Originally published in ESSAY, September 1993
He trudged the Road of Happy Destiny — the experience, strength and hope of the late Jesse L.
[Reprinted excerpts from Jesse’s talk at the International SA Conference at Nashville in July 1993. For information on how to obtain the entire talk, contact SA International Central Office.]
Thank you very much. It is beautiful to be with you. I have looked for this opportunity for some time and now it is here.
I am Jesse L, a grateful sexaholic. I did not lust yesterday. I have been lust-free for a goodly number of days. These days add up to 3,886 lust-free days. For that freedom from lust I am never sufficiently grateful. Because of 17 years of Twelve-Step life before I got to SA, my years in SA have been focused primarily on the Twelfth Step. I reworked the first nine Steps on SA in my first three months. Since then, as Chuck C. and Clancy have recommended, I have spent my life on the last three Steps, principally searching only for knowledge of God’s will for me and the power to carry that out. This work has shown me that lust is the central issue in my life.
All sexual sobriety is what happens when you are lust-free. You can get sexual sobriety and still be lusting but it isn’t worth much. The most extreme example was the guy who, long ago in our group with a very generous IQ, convinced himself that not masturbating meant that he was sexually sober. So he would masturbate to the point of ejaculation and stop so that he could be sexually sober. That was his technical sexual sobriety and it is the most extreme example of technical sexual sobriety I have ever found. But he kept slipping for some reason.
His exaggerated use of lust while staying technically sober by his interpretation of our program shows us our real enemy, which is lust. If you play with any lust, it is playing with the tiger and that tiger will kill you. If you stay lust-free and stop lusting instantly when it comes, then sexual sobriety is inevitable for you.
So the minute we are ready for the prayer “God help us,” God works perfectly and lust is powerless before that prayer of “God help us.”
I believe the spiritual sickness of lust is wanting sexual stimulation at that moment instead of what God is offering us. Later we come to see that lust is wanting anything other than what God is offering us each moment. My story tells how lust killed my life. And my story tells how stopping all lust instantly and seeing lust for what it really is has led me to a new life that I didn’t even know existed, to say nothing of knowing it was possible for me.
To me this program is only about one thing—lust. All the rest is just details. Lust is the only issue, sexual sobriety is the inevitable result. Lust robbed me of real life from age seven to age fifty-seven. Lust cost me fifty years of life. No wonder I wanted to stop all lusting the minute you told me that what I thought was my life-long friend was really my enemy. No one had told me that before and only your special ability and knowledge as a fellow man or woman sexaholic could reveal the enemy that was lurking beneath the guise of a friend. It’s like a spy novel. Your most special agent is a spy for the enemy and you must kill him immediately.
I had never suspected him, lust, so no wonder I was immediately grateful to you for the good news. And I am never sufficiently grateful. And most important of all, since you came to me ten years ago and told me who the enemy was, this fellowship has given me the safe haven where I could seek a lust-free life.
As I have progressed down your path, I have found that a lust-free path has led me to a life of beauty and joy I had sought since a young man. When I was seventeen I went to our young Baptist minister. I had been baptized at twelve and became more and more aware of the contradictions of church life. Our minister was a very religious young man and I loved being in his church. But I said to that pastor, “Reverend, there’s got to be something more.” Now I know what that something more is.
Our program is one of attraction rather than promotion. It is so significant that you asked me to speak on the Twelfth Step because in my Twelfth Step work in Bozeman, my life was an almost complete failure in attracting people to that other Twelve Step program. I couldn’t attract anybody. I couldn’t carry the message in my own town through my own life. My words in my books were beautiful and powerful. My life wasn’t beautiful and powerful. The people who read my books were attracted to the program in droves but the people who read the big book of my life didn’t want it. I watched people my books had attracted start meetings that grew astronomically. Yet, when my wife dropped out of the flourishing Bozeman group, the membership dropped way down and it just barely stayed alive for the next five years when I was in that program. So I had five years of failure in my life in Twelve Stepping in another program. That was one thing that was making me ready.
