It was in a porn magazine, ironically, that I first learned of SA. This new group for sex addicts was mentioned in a short article of the ha-ha-guess-what variety. I did not laugh; it sent a chill down my spine. Two months later a local newspaper carried the famous “Dear Abby” column, and I was one of the multitude who wrote to Simi Valley. I received the SA brochure and a letter inviting me to write again if I wanted further information. I did not write. The brochure confirmed for me that I was a sexaholic, but I was afraid, proud and unwilling. I kept the brochure, carrying it around for years in the back section of my briefcase, and re-reading it from time to time. But it would be 11 years before I entered an SA group and started working the program.

I had been hooked on masturbation since puberty. To my daily “drug,” as I often thought of it, I eventually added pornography, fantasizing, sex with objects, and fetishes, especially women’s undergarments. I had also indulged in voyeurism and exhibitionism, and lusting after girls and women. I sometimes lusted for men as well and in my twenties experienced sex with men a couple of times.

By the time I read the SA brochure, my addiction had grown into complete promiscuity. I was married but had started going out with prostitutes whenever possible, using stashed money taken from our household cash. Finances were tight then and I knew I was stealing from my family to have illicit sex, but I did it anyway. I needed more money so I began using corporation money with the intention of paying it back. But I was spending it too fast to pay it back and gradually began submitting falsified expense accounts. I spent money on strippers, phone sex, women’s lingerie (which by then I was wearing regularly under my clothing), and an increasing flow of pornography. By this point I had also had my first extramarital affair.

At the time of the affair, my wife and I were married for 12 years and had four of our five children. The affair was a large and painful crisis for both my wife and I, but it passed. I think we both just suppressed our individual pain and tried to keep up our image as a good family. We were and still are, thank God, a good family and people told us so, but such praise had a bitter after-taste for me because of the hidden life I was leading.

I had been raised in a religious atmosphere but I was breaking every moral precept I had ever learned. After high school, I spent four years in a religious community for men. Three of those years I lived under a vow of chastity but was only able to live this vow for a month at a time at most. In my adult years I stayed with my church, even taking on parish leadership roles, while my private life would have been a scandal had it ever come to light.

During the affair and after it I continued seeing prostitutes and began placing and answering ads in sex magazines. This led to encounters, mostly with men, and to more shame. I had long prided myself on my ability to balance my two lives: the upright public life and the secret promiscuous life. By the time I read the SA brochure, I was losing my balance. On the surface, my main reason for not writing back to SA in 1981 was that I wanted to keep my newfound sexual freedom. As I look back, however, that was also the time when I was contemplating suicide.

I had made the decision that the only way to escape my sexual compulsions and to avoid bringing public shame on my family was to kill myself. I had begun looking for the right method, one which would be easy to apply and sure to succeed. God’s grace led me to a retreat house, where a spiritual director intervened and over a few days, helped me to choose life rather than death.

The thought of suicide faded, but I was no further ahead in dealing with my addiction. During our marriage, my wife would often confront me, and after reacting angrily, I would remorsefully apologize, promise not to do it again and then throw out or burn the magazines, the lingerie or whatever. Then I would break my promise. Every year, I returned to the retreat house and in prayer I would rededicate myself to my marriage and to God and promise to stop what I was doing. Then after one or two or three weeks I would masturbate and all my good intentions would evaporate. I would also stop praying: it seemed pointless when I felt out of favor with God.

I have often given thanks to God that somehow, in spite of my lustfulness, I was never sexually attracted to my children, and never made any sexual advances toward them. That does not mean they have been unaffected by my addiction. Each of them, at some point while growing up, has entered a room unexpectedly and found me acting out. They also received verbal abuse and sometimes physical blows as a result of my uncontrolled outbursts of anger.

A few years ago my wife and I both began seeing therapists individually and a third therapist together for marriage counseling. At the same time, my acting out moved to a new frantic level of intensity. I also got into another affair. This time the affair was with a married woman. Two months into the relationship she became pregnant. There was little doubt that I was the father. The affair and the pregnancy caused more pain to my wife and older children. For a long time separation and divorce were talked about frequently. We look back on this unhappy period as the “three years in hell.” The other woman and her family went through hell, too. Divorce left her a single mother with four children.

Therapy helped my wife and I to talk to each other. Friends supported us. We stayed together by making short-term commitments. My wife forgave me again, but warned me that another affair would mean she and I were finished. I can handle that, I thought: no more affairs. I stepped up my use of strip bars, pornography, sex toys. I also cruised sex ads and telepersonals, which led to sexual liaisons with men. I got heavily involved in a cross-dressing club. I spent thousands of dollars on clothing, make-up and other accessories and would skip work to spend time “dressed-up” at the club. I was aware that I was getting involved with some very peculiar people and getting into situations that could even be physically dangerous.

