Dying: Admit I am powerless over lust; that my sex, sexuality, orientation and relational misconnection are unmanageable.

At a recent check-meeting on chronic slipping in our local group here in Somerset, I made a personal discovery which I would like to share, it made so much sense to me.

Getting sobriety in SA was a complicated job for me. First I had to attend meetings where I was told to listen and identify in anticipation of a time when I’d become willing to surrender my lust habit to God. Initially, I resisted this open-mindedness, thinking that I needed to lust to be me. In a year’s worth of meetings, listening to sober and unsober members, I began to realize the benefits of the sober lifestyle for those who had it. I grew enthusiastic about getting serenity, choice, and freedom from lust. One thing that particularly appealed to my ego at that time was that only a sober SA could lead meetings.

On February 4, 1995 the SF Bay area SA Intergroups hosted a half-day workshop on sponsorship. Its purpose was to raise consciousness about this vital aspect of recovery. The workshop saw sponsorship as the “oft neglected leg of the SA tripod” — 1) actively working SA’s Steps and Traditions, 2) regular and frequent attendance at SA meetings, 3) giving and receiving SA sponsorship.

Hi, my name is Gary G., and I’m a gratefully recovering sexaholic from Cleveland, OH. With the help of God and this Fellowship, I’ve been sexually sober since April 1993. I have been attending SA meetings regularly since November 1991. In early 1994, I joined with a group of SA members from northeast Ohio, who were attending SA meetings within two prisons near Cleveland.

During my six years with SA at the Central Office, this is the hardest letter to write. I feel as if I am severing a line so important to myself, yet I know we must always go forward and trust in God’s wisdom.

Hi, my name is Mike, and I’m a recovering sexaholic. And I’m grateful to be here sober tonight through God’s grace, and all of you people. A couple of years ago we had Thanksgiving dinner at my house for the first time. My whole family came. I figured I should say something before we all ate, but I knew there were lots of things going on in the family, so I didn’t know quite what to say.

My name is Harry, I’m a sexaholic. I’ve been sexually sober since February 3, 1986. Expressing my gratitude to God and the fellowship for my recovery will take the rest of my life, and beyond. Jess promised he would help me with this talk if I volunteered to give one, and so I volunteered, and he also said it might be good to prepare the talk and then have a trial run to see how it went….

Hi, my name is Mike B. and I’m a sexaholic. I’m on the SA Service Structure Committee… With the help of other SA’s, a service structure was written and later adopted during the January 1994 Rochester Conference Business Meeting. The work we wrote is in the June 1994 Essay. As stated, the SA group is the basic unit of the SA structure which will be represented in the Intergroup.

Greetings. I wanted to let you know what’s happening in our group in Japan. We have a small group of four to six regular members. Two of us are foreigners, and the rest are Japanese. We all speak Japanese. I joined the group this January, and the meetings are held every Saturday afternoon, in English. In May, we started a meeting in Japanese one hour before the English-speaking meeting to attract more Japanese newcomers.

We’ve recently made some changes in our group meetings. We’ve been meeting since 1987 and our weekly meetings were primarily discussion meetings with a monthly Step meeting. After reading in the Essay about meetings, we decided to center more on the solutions rather than just our problems.

My name is A.G. and I am a sexaholic. I have been in SA for two years and since then my life has changed and is still changing a day at a time. I can see what my sexaholism did to me and my wife and also to our child. I am grateful to God and the other members in SA for keeping me on the good track of recovery.

Thank you for sending the September ’94 issue of Essay, the pamphlet on the International Unity Conference in January ’95, and the International Directory. I thoroughly enjoy the Essay, especially the stories of those who have experienced healing in their lives.

What a fantastic one-day SA seminar I attended yesterday in Montreal. We were 33 SA members, and most benefited from intensive sharing and discussions about the powerful spiritual program provided by our SA fellowship.

We had our “International Convention” here on October 22, 1994. There was some great sharing about recovery. We had one member with over a year of sobriety and another with over six months. The others had varying times of sobriety. I had the privilege of hosting three of the members at my home. We are hoping that numbers will increase and our fellowship will grow spiritually and that we will be able to enjoy a quality of life which we know is available if we work the Steps and abide by the Traditions.

Last year the Central Office Oversight Committee (COOC) felt that the high cost of producing and mailing the Essay should be offset by a subscription to cover these costs, and beginning December 1993, the newsletter was sent to subscribers only. An immediate result was an unforeseen and regrettable drop in readership. Although subscriptions have increased steadily in 1994, circulation is still only about 25 percent of what it was in 1993. That means less than one-fourth of the fellowship can participate in fellowship-wide communication!

For several years I was aware I had a sex problem and yet I was not willing to seek help. I would go on alcohol and sex binges, rotating between the two, trying to find happiness and peace. I started 25 years ago looking at pictures and fantasizing things that somehow I assumed to be normal. I began acting out some of my fantasies and that’s when everything started to go downhill.

Since the meeting in Rochester, NY in January 1994 the COOC has met six times. Quite a few matters of significance to the SA fellowship as well as the operation of the Central Office (CO) have been discussed.

Hi, my name is Roy and I’m a sexaholic. None of you knew this, but all of the speakers got together and designed the perfect program, just so we could all complement each other [laughter].

I’m Harvey, a sexaholic. You know, talking about spirituality as a separate topic here makes me think a great deal about how to talk about spirituality as a separate topic, because all weekend we’ve been talking about spirituality. I was told many years ago, there is no spiritual part of this program, it IS a spiritual program. So in thinking about talking about spirituality, I thought I would share with you some things that have happened recently that to me are the essence of spirituality.