The other thing was a volcano of sexual addiction that blew up in my face in 1969 and 1970. And my addiction blew up while I was still trying to practice that other Twelve Step program. I would ask God to help me each morning and slip again. I would wake up each night with fire in my belly wondering why I couldn’t stop and seeing that my whole life was on the line each day. I got into affairs. As I slipped down that toboggan slide into hell, I violated every canon and every honor and everything about me. I had no integrity in the beginning of the addiction and I had nothing but shame and horror at the end.
In July of 1976 in a Westwood, California bookstore I had a deep awakening that paved the way to the real awakening that was to come seven long years later. I had gone to spend three days with a woman I had been having an affair with. But in that early evening insight, I saw all of a sudden that I loved my wife more than anyone in the world. I saw that she was the person I most wanted to be with. I saw that I had to break off the affair with this woman a day early and go back home and try to learn how to be a man and how to be responsible. That was in late July of 1976. So I had white-knuckle sobriety without you and without the secret.
My wife thought I was trying to torture her to death. She had recovery in another program and a new way of life. I knew there was something wrong in my marriage and with women but I didn’t know what it was. In March of 1983, we were in Phoenix for the winter. There was a sex addict minister in some kind of recovery going around telling from the pulpit his wild tales about his descent into hell as a sexual addict. And boy was that a spectacular tale! At the end of his addiction he had progressed to the point where he was looking out over his congregation deciding what woman in that congregation he was going to have sex with that night. He would go to a motel in his little town and check in with her, so he was just screaming to be caught. That shows how the path to idiocy goes.
Well, that story was the talk of the town. “Wow, did you hear about him?” The story was all over Phoenix. So, of course my wife heard about this story and saw the parallels to what she had earlier suspected about me. As for me, I didn’t see that the story applied to me at all, because I wasn’t acting out as I saw it. I would just walk into a restaurant and make sure that our waitress knew what I was and who I was. I thought it was kidding and joking. Hah! I was coming on to every woman I saw. I would lie in bed fantasizing sex with another woman. My wife would call me a jerk and I would use as a tranquilizer some sexual fantasy about one of those women I thought loved me. Now one of them did try to blackmail me but in my twisted mind I thought she really loved me. She wanted to, she just had these little problems like needing money, otherwise she would never have needed to blackmail me. So to my mind, it was true love.
So, my wife in a great moment of clarity and a growing recovery, got hold of an SA folder with two telephone numbers and handed it to me. “Get in SA or get out!” Thirty-four years of marriage, seven years after I had quit my acting out, and that’s my reward for being a good guy? Here I was being the best guy I could be and I got zapped. But I took the folder and made the call. I got Kent on the phone, a guy who came in from the first Dear Abby letter. He said, “Jesse, it’s lust. It’s what’s in your head that is killing you.” That was the greatest relief that I have ever felt. Nothing in my life has been more important than that.
So I had a ton of lust thinking to stop and that’s why my story in the little blue book says, “It Was All in My Head.” So like some of you who have spoken at this conference earlier, I too have to apologize for my poor acting out story when I came in because it is so feeble compared to the wonderful acting out stories some of you have to tell. Phooey! I think our situation is just like in AA. We can play one-upmanship with the horrible details of our stories that give us so much concern. By focusing on the “I drank worse than you did” aspect of our stories, we are continuing our isolation and separation. And we risk missing the central point of our stories. The details of our stories are not to be hung on to gleefully. I think we need to see to the heart of our stories and that the details are possibly totally inconsequential. Because lust is the issue, not those details.
When I came into SA, I had some advantages that helped me. All the years of sponsorship and teaching by those old AA’s in that other program were ready go to work for me now that I was off my last big drug, lust.
I came in here knowing that the program was all God. So I said, “God help me” the instant any lust came to my mind. I took every measure I could to avoid lust. I stayed out of malls, stayed away from the television and movies. I might be walking down the street and see a woman coming towards me, I’d walk over to the other side of the street if I had to avoid lust. The people at my meetings in those early days couldn’t believe what I was doing. “You are giving up the best part of life,” they said to me. I thought, “Well, maybe I am. I’m a maniac.” But it’s no problem. Sometimes taking things to extremes serves me to good advantage and that was one, I’ll tell you, where I believe it really served me.
