(The following is an extract from a talk given by Roy K. at the Unity Conference in Orange, CA, on October 8, 1995.)

Thank you for bringing us together. I surrender my ego, my fear, all of my defects. I surrender my preparation for this talk and we ask together for Your Presence above all else, that you will dwell in our hearts, be with us as we share together, the exalted, that we may be your servants, helping those who are lost in the tyranny of lust.

Something came to me recently from another member in Australia, who was at the Stepping Stones, which is where Bill and Lois had their last home. From the archives at Stepping Stones he received from the archivist a copy of what was on the flyleaf of Bill W.’s family Bible. They didn’t have children, but over the years they apparently had a family Bible. I didn’t know that. And these are the entries on that flyleaf that I’d like to read to you. Notice the date: they’re all before 1935, when he was bottoming out. He tried ever since the service in WWI to quit and he couldn’t. This one’s dated October 20, 1928. It’s in Bill’s handwriting: “To my beloved wife that has endured so much, let this stand as evidence of my pledge to you that I have finished with drink forever.” The next one is Thanksgiving Day, 1928. “My strength is renewed a thousandfold in my love for you”—I don’t know the reference to that, was that another lapse or something? I don’t know—Next year, January 12, 1929: “…to tell you once more that I am finished with it. I love you.” The last one is September 3, 1930: “Finally, and for a lifetime. Thank God for your love.”

What does this tell you? That Bill tried with every ounce of his being to stop drinking, and he couldn’t stop. Folks, that was alcohol. How many here are recovering alcoholics?

News item: “A new plague has broken out on twentieth-century men. It has already infected most of the males in our world and has begun spreading to females. The virus-like entity is energized by an as yet unrecognized source of energy from within the male himself, creating a ravenous need for more and more of the person upon which to feed. The human immune system is powerless over this, the most virulent toxin the world has ever known.”

What’s that talking about? Lust… This is a spiritual virus. And it’s what you and I, most of the people in this room, are addicted to. I am helplessly and hopelessly powerless over lust and I’m 19 years sober sexually, with progressive victory over lust. I have no resources in myself for overcoming this supernatural, superpowerful force that I let into my life. The amazing thing is today I’m free of the tyranny of lust. I’m tempted to lust, just as you are—less often than I have ever been in my life; many many days go by and I don’t even think of an image, a picture or anything else—and there’s no temptation. But I’m a lustaholic. I today have no strength or resources or power to overcome my lust temptations or the lust that’s out there. So how can I stand here and give you a recovering marriage and a recovering person? The burden of my heart is with the sexaholics who cannot get sober. A year ago we had another conference right in this hotel. Look at how many people who didn’t come back. We can have a false sense of security and accomplishment and pride in our program by just looking at the numbers. They keep increasing all the time. It means nothing.

The problem of lust is the most difficult infection the world has ever known. And there’s no cure. But thank God there’s a reprieve and there’s healing and cleansing and recovery. And I want to testify to that. I’m a little superstitious because when I talk like this I’m afraid I’m going to jinx myself, because after a year-and-a-half of sobriety I had a slip and went on a three-month sex binge and got suicidal. It was all over. If the resources of my continued progressive victory over lust and fear and resentment and marital un-love resided within myself or my program ability, I should have great reason to be superstitious. I may not make it. I may not screw this program tight enough and make enough calls and do this and do enough writing and do enough of this, you know… But the grounds of my sobriety lie in a power greater than myself and that’s what I want to talk about. Because the answer to the infection, the answer to this supernatural force of lust is a benign, loving Power that is available to us, who loves the sexaholic where he is.

Can you believe that? It’s making a believer out of me and I am very reluctant. Coming from a super-religious addicted background, with all the belief, you know, believing everything right to the letter—and I was a worshipper at the temple of Aphrodite, a worshipper of the goddess of lust. One of the greatest impediments to my continued sobriety and your continued sobriety and certainly my sobriety in the early years, is fear-driven sobriety. Fear-driven sobriety. It worked. For a while. I want to tell you fear-driven sobriety is wrong. It is anti-program and eventually doesn’t work. But it has the appearance of working. It doesn’t work. And one of the fallacies is self-control.

