I am a gratefully recovering sexaholic living in California. My sobriety date is November 26, 2009. At my first SA meeting, there was one other woman in the room who had joined SA four months before. She became my first SA sponsor.

A lust drunk was stranded on a desert island with no lust hits or any other way of escaping his loneliness. One day he saw an old brown bottle washed up on the strand. He picked it up, dusted it off and at once, a genie appeared. “For joy, you have freed me!” cried the genie. “Ten thousand years I have spent in that bottle. For your pains, young man, I will gladly grant you three wishes for freeing me.”

Hello, my name is Ilona and I am a sexaholic. My sobriety date is January 14, 2016. When I walked into SA I was the only female in the room. This was expected, if at first, unsettling. I discussed this with my sponsor. She told me “What better way for your recovery being in a room of recovering men and learning to relate to them non-sexually?”

I found out when I started to sober up and get into recovery that part of not lusting required keeping physical boundaries. In my active addiction, I did not pay attention to this and had no idea that there are healthy boundaries. For me, this means no intimate hugging with men and women and making sure I have enough space around me to stand or sit.

I’m a sexaholic from Luxembourg, sober since May 31, 2004. My first SA meeting was at a convention in Germany in 1995. I was in a lot of pain and went after one of the meetings to one of the women and asked her to be my sponsor. She agreed.

In my mid-forties I found myself full of fear, uncertainty, and loneliness—not knowing why my life did not have the shades of color I saw in nature, the sunsets, the immensity of the flowers. I felt that I did not belong—that perhaps my Higher Power had made a mistake. Lust had always been there, but at a very high cost.

Dear New Brother,
The first thing I want you to know is that I will honor your anonymity; I will not use your name nor give you mine. At a large Saturday morning meeting of our 12-Step program your sponsor read your First Step letter. It resonated with me, and I want to give back to the fellowship by writing my share to you.

The author of Tough Love Changing Lives describes what made the change for him back in 1993. Apart from the Gift of Desperation, he had friends who cared enough for him to take him to a strong meeting, which he describes for us in detail.

The Feb 2021 issue had a cartoon of a male in recovery witnessing those of various religions squabbling over ‘who is in the right,’ and engaging in fisticuffs. The ‘observer’ stands aside, witnessing the fray. The message of freedom from anger and resentment could have been conveyed much better. Anger, in particular, is a complex issue. Rendering it so simply does not do justice to finding recovery from anger and rage.

Dear Essay readers,
We hope you find inspiration in this issue on how you can turn your local meetings into strong spiritual gatherings by reading contributions from fellows from all over the world. You can also find out which pieces of literature on meetings our fellowship has to your disposal.

The lockdown paradoxically brought our neighboring regions of Europe & the Middle East and the German-Speaking Region together in new ways.

The third Asia-Pacific Unity conference took place on Sunday April 25, 2021. The real purpose of this one-day conference is carrying the message and strengthening small groups through unity with others.

Our Hungarian fellowship was established in September 2019 on the closing day of the SA conference held in Budapest. The determination and enthusiasm that set us on the road is still with us to this day.

Dear Members of SA,
Have you heard of the SA Board of Trustees? Do you have any idea what service the Trustees provide our fellowship? Have you ever thought that you might be a candidate to serve as a Trustee? Whatever your answers to these questions, we invite you to read on and learn more about this particular service opportunity.

In 2005, my AA sponsor told me: “I found the solution for you, SA has arrived in Venezuela.” He put me in contact with a member who had several copies of the White Book. I read it in one sitting, from beginning to end, and totally identified.

When I came into the program about ten years ago, there wasn’t much Persian-translated SA literature. We didn’t have any translation of the SA White Book yet. This led to an imperfect understanding of the Sobriety Definition, which caused our fellowship to have loose or erroneous interpretations of it for many years.

The photo below was taken from a bluff overlooking the Turnagain Arm and the Chugach Mountain Range of Alaska. Let me share with you the story behind it.

This is what Step 4 is designed to achieve. The question “What was my part?” is not designed to blame the victim who has a resentment against a wrong that was done to them. The question goes to what part of me is broken that keeps this pain alive? How have I taken myself out of the land of the living because of this resentment?

Ironically, I spent the first nine months of my existence in a dark place, a sort of tunnel, sheltered from the light, from real life, as it were. Then, I was thrust into the light, into the real world. But, over time, I found this light blinding and painful. All I knew to do was to look for a dark place to escape back to, somewhere that made me feel better.

This year I celebrated five years of SA sobriety, one day at the time, one moment at a time, one hour at a time and so on … This is a miracle that I have been blessed with. Could this have been possible before? No, it was not possible.