Now, if the prayer “God help me” wasn’t enough to stop lust from continuing, I found myself a bigger weapon. Sometimes I would just be driving along in the car and all of a sudden, bang, my ego had slipped a videotape in my head of the most intense sex possible and I’m watching it play. Where did that come from? Well my ego knows where the lust tapes are and it pops them on there for its amusement. So I would say, “God, help me.” But the videotape keeps on playing, it won’t shut off. So then I go to the heavyweight stuff, a long prayer. For me it is the Our Father, a long prayer. “Our Father . . .,” and I’m saying that prayer and see to my horror that I’m still lusting in a part of my head while I’m praying. Lust just won’t shut off. But it is no problem, I found, because of two things. When I’m praying, lust can’t really get hold of me because lust needs my undivided attention. And I will never give lust my undivided attention. That videotape can play and play. And then I found another secret, and that is I can always pray longer than my lust attack can last. So always at the end of one of those Our Fathers would be a time when the tape had stopped playing and the screen was blank.
Now it might come back on five minutes later. No sweat. Here we go again boys, “God help me, God help me, God help me, Our Father . . .” Or, there have been other times when that tape will come on and I’m just a little lethargic about snapping into the “God help me,” for a few seconds or so. I hear people with these ten second lust rules. Not for me. You can do enough lusting in ten seconds to slip good. And even three seconds, that isn’t fast enough for me. I need the second thought rule. That is, that the first thought is on God because I’m an insane sexaholic and God knew what he was doing when he made me that way. But the second thought, that’s on me, and I don’t want it. Sometimes I’m not as sharply aware of my sexaholic nature as I should be. Sometimes I lose some of my vigilance, the eye of the hawk. So I come to awareness in my third or fourth lust thought before I’m aware of where I’m at. But then, bang, “God help me.” I’ve said that “God help me” prayer so many times that a lot of times now I’ll see something that’s an occasion of lust and I’ve automatically gone to “God help me” before I’m even aware of what’s going on. That prayer and that vigilance for lust is now built into me like patch pockets in a suit.
So, from the start I had a ton of lusting. But I saw that I got the same relief from stopping lusting that all the others got from stopping lots of acting out and lusting. So being a scientist, a PhD psychologist, I’m impressed by the fact that those who mostly just stopped lusting when we came in got the same results as the person who stopped lusting and acting out. That says to me that acting out isn’t the real problem. Acting out is just the eventual and inevitable result of lusting.
So I knew the program was all God and believed it totally so I knew I just had to stop. I stopped lusting that sharply for thirty days and went to Oklahoma City to be with two of our sons in treatment. Two other kids were living there who were drug and alcohol counselors and they both looked at me and said, “Dad, you’re different.” Those were such beautiful words to hear. They were the first external signs I got that I was making progress. And those words came after just thirty days. Those words made me look at other things and I saw the shame and guilt, most of it, had gone.
So, I gave a talk when I first came to Oklahoma with only thirty days of sobriety, and my little friend Sylvia came trotting in and she heard my talk and knew that was her problem, too. Now I had a meeting to go to. And then I went to Provo, Utah, to talk to the Overeaters because they had read my books. I told them I didn’t know that much about overeating so I talked to them about my sexual addiction. I passed a sheet of paper around and a whole bunch of women signed up. Now I had some new friends in Salt Lake to talk to, to help me with my program. Then I went to Minneapolis to make a talk and a group started up there, the one Jim E. was talking about. I went to Bozeman for my School of Life and a guy from Edmonton was there. He went home and started a group in Edmonton. Bill from Livingston needed a group and found me, so the Bozeman group started up. And the guy from Edmonton became my sponsor.
