I never knew I was a sexaholic. In the six weeks between the time I heard of Sexaholics Anonymous and my first meeting, I did a lot of honest soul-searching. I was working the program in AA and considered myself safe from the dangers of other addictions. I wavered between ignorance of my sexaholism and denial of what I did know. Denial was my first reaction to everything.

For years my drinking covered up my sexaholism and confused people who tried to help me. It took a low bottom and a spell in a drying-out unit for me to seek help for my drinking. I couldn’t see how an alcoholic could live a normal life without drinking. As long as I could deny it, I had a chance of beating it. Once I admitted it, I’d have to put myself in the care of the psychiatric community. Even if I admitted it, there was no guarantee I’d be free of it.

I started drinking in my late teens, mostly to relieve inhibitions I had with girls my age. I had been acting out sexually since I was 14, having discovered masturbation by trying to steal sex from my younger sister in her sleep. Later I molested both of my younger sisters. At 14, my selfish pursuit of sex already had caused a major split in my relations with God, my family and my peers. It’s either God or masturbation, my religion seemed to say, and I chose masturbation.

Since I was 10 or 11, I had been acting in, entertaining fantasies of romance, dependency and sex in order to escape a fear-filled family atmosphere. In school I avoided work and looked forward to the day when I could escape geographically.

When I was old enough to move out, instead of becoming self-sufficient as I had planned, I started to drink heavily. It was the late sixties and there seemed to be a great, liberating cultural revolution going on. I moved to the anonymous big city and hung around the periphery of the hippie scene. I read a lot and liked to think I was well connected and could procure anything. Dope smoking became for me a point of rebellion against authority. Prolonged use of dope made me uncomfortable but didn’t stop me using.

People sometimes told me I should watch my drinking. This never got the desired reaction from me. I even felt a perverse satisfaction. I had fooled them. No one ever confronted me about my acting out, either because they didn’t know about it or didn’t consider it to be acting out. I worked hard at balancing my use of drugs. Alcohol was keeping my life manageable, I thought, while lust was saving me from alcoholism. Lust kept me sociable, while alcohol gave me something to blame if I made a fool of myself trying to connect. I drank so that people wouldn’t want to get to know me, or if they suspected there was something wrong with me, they’d think it was my drinking. I convinced myself of this also. In the end I was a public and a private drunk.

I tried another geographic cure, moving to a foreign country where I knew only a few people. My life changed when I got a job that gave me security and a future. For the first time I tried to stop drinking. I decided my real problem was the anxiety I felt when I wasn’t drinking, but when I talked to professionals I was careful not to mention drinking lest they think I was alcoholic. According to some alcohol consumption tests I did secretly, I was already in the chronic stage. To get my drinking under control, I’d have to treat the anxiety. I considered group therapy and tried forms of self-hypnosis and biofeedback, but stopping drinking completely wasn’t on my agenda.

Despite a career and friends that cared about me, my drinking and sexing got worse over the years. Inside I was terrified. I felt a growing awareness that no amount of alcohol or sex would make me the person I wanted to be: confident, self-sufficient, someone with nothing to prove. Somewhere I had taken a disastrous turn in my life and there was no going back and no one could help me. I had turned 30. I could look back on the 1970s — my twenties — as a lost decade. Secretly I would have given anything to regain control of my drinking. As for my masturbation with the girlie magazine I had stashed under the mattress, I was too foggy and ashamed to even ask myself why I hid this from everyone. But it was becoming more and more my secret world. I had even started to fall in love with the models in the magazines. Once I looked for a phone listing of a porn magazine with the idea of tracing one of the models in its pages. Fortunately I didn’t go through with this.

I tried to write pornography. I thought this would solve my masturbation problem by putting me in touch with people I could act out with. Fortunately I didn’t get very far with that idea either. Daily masturbation had me riddled with guilt and drinking was taking a terrible toll on my physical and mental health. Mornings I was usually sick from the previous day’s drinking and would practice “my stomach exercises” in the bathroom, trying to throw up. At work I would leave my desk to lock myself in the bathroom where I would drink from a flask and sometimes masturbate to a lingerie ad. I used antacid medication for my stomach and toothpaste to get rid of the smell of alcohol. Evenings I would go to the bars with friends from work. I lived like this for years. Eventually my health gave out — for a long time I had been suffering from sleep apnea without realizing it, and I had the beginnings of liver disease.

I stayed sober on “the doctor’s opinion” for nine months, at which time I thought I’d try some controlled drinking. I sincerely tried to watch myself, carefully avoiding my old haunts, but it wasn’t long before the old drinking patterns came back. I would stash bottles in my apartment, even though I was living on my own. One morning I woke up sick and decided to take the advice the doctor had given me months before and go to AA.

