I don’t know why you’re not able to stay sober, but I don’t think it’s the incapacity to be honest. Agonizing over that is like agonizing over grieving the Spirit—it happens to very few people.

In my own case, I was unable to stay sober for two reasons. First, I had not fully taken Step One. There was a significant area of unmanageability and powerlessness in my life to which I was blind. Note that it was not related to sex or sexaholism. Once my eyes were opened to it, I was able to shift my priorities and stay sober.

Second, I wasn’t making sobriety/recovery my number-one priority at all times. I got too caught up in trying to function in the external world. It’s tough to say, but for me, if I want to stay sober, then I need to put SA before my job, my family, and my church. This is not an unusual situation—I know of people who resent AA because, as children, they were neglected by a father or mother in favor of AA. But we do what we have to do to stay sober. I personally think those neglected children would have been much worse off if the parent had remained an active alcoholic, but they don’t know that because they didn’t experience the active alcoholism.

This is the reason that some of us have to hit a hard bottom before we can get sober. We have to be willing to do whatever it takes. It’s a very selfish attitude, but as sexaholics, if we have a solid Step One then we know for sure that we’ll eventually lose everything if we don’t stop acting out. Sexaholism is a progressive path to hell—it keeps getting worse and worse the longer we feed it. It kills us slowly and painfully. It takes away everything we love and fills up our lives until there’s nothing else but the obsession.

If you look back to emails I’ve sent you in the past, I’ve suggested some radical things: do an in-patient program for 30, 60, or 90 days; rent an apartment in town and attend three meetings a day for a month or two; go to international conventions; travel the hours to a large city to attend meetings there; send out letters to local therapists, clergy, and corrections officers, asking them for potential sexaholic contacts; consider moving to a city with more meetings. The goal is to immerse yourself in recovery, especially for the first few months, and to spend time around people who have significant sobriety. But it’s always “I don’t have the money or the time or the inclination. I have responsibilities.” For me, those other responsibilities had to take second or third place in my priority system. And weirdly enough, things are working out okay. That’s what happens when I put my priorities in line with God’s priorities.

Your kids are growing up and leaving home. If money is an issue, perhaps you could sell your current house and purchase a smaller one. Does your wife have a job? If not, maybe she could get one. Do your church activities interfere with your recovery activities? Maybe you’ll have to cut back on your involvement with the church. Does your wife complain that you’re spending too much time on recovery and not enough on her? Tell her that this is what you need to do in order to stay sober and that you’d rather neglect her than lose her to your addiction. I’m sure there are many ways you could manage to do what you need to do, provided you set your priorities accordingly. After all, didn’t we always make time for our addiction at the expense of everything else? I don’t recall how much money you’ve spent on acting out, but program experience tells me that we will pay whatever it costs to keep feeding our addiction.

This is tough talk. And it’s the reason we have to get to the point where we have no other option but to stop before we can stay sober.

As your sponsor, I only make suggestions. You are the one who makes the actual choices and takes action on them. Also, I’m somewhat of a “bad” sponsor because I expect my sponsees to be self-motivated. I don’t track them down when they haven’t called for a while. I don’t keep hammering on them over and over to do things. I just make suggestions and let them do what they will. I lose a lot of sponsees because of this attitude, but it keeps me sober.