I am a grateful recovering sexaholic. Because of my dad’s death and mother’s illness I came to California to help out and ended up at the North Hollywood SA group, where I found recovery. Halleluiah! I did my First Step with them which was the most healing and surprisingly, the most cleansing experience I’ve ever had in my life. I say surprising because I’m a woman and was greatly outnumbered in the meetings by men! To give a moral inventory on my sexual history, including my abuse as a child, to a large (and I mean large) group of men took all the courage I could muster. But I can’t put into words how healing it was to hear men admit to me they had been perpetrators themselves of abuse of children and that they’d never heard a woman’s First Step and how much it helped them. They thanked me for sharing and having the courage to do it. (I think I began to understand then what it’s really all about.) What joy, by surprise! Never would I have thought that that could be healing and freeing, but it was. God “writes straight with crooked lines,” doesn’t he? The shame I’d felt forever seemed to be just melting away with each one that shared his or her feedback (there were three women there too). I’d gotten a sponsor (a woman) as soon as I joined the group and a kind of co-sponsor (a man). I feel I have the best of both worlds because I’m learning for the first time in my life how to have healthy male and female relationships. I’m also beginning to become comfortable with real life for the first time in my whole life. I’ve spent so many years inside my head in fantasy; real life, honest life in recovery is so much better!

Well, all this to say I’ve returned to my real world here in Spokane, WA with six and one-half months’ sobriety and there is no SA here. I’ve been attending open 12-Step meetings since being home and although they help, it’s just not the same. I’ve shared my story with some here who I felt needed to hear it, but perhaps they haven’t bottomed out yet. It’s hard to believe that in a place this large there isn’t another person familiar with SA or needing SA fellowship. There just has to be, so I’m writing to you to make myself a contact person for my area.