My first AA meeting had a profound effect on me. It was the first time I had ever sat among a group of people who were there for each other to solve a common problem that they couldn’t solve alone. No last names and no keeping tabs on attendance. No dues or fees or discussions. No authority figures monitoring the proceedings. No anxiety or attempts at rationalization when it came to talking about their drinking. People were using a word to describe themselves that I thought I could never get past my lips — alcoholic. Then they looked at me in a way that suggested they expected me to do the same. As soon as I admitted it, it changed my life all right, considerably for the better. The only way I can describe the effect of my first AA meeting is to say I haven’t found it necessary to take a drink since that evening, 14 years ago at the time of writing.

The effects were immediate and dramatic. Discovering I was an alcoholic was like having my hearing restored in an ear that’s been blocked — except this happened on a level of awareness. It was true I had the problem, but now I had the solution, too. I had something concrete that I could work on. For the first time in ages I didn’t feel crazy. I had a primary purpose, something I could live up to.

I was learning what it meant to share my life. I stopped feeling lonely. AA was like an underground army of kindred spirits looking out for each other in an unfriendly world. My wife, at the time my girlfriend, noticed a profound change in me from the first meeting.

Even the Steps started to work me. One afternoon a couple of months after my first meeting I was on my way to the pub to watch a soccer match and have a few beers when I stopped in my tracks, remembering that drinking and AA didn’t mix. I was crushed. It was not possible to go through life without a drink, I thought, so why am I trying to fool these AA people? I decided I’d have the few beers anyway and simply admit it at the next meeting. What would they do, kick me out? As I pictured myself admitting this to the group, I remembered that AA doesn’t expect me to stop drinking for the rest of my life, but just for one day. I knew I could abstain for one day.

Without realizing it I had just taken the Second Step — Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. My thoughts had turned to a power greater than myself — in this case the group — and I was relieved of a compulsion that had dogged me all my life. It was probably the first time in my life I denied myself something in the name of a higher power. As a drinker I was no stranger to the day-at-a-time philosophy, telling myself for years “I’ll quit tomorrow.”

It was suggested to me in AA that I let go of any prejudices I might have against spiritual principles. When I did, I started to appreciate the AA literature for the first time. I especially identified with the hopeless alcoholic in the Big Book who places himself in the care of a “celebrated physician” (There Is a Solution). It corresponded with my own experience. A psychiatrist I took great pains to see told me what Carl Jung told the early AAs — that it would be impossible for me to recover unless I found God, and that as an alcoholic I belonged in AA and nowhere else. I had to hear this from a psychiatrist, not just from AA, to believe it.

That I couldn’t take responsibility for myself is something I suspected when I reread letters I sent to psychiatrists. What can I honestly expect anyone to do for me that I can’t do for myself is a question I wasn’t able to ask myself. What can anyone tell me that I haven’t heard from parents, teachers, books, friends?

Our troubles, the Big Book said, are basically of our own making. It took the evidence of God-power working through others to convince me of this. I’d had it all back to front. It would take years of therapy to get to where AA members started — if I lived that long. I had been prepared to take steps so that I could regain control of my drinking. AA brushed all that aside and said the first thing for the alcoholic is to put away the drink. I considered it a stroke of good fortune to have found a psychiatrist who considered therapy to be worthless for the alcoholic. After I left this uncommon treatment, I went to AA meetings, got a sponsor and worked the Steps. At this stage my wife was in AA also. Sometimes we’d drive for miles to a new meeting.

All this time my sexaholism was progressing. Without alcohol, lust hits were more intense. But without alcohol, lust hangovers were more intense. I was still masturbating and I always had my eye out for stronger forms of pornography. It was never my style to buy girlie magazines — the cashier might think I was a pervert — but I hung out with program friends who had stashes and watched the occasional porn video with them. Sexual relations with my wife weren’t right. She was the one to initiate sex and since I had usually masturbated within the last 24 hours, I would have to resort to fantasies to complete the sex act. Talk of marriage made me uncomfortable. I fantasized that my wife would run off with someone in the program, then I wouldn’t have to tell her I couldn’t handle intimacy and I’d be free to act out uninhibited. Other times I was afraid this might happen. I sent her mixed signals all the time.

Without drink I had more time on my hands. I used to watch a woman across the street, waiting for a glimpse of nudity. This form of acting out had only started since I stopped drinking.

One night at an open AA meeting after three years in the program a young man beside me introduced himself as an Al-Anon and a sexaholic, and I was proud of myself for not bursting out laughing. The next I heard was that there was a group meeting on the premises that called themselves Sexaholics Anonymous. What next?

I was feeling righteous and superior until I met some other AAs who I considered to have solid sobriety who were also members of SA. I was taken aback when I tried to go to one of their meetings only to be told, politely but firmly, that their meetings were closed. Would I like to come to an information meeting? At the information meeting two SAs told their stories briefly and I wasn’t able to identify with either.

During the weeks that followed I thought a lot about my sexual acting out but couldn’t find a reason to get on my knees in gratitude for SA. My Fourth and Fifth Steps — moral inventories of my life and admittance of my wrongs to a sponsor — were replete with my sexual acting out. I had had an affair with my sister, for which I made the best amends I could and was willing to do anything more that was needed. That was in the past. I had acted out anonymously with men, but I didn’t need willpower to stop. As for masturbation, that was just letting off steam.

