Higher Power’s guidance in both struggle and service.

Step into Action (p. 67) tells us that “There are many good ways to do a Fourth Step inventory.” It recommends listing and describing our resentments, fears, and the selfish nature of our sexual behavior, but it also mentions identifying our positive attributes and recognizing what “God would have us be.” This can also be found in our personal history of other, more positive, behaviors—especially in actions that stand in direct contrast to our defects, like opposite ends of a pendulum’s swing.

As I stood in the patio of a police station, I looked around at the dozens of fellow detainees, milling about in twos and threes, talking quietly. We had been detained after participating in a brief public demonstration.

It wasn’t my first time in a police station, though. A previous experience had nothing to do with standing up for a cause. I had been acting out in a park at two in the morning when I was rounded up with several other offenders after several days of uncontrollable behavior in a variety of places. That time, I spent a few hours in a holding cell before being released without charges.

Nowhere were the two extremes of my life more evident than here, in a police station: on one hand, a person trying to live by their principles; on the other, someone engaging in self-destructive behavior in the middle of the night.

As the hours went by during my second visit to a police station, I occasionally stood by myself on the bare cement patio, gazing over the wall at the snow-covered mountain range in the distance. It towered like a white-crested tsunami of granite rising from the horizon, about to crash onto the city below.

A passage I had once memorized came to mind as I stood there, looking at the majestic peaks. It spoke of finding strength by looking to something greater than myself.

The words gave me peace and a sense of being loved and accompanied by my Higher Power in that moment.

Years later, those same words of assurance and encouragement gave me the key to a new life of sobriety and integrity. Sexaholics Anonymous has helped me wake up to the uncontrollable nature of the pendulum swing in my life. Those remembered words provided me with an unexpected escape from that endless, wild ride, revealing that God would also help me on the positive side of that pendulum swing—in the firm mountains of the SA program, with my fellow recovering addicts, and through the snow-white attitude of radical dependence on my Higher Power to live a life of sobriety and service to others.