I cringe with self-centered fear each time I hear a sexaholic attempting to assuage the pain and shame of a relapse by subtly downplaying the value of his or her lost sobriety. While beating myself up will strengthen my disease through shame and unworthiness, I equally enable my sickness if I minimize the importance of sobriety. Since I have quite a way to go before becoming a spiritual giant, today I have good reason to be very afraid of the possibility of losing my sobriety.

My own disease cost me a marriage, a career, some of my legal rights, and nearly my life, and it is only through sobriety that I have learned the true value of what I had lost. A man I once sponsored committed suicide at the beginning of this year. Another sits in jail today, having been arrested last week—he is looking at eight to 30 years in prison. Yet another still has all the worldly “blessings” that I now lack—job, family, legal freedoms—and yet he remains absolutely miserable because he stays caught in the cycle of addiction. He cannot—as I could not—experience these gifts as true blessings while remaining in the service of lust.

It must remain very clear to me that the life I live today—one in which I am able to face challenges successfully that once would have overwhelmed me, and remain helpful to others in the midst of them—is not a thing that I own and control like a car, but a priceless unearned gift that is contingent upon the growth and maintenance of my spiritual condition (AA 85). The possibility for this spiritual experience hinges upon the gift of sobriety, and my very life depends upon my remembering the enormous value of sobriety and the True Source of it.

If a man I sponsor relapses, I urge him not to beat himself up, while encouraging him to embrace the full consequences of his mistake. He will need to seek a great deal of help from God and others in order to do this successfully. I do not believe that I would be alive and sober today without having fully grieved the loss of what my disease has cost me. This required me to face the painful truth about what I had done and take responsibility for my behaviors—which in my case were criminal—without identifying with the behaviors themselves. I had to learn to call my crimes what they truly were without becoming a victim of my own judgmentalism. It was impossible for me to experience this without divine help, and God chose to use the fellowship of Sexaholics Anonymous, for which I do not have the capacity to be sufficiently grateful.

My sponsor told me that I am not those things I did. If I were, it wouldn’t have been killing me inside to do them. My actions in the disease were who I am not. That’s why they were so harmful to me: because I was betraying my own nature in doing them, and without the spiritual solution offered by our program, I was becoming “the kind of person” who did such horrible things to others.

Today I am learning one day at a time to become the man He created me to be. And today I need to affirm that my sobriety is the most valuable thing that I have. If I become prideful of it, I will forget that it is a gift and I’ll stumble; yet if I forget its true value, I may one day find myself unwilling to pay the necessary price to protect it. I cannot afford either mistake.