When I was a small boy of three or four years of age, I was the first to go to bed. I used to hide my head under the pillow and dream about women of beaming beauty. There wasn’t anything explicitly sexual, but I fused with them. I remember at that age walking with a two-year-old girl and immediately getting a weird feeling of being “connected” to nature and the whole universe — and being afraid of that small creature.

When I was five, noticing the mother of a friend, I became obsessed with a certain part of a woman’s body. At the same age, looking at a neighbor girl standing and relaxing on her balcony, I fell deeply in love with her and stayed obsessed for years.

Although women were always present in my mind, I was afraid of marriage, the “dark” and “boring” family life. I wanted an everlasting courtship, faithful — but without commitments. The inexhaustible magic effect. But how afraid I was of women. How little I trusted them! I thought it was difficult to find one who was trustworthy, and that the one to marry me could get tired of me, tell my secrets and ridicule me in front of everybody. Irresistible attraction and insurmountable fear. Lust.

I started to collect soft pornography, taking pictures from Fashion and women’s magazines. When the sense of sin overwhelmed me, I would throw the whole thing into the garbage, making a firm commitment never to do that again. Only to start all over again next day. Every time I went to confession to a priest, the recurring sin was sexual desires. And as soon as I had left the confessional, I would fall again. I was powerless over lust!

When I was a teenager, I would walk past the shop windows, trying to get the female shop attendant’s attention. I dreamed of one of them falling in love with me. If this happened, I thought, my fears, insecurities, resentments and inadequacies would disappear and I would be born into a new and marvelous world, far away from the reality I hated so much.

I spent hours at the swimming pool. I walked the beaches alone, staring at the sunbathing women. It was my way of getting drunk — the visual “drink,” the lust “drunk.” At the same time I was so shy I didn’t dare to talk to them! 

When I was 18, I started masturbating. So far I had avoided doing that out of fear. My father had told me that masturbation led to loss of intelligence. (I often ejaculated just looking at a girl.) My first physical contact with a woman (an extension of masturbation) was around the same time. From then on I was obsessed with experiencing again the magic effect of those first experiences, but the depression after orgasm was greater and the effect less.

Cruising was my favorite acting out activity. I didn’t want the responsibilities that an established relationship entailed. I wanted to be free, without any bonds. Bourgeois courtship and marriage gave me the creeps. I spent so many hours on the street, on buses, in the subway, in the libraries, looking for women!

Little by little the addiction gave me less pleasure and more frustration. I took comfort in drinking and overeating. In AA, I could see that my real Higher Power was lust and after getting tired of flirting with three women at the same time, and a serious misunderstanding with another which showed me how unmanageable my life was, I started my sexual sobriety, working the 12 Steps of recovery.

I got in touch with a program for sex and love addiction, and for five months I was the only member in my city. At first, although acknowledging some problems in the sexual area, I firmly believed that my problem was romance. I rationalized it by telling myself that since I wasn’t having affairs with a different woman every day, I couldn’t possibly be a sex addict. But God and my survival instincts made me see I had to stop masturbating, to abstain from any sexual relationships. At the time I didn’t have a clear idea if I should exclude sex in marriage or in a committed relationship, my only commitment being to lust. I also gave up the idea that a princess would come out of the blue and turn my reality and my life into bliss and everlasting happiness. No dating for a year and a half helped me a lot, in both the sex and romance departments.

My fear of acting out helped me avoid occasions that could lead to a slip. I worked the Steps with a strong AA sponsor who used to tell me that if the Steps were worked according to the AA Big Book, I didn’t need a specific program for sex addiction. I doubted this, but I was too afraid to take any chances. In AA, I had learned that I couldn’t allow any alcohol image to lodge in my mind. Sooner or later it would lead me to the bottle. This way, I gave up. I surrendered any image related to lust and asked for help from my Higher Power.

Thinking that a year without dates was a “wasted” year, I plunged into working the Steps as hard as I could. At last, turning sex and romance — my two varieties of lust — over to my Higher Power, I was able to work the Third Step in all of my programs. Lust detox allowed me to recover my childhood memories and to put what I was unearthing into a thorough and searching Fourth Step. While I was writing my resentments, fears and character defects, I began to understand that I wasn’t perfect, and to accept that others weren’t either. The Fifth Step took the deep shame I had always felt away from me. The Steps were changing me. I had found the solution.

