When this piece was written, SA was only one year old, but even then there were temptations to conform to the rapidly shifting cultural mores. Perhaps the piece is even more relevant today, where there is increasing pressure to put personality before the principles embodied in our Traditions.

Submitted 10 March ’82, rev. 7/84, re-submitted 7/07

Today the world is adrift on a sea of rapidly shifting mores. Change is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. The last eighty years have surpassed the rate of change of the last eight thousand, and the last thirty have probably surpassed it all. Every aspect of our lives and sexual thinking are affected. Thousands of voices clamor for attention, preaching new “freedoms” of every kind. Was it not but a few years ago that “shacking up”—what the courts called “cohabitation”—was thought to be abnormal? Today it is called a “meaningful relationship” or having a “significant other.” And witness the new movement to legalize incest.

Look closely at any of the sexual trends in the last few decades; there is something more than mere reversal of attitudes or even revolution here. There is a dissolution of the entire fabric holding couples and families together.

Such forces as the Pill, the Bomb, the technological revolution, world war, the population explosion, and especially the media are all facilitating changes in the attitudes and beliefs of men and women toward sexual thinking and expression at a rate never before experienced in the history of the human race. And we are trapped within this flux.

One historian called it the “Sexual Wilderness,” but it is deeper than merely being lost in a wild land. The problem seems to be spiritual. There is rebellion here—against authority, against God. There is movement toward destruction here; sexual victimization has broadened to damage every aspect of life. There is connection with a larger spiritual darkness here.

We sexaholics, victims of our own attitudes and actions, are nevertheless children of our times. Not only did we let these forces into our own lives, we helped give them free reign in the world at large. As a result, we found ourselves not only adrift, but drowning in this sea of relativism, with nothing to anchor our frail lives against the storm of change without and the storm within. Enslaved to the darkness, we were powerless to save ourselves.

Most of the voices we hear today on the beguiling windsong playing about us offer the easier, softer way. They appeal to the lower instead of the higher, to our weakness instead of our best, to the transitory instead of the lasting. As angels of light offering new and glorious “freedom,” they pander to our lust. To have and indulge. Their cry is “DO IT!” rather than “I can do without it.” “Have it now!” rather than “Thy will be done.” Theirs is based on a deception—the primacy of the physical and emotional instead of the spiritual. And God is not there.

The best among these voices would settle for the “good.” But as Bill W. of AA used to say, the good is often the enemy of the best. And if SA has anything unique to offer, it is the best—sexual sobriety. Sobriety as we have come to see it. To the world at large, we have nothing to say except to bear witness to the truth of our own experience. But to the storm-tossed suffering sexaholics (and only to sexaholics), who want survival and freedom from the bondage of their “freedom,” this program offers an island in the storm, an anchor for the soul, a Connection with the unchanging, the real, and the true.