[The following is an extract of a talk taped on November 3, 1995 at an SA conference in Minnie Water, Australia. The tape was sent to us by an SA member there. Ed.]

My name is Patrick, and I’m a sexaholic. I’ve been sexually sober for 28 days, nine months and two years, by the grace of God. And I never thought I’d ever be able to be sexually sober in my life. I was totally powerless over sex, over lust. My life was incredibly out of control, and today I can smile; today I’m happy. I never thought that day would come. I waited a long time for it [Laughter], a long, long time, and I paid a price for this fellowship, which was the highest price that I could ever be expected to pay.

My addiction drove me to a lot of shock treatment, mental homes, psychiatric wards, alcoholic hospitals, counselors, priests, psychiatrists, anyone and everyone. I was totally out of control from about 1958 to 1993—that’s a long time. What progressed with me was the addiction, which was something I could not handle—living a Jekyll and Hyde existence all that time. I started picking up alcohol to find relief, to get off this thing that was going on in my head and in my body all the time. I had to go to dreary old pubs and drink myself insensible because in that I could blot out and enter fantasy, but once I did that I became even more vulnerable to the sex problem, and I’d finish up in the most unusual places, to say the least [Laughter]. It’s like telling somebody else’s story tonight. I had this problem of masturbating and going into toilets and masturbating myself and other men. I didn’t go much further than that, I can be honest with you. I was totally obsessed once the clock started in my body, and it would start as often as every day; I just had to obey that inner clock. There was no way of me stopping it. I was totally out of control. And that went on for a long time.

At 25, I put myself into a monastery, hoping that it would stop, hoping that this grand gesture, giving myself to God, would cure it. That God would become my all in all and I would lose myself in this wonderful thing. I was successful for seven years. I didn’t have a lustful thought, to my knowledge, or act out or anything. It was an incredible experience for seven years. I was emotional at times because I’m an emotional person, but after the seven years, I picked a drink up. There was no reason why I shouldn’t. I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. Within a couple of weeks my personality changed. I started getting resentful, fearful, guilty. My sex problem came back in an incredible way, and I was moved from place to place, always in disgrace, always a failure, always crying my eyes out, begging God to take it away and he wouldn’t, afraid to go to post a letter, because I’d be looking around, afraid to get on a bus because I’d be sitting next to a man and our knees would touch, afraid to go to a cinema.

I wouldn’t know what to do. I lost the ability to relate to another human being, except on the sexual level. I’d get days off once a week and I’d go to the city and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Nine o’clock in the morning I’d be there and I wouldn’t know what to do. The day would stretch ahead and I’d go from toilet to toilet to toilet to toilet to toilet until ten o’clock at night, and then I’d come home.

Early in the evening I started going into pubs and I’d have a drink here and a drink there and a drink here and a drink there.

I was given a lot of shock treatment. I was taken to my first alcoholic hospital. I was there for seven weeks and they told me I was an alcoholic. I wouldn’t accept it. I wasn’t an alcoholic, I had another problem I couldn’t speak about. I couldn’t tell anybody about it. The only person I could tell about it was some priest who didn’t know me. I could creep into the little room at the back of the monastery, the back of the church, and unload the barrel of my problems and my fears and come out feeling clean, just clean enough to go home to face the community. And then hide myself for about three days until my psyche and my soul healed, avoiding people, then gradually coming up again, and three more days ahead was my next day off and I knew what was going to happen, and I’d go into the chapel and I’d say “God please don’t let me do this today, please, I beg of you, keep me out of the toilet. I don’t want to do it. Please God.” And I’d go out and catch the bus or the tram and I’d go into the city and the first place I’d go would be a toilet.

I had no ability to do anything else. That went on for years and years and years and I was in and out of alcoholic hospitals. I could not deny the inner urge. Many times I’d be in my house, in my room where I was living, and the clock would start, tick, tick, inside me, and I knew what it was and I’d walk up and down and say “Please God, take it away,” and I’d walk up and down and walk up and down and up and down, and I’d put my coat on and sneak out the back way and go down to the local toilet. I was totally out of control.

The other part of it was that my relations with people were almost non-existent. I didn’t have the ability of loving anyone. I resented everybody because everybody seemed to have their life in order and I didn’t have my life in order. Everybody was successful in relationships and no one wanted a relationship with me, because I was neurotic. So I was angry, resentful, fearful, guilty. It was hell. It was absolute hell. It went on for about twenty-five years.

I tried AA. I was twice in two years in an AA hospital for seven weeks each time, and I’d come out and drink straight away. And I’d find myself in some licentious part of whatever city I was in, there till midnight. I’d say I was going to an AA meeting and I’d just go to the door and I’d be afraid to go in and I’d walk out and go out on the beat and then come home. It was a very, very bad life. I was really seeking love. I was really seeking connection with another human being, because I couldn’t make that connection. I prayed like a saint and I acted like a sinner, and I cried out to God a million million times “Please help me, please help me,” and he wouldn’t. I’d say, “Well you can strap it, if that’s the way you want it. You’re a great God for the academics and the professors and all those that have got everything, you’re a great God. But for this poor bugger you don’t give a hoot.”

