By the grace of God and the fellowship of SA, I have been sexually sober since August 1, 1985—something for which I am frequently but never sufficiently grateful.

I was introduced to pornography when I was eight years old, by a neighbor boy who was 14. The pictures were tame by today’s standards, but they were quite exciting to me. I knew instinctively that I could not tell my parents what I was doing. I have two kids now, and I look at them at the age of eight and ask myself this question: How could that have happened to me?

I acted out for 25 years: compulsive sex with self, use of pornography, promiscuous relationships with women, fantasy, sexualizing, objectifying and dependency relationships. The White Book says it best, “…we bought it, we sold it, we traded it, we gave it away. We were addicted to the intrigue, the forbidden, and the tease. The only way we knew to be free of it was to do it. ‘Please connect with me and make me whole!’ We cried with outstretched arms” (SA 203). That was my story.

I’m sober today because some faithful person told me about his spiritual journey and his conversion experience. This got me to thinking about my own life at the time. By then I had married the person whom I thought was the woman of my dreams. I had a great career in a Fortune 100 Company in Rochester, NY. We had a beautiful home and two nice cars. I’d done everything I knew to do to make myself happy. But when my best friend from college told me his story—that he had a religious conversion—I began to examine my life.

I realized that deep down inside something was missing, so I went back to church. After a while at church, it occurred to me that my thought life—as well as the behavior that I was keeping secret from my wife—was not consistent with my newly-found faith. I began feeling guilty. That’s when I realized that I had difficulty stopping. But I had no name for my problem, and I did not know I was powerless.

I found the last piece of the puzzle one day in February 1984, when I turned on the television to watch a nationally syndicated program. I watched the program basically to get a hit, because the host often had racy topics. But that day, instead of something racy, there was a guy sitting behind a screen so that his face could not be seen, and he was talking about his sexual behavior. He looked at pornography, had sex with himself frequently, and kept it all a secret from his wife.

I was mesmerized. This man was telling my story. I felt shame, but I knew this was the piece of the puzzle I was missing: I am an addict. The idea brought me up short. I knew I had to stop but I did not know how. The guest on the program had written a book on sexual addiction, but there was no mention of a solution. Over the next 18 months, I tried to stop, but I could not.

Later that year, my wife told me that she wasn’t happy in our relationship and she wanted to go to counseling. I complied but I did not mention my addiction. After a few months, in May 1985, my wife decided to move out of our house and seek a legal separation. I was devastated.

I continued with counseling on my own, and after several weeks I mustered up the courage to tell the psychiatrist that I thought I was a sex addict. When I asked him if he could help me, he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a blue and white pamphlet with the letters “SA” on it. He then wrote out an address on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk to me. It said, “SA, P.O. Box 300, Simi Valley, California.”

I did not know what SA stood for. Had I known, I’m not sure I would have written a letter. But the letter went out. A week or two later I received a copy of the pamphlet with “The Problem,” “The Solution,” and “20 Questions” in it. As I read “The Problem” I cried. I saw myself. I could also see that God would be part of the solution.

I had already taken a simple step of faith, and I recognized that God loved me just the way I was. I knew that I could not do anything to earn His love—He just loved me. And I could now see that He would be part of the solution.

I later learned that one of the guys at my first SA meeting had previously left that pamphlet with the psychiatrist, in case someone else might find the solution. What a gift! We may never know how the simple things we do in our recovery will impact the lives of those who are out there looking for help.

After my wife moved out, we had to sell our dream home. I was defeated. The last time I acted out was July 31, 1985, because I didn’t know what else to do. I had planned to go to a meeting after I moved, but the SA contact in Rochester reached out to me first and invited me to a meeting. I told him I would be there, and I attended my first SA meeting on August 7, 1985, when I was six days sober.

The meeting was held in a mental institution in Rochester. To get to the room, I had to walk the gauntlet of people smoking and wearing white gowns. Three other men were at the meeting. The man who had called me was there, and he told his story. He said he’d been sober five months, and I about fell off my chair. I was six days sober. There was another guy who had five days, and another who had maybe a couple of days. We never again saw the guy who had invited me. He went back out. We later learned that he had died of his disease.

Then the fellow with two days disappeared as well. So we were down to two. We were a couple of scared guys, newly sober, but we held hands and we kept marching forward. And this year, by some miracle, we both celebrated 30 years of sobriety.