I want to read a quote from George MacDonald, in 1885 (just to give it to you so that you hear something better than I can ever say); and, if you hear nothing else, hear this and assimilate it. The English is a little stilted because it’s 100 years old: “I will allow that mere effort of will may add to the man’s power over his lower nature, but in that very nature it is God who must rule and not man, however well the man may mean. From a man’s rule of himself, however devout, arises the huge danger of nourishing by the pride of self-conquest something far worse than even the unchained animal self—the demonic self. True victory over self is the victory of God in the man, not of the man alone. It is not subjugation that is enough, but subjugation by God. In whatever man does without God he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably. No portion of a man can rule another portion, for God, not the man, created it. A man may develop a self-satisfaction which in its very nature is the root of all sin; doing the thing God does not require of him, he puts himself in the place of God, becoming a law giver unto himself.” We can do that in the Program. Become a law giver to ourselves. Very insidious form of self-worship, playing God. “…becoming a law giver unto himself, one who commands, not one who obeys.” Now it closes with this: “The diseased satisfaction which some minds feel in laying burdens on themselves is a pampering of the most dangerous appetite of that self which they think they are mortifying.”

Self-will doesn’t work. It worked for me for a year-and-a-half. Addiction to meetings and socialized spirituality kept me sober for a year-and-a-half. We’ve got men in this meeting tonight who have sobriety in AA for years, newcomers, God bless their souls, I love them, and they are a testimony to how long I was in this program and didn’t see the real problem. A 40-year AA man in Australia said the same thing a few weeks ago, and now he’s six months sober in SA and says that his experience is like being born anew.

The best thing I can do is bear witness to my experience, to help you find the power, the Higher Power that can solve this dilemma and bring healing to this lust disease, this incredible virus. And I’m going to take a chance, I’m going to do it by doing an experiment. Just recently in meetings I kind of had a light go on and it has raised a question. Some of you were in the meeting where I raised the question: I wonder if any of us can truly enter recovery without not only spilling the beans on our First Step sexual history—that’s kind of easy, that’s what we did—but what was going on in our souls while we were in the trance. What was I doing on the bathroom floor with the picture of a woman when I was masturbating? What was I doing inside my soul? If I can sense and come clean on that, if I can truly see what that is, then I’ve got a small little handle on the nature of this illness. So I’m going to take the masturbation scenario which, as far as my experiences go in SA, of all the different kinds of acting out that we have and do, the common denominator to all of it, for 99.9 percent of us, seems to be masturbation, and most of that seems to be masturbation to images or memories of images. Any debate on that? [Laughter]

I think there’s a reason for that. We’re living in a different world. The camera was developed in the 1820s and ’30s in France and England, but by 1910, Kodak put film on a roll and Box Brownies sold for a dollar apiece. So from the turn of the century to the present day there has been a revolution in the human species on planet earth the like of which makes all of the other revolutions—the Neolithic revolution, the Guttenberg revolution, printing, the Industrial Revolution bringing us into the modern age, the Technological revolution—all those pale into insignificance [by comparison] on their impact on you and me as human beings and sexual human beings and on our sexuality.

So what we have today is a new kind of lust. We’ve always had lust in the human race. But there’s a new kind of lust which makes it incredibly more powerful—image-driven lust. And that image-driven lust has somehow produced in the air in which we live and move and have our being, a spirit of lust that it connects with.

By the way, you know where I should be this weekend? My 50th high school anniversary is going on in Van Nuys this weekend. And I have to lead with my weakness; I was going to forget to do this and then it just occurred to me, I’ve got to tell you where I am today. Anyhow, I decided I wasn’t going to that, you know, for a year I knew I wasn’t going to go. They start drinking—there’s so few left anyway [laughter]—they start drinking right away and unless you’re drinking, you don’t fit in with the crowd. I’d love to see some of those people, but I decided not to go until, just the day before this weekend, who calls up but my former high school friend, the girl who lives next door, calls up my wife—I’m glad I didn’t answer the phone, somebody’s looking out for me—and says, “Is Roy going to the reunion?” And my wife said, “No.” But it happened to be Susie, my next door neighbor, and I used to peep through the breakfast room curtains at her across the fence. She was one of my first peeping experiences. But anyhow, she called me suddenly and I start thinking: “I want to go to the reunion!” [Laughter]

Why? That’s so innocent, right? Why? I want to be lusted after. Passive lust. I’m powerless over it. I was powerless over that temptation…. I have no power over when a temptation comes but thank God, I was able to surrender it, many times and got over it and I’m here today and didn’t have to cut out…. I’m still powerless over lust but I want you to believe me that there is a Presence in my life today, in here, that is my shield. A personal, loving Presence. A cleansing, delivering Presence. He’s my sobriety. He’s my faith. How did I get there? How did I get there from a religious addiction, where I had all the belief but was worshipping the goddess of lust, to today where I don’t have religious connections with the institutional forms of religion, and I have a saving power, a Friend?