I was becoming less able to hide what I was doing. My wife discovered my cross-dressing activities and so did two of my children. My oldest son found out about my sexual liaison with a man. My fantasies were moving into violent and abusive scenarios and I feared I would eventually act them out. My constant daily companion, masturbation, had me enslaved. I could never say no.

In Jan. 1992, my wife said to me: “I’ve tried to understand and to live with all this. I’ve forgiven you a lot and I can forgive a lot more. But you’ll have to make some decisions or I’ll have to make some decisions.”

A few days later I found a book on sex addiction. I bought it, read it rapidly, identified with much of what I read and began, I think, the process of surrender. I felt weak, tired, worn down, out of control and in need of help. Back home, I pulled out the old SA brochure I had kept for years. I read it one more time. Then I phoned the “Self Help Clearing House.” There was no SA phone number then, but they gave me an SA address and I immediately wrote a letter.

The same day my wife and I went to a mall to buy wallpaper. In the car she told me she wondered if we should bother buying anything for the house since things seemed likely to come to an end between us. I showed her the letter to SA that I had in my pocket, ready to mail. She cried, I cried and since then she has supported me in my program and in the time and work I put into SA.

I attended my first meeting in April of 1992. I had a honeymoon period of sobriety for three weeks, slipped, and was on a roller coaster for 10 months. As I write, I am, through the grace of God and the fellowship of SA, sober for more than three years. The change came, sobriety took hold and recovery really began when I was able to make the shift from working the program on my own terms to turning my will and life over to God. This meant, for example, being quite serious about getting to all the meetings. It meant I had to stop trying to “understand” and “psychologize” the program. I just had to do the simple yet sometimes difficult things it says to do. I had to find a sponsor, follow his directions and start carefully working each step.

One of the most powerful sources of strength in my life today is prayer — not my old pray-only-when-l-feel-in-control type of prayer, but prayer in which I just try to acknowledge the presence of God, a presence that I now know has always been there no matter what. I started with 15 minutes each morning, but now I give it a minimum of half an hour. Praying for serenity at the beginning of the day makes it possible to pray for it again and again during the day. In any situation of difficulty, anxiety, stress — any condition that can lead to lust — I do a mini-inventory: “What is here that I need to accept? Grant me the serenity to do so. What can be changed? Give me the courage to do it. And give me your wisdom to know the difference and to discern rightly.”

Staying in the present is important for me too. My addiction to fantasy covered more than sexual fantasy. I need to have goals and dreams, but I have to test them against reality. I am discovering my feelings and how to share them appropriately with others. One of my first discoveries in the program was honesty and I have been able to give up my compulsive lying. Desiring to move always toward the truth, I have been able to speak with each of my five children about the past, about their pain and mine, about the affair, about my need for a group to help me with my sexual compulsions. I have asked for, and received, their forgiveness. I thank God I came to my senses and have been able to know this closeness with them before it was too late.

As for my sixth child, my daughter through the affair, I am now regularly in touch with her. We knew that she would inevitably need to know who I am and this has just begun to happen. She is now eight years old. I cannot be a father to her in the same way as I am to my other children, but I would like her to know my love and acceptance as much as possible, rather than rejection. My wife and children offered me the possibility of her visiting our home, and we have all now enjoyed her presence there. God prepared this. I could never have asked or hoped for it.

I have experienced a most amazing change in my relationships with friends and colleagues. I never before realized the degree to which lust had clouded my contacts with others and prevented true closeness. Now I am learning every day the joy of being with other people and reaching out to give instead of to take.

My wife and I are approaching our 29th wedding anniversary, something that seemed impossible a few short years ago. I can honestly say that our relationship now is better than at any time in our marriage. I have learned that love is different than sex and that sex in marriage can be free of lust and the selfishness it brings with it. We went through a long abstinence period which helped me to discover two things: that sex is optional, a truth that opens the door to a new and fulfilling life of personal freedom; and that in a loving marriage, sex must be at the service of relationship, not the other way around.

Someone asked me recently if I thought I would have to stay in SA all my life. I said that even to answer that question would go against the one-day-at-a-time principle by which I try to guide my daily life. I think I have gone beyond the point where I “have to” be in SA. It is now just something that I do. As I do it, I try to share it with others. And I give thanks to God. Life continues to get better, but I need always to remember where I came from. I need to remember that I am not only powerless over my acting out, but over my recovery as well. My growing conscious contact with God has taught me this: that if I work on becoming “conscious,” God will look after the “contact.”