I read SA’s 20 questions. Then I turned to the back of the brochure to see how high or how low I’d scored, expecting to be told I definitely needed Sexaholics Anonymous if I answered a certain number of questions with a yes.

There were questions on the list that gave me pause, however. Did I still resort to images during sex? Did I want to get away from my partner quickly after the sex act? Did I still resort to masturbation, even though I was having as much sex as I wanted? It wasn’t so much that the answer for me was yes. What pulled me up short was that the questions were asked at all. Only a group that was dealing honestly with the answers had the right to ask these questions in the first place.

Having a functioning SA group in the vicinity did more than anything to make me take a fearless moral inventory of my sex life. It meant the jig was up for me if for no other reason than that the jig was up for them. What would the therapeutic community tell me if I brought my secret story to them? Ironically, I discovered later that two therapists whose opinions I most respected were members of SA.

I didn’t make much progress on why I might need SA until one day a friend of mine from AA, who was also a member of SA, told me that the key to the thing was lust. For him, it started with sexual fantasies which he said actually affected his metabolism. Lust acted like a narcotic in his bloodstream and once under the influence of lust, he had no choice but to act out.

This hit me. I could easily relate to this. I could be intoxicated on lust without acting out. It would only be a question of time before I needed stronger forms of lust. I couldn’t lust safely. Even if things didn’t get any worse, lust was already making my life miserable and unmanageable. It wasn’t surprising that a fellowship had grown up around the idea of too much sex. What was surprising was that a fellowship had identified the first drink and declared its powerlessness over that. Deep down something told me I had known it all along.

It took some time for me to digest all this. To admit this was to admit I was out of control, and to be out of control in the sex area is to be out of control as a person.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. But it was the truth, and the truth promises to set us free. Discovering I was a sexaholic was like taking a punch on the jaw. It left me reeling but it got rid of a bad tooth. There was a line in the book that summed it up perfectly for me: “We were free to see and admit what we really were inside because we were finally free from having to act out what we were” (White Book, p. 84). This described my AA experience also. I saw the need to quit masturbating and give up all forms of girlie magazines. Since my wife and I weren’t married it meant we had to stop having sex. When I told her this she was none too happy. What bothered her more than not having sex with a sexaholic was having the sexaholic tell her when she could and couldn’t have sex.

I got an SA sponsor and called him every day. We would get current and then he’d suggest we pray, as his sponsor had prayed with him. This felt uncomfortable in the beginning, just as saying the Our Father after AA meetings had felt uncomfortable.

After three months of sexual sobriety I was able to give up smoking. I had smoked for 25 years. I figured I couldn’t feel any worse than I did, and I was right. There are many similarities between quitting smoking and quitting lust. The first day is the hardest. The second day is the second hardest. The third day is the third hardest, and so on. The point is it never gets harder than at the beginning. It can appear harder if I haven’t surrendered. But there the similarity ends for me. It has been many years since I had the craving to smoke, but I don’t believe I’ll ever get to the place where I’m no longer tempted to lust. SA, more than any other, is a program of repetition.

I set myself priorities I could handle, putting first things first. In the morning I would tell myself that the only thing I had to do that day was drive defensively and not smoke. Getting to SA meetings, wherever available, took preference over everything else. My wife and I discovered we really didn’t miss sex. We grew closer together by being less dependent on each other and by my staying away from my drugs. I was free to be honest with her and free not to manipulate her for sex or other favors. I missed masturbation and picture women, but I had my SA group.

After two years, my wife and I got married. In marriage, we continued to use abstinence as a tool. Going back to sex after such a long absence was a letdown to both of us. Sex wasn’t optional — it simply wasn’t possible at times.

I owe the life I lead today to a loving God that works through Sexaholics Anonymous, and most important, to its definition of sexual sobriety. Left to my own devices, and their name was legion, I would never have found this on my own. And it goes without saying that for me, there would be no sobriety from alcohol without sexual sobriety. Similarly, I don’t believe my sexual sobriety would last very long if I were to try controlled drinking. My drinking, although it clearly took on a life of its own, initially was something I did to compensate for what I saw on the inside of the cup. Today the cup is open to inspection and alcohol has no place in it.

I’m beginning to enjoy life in a deeper way. I’m back in a line of work I gave up 15 years ago. “What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind” the AA Big Book tells us (p. 87) and I’m amazed that this is increasingly true for me. I’m also grateful for the ability to do the work and the progressive ability to relate to people.

I could tell about how SA has grown in numbers and in sobriety and organization where I live. I could tell about the love and respect that has grown between my wife and me and the intimacy that’s possible between us. But I couldn’t tell about any of this if I didn’t believe that what I have is made available by a loving God to all who are willing to work this program in sobriety.