The addict part of my mind likes to get me spinning around and frantically worrying about my problems. It likes to convince me that the only behavior that’s right is to be firmly in the driver’s seat of my life. “You must be in charge of you,” it shouts, as I bulldoze my way through the day, leaving a trail of scarred situations behind me.

The Oxford Group’s “Four Absolutes” were absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love (the Oxford group was a precursor to AA).

In the summer of 2001, I spoke with women in other 12 Step fellowships who identified themselves as having SA issues. At the time, only two women were active in SA groups in San Diego. Other women were reluctant to come to SA because the fellowship was mainly men. I began to think how lovely it would be to gather all of these women in one room so that they could hear that other women have similar issues.

In meetings, I have often heard sexaholism referred to as “it.” It is cunning and baffling. But my experience has revealed that there is no it in my life, there is only me. By making my sexual compulsiveness an it, I’m trying to minimize my problem in order to make it seem more manageable (by me). It is not cunning and baffling; I am.

If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing you resent, you will be free (AA 552).
When I was new in the program, I was justifiably angry with someone I had resented for years. My sponsor told me to pray for the person I was angry with every day and every time he came to mind.

Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings (AA 59).
Asking for something means that I am not in control of the outcome. I may get what I asked for, I may not. It may look like I expect it to, it may not. I never was very comfortable with this before.

[…]I do whatever is in front of me to be done, and I leave the results up to Him […] (AA 420).
One of the concepts that I learned early on in SA was that the problem was not my behavior, the problem was my thinking. Acting out starts in my mind. If I entertain lust, it eventually will lead to acting out.

We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day, ‘Thy will be done’ (AA 87-88).
I have so often felt that if only I could achieve a certain level of skill playing the guitar or learn enough history, politics, math, and science as I felt I wanted or needed to, I could then be the person I wanted to be.

That’s the message my addicted mind keeps trying to send to my Higher Power. It has never ceased to amaze me how God lets me get away with being as stupid as I want to be sometimes!

Here are two ways I practice Step 12:

Recently my sponsor in another 12-Step program pointed out a sentence in the Big Book that I hadn’t paid special attention to before. It comes in Chapter 11, A Vision For You. The reading has to do, in part, with events surrounding a business trip by Bill W., the co-founder of AA, when he was just six months sober.

I attended family counseling for six years; my wife was crazy and she wasn’t getting any better. Did it have anything to do with the fact that I was having several simultaneous affairs? I was a respected professional in a small town. Some of the women were my clients. This was in violation of the ethics of my profession and whatever ethics I might have thought I had for my marriage.

Two Trustees rotated from service: Dorene S. and Maria G.
Other Trustees were affirmed for another year of service: Luc B. and Lawrence M.

How many Delegates does it take to change a light bulb?

The following suggested policy on how to deal with abuse disclosed at meetings first appeared in the ESSAY in October 1990. It is reprinted here at the request of the Delegates and Trustees, who discussed this and related issues at the General Delegate Assembly meeting in St. Louis, on July 7.

Thank you God for SA with a very tough bottom line; recovery came to me because of this program. Thank you for teaching me that every person has dignity. No matter what their station in life, economic status, addictions, and illness, no matter what they’ve done—every person has dignity.

“Sounds like you are feeling better.”
Those were the words uttered by my sponsor when I called in despair over a financial predicament I was working through during a career transition.

Sometimes, in meetings, I would share about the “amazing insights” I had, but these are all things I now see in my rear-view mirror. My motives and drivers were revealed to me after I did the work of the Steps. My insights did not lead to recovery. They are knowledge I had been given as the result of working the Steps.

While working for the radio industry as a disc jockey, I was trained to avoid dead air in my work. Pushing buttons, speaking, starting programs on time was very important. Timing, down to the second, in every hour was accounted for. Two seconds of “nothing” on the radio seemed an eternity, and was often cause for unemployment if done repeatedly.

A story out of the old West tells about a stagecoach owner interviewing applicants for driver. He stood at a dangerous curve on a winding mountain road where one side dropped hundreds of feet sharply into the canyon below. The owner asked, “Driving six horses at full speed, how close can you come to the edge of the cliff and not go over?”