On my way home to join a Zoom meeting I stopped by my mailbox. I have a subscription to a golf magazine, and this particular issue had two beautiful professional women golfers on the cover, which meant it would be full of photos of them.

I threw the magazine on the table and logged into an SA Zoom meeting, but my addict was really looking forward to the meeting ending so I could start looking at the magazine. It was a reader-discussion meeting, and the reading was entitled, “Why Stop Lusting?”

My Higher Power was speaking to me through the literature and through the shares during the meeting. Nothing good could come of me looking at that magazine in the next room, but my addict was still anxious for the meeting to end, and we were arguing—my sober self and my addict. Actually, that’s not accurate. The literature and my friends in the fellowship were telling my addict that I shouldn’t look at the magazine. I, alone, was not persuasive enough to talk my addict out of it.

The meeting was wrapping up, and I knew I needed to take some kind of action in the next five minutes, so I went to the other room, got the magazine and returned to the Zoom meeting. While I had a screen full of fellow SA recovery partners on my screen, I tore off the magazine cover. Then I flipped through the magazine and tore out pages that had pictures of the women who were on the cover. There must have been ten pages. I tore the pages into strips and then I tore the strips into little pieces; making sure to tear through anything that looked flesh colored. I threw it in the kitchen trash can because I knew it would be covered over by a lot of smelly wet garbage.

This is why I have to attend meetings every few days and take daily actions. Otherwise, I’ll be right back where I came from, or worse.

The reading in the meeting said, “Our addiction to lust is like the alcoholic’s problem with alcohol. Just as the alcoholic cannot tolerate one drink of alcohol, we sexaholics cannot tolerate even the smallest drink of lust. Lust always leads to more lust, eventually making us drunk with it. Once drunk, the urge to act out sexually is impossible to resist. Even worse, lust keeps taking us deeper and deeper into behaviors we promised ourselves we would never do. The shame that these behaviors caused us required more and more lust to mask it. Just a little lusting simply doesn’t work for sexaholics like us.”