Just wanted to send you a note about our area’s “Sharing of the Fellowship” retreat May 31. This was our fourth annual retreat and it was an especially wonderful experience of fellowship and recovery.

Soon after I got out of the Clinic in Bad Herrenalb in 1986, I moved to Bonn. I knew there was a male and a female SA member there and I got in touch with them. After speaking to my church minister, we had a meeting room. Thus, our first SA meeting took place on November 26, 1986 in Bonn.

As requested in the March 1997 issue of the Essay, below are some ideas for increasing the distribution of the Essay.

I know the discouragement and self-doubt of sitting in a meeting room by myself over and over again and waiting for someone to come. Then when they came, I spent years being discouraged at the people who didn’t stay. In our early days in Bozeman, one other member who had often been the only other person in the meeting, said, “Why aren’t people staying?” I was finally able to laugh and ask him back, “Why would a person be crazy enough to walk into a meeting with us two lunatics and want what we have?” It takes time to have enough to offer people to stay.

In the wake of the new focus on book study meetings a few years ago, I wanted to start such a meeting Thursday night, a night when there were no meetings in my metropolitan area. Admittedly, I wanted it near where I lived as well, but other SA members did live in the vicinity. I approached the church that I attended and was given permission to use a classroom for the meeting.

Service is important, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is usually more difficult to relapse when giving service than when not. However, “service” is not a sure fire “cure” for relapse, but it certainly helps.

I write this to express my gratitude to my Higher Power and SA for the gift of sexual sobriety. It has been a goal all my life but I could not attain it on my own, no matter how I tried. God knows how hard I tried! I grew up in an alcoholic home with a lot of violence. My father was an alcoholic who never got into recovery. My mother was a devout Irish Catholic who taught us children to be loving, decent and above all, to be chaste. I could not live up to that and consequently, I was prey to a lot of shame and guilt as I grew up.

Two years into the program and growing more and more cocky about my power over myself, during my first major crisis I slipped into my old patterns. Caught by the trance leading up to masturbation, I ended two years of what I would now call abstinence. In the carelessness brought on by thinking I was in control, I acted out.

My family and I took a vacation recently. In preparation I called motels and found one near our vacation area that was affordable.

Greetings from the Guam SA Group. We’re alive and well — three regular members, with perhaps a fourth.

Around 40 SAs and S-Anons from the U.K., Ireland, the USA, Austria and Luxembourg gathered at a retreat house atop London’s Mill Hill for “A New Beginning” over the weekend of March 21-23.

[The Oklahoma City Jan. ’97 SA Convention] was my second convention in the States — the first was of another S-fellowship. What impressed me about this one was the substantial number of members with five to ten years of solid sobriety. There was a very strong emphasis on the solution rather than the problem. It was also great to see so many people from different ethnic and religious groups. It was a great reminder that this disease is no respecter of persons.

Over the weekend of April 25-27, the third Australian SA Conference was held in Yackandandah, Victoria. With 24 members attending from various parts of Australia, this was the largest conference so far, and we are growing slowly in numbers and sobriety.

When I was a small boy of three or four years of age, I was the first to go to bed. I used to hide my head under the pillow and dream about women of beaming beauty. There wasn’t anything explicitly sexual, but I fused with them. I remember at that age walking with a two-year-old girl and immediately getting a weird feeling of being “connected” to nature and the whole universe — and being afraid of that small creature.

The following information comes from the meetings of the SA Board of Trustees, the General Delegate Assembly, and the SA Business Meeting (called “SA Today” at the conference; audio tape of the same name available from Glenn K Audio Tapes):

Invariably I find Essay to be a very helpful series of personal sharings. In the last issue [Dec. 96], the article, “How I Deal with Romantic Lust” was one that helped me considerably. J.R., who wrote it, made an excellent contribution to the basic understanding of our deadly disease.

Many of our members tell us that it was several months before they became aware of the Essay. Once a person finds the Essay’s inspirational articles and heartwarming stories of recovery, that person is likely to subscribe and become a regular reader.

I have been concerned about a policy of our international conferences and feel a need to address this in a forum permitting the greatest participation possible. That issue is the prohibition of children from any official gathering at the conferences, a policy that has been in place for the past two years.

At the most recent Convention in Oklahoma City, the SA General Delegate Assembly elected four non-sexaholic professionals to the SA Board of Trustees. Each of the four nominations was approved unanimously by the General Delegate Assembly and the Board of Trustees. They will serve staggered terms as the historic first non-sexaholic trustees and are eligible for re-election. Following is some biographical data on the new trustees and written responses to the Board’s questions.

I never knew I was a sexaholic. In the six weeks between the time I heard of Sexaholics Anonymous and my first meeting, I did a lot of honest soul-searching. I was working the program in AA and considered myself safe from the dangers of other addictions. I wavered between ignorance of my sexaholism and denial of what I did know. Denial was my first reaction to everything.