Here’s the experiment I want you to think about. The failure of your sobriety or recovery from lust is due to the fact of misconnection or no connection with the power great enough to do it. It’s that simple. If you want to try an experiment, go through your own lust trance, the thing that’s going through the inside of your soul you don’t want to tell anything about—you know, you can tell about the acting out, but not what’s going through your soul—and go through that and see what it is and then on the next column write what kind of a Higher Power against each of these attributes of my lust trance do I need—to give me not only victory, but cleansing. So I’m going to tell you about my trance. And I hope you understand what happens but I’m going to give you the anatomy of my masturbation scenario, the pictures.

It starts with a look. Compulsion strikes. The ritual begins. I’m gone, right? Somehow the neurology, whatever, has done it. It can be any kind of stimulus whatever. The ritual begins and I become under the control of the force. I haven’t done a thing yet, haven’t bought a magazine, nothing else, but I’m under the control, so I’ve got to score a connection one way or the other. And with me typically in those early years before prostitution, it was the magazine rack. If you were to see me in there, on my shoulder, one magazine after another, just like the other johns, going through one picture and then another, snatching this or that, and sometimes I’d go out with a pile of magazines losing a whole lot of money, just to get that right connection of an image.

What is the image? Is there anything there? It’s dots of ink on paper. It’s two-dimensional. It’s nothing. So why does it attract me? Why does it connect me with a force that I’m under the control of? Then the next thing I do after I get one is I hide, in secret, lock the door so nobody can see me. The trance begins. As I stare at that image I open my soul, and the consumption begins. I begin ingesting. Catherine McKinnon, the attorney [against] pornography, uses this term and she’s dead right: “the consumption, the consumers,” we are consumers. What are we consuming? What am I taking in? Now it has the feeling of a life-giving sustenance, just like food and water. It’s the same thing if I’m doing this to the image of a woman, a mistress, a prostitute or even my wife. It’s giving me a spiritual connection. Spiritual sustenance. Giving me some kind of food. But, is it real food, is it going to satisfy? That is spiritual intercourse. And there’s nobody else there but me. What am I having intercourse with? It’s a spiritual connection of my soul with a higher power. Possession. A presence has possessed me. I’m overcome. It offers life. What is this but an act of worship? That’s what I was doing, folks. A worshipper of the only God in church, but a worshipper of my true god every day, every single day, could not live without the infusion of this spiritual force that I open my soul to.… I think today the temple of Aphrodite is in every home in America and is in the air about us. It’s an invisible temple. We enter it all the time. Because it is our world. It is the spirit of lust in our world today.… In that trance I was in intercourse with that image and with the spirit, whatever was possessing it. I was taking that woman. I was feeling her body, I was taking the spirit of lust that was emanating in that body through those eyes, through that figure, through the connections, the neural connections I had set up in all of the thousands of masturbation [experiences/rituals]. I was perverting. What was I perverting? Sure I was perverting the image, but hey, I was perverting myself. I’m a recovering sex pervert. I was mis-using. Now, how easy do you think marital recovery is going to be for somebody like me?…

That’s the most damning thing about this illness—blinding me to the truth about myself. And if you can’t see the truth about your other defects, you’re never going to make recovery or sobriety. For to see that truth would be to fall down and cry: “God be merciful to me!” The cry of the sexaholic.

So what kind of a Higher Power do you think that needs? Okay, let’s go back from the trance, the elements of that spiritual intercourse and try to extrapolate just logically what kind it needs. First of all, I’m going to need a Spiritual Power, because it’s a spiritual force. Nobody was there but me. Next thing is that Power has to be more powerful than lust. It’s got to be a supernatural Power. Another thing is that Presence, that Power, has to be able to take lust and its death if I’m going to have within me a spiritual presence that will overcome lust—that Presence has to be able to take it. Can you take lust? I can’t take lust anymore. So your Higher Power has to be able to take it, it has to be personal. This Presence has to know me. Sorry, folks. I am very demanding on the One who I have to have. He’s got to know me just as I am, even beyond the layers of my kidding myself, my fooling myself. So, He’s got to be a revealer. He’s got to see what I can’t see. That’s the only way I can get out of this.