My friend and I went to our first SA one-day conference in Cleveland in October 1985. On the way over, we listened to a tape of an old timer by the name of Jess L. He sounded scary, but we hoped that SA would be the solution for us, as it had been for him.

Five months later I lost my job, and I had to move to Detroit to take a job there. I thought that in Detroit—with a population of several million people—I would have no problem finding an SA meeting, but there were none. I attended another S-fellowship there for awhile. But I kept reaching out to SA’s Central Office, and Roy K. (who managed SA Central Office back then) suggested that I attend a conference in Chicago in September 1986. So I went.

It was there that I first heard about leading with my weaknesses. It was also the first time I heard about sharing my top plate. Today I think of Chicago as the Nashville of the North, because of the role it has played in my recovery. I left the conference determined to go back to Detroit and start an SA meeting there.

I had it all worked out in my head. The meeting would be on Tuesdays because that’s what worked best for my schedule. So I marched into the meeting place of the other S-fellowship, and I said that I wanted to start an SA meeting. They said they would support me, but the only time available was on Sunday afternoons, so I thought, “I guess I struck out.”

I kept in contact with Central Office, and Roy suggested that I attend a national conference in St. Louis in November 1986. So I went, and there I met two people from Nashville who would become two of the most important people in my recovery (I knew that I’d be moving to Nashville within a couple of years). I look back in wonder at all of the “coincidences” that have occurred since I got into recovery. It was also there that it hit me: God wanted the meetings to be on Sunday.

So I went back to Detroit and asked whether the meeting place was still available, and it was. We had our first meeting on a Sunday in January 1987. I wasn’t even there. I was back in Kentucky, visiting my parents for the holidays. One of the other guys held the first meeting, and I came back for the second meeting. Within a couple of weeks we had a dozen people at the meeting. It was unbelievable. And it was not just men—it was probably 50-50, men and women. And people kept coming.

It turns out that the name of the facility where we held our meeting was “CAPS”: Children of Alcoholic Parents—and I realized that was what I was. The members were working on the same issues that I struggled with. At the time I was still married and trying to keep things together, even though I was 400 miles away from my wife.

I began seeing a counselor because I realized that I had codependence issues. I had one of those epiphanies when I was able to ask myself, “What is it about me that causes me to be in relationships with certain types of people?” In all of my relationships, my partners always left me. I was always dependent on others and they always left. Then they would come back, and I always took them back.

At the time, my ex-wife was already engaged to someone else, and she would call me for advice. I knew that if I didn’t stop talking with her and get some help, I could lose my sobriety. So I started getting counseling, as suggested in our White Book.

The counseling involved looking at my childhood and the role I played in the family system. My parents both had their own issues that caused me difficulty, and working with my counselor, I was able to separate from them for a time. I felt unsafe around them; one of my parents had threatened my life multiple times.

I also separated myself from my ex for awhile because I couldn’t talk with her. I couldn’t give her advice about her love life. I was still married to her. I also had to separate from my childhood friend who shared his faith story with me, because I had become his wife’s confidant, and he was the dad that I could never please. I had to separate from all of those folks, so I moved to Nashville in 1988—and there I had my rock; my program. Two meetings a week! I had a place to go.

The Nashville fellowship was approximately 50% men and 50% women at the time. We learned how to be in meetings together and how to do activities together. We did raft trips. We did picnics. We worked our Steps together. We learned how to be together as a family. That was a wonderful experience.

A couple of significant things happened to me during those early days. Early on, wherever I went, I had been the guy with the most sobriety. So guess who didn’t have a sponsor? I had basically been winging it on Steps One, Two, and Three. But now the jig was up. I needed to do more work and I needed to get an SA sponsor.

By the time I moved to Nashville, I was a couple of years sober. It took me another year after I moved there to finally ask one of the men to be my sponsor, and it was my sponsor’s idea to have our first SA International Convention in Nashville in January 1990. He also thought that I should be the Chair. It wasn’t as complicated as it is today, and after several months of planning, about 300 people came to that conference.

God has a wonderful sense of humor. I was a very conservative Christian, and God brought an Orthodox Jew into my life to be my sponsor. I said to him, “I’m ready to do Step Four.” He replied, “Why don’t we start on Step One?” So that’s what we did, and by the time we had our convention, I was doing my Step Nine.