We set up a 12 Step program for sex addiction, but our sobriety definitions were very different from those of SA. It folded after two years. I felt drawn closer and closer to SA. I reached a peak when I turned two-and-a-half years of sobriety. An SA visitor from another country explained to me that marriage was more important than I realized; little by little I started to see it had a spiritual dimension. I asked God for guidance. In the end I saw that I felt closer to God and got more freedom from lust when my bottom line was according to the SA sobriety definition.

In the summer of 1993, I met somebody who helped me to live better the principles of the Steps. But during this transition, so good for me, problems piled up. My fourth year of sobriety became the worst. I was alone, a loner in the city where I live. Once in a while I found sex addicts, but they were sex addicts who hadn’t hit bottom, who hadn’t lost the hope of “controlling and enjoying” lust, who wanted to learn how to drink “safely.” I got used to being a loner. I had peritonitis and was about to die. I don’t know how much my hospitalization, anesthetics, being in a physical state where I could barely pray, and not having enough energy to turn my lust over to God, influenced the situation. I had some overwhelming legal problems, and my Third Step was losing strength, getting weaker and weaker. Lust was creeping back and taking over my soul. But God helped me and I stayed sober.

First he sent me an addict from New Jersey, an Hispanic who came to my country on vacation in the first days of July 1995. After three days of talking to him and sharing my temptations, I felt I was back on the firm ground I had walked in my first three years of sobriety. He stayed for 10 days and he was a blessing sent by God.

After that, I traveled to another European city and I couldn’t believe what I saw. From a languishing SA group that had dwelt in the problem, a sober, strong group had grown with lots of members and five meetings a week. They lived in the solution. They worked the Steps. They looked happy. I was astonished. I wrote an inventory of my lust during my years of sobriety and asked the members with more than a year of sobriety to listen to it and give me some kind of feedback. They were very hard on my flirting with lust during my fourth year. One member asked me: “Are you done or do you need more?” I didn’t like these words. How they hurt!!! I thought they were being unfair to me. Afterwards I could see it wasn’t like that. They were confronting my ego, my lust. And to confront lust you have to have a strong vocabulary. They suggested several things: “Call us as many times as you need. Don’t care about the money.”

I committed myself to call at least once a week. But if I needed it, I was willing to call much more, three or even seven times a week. They insisted that if I wanted to attract people, I had to become “attractive” spiritually. To do that I needed to be permanently in touch with other recovering sex addicts, as much as I needed, no matter how far away from my country they were. I remembered the words of the oldtimer from the USA I had met in 1993: “You need another recovering sexaholic to get current with on a daily basis.”

I started to tell God in my prayers, “Lord, if you want me to set up an SA group, please, give me the strength and the willingness.” “Thy will, not mine, be done.” And people started to ask for help. Today we are several committed members. If this were my work, I would tremble to think what might happen, asking myself when everybody else was going to leave the program. But just as I am powerless over lust, I cannot organize a group based on spiritual principles, let alone make people live spiritual principles and recover. It’s the work of the One who has given me what I was looking for in lust.

Today, to stay sober, I try to stay in touch with other sexaholics. If I can, on a daily basis — over the phone or one-on-one — I share my temptations and they share theirs. Most of the time no feedback is necessary and I try not to give any unless it’s strictly necessary. The bottom line is acknowledging I’m powerless over lust, turning my life over to God and sharing my temptations on a daily basis.

For me, the real battle is the one over my temptations and desire to look. I avoid “looking at” women in the street — more difficult in summer! But if my eyes go away I start praying for the woman whose image captured my eyes, turn my eyes away and say: “Lord, may I find in you what I’m looking for in that person.” Instead of contacting the image created by my lust, I make the right Connection and I contact God. I thank Him for that opportunity to connect with Him. It is He that my lust was really looking for. But what my lust found were substitutes that gave me no lasting, no deep satisfaction, but left me anxious, in pain and with the same void.

The more I work the program, the more lust loses strength. Every time I surrender a temptation, a thought, lust backs out. For me the key is in the Steps and in union with God and others. To turn my life and my will over to God. To identify and acknowledge my resentments, fears and character defects in order to surrender them, asking God to remove them, and finding a peace I never dreamt of every time I do it, restoring my relationships with others and giving instead of taking — I’m just at the beginning and everything is so different! Although I have received a lot, I have no strength to walk ahead, but I ask for strength of the One who is infinitely more powerful than my lust and my ego, even when I don’t feel like asking or praying.