SAICO is pleased and proud to announce the addition of a new piece of literature for the fellowship.

Dear ESSAY Reader,
As we move toward summer and possible vacation plans, we hope you will take this issue of the ESSAY along on your travels. Like our sister publication The Grapevine, our goal is that you will be taking a “meeting in print” with you. With ESSAY contributions from you, sharing the experience and hope of your recovery in Sexaholics Anonymous, each issue can move closer to reaching that goal.

The first time I heard about visiting or writing to prisoners was at a SA Conference. It sounded good, but I put off doing anything for the next couple of years because of my fears. Stories about prisoners and what they do to sex offenders fed my fears and led me to procrastinate. Finally, another SA member got an SA meeting started in the Albion State Prison near Erie, PA, where I live.

When weak, I am strong.
When I surrender I’m free.
Live with paradox.

Many of us who have difficulty believing that there is a God or that (S)He will help us, can begin by letting the group be a “power greater than ourselves.” After all, here is a group of people who suffer from the same disease, who have found a way to overcome the problem. Surely that’s more than we have been able to accomplish for ourselves.

Does my marriage permit me to lust, still? Is it my life’s equation that marriage = sex = lust? I suppose that could be. Certainly it would be true for me that there is indeed a very strong association between sex and lust. And if you ask me, “Do you want to be free from lust?” and I was to honestly answer — I would have to tell you, “No, I do not want to be free from lust.”

When we come into the program, all we want is physical sobriety. But we quickly learn that not acting out is not enough. Because real sobriety is living “happy, joyous and free.” The White Book tells us that to maintain physical sobriety and enjoy progressive victory over lust, we have to face the waves of emotion and constant trials of life we were running from when we came into the program.

My story is not unique, and for that I am grateful. When I discovered I was a classic sexaholic, I became hopeful, realizing my problem had a classic solution. Hope and honesty were small words in my vocabulary and an even smaller part of my life before I came to SA.

Sponsor-by-Mail Service
Keith S., MI, the coordinator of this service, reports that there are currently 177 inmates from 30 states that are being sponsored by 49 SA members. The number of inmates participating in the service has almost doubled since the end of June 2001.

I have been a member of SA since 1993. I receive a tremendous boost in my recovery by attending open AA meetings. In fact, I attend more AA meetings than SA meetings. Part of that is because of two particular differences between AA and SA: length of meetings, and stating length of sobriety.

Brief summary and main motions passed:
That this Delegate Assembly approves the inclusion and publication in SA Fellowship-approved literature, the wording “in SA’s sobriety definition the word ‘spouse’ refers to one’s partner in a marriage between a man and a woman.”

Dear ESSAY Reader,
Thank you for reading this issue of ESSAY, our Fellowship’s quarterly magazine. Our hope is that ESSAY can increasingly reflect the breadth of sobriety and recovery in SA and also be a “meeting in print.” Here we can share our experience, strength and hope with one another as part of our Twelfth Step work.

I want to share a story with you, just to make the point of how a group like this can change or encourage others. One guy started in our prison group at the second meeting, almost six months ago. He came into the group with a huge chip on his shoulder, and he made it clear to all of us that he didn’t care how anyone felt about him. He was just doing this for himself and no one else.

I said to God, “Look how much I’ve grown.”
Then I waited for His reply.

Our recovery calendar page today says, “Gratitude turns problems into blessings, and the unexpected into gifts.” I am grateful for the reminder how important gratitude lists have been to my recovery from sexaholism. During the first several months of sobriety I wrote gratitude lists daily. My sponsor told me to put twenty items on it per day.

I recently had a major awakening about lust in my marriage. It happened one morning after a night during which I had wanted to be sexual with my wife. In the past, my desire would quickly turn to lust. I would feel as if I was about to explode if I did not have her. Sex was not optional. That night had been different. As I wrote in my journal about it the next morning, I understood why.

If I think about it, life is kind of like walking a tightrope. It’s not easy. It can be dangerous. Still, if I practice, if I use a balance pole, if I have a safety net — it can be done without causing undue harm either to myself or to others.

The first recollections of my addiction are from the summer of 1961. I would be nine in August and I had just moved to a new subdivision. The only other boy in the neighborhood was four years older than I, and he was pretty lonely, since his parents both worked. We began to spend time with one another, and since he had a house all to himself, most of our time together was spent there.

Dear ESSAY,
I am one of the twenty-five inmates, here at Adrian, MI, that Keith S. wrote about in your last issue. Thank you, Keith, for so many things.

I spent the first several months foundering about. I “knew” from AA that I would need a sponsor. I am not proud that I waited so long to ask someone to be my sponsor, and I do not recommend the delay unless you really, really enjoy pain, isolation, and misery.