relationship between equals. When I help, I am very aware of my own strength, and that I am using it to help those of lesser strength, those who are more needy than I am. Helping incurs debt; makes those helped owe me something. Helping also perceives that the person is broken or needs to be fixed. Their brokenness requires me to act, in effect to play God. It is a form of judgment, which creates distance, disconnection, an experience of difference. It becomes a moral distance because of the perception of unequal expertise.

Conversely, Gentle Love is true service to another equal. We don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experience, strengths, and hope. We reveal our failures, limitations, our wounds, our dark-sinful mistakes that those we would serve could relate to. They see the wholeness in us, and it touches the wholeness in them, their Godliness so to speak. Serving, like healing, is mutual. There is no debt, as I am served as well as the one I am serving, the miracle of 12^th Step work. Service work is a relationship between equals, and we should serve them not because they are broken, but because life is holy.

For me, Tough Love is what I need when I’m being dishonest with my program and myself. It’s when I say, “I can’t” do something when I know that it’s that I “won’t” do it. Without Tough Love, I’m going to wallow in my self-pity. I expect Tough Love from old-timers, folks who say, “Been there; done that.” This works, this doesn’t. And most importantly, “Quit fooling yourself.”

Gentle Love, on the other hand, is when I’ve come up against an obstacle that I simply cannot or am not ready to overcome. Gentle Love occurs when I’ve mentally beaten myself up and my sponsor or a fellow SA tells me to stop. It’s what program means when it says, “We will love you until you can love yourself.”

In either case, there are those in the Fellowship who are there to support me and join me as I trudge this Road of Happy Destiny. Thank God for SA!