I went to Seattle and gave a talk to alcoholics there and talked to the sexaholics alone in the evening. The SA group there had died out so the AAs who were sexaholics started a new group. Wherever I went, it seemed like a group popped up. My son said, “Dad, you’re just like Johnny Appleseed.” And all that message-carrying was done with only three to six months of sobriety. How could I carry the message so well with so little sobriety and still so crazy from the old lust? Ordinarily that’s impossible, especially when I had to face that I couldn’t carry any message for years in my other program.
Was it me and my charisma? No, obviously not. Me and my charisma didn’t work before, did it? It didn’t work worth a dang. No, charisma wasn’t the secret. What was the secret? Near as I can figure out it was some combination of God’s grace and a lust-free spirit. God couldn’t work through me before because all the lust clogged up the channels. So the message-carrying I did in those earliest days is another reason I think a lust-free spirit is so vital.
One of the things God handed me when I walked into this program was a lot of celibacy. So I ended up with more celibacy time than all but one priest in this program. That was one of the gifts God had for me. But the program tells us that. It says sex is optional. Isn’t that beautiful? And it is proof that you can build a beautiful marriage despite that. It doesn’t make my wife totally happy that that was taken away. But there are little obstacles in the road that a car will drive over, but it is the great big obstacles like the boulders that the car won’t drive over. So it seems to me now that it might have been the lust-free spirit that was the only difference, and the big difference, that let me carry a new message. Now people wanted what I had. If you want what we have and are willing to go to any lengths to get it, then you are ready to take certain Steps. And they wanted what I had.
But all these early times in my groups, I couldn’t figure out why others would play with lust and weren’t willing to stop like I was. It took me years to see that each of us comes in from different situations. In my case I had gone through all these things I told you about. Lust nearly cost me my marriage. Lust smashed every value I had. Lust made a mockery of my life. Lust robbed me of my integrity. Lust made it impossible for me to really practice my other program. Lust made it impossible for me to attract others to that program. So I had many reasons for giving up lust that others didn’t have. That’s why I said I was a grateful sexaholic in the first meetings I came to. I was grateful for it because that’s what it took for me to break out of my prison and to smash a hole in the wall of my monstrous ego.
So I had two adventures in this program, one was my adventure in fellowship where I reached out to others in every way I could. For years it was hard to reach out with the phone or letter. But as AA says, I acted my way to right thinking.
My second adventure was with lust. That adventure has carried me home. My wife has always been teaching me and a special place was when I came into this program. By reading the spiritual books and their definitions of what lust was, she started teaching me that lust wasn’t just wanting sexual things. Lust is wanting anything that God doesn’t have for you in this moment, anything God doesn’t have for you right now.
I believe we sexaholics have a special talent for holding pictures in our minds. Just as alcoholics can’t handle the chemical alcohol, I think we have a special problem because of our ability to retain pictures. I don’t want any more pictures in my head.
We live up a mountain valley outside Bozeman and I love to watch the Boston Celtics. My wife and son started a Serenity Shop a few years ago. She comes home tired needing to watch Jeopardy to relax. Well guess what time Jeopardy is on? Boston Celtics time. It was an uneasy peace for a few seasons, “Honey, you watch the game tonight and I’ll do something else.” So we got a second dish out back. That’s the Boston Celtics dish. Each fall I return with new hope. But when the beer commercial comes on in the Boston Celtics game, I just hit the mute button and turn away.
My wife sees that and says, “What’s wrong with you? You don’t have any freedom. Are you going to act out because you see some gals playing on a beach with some guys?” Well, I’m not going to try to teach her all about sexaholism, nobody can understand this but a sexaholic. The reason I mute those commercials and turn away is that I just don’t want those pictures.
So I think being as lust-free as we can be is the heart of sexaholism. I think lust is the shield we put up to keep away life, to keep away love, to keep away God and they are all the same, life, love, God. Sexual sobriety isn’t the issue; lust is the issue. I’ve seen lots of sexual sobriety and some of it isn’t worth much. And who are the long-term people in sexual sobriety who slip? They are the ones who are lusting, sometimes even in its subtlest forms of romantic and other kinds of stuff. Those romance novels in the supermarket are just as pornographic as the hardest core stuff because the readers of both are lost in lust. But in a way the romance novels are more dangerous because people think that romantic lust is harmless. It sure isn’t harmless for a sexaholic, it is as dangerous to us as dynamite.
