Sobriety came in the summer of 1985 like an unexpected gift. Just about three weeks earlier I had learned that there were people who called themselves sex addicts and held meetings and worked the Twelve Steps. I had begun making a weekly 200-mile round trip to the closest meeting. I had read the SA manual twice, but — brain numbed by decades of sexual obsession — I didn’t understand most of the basic principles there. I wanted sobriety, but the addicts I was meeting with didn’t have a group definition of sobriety and preferred to talk about bottom lines.

What was my bottom line? What was sobriety for me? I kept questioning the other addicts, and I prayed that God would reveal His will for me. The understanding that came clear to me was that the mental obsession — the sexual fantasies — made me drunk and that sobriety for me required abstinence from sexual fantasy. I understood that to be sober I would need to let go of the fantasy hits one at a time as they came. But I saw that as a prescription for failure. I had struggled for years in prayer and anguish to break away from that fantasy life, and I had always failed. I was addicted to fantasy. It was mainly with fantasy that I administered the drug to myself. To pick up a white chip and declare to those other addicts that I was going to give up fantasy was to embrace failure.

The wonderful thing is that I embraced failure. I embraced powerlessness. I picked up the chip, and from that day I have surrendered the fantasy hits one at a time. Instead of failure, God gave me the gift of sobriety. It came like a miracle because in late July, at the same time I was praying for God’s will, I experienced four days of freedom from sexual impulses such as I had never believed possible. Four days of serenity and clarity of mind. At that time, I took it as a sign from my Higher Power that I should go ahead and pick up that chip.

Looking back now at that time in recovery, I see more than ever what a free and unexpected gift sobriety was, but I also see my recovery as a continuum. At the time, it seemed to come like a bolt from the blue, but now I see a Higher Power preparing me for that gift for ten years. Intermittently during that time I was experiencing glimpses of sanity. In other words, without knowing it I was experiencing the Second Step. That healing and gradual release from the insanity of addiction began before sobriety and, thank God, has continued until today.

The main agent of sanity for me was Alcoholics Anonymous — and I’m not even an alcoholic! In 1975, I discovered that I qualified as an Al-Anon and began going to meetings, but I soon found myself going to more AA meetings than Al-Anon. I certainly needed Al-Anon, but I felt more at home at AA than anywhere else in the world. I didn’t know why, but I kept going back. My recall of those days is not so sharp, but I would guess that I attended three or four meetings a week, mostly open-discussion AA. I didn’t take a sponsor (how, I asked myself, could I tell a sponsor that I lived in a fantasy world, masturbated compulsively, and molested children?), and I didn’t work the Steps. I just showed up again and again for five years. I soaked in the attention and the sense of self-worth that I got from the alcoholics and the Al-Anons, and I soaked in the sense of honesty around the tables. Emotional and literal honesty was something I had very little experience with because, in my mind, the truth about me was too terrible.

During the first five years, I saw lots of alcoholics walk in the door. Those who kept coming back and got sober became beautiful. That’s the only way I could describe it. I saw it again and again, men and women, young and old, becoming beautiful. That made an impression on me. I didn’t know what it meant to be beautiful, but I wanted it for myself.

During that time — after considerable stalling, and still without a sponsor — I started working the Steps. As I worked the first three Steps and started to talk about the Steps and about my feelings at meetings, the experience of others that I had been hearing around those tables began to make sense to me. I began to understand what they meant by gratitude and acceptance and prayer — not praying for what I wanted, but praying for God’s will for me.

1980 was quite a year. My first marriage broke up; I hit bottom sexually; I had a Second Step experience; and I worked the Fourth and Fifth Steps. I can’t tell you what order they came in. I was drunk with obsession much of the time, and I don’t have a clear memory of what happened when.

But I do remember something of how the Second Step came to me. I was sitting in an AA discussion meeting that I had attended religiously for four years. I don’t remember the topic. It came to me — I didn’t know where from — that all my life I had felt responsible for knowing how events around me were supposed to work and even for making it happen. In other words, sometime early in life I had put myself in the place of God. I had been to enough meetings by that time to understand the absurdity of my thinking. In a flash, I saw that I had a choice between, on the one hand, continuing to take responsibility for making things turn out right — through manipulation and my own personal anguish — or, on the other hand, letting go and letting God — acknowledging that there was a Power greater than myself.

