It was fear that brought me into recovery,
But fear will not keep me sober.

When I sit in meetings listening to others sharing their personal issues, I have a tendency to compare myself to what they are describing. In doing this I miss the point of my recovery. My personal truth is that listening to someone else’s difficulties makes me feel comfortable that there is a group where I can express the same frustrations. I really loved that at first.

Yesterday God gave me an Eleventh Step prayer. At the time, I was in my head, fussing over one of my sons, making an inventory of all the things I wanted for him. It was a typical dad-list, including things like a better job, a better education, a better place to live, and a meaningful relationship.

Last week a guy who had just moved to the area attended our meeting for the first time. Afterwards he commented, “It is so nice to walk into a group I have never attended and feel immediately at home.” As good as it must have felt to him to say that, it felt even better to us to hear it. What greater compliment could a group receive from a newcomer?

I suffer from a sort of hyper-vigilance. Something in me wants to identify and define every object, every person, every angle and surface in my physical environment. My ears are open; my eyes are taking in the very texture of things around me. This drive to know everything that’s going on around me could be a useful trait if I were Batman and dwelt in Gotham City.

Being born in August and growing up near the ocean, it was natural for my family to celebrate my birthday each year at one of the nearby beaches. After a day of living it up, I would come back burned to a crisp and covered with lesions given me by the local stingrays (well, okay, they were only jellyfish, but being an addict I tend toward the dramatic).

All I can share is my experience, and my experience has been that so many times I have had opinions and given advice to others about matters about which I never had any experience. I was like a man who tried to tell someone how to fix his carburetor when he had never opened the hood to his own car.

Tonight I had the honor of presenting my SA sponsor with a 19-year chip. It is a brand new chip. He saves his chip and presents it to me each September, fifteen months later. We have been doing this for years. I think that receiving a chip from a member who has carried it for a year makes it even more special.

I have found no way of permanently eradicating my ego. For me, living in Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve are not enough. It takes resubmitting to all the Steps formally again and again. It is not really that hard when I can see my current level of unmanageability to do a new First Step.

Okay, I understood that part about no sex with anyone other than the spouse. Heck, that’s what got me to Sexaholics Anonymous in the first place. But no sex with myself? Who were these guys kidding? Didn’t they understand that if I refrained from sex with self, something terrible would happen? I might even die, or explode, or something equally dire.

I stood in disbelief. The computer screen had three emails from women at work that I was acting out with. My wife was crying, asking me, “Why?” I was in shock. I stood there physically present, but emotionally far, far away. I was numb to my feelings, to my life, and to myself.

Hi there, Billy here from New Zealand. Just thought I should drop you a note to tell you we are still in existence here in New Zealand.

My first year in recovery was about avoiding triggers. That was disastrous because what I was really practicing was avoidance. If only I don’t see x, or y, or z, I won’t be tempted. It didn’t work. It only made me more sensitive to triggers.

“Progressive victory over lust” is often the hurdle that humbles me in my own program. My lust can, in a heartbeat, zero in on just about anything: sexualizing people, overeating, disappearing into TV, lying, pretending to be someone other than who I am, the list goes on and on. The solution has always been the same: reaching out and giving, of my time, my experience, my caring, my love; giving some of the “real” me to someone else.

My name is Bill and I’m a grateful and recovering sexaholic, actively involved in SA for almost ten years. I’ve been blessed with the grace to maintain sobriety, and by all appearances seemed to be working a solid program. However, somewhere along the path in the last few years, complacency set in.

My addiction has forced me to examine myself. As a result, I have uncovered a part of me that has long been buried: anger. Now that it has been brought to the surface, I’m seeing the reasons for my anger. SA is giving me healthy alternatives to resentment and bitterness.

Serenity did not come my way very often in recovery. I rationalized that my Higher Power must be withholding it from me because there were special plans in the works for me.

In the past, a big part of the reason why I felt that I had little value as a person was because I did not own valuable things. I didn’t own a fancy car, live in a dream house, or flaunt a stylish wardrobe; I didn’t have an impressive career in which I could rub elbows with the rich and popular.

Yesterday I got a call from one of our members who has struggled with staying sexually sober. He had a business trip scheduled that would take him a couple of hundred miles from home and through some towns where he typically would stop at slippery places. He would set himself up to act out when he arrived at his destination.

If you are a newcomer to SA, you may have the same opinion of the saying “Keep coming back, it works if you work it” that I did when I first started attending meetings. Whenever people got all excited talking about the power of those two simple principles—go to meetings, work the Steps—I often felt they were misguided or brainwashed, or maybe even a little crazy.