Soon after I got out of the Clinic in Bad Herrenalb in 1986, I moved to Bonn. I knew there was a male and a female SA member there and I got in touch with them. After speaking to my church minister, we had a meeting room. Thus, our first SA meeting took place on November 26, 1986 in Bonn.
A short while later there were four of us and we stayed that size for a long time. Often there were only two of us, but we could feel how the meeting was helping and only once did we have to cancel the meeting because of lack of attendees.
After a year we handed out service positions at our business meeting. The group atmosphere was best, we found, when every member had a service position. We started carrying the message as a group, starting early on with regular business meetings, which became the backbone of a stable group. Monthly business meetings, monthly Step meetings, and having those with more than 30 days’ sobriety speak in the first half of the meeting still mark the spirit and essence of SA in Bonn.
Conducting our first information meeting was not easy for us. We started organizing it at the end of 1987 and it finally took place a year later in October 1988, after a couple of detours and clumsy organization. Since then we have held information meetings every two years with very different results. One of our information meetings was attended by a prison official who robbed us of the illusion that we could do 12th Step work in prisons, like AA.
At the time of our first information meeting, we had five or six group members. Some came from Cologne, who were beginning to form a meeting there. A year later, the establishment of the Cologne meeting was announced at the business meeting of the German-speaking convention in November 1989. We had been asked to organize this convention. To accomplish this, our group held three business meetings a month. After this convention, we hosted conventions in May 1992 and in May 1995.
The group has continued to grow. About 10 people have been coming regularly for a couple of years now. In addition to the regular information meeting, the group holds an info meeting for the local hotline organization, and we can be reached via the local self-help group coordination center. Learning from our experiences, we again conduct two screenings for newcomers. It doesn’t seem to be enough to do just one screening. Our SA sobriety definition seems to demand two screenings.
With the help of the Higher Power, our group hopefully will go on meeting for a long time to come and thereby fulfill its task of carrying its message to sexaholics who still suffer.
Derk S., Bonn, Germany
(Editor’s Note: Beginning this issue, contributors to the Essay will be identified by first name, last initial, city and state. This change is in keeping with other 12-Step fellowship publications and is intended to allow readers to more easily identify contributors to the Essay. If a contributor requests that their identity be withheld, however, they will be identified as “Anonymous,” but readers who wish to correspond with contributors so identified may do so through the Central Office.)