It says in the Bible that to those who have got, will be given more; and those who have less, the little they have will be taken away from them. And I said “That’s what I am. I’ve got nothing and you’re taking everything I have so you know what you can do with it.” And then I’d creep back into chapels and say “Look, I’m sorry I said that. Please forgive me, I’m sorry.” I had nowhere else to go. And I fought with God tooth and nail like Jonah and the angel, I fought with him. “What good is your dying on the cross for me? It’s not helping me now. What’s the good of it all?”

That’s where I was. I’d been living a double life, trying to hold my act together. My superior said to me once, “The only witness you’ve given us in 35 years is you’ve gotten up next morning and started again.” That wasn’t too bad; I accepted that. Then eventually they told me that in 35, 36 years I hadn’t succeeded in one job, and the skids went from underneath me totally because I’d been struggling for all those years. Apparently it had all been worthless. I’d failed. I’d failed at life. I was 57 then, and I used to stand in the back of the communion line, hoping I could empty the chalice because there would be more wine in it for me. That was as low as I got. By that time I’d lost hope.

And then I fell into an AA room one night half drunk and from that I got into another hospital, and then I stopped again. Then I started drinking again and finally got into AA in 1983, for the second time, and I started to get well. I started to come out of this dark tunnel that I had been in all my life and I started to meet people. When the meeting was over and they started to talk to each other over a cup of coffee, I had to bolt out. I was scared stiff of being trapped in a corner. They wanted to know about me and I had a guilty secret. It wasn’t just alcohol. So I stayed sober for about three or four years and then I had a slip, and then I stayed sober again and then I had another slip. Then I tried suicide and they got me into hospital just in time. Another time I drank enough alcohol in 15 minutes to get a level of 3.1, and they put me in hospital and pumped me out and said I wouldn’t live, it was too much, that the brain was soaked. And I came out of that, thank God. And I still drank again later on.

I was still going to AA meetings. Sometimes I’d be on a high, sometimes I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t tell my great problem. My great problem was I was a sexaholic, I was controlled by lust, that I was leading a shadow life. I used to go to pubs and drink soft drinks, ginger ale, from one dirty old pub to the next, didn’t have the courage to pick up the alcohol, because I knew what would happen. And yet, I wanted to. Went to [another S-fellowship] and found I could join in the group, but nobody talked about sobriety, and I wanted sobriety more than anything in the world. I wanted to stop what I was doing, because what I was doing had destroyed my life. So I didn’t stay in that group because nobody gave me a way of not doing what I was doing.

Eventually Paul and John [and I] got together and started an SA meeting. We’d sit in the streets in Richmond in Melbourne on benches with a book in our hand. We had nowhere to go and we tried to put this program together. We’d sit in parks and underneath high rise buildings and we moved into coffee shops, and nobody was sober, and we didn’t know how the hell we were going to get sober.

My holidays came up and I went to see my brother. First day I was there I went to an AA meeting—they knew I was an alcoholic—I went to the AA meeting and then I went into the toilet, then I went to the pub and drank ginger ale, went back to the toilet, and I was coming home each afternoon, spinning a whole lot of lies about what I’d been doing all day, and gradually I realized that I was in a hell of a mess, because I couldn’t stop. I came back to Melbourne and I said “Paul, let’s get together, let’s have that meeting,” and we met on the 6th of January 1993, and I haven’t acted out once in two years, nine months and 28 days. I haven’t had an impure thought that I’m aware of that I’ve entertained since the 6th of January 1993.

My life has changed radically. In my sobriety I became obnoxious, controlling, resentful, but I was sober [Laughter]. And the weeks went by and I was the only one sober, and the soberer I became, if the others weren’t sober the more alone I felt. And I still stayed sober, and I walked out of meetings, stomped out, saying I’d never go back there, and I went back. And my sobriety has developed and I have a lot today that I could never ever have dreamed of having in my whole life.

Today I’m successful and happy. I found a God that I could turn my life over to. I didn’t believe I’d ever find a God because I had great proof that God couldn’t and wouldn’t help me. I have about 40 years of it! I knew God wouldn’t take this problem from me. I had proof. I’d asked him a thousand times. I’d fasted and prayed and kept vigils and done all that, and it didn’t work. Strangely enough when I said to him in SA “I can’t handle lust, would you take it from me?” he took it. He took it from me. And the days went by and the weeks went by and the months went by, and now I have a relationship with God which is very intimate, very rewarding.

I have a fellowship in which I feel totally at home. I’m terribly obsessed with SA; I feel very possessive about it. I don’t want anybody to come in and change anything at all, because this has given me life. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve tried every possible cure, every possible hospital, to try to stop and only SA did it and the grace of God. My life was out of control, I was powerless over lust. I’ve everything to be grateful for from SA. It’s given me what I never dreamed I could have: integrity, freedom. Freedom is incredible. I have just as much chance as anybody else in the world now to lead a good successful life. It’s only up to me now. Before I didn’t have a chance. So I thank God for SA. Thank you for sharing.