On the other hand, I’ve never seen freedom from lust that wasn’t staggeringly beautiful. I’ve seen that it has always planted those people’s feet firmly on sobriety’s pathway. So lust-free seems to me to be the total answer. Those who don’t lust, stay sober. Those who lust, don’t stay sober. I’ll repeat that. Those who don’t lust, stay sober. Those who lust, don’t stay sober.
Occasions of lust are in our society constantly. It’s like matches dropping on a pavement. When a lighted match falls on a pavement, there is no fire. But say I’m lusting. That’s like throwing a little kindling wood down, dropping little pieces of paper and spilling a little gasoline on the pile. Still no problem, there won’t be a fire. But then look what happens when an occasion of lust comes along and the match drops on that pile of lust. What lust is, is going halfway down the waterslide and trying to stop. What lust is, is like the guy who masturbated to the point of ejaculation and tried to stop. So all wanting things that God isn’t offering us in this moment is lust and will kill us.
My wife recently said to me that in spiritual life we first must face the fact that we are going to die. I thought I had because I had a heart attack thirty years ago and that threat of death has been hanging over our heads for most of our marriage. But I saw that I wasn’t ready to die and that lust and sex with young women was a way of hanging onto life for me and a way to steal somebody else’s life and vitality. So thanks to SA, I did a couple of things. I stopped using sex to hang onto life and drive away death. And because of the peace and joy and love that you have given me and a whole bunch of things that I don’t understand, I have finally accepted that I am going to die. It’s so beautiful to accept that because until I accept that I can’t do anything. Now, thanks to you, I can see so clearly that, until I die, I’m going to live, or turning it around, I’m going to live until I die.
Now I’m planting trees. And I’m not frantically grabbing at projects that I want to do before I die. There is no hurry. I’ve got all the time in the world.
Freedom from lust of all kinds has led me to the moment by moment awareness and appreciation of what God is offering me at this moment. That’s life at its highest. There isn’t anything greater than that. Now, you are all used to it. You all experience it regularly, you just didn’t understand quite how radical it was. And you experience it, each of you, in your meetings. When you are in that meeting there isn’t hardly a wandering thought in that meeting. And then we gradually take that moment-by-moment awareness we practice in our meetings and we carry it on in all the rest of our life outside the meetings.
There is a line in “The Problem” that says, “we went for the connection that had the magic because it bypassed intimacy and true union.” But we were looking for the magic. Do you remember any of you, looking for that magic? I’ve got good news for you; I’ve got great news for you. One of the most beautiful lines in the Big Book of AA says, just ahead of the promises, “Before we are half way through . . .” Well, I must be at that time it talks about because by now I’ve found the real connection and the real magic. In the last three days, and I mention them most specifically because we have shared them together, I have been experiencing that magic. As I have been moving among you these three days I have had the watchful eye of the hawk for those of you who are carrying God’s gifts for me. As we caught each other’s eye, almost all the time I was able to receive the gift you had for me. It could have been a loving glance, an appreciative smile, a recognition of another of God’s children. It could have been some gift you had to give me. It could have been you giving me the gift of allowing me to serve you in some way. So that is the real magic. It is the real gold, not the fool’s gold that you and I spent our lifetime chasing. As one great spiritual man said, the world is its own magic.
I have come to believe that way deep inside us is the ego and a razor’s edge away from it is that whole total life of the spirit there in us waiting to be discovered. And the way I found it was by pursuing a lust-free life. With your help and in your company I came to this new land.
Now, all of a sudden I wake up to find myself at the place I had asked the Reverend about at age 17, fifty years ago: The place where the something more is. I believe now that there is something more and I have found it and I know where it is and it is right here with you.
So this is what I have been doing as I have been walking among you here is living this new life that you gave me. I’ve been receiving all your gifts and now there is a new bunch of golden threads between me and each of you that will last forever more.
Jesse L., Bozeman, MT