When I joined SA in the autumn of 2020, I was broken but willing to take direction. That’s because I was so desperate. Many years of experience in AA did afford me some advantages, though, including countless book study meetings and a good familiarity with the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve. I even remembered some passages, like page 417 about acceptance, which I could still recite word for word. The stuff I memorised still serves as a kind of mental reference library.

All this knowledge did absolutely zero for getting sexually sober, though. That is, until someone suggested SA, which I surrendered to, desperately.

I immediately began looking for a female sponsor in SA and attended meetings daily. I also attacked the literature as I had in AA. I underlined impactful passages with colored pens, which turned each book into a personal workbook. When my inner sexaholic does her thing and torments me, I now have another personal reference library close at hand. My White Book is so heavily underlined, highlighted, and annotated that it’s almost unreadable in places. All the prayers are notated in the margins with the page corners turned down. There was a time I’d go through each of those folded corners and pray all the prayers in my quiet time.

I was blessed with a sponsor who taught me to read a passage each day, write freestyle impressions about it, and send her what I wrote. We worked together that way through much of the Big Book, the White Book, and the Twelve and Twelve. I will be ever grateful to her for showing me how to live with that firm foundation to my recovery. She taught me, “whenever I’m troubled, the literature has solutions.” This fit well with my view of Program literature being my personal reference library. I remember that time with my first sponsor fondly.

I’m reworking the Steps with a new sponsor, and she’s having me follow the SA book, Step Into Action. For each Step, it suggests several passages to study in other books. This is a slower approach to working the Steps, but it’s laying another sound foundation to my recovery.

Although I had freed myself from most social media and tech gadgetry, a mentor suggested I get a chat app that many SA members here in the UK commonly use — I had no idea such things existed. Then, because the world was in lockdown when I joined SA in 2020, I embraced online meetings and made contacts all around the world. I enthusiastically threw my lonely self into all the technological connection I could find. I took to heart that “The unconnected sexaholic is a misconnection waiting to happen” (SA 34). I came to understand “unconnected” to mean unconnected more from God than from fellows. This was a very meaningful realization for me.

I’d say the core of my success in recovery is leaning heavily on Program literature. It’s helped me understand and deal with my inner addict, I grow in my personal program because of the literature, and it helps me grow in all aspects of life when I “practise these principles in all [my] affairs” (SA 143). My main source for knowledge consumption was digital media with its constant barrage of bite-size chunks of questionable information. Not only had it stolen hours from each day, it became the lens through which I viewed my life. Replacing that digital lens through which I focused most of my time and thought with the new lens of approved literature of SA, I find life so much more worth living. I thank my sponsors for this huge perspective shift as I try to pass on my love of the literature to my sponsees.

I suffer from chronic pain and a sleep disorder, so I’m frequently awake for long hours at night. I love the silence, and I love consuming the literature and recording my thoughts and impressions in study journals during those quiet hours when I can hear HP’s influence a little more clearly. I can take a recovery perspective with my pain and sleep problems by enjoying my immersion in the literature until I’m able to sleep. I can look at these medical problems then, as a gift from Higher Power. I can look for encouragement to be good to myself, and to feast on the experience, strength, and hope of those who have gone before me and enshrined it in writing.

I firmly believe that when I study recovery literature and write, Higher Power communicates with me. It’s my form of meditation. When I do this, I have a good day. When I don’t, I don’t (nor do people I come in contact with). It really is that simple for me.

When I write, I discover afresh what my heart really believes. And when the ESSAY publishes something, I get to pass my experience on so it might help someone else. I see the ESSAY as one sexaholic talking to another, a real “meeting in print” (SA Service Manual, ch. 15, p. 1).

Our program literature is why I’m still alive today — happy, joyous, and free! I will never be grateful enough.