The next is I’ve got to be cleansed from this virus infection. I need a spiritual cleansing. I need a healing from it. And, above all, I’m a person, a human being. What I was doing was in pursuit of love, wasn’t it? So, what I need in my spiritual Presence, personal presence, is someone who loves me just as I am in the most difficult moment of my temptation. Not waiting for me to be good first. I don’t need a God where I’ve got to be good first. I need a God who takes me just where I am. On the phonecall from the girl from the reunion…. I need the Life Giver. I’m dead in lust and I need life.

I’m getting life. Every time I connect, say, “Come on in; just as I am.” Finally, how did I discover this One who works for me? By agonizingly, slowly, grudgingly, incorporating twelve simple principles into my being. We call them Steps. They aren’t really Steps, they’re principles of being that take character change to incorporate slowly and I’ve just begun the process. But it’s working. Even imperfectly, it’s working. A great admission, I’m lost, I’m powerless over this temptation right now—that’s the thing that opens the door. When I say that upward, that opens the door to know that He can restore me to sanity because He’s restoring others.

You know what I do every morning? I want to share this with the married couples. I used to do my quiet time alone, never talked to Iris, never brought her into my program…. I started out five minutes at a time. When my sponsor told me in the late seventies, do this thing every morning, I’d go in the garage and I could last a couple of minutes just praying or reading the 24 Hour A Day book or whatever, and then my mind would race with lust and images and memories and I’d have to get out of there…. But I did it. Five minutes, then six minutes, I don’t know what it was but slowly over months and years it has developed into the most precious time of my day. I get up, take half a thyroid with a glass of water, go into the garage and that’s my time. It’s before any phone calls, any newspaper, any wife, anything, I’m there. And that’s heaven.

And then after I do that, I come in, and I’m bringing Iris into my recovery now. We will sit down together and read a portion of our devotional literature. Right now we’re in a Harmony of the Gospels. You want to know what this morning’s reading was? “It’s not what comes into a man that defiles him by unwashed hands, it’s what comes out of his heart. For out of the heart proceed fornications, thefts, murders, adultery, etc., etc.…” And we hold hands together and we pray. We ask God to keep us sober in our marriage just for that day. We don’t have a marriage tomorrow. God ain’t through with us yet. I don’t have sobriety tomorrow. We ask him to guard us from un-love.

I ask him to keep me from misperceiving Iris; she’s a couple of years older now than she was when I married her, and I’m a couple of years older. We ask God to keep us from misperceiving and un-love and then we pray for the family or whatever. We give up all our possessions, our family and SA to God every day. We give up the little house I’m working on that I love so much, that I’m beating myself to death over, exhausted every night, it’s gotta be right. And I give up my manuscripts that are unpublished and just take back what he gives us today. And it’s marvelous and I’m beginning to share with her some of my inner stuff that I would never dare do before.

So it’s slow but it’s working, and you guys, you know, don’t take that long!

And the Steps, the principles, that’s how. I didn’t work these twelve principles. I had to come to places where I was forced to change. Looking back on it I was incorporating that Step, that principle without knowing it just in the pain of the marriage. Like the Ninth Step amends. At first all I could do was write a note to Iris and say I was wrong, it was so hot. Of course she never answered the note [laughter]. 

But these principles, you know them, I don’t have to go through them. Each one of these is something I have to continually incorporate into my being to have this continued reprieve and joy and recovery. And there’s no way I can do it for you and there’s no way anyone else can do it for you. It’s as private and personal as the masturbation ritual. The essence of your program eventually is going to wind up with you alone—with sponsors and meetings and books and literature, that’s all tools—but, eventually, if you don’t have what you thought you were getting on your knees in that bathroom like I was, in yourself, you don’t have it. So the question. What is recovery for the sexaholic? What is recovery? Don’t cheat yourself. This is the most difficult, impossible malady the world has ever known. We’re lucky because it is. Because we have to find the One who can handle it. 

Thank you.