She discovered the two things that make up her self-esteem.

I learned very early that life was all about being a good girl, pleasing, being obedient and nice. I was being raised to be a good wife in the style of those days. My parents, of course, were blameless, giving me everything they knew to shape me as they had been.

The subsequent 40 years of my life were defined by fear, shame, and guilt. I was an easy target for sexaholic men, and married one. I thought I was doing God’s will by serving and pleasing all around. My own sexaholism exacerbated the scene. I was suicidal the whole time, under psychiatrists. Self-esteem was a sick joke to me.

In my 50s, I found SA. Steadily, I worked through the Steps. As promised, scales fell from my eyes. I have had hundreds, maybe thousands, of personal conversations with lots of sisters all over the world, and with some sober brothers too. 

I derive my self-esteem from two things: God’s love for me, which I found in Step Two, and my personal integrity. Today, I say what I am and am what I say. I live a life of rigorous honesty, warts and all, as the saying goes. One of my shares in a meeting ended with “I may be mad, but I’m happy, joyous, and free!!”

Each morning, I surrender my whole day and my whole self to God. This is my personal way of escaping the heavy cloud of dense fear, shame, and guilt. I had to accept the difficult lesson that life is a grey area. In my Step Six studies, I learned that I make Step One 100%. The other Steps are about “progress, not perfection”. I am a human being today among fallible humans in SA, all doing our utmost to live sober, not perfectly, of equal dignity and worth.

When I stopped trying to be “good enough” and gave it all over to God, I was flooded with the value and worth I sought my whole life. Today, I am good enough for God and for myself, and that is all that really matters.