At the time I had been divorced for three years. I hadn’t had my first date yet, so I called my ex and said, “We’re having a conference, and I’d like you to come.” I had told her about my addiction and recovery, and she denied it multiple times. I had this vision of us hitting the conference circuits. Instead I got to do my Ninth Step with her. That was a powerful experience. A couple of months later I had my first date in sobriety with a woman I had met at church.

My separation with my parents ended when I received a call that my dad was in the hospital with a heart attack, and he wanted to see me. So I went. We had tried to reconcile once before and it hadn’t worked, but when I went to that hospital in Lexington, KY, we reunited. It was a wonderful experience. By then I was five years sober, and I was just beginning to have some compassion for my dad. He had done the best he could.

Eighteen months later he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The SA fellowship shared their experience, strength, and hope with me as my dad went through that experience. I had been dating off and on, but from 1992 to 1993 I don’t think I had a date. I was with my dad almost every weekend. We had a conference in Nashville right before he died, in 1993. I remember talking about his death with my SA friends there and crying. The SA fellowship loved me through that experience.

After the conference, we had our annual SA raft trip and I celebrated my eighth sobriety birthday shortly afterwards. One of the members painted the number eight on a river rock, and he gave it to me on my sobriety birthday! I still have that rock today.

Dad passed away in August 1993. The phone rang off the hook the day he died. I was surprised that all the phone calls were for me. Again my SA family loved me through my grief. They became my laboratory for life.

In January 1994, I attended another International Convention, in Rochester. There were three feet of snow on the ground. My ex was still unattached. I hadn’t had a date in 1993 and she had broken off with that ”boyfriend,” so we had dinner together. I was still holding out hope. But it was clear to me that we had taken different paths.

I was sad for a month or two after I had that awareness, but I was going on nine years sober and I had wonderful friends and a job that I enjoyed doing. I was active in service to my fellowship and active in my church. I thought, “I can be single the rest of my life. Or I might get married and that will be okay.”

Nine months later I met the woman who would become my wife. I met her through SA. A group of us had formed a book club outside of our SA meeting, where men and women would read books to help us understand relationships.

In December 1994, one of the guys in our club decided to have a dinner party, and he invited several of us single guys. A female friend of his invited several single women, including the woman who would become my wife. We were gathered at a condominium in Nashville, and one of my buddies flirted with her all night long. But I called her afterwards—and the rest, as they say, is history.

We married on August 3, 1996, two days after my 11th sobriety birthday. My sponsor read an Old Testament lesson at our wedding. The men and women who were in our book club and in SA were members of our wedding party and served as ushers.

My wife and I tried to have children pretty quickly. I was 44 by then and she was 34. We learned that we were infertile, and my friends in the fellowship supported me through the in-vitro process. We have a picture of our oldest son at eight cells before he was implanted in his mother. The picture is in his baby book. The men and women in my meetings walked me through my wife’s pregnancy and helped prepare me to be a dad. It’s a miracle.

Our second son is adopted, and the fellowship also walked with me through the adoption process. The SA fellowship has walked with me through so many things that I’ve had to deal with in life. SA is my family, my learning laboratory, my rock.

The experience of celebrating my 30th SA anniversary was unbelievable. Through countless opportunities, I’ve learned that when I surrender my right to lust and turn to God through prayer, make a phone call, or go to a meeting, my life is continually improved. SA has given me this wonderful perspective. But I keep coming back because I’m as powerless today over lust as I was 30 years ago. I am not cured! I continue to work on the character defects that trigger my lust. As my sponsor says, if I want to stay sober for another 30 years, all I have to do is stay sober one day at a time.

I believe that our fellowship is on the cusp of exploding worldwide. I daily ask God to bless SA and make me a good steward of our fellowship. We have a wonderful message to share—but I only have a message if I work my program and am of service to others. I also try to be generous in my giving, so that others will hear the message. I hope that other members will join me in these goals.

Last summer, right after the SA convention in Chicago, my sixteen-year-old and I took a train from Chicago headed for Flagstaff, and then on to the Grand Canyon, where we met up with my wife and youngest son. It was an amazing experience! I would never have had this experience had I not found SA. I never thought I’d have a wife and children, and I never thought I’d be so close to them.

I’ve been given a gift that I would not trade with anyone, and I owe it all to God, and to this wonderful fellowship of SA. May God bless all of you and this wonderful fellowship.