The Third Step has been the hardest and most confusing for me. It would have been much easier had I better understood and practiced the first two Steps from the start.

At a recent meeting several people bemoaned the fact that they acted out against their own self-interest. They did not want to act out but felt compelled to do so.

The Millvale Group in Summerside is one of two groups on Prince Edward Island, Canada. We have approximately 15 members who attend regularly.

It feels so wonderful to have at last an SA meeting here in Greensboro, NC. This meeting came about as a result of our Higher Power expressing himself through the group conscience process. Four weeks ago, after much prayer, discussion and deliberation, our Wednesday night SAA group held a group conscience and voted unanimously to become an SA meeting.

The Belfast SA group began after Chris B. went to the Waterford Conference in October 1996 on the advice of an American clergyman. Since then, SA meetings have been held every two weeks in a local parish center. For the most part there were only two people in attendance. Recently, however, two others heard about SA through other 12-Step fellowships and have been introduced to SA literature and meetings.

The new Interfellowship Committee will communicate with other “S”-fellowships. A member of each of the other “S”-fellowships will be invited to attend the SA Today meeting at the next International Conference.

An article in the December 1996 issue of the Essay mentioned that while it only costs three dollars to publish a copy of the SA White Book, we charge ten dollars in order to raise enough funds to keep SA operating.

It’s 11:15 a.m. on the second Saturday morning of the month in Silver Spring, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC. The regular Saturday morning SA meeting has let out and the Maryland/Washington DC/Virginia Intergroup meeting is about to begin. I drove 35 minutes to be here; others came from as far away as the Maryland-Pennsylvania border or Fredericksburg, VA, both well over an hour’s drive away.

I have been coming to SA for over two years. I am now 150 days sober. I believe that my history of achieving a few months’ sobriety and then slipping lies with my ego. I seem to lack humility, which causes me to believe too much in my own way of seeing the world, no matter how painful that is, rather than accepting other people’s guidance and support.

That’s what the man on the SA tape told me to do for my boss. My boss told me I was a “permanent temporary” and that I wouldn’t be hired as a permanent employee. When he told me that, I had been on the job about a year and a half. As I went through the Steps again, I prayed for the people on my resentment list. The man on the tape told me to pray for them until I meant it, and I did.

As a shy and overweight teenager, I retreated into a secret world of masturbation. This covered feelings I couldn’t handle and made me feel good about myself. It was my first drug: medication through masturbation.

The Solution states that “We saw that our problem was threefold: physical, emotional and spiritual. Healing had to come about in all three.” A number of us have found that the emotional and spiritual are well dealt with in meetings and in the literature, but that there is not much discussion on the physical aspect of recovery.

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.