“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves…” — now that part of the Second Step was more than a collection of words to me. It was a promise of release from a life of burden and misery. There I was, un-sober and numb much of the time, but I had nevertheless been given a glimpse of sanity.

It was another five years before I was ready for the gift of sobriety. Now I don’t see that as lost time, but as a time of preparation. After I hit bottom in 1980, I went to more AA meetings than before. And I began telling my story to others, one on one, because I knew that Bill W. had stayed sober before he met Dr. Bob by finding drunks to tell his story to. Not expecting to find anyone else like me, I sought out a few people that I thought I could try to tell my story to, mainly sober alcoholics and members of my church. I was learning to bring the inside out. I molested no children, one day at a time.

But I was continuously drunk. Drinking with my eyes. Living in fantasy stories — and believing in them. Never going more than 36 hours without masturbating. Yes, I tried again and again to stop masturbating, and when I occasionally made it to 36 hours I would feel heroic, as if I had set an Olympic record. But then I would masturbate four or five times in the next eight hours to celebrate. I was a sick man, and I had no name for my sickness but “perversion.”

Yet God was preparing me. I remember (and this is clearer in my memory) a weekly prayer meeting that a friend and I had at his service station, a two-man prayer meeting. I was learning to bring the inside out. I had shared my story with my friend, and we shared our spiritual journeys week by week. I remember telling him more times than once that my craziness always started in my head with a fantasy. Nobody taught me that, and I didn’t figure it out; it was an understanding that came to me from somewhere else, sick as I was.

That’s why in 1985 I was willing to pick up a white chip and let go of the fantasy starts one day, one hour, one minute at a time. But now I see that I didn’t get sober in four days or in three weeks. For me, the gift of sobriety was a miracle, alright, but it was a miracle of the educational variety. For ten years God was preparing me so that, by the time I learned of this fellowship of sex addicts, I was ready to be sober.

Now I’m beautiful! That’s right, I’m beautiful — not perfect, but worthy of God’s love and of your love and able to love you. I used to think I was incapable of love. Now I know that when I surrender my will to God’s, I can be a blessing to others.

Today, life is good, but it’s not easy. Although the compulsion to masturbate has been removed from me, I still want the fantasy. I still want that first drink. There have been times when I’ve felt like I’m hanging on to my sobriety by my fingernails, and only repeated prayers for surrender and lots of phone calls can bring reprieve. I call another addict and say, “There’s a fantasy that keeps coming into my head, and right now I want it more than I want sobriety” — and the action of making the call opens the door to surrender. Or I say, “I really don’t want to make this call, but I’m in the damned habit!” I acknowledge my powerlessness to the other, and I’m freed for the time being.

I continue to experience periods of powerlessness over my ego and fear. My wife can tell you that I’m not an easy person to live with. But, we have a good marriage. My wife works her program and I work mine. We don’t try to sponsor each other; but, we do share our hopes and fears. I’m able to listen to her pretty well without trying to fix her (well, not too often, anyway), and when I’m not capable of listening, I tell her that. God gives her and me the patience to work through the daily give and take of child-rearing, job pressures, and our individual bumps and rough spots.

I have more patience with myself as well. Most days I am able to accept my powerlessness and to experience gratitude for the healing and the sanity God has given me. I didn’t used to be patient. Giving up my former role as the Higher Power has been a very slow process. When I first started working with my sponsor, we had quite a struggle with that. I was still trying to figure a lot of things out. I wanted to know what was driving me to do the things I did, what was driving others to do the things they did, what I should do to make things come out right. I wanted to know “what the issues are behind all this,” as a caller said to me recently. I thought it was my responsibility to reason things through and come up with answers, with solutions — the quicker, the better. Now I know that reason never got me to the truth. The truth comes as a gift from a Power greater than myself.

“When it’s time for you to start thinking,” my sponsor told me back then, “I’ll let you know.” He hasn’t given me the go-ahead yet, and today I’m not in a hurry.