At the heart of our condition is the drive for union with Person. Bonding. This drive, instead of having been diminished by our misconnections in lust and sex, seemed to increase. Never satisfied with the substitutes, our longing for personal union merely deepened and energized the vain pursuit for the real.

We come into SA, come off the substitute connections, and lo and behold, we start finding true union with person in other SA members. First, as we identify with them in meetings, sharing honestly. There is bonding here; the first time we’ve ever been intimate with people in the deepest secrets of the heart. We are totally exposed and vulnerable, leading with our weakness. And we are accepted! And the others feel the same way. The “safe haven” of being together is a marvelous refuge. A dependency develops; we need them coming back to meetings, and they need us. We sense that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we must continue having whatever it is we’re getting there. Fellowship. That’s why it’s so threatening for regulars to stop coming to meetings.

Then, we seem to single out those toward whom we have some special affinity, for whatever reason, and risk closer intimacy. More self-disclosure and more bonding ensue. But something else happens. We also begin to see their defective natures in action. And they ours. Often, we don’t like what we see, and our impulse is to push them away or back away ourselves. They’re part of true union now; they’ve got to be perfect! They can’t let us down. Thus, we bring to this growing interaction and union all of the faulty mechanisms of our sexaholism, for ours is the illness of diseased unions. What happens? The very people we need so desperately for recovery—other members—eventually begin relating to us out of their sickness! And we out of ours. How can it be otherwise, given what we are? Sometimes it’s such a jolt we don’t know what hit us. Pain.

Since one essential aspect of our malady seems to be misplaced dependency, we often subconsciously make the other person serve more than his or her natural place in our support system within the fellowship bond. Love and support stop being enough. Perhaps we need them too much, as we did our parents or lust or dependency objects. Perhaps they need us too much. Perhaps we begin transferring suppressed anger at parent or authority figures onto them, or they onto us. Maybe it’s sibling rivalry all over again. All of the relational dysfunctions with which we come into SA eventually get expressed in our relations with other members. When this happens, it’s just a matter of time before that person “lets us down,” just like we thought everyone else used to do, or when they no longer “satisfy” our need of them. All this can blow us apart, and sometimes it does.

Thus, the very mechanism of our addiction can come into play between SA members. We can act out our sexaholism with each other without having sex or lust! (Which indicates that sex was only a symptom, not our real problem.) That’s why victory over our diseased unions must become part of the process of recovery. We’ll never get well without it. We learn to simply trudge through the pain and learn from experience. The Steps and Traditions tell us how. And we can walk through the experiences to build a deeper bond.

One member describes the experience of having to step back from another member in order to recover from her excessive dependency. She suffered terribly from the pain the experience caused, but she also found that it contributed to her recovery in a way that nothing else could. Instead of fighting back or running, she humbled herself before God, accepted the situation, and prayed first that she might be free to be an instrument for good in that person’s life. Then she asked that she might be connected with that person in accordance with God’s will and not her own. And that’s the very thing that happened. Not only did she begin to be freed from dependency in that relationship, she began to be free from dependency in other relationships as well. And as a result, she was able to relate to that person and to others on the basis of a more genuine friendship.

This points up the necessity of making the transition to our true Connection with God as soon as possible. If we linger on having the group, sponsor, or other individuals as Higher Power, they may remain nothing more than a power created in the image of our own sick need. A lower power! Which prevents our real need from ever being filled. Without finding personal union with God in our own experience (Steps Eleven and Twelve), we increasingly must use, abuse, and distort other relationships in attempts to fill that need. This basic need of ours won’t go away; it’s got to have some kind of connection. That’s just the way we are.

Thus it seems we can’t survive in the fellowship we need for survival without learning how to love one another through the illness. And considering the load of liabilities we come in with, we don’t seem to be able to love without the love of God. In the final analysis, our program always seems to come back to God and His love for us. We can and do love, because He first loved us.