Response to Roy K.’s Letter and Papers to Tri-State NY and June Essay

• 24 supporting letters and calls
• 3 letters (no calls) against

A few notes from some of the calls:

“Your use of the term ‘pseudo-sexual’ is right on the mark! Really grabbed me as describing our condition.”

“I left SA because of the stand on committed relationships. Now I’m back and 100% for the SA position.”

“I’m with what you wrote 100%.”

“Very good! It’s the only response we can have.”

Group Feedback on Suggested Policy for Responding to Abuse Disclosed in SA Meetings

We can speak for ourselves and our SA meeting. We are recovering sexaholics who desire to stop lusting. We want the Twelve Steps of Recovery practiced in a fellowship and on a foundation of progressive victory over lust, that is, sexual sobriety. We agree that we must take a stand for something or else we can fall for anything, and our stand reflects our group conscience process, taken seriously, we believe.

Several of us have admitted having struggles with molestation urges. Nevertheless, we support the policy suggested in Essay, October ’90. Anyone who comes to SA while continuing to molest others, though relieving inner “pressure” by speaking about it, effectively turns his or her SA group into an enabler group where the person can persist in the abuse. We wish to accept the person but not the refusal of responsibility for their own actions as well as the impact on those molested. We say this for the well-being of all.

Had this policy been followed when several of us first came to SA, much needless suffering and harm done to ourselves and others, including substantial time in prison, could have been prevented.

Sad to say, in our early SA meetings, we consistently chose to distort SA’s qualifier on the 9th Step (“would injure them or others”). The earlier (pre-’89) edition of SA’s Big Book could have been very helpful in its clarity about how the 9th Step’s “except” clause was responsibly explained (found on page 3 of present edition).

But, you must see, being addicts and having impaired and fearful thinking while we were still resorting to our drug, we kept putting ourselves, not others and certainly not our Higher Power, in the center stage.

We now, as a sadder but wiser SA group, in desiring to abstain from lust in any form, including molestation, support the policy on sex offenders suggested in October ’90’s issue of Essay. Strong medicine for a powerful, cunning disease is the bottom line.

As with AA, SA meetings are not to be run by drunks who are still getting drunk, but by sex drunks in general recovery and sobriety. Blinded by lust, the god of this world, we tried to pretend that the persons whom we lusted after and with, were in a committed (and so non-lusting) relationship with us. Only when this lie was confronted and we were no longer enabled to keep playing such a hazardous game with others’ (and our own) lives, could we finally begin living the Program.

For several years, conferences and even several meetings a week, some of us “came,” yet without sustained SA sobriety. I personally never really “came to” until my molestation was lovingly, gently, and most importantly firmly confronted in non-negotiable terms.

Only following this, I “came to,” I woke up and then with my actions, not just in my head, I could “come to believe” the Program only works when we let it.

Over three years of hindered, half-measured working brought forth half-measure results on an irregular basis at best. And, of course, this also resulted in being deprived of the joy of recovery for so long.