My name is Will. I’m a sexaholic and part of a recovering couple. I’ve been sexually sober since January 5, 2000.

Last Saturday, my wife and I came home from our beach vacation. I usually have trouble on vacations. I have rage problems when I’m outside of my usual environment. But I came home and was still sexually and emotionally sober. Mostly it’s because I’ve admitted that I’m totally powerless over lust and can’t be looking at people other than my wife. When I see an interesting person in the distance I surrender and admit my powerlessness—and I don’t have to look anymore. I don’t need more information.

One difficulty with our vacations is that we live in one house with my wife, my four siblings, my siblings’ spouses, and several of their kids. I love my family but I struggle with judging some of the in-laws. One goal on this vacation was to not judge and to just be with them. We also wanted to just be with our kids, who are in their 20s. My wife and I like to give the kids all kinds of instructions and directions, but we mostly keep our mouths closed these days and just gaze at them. It’s a way to be together without too many problems.

One of my sponsor’s greatest gifts to me was telling me that I need to be my kids’ father, and that there’s a time for correcting them, but it’s not when I’m emotionally upset. He emphasized that, more than anything, I need to stay connected with my kids. That was great advice. As a rager and control freak, many times in their teenage years I wanted to disown them. At one point I participated in a recovery program for drug-addicted kids and their families. I found it helpful to learn to detach. Today I have good relationships with my kids.

I’m no expert on marriage or families or relationships, but my wife and I have found something that works for us. As I’ve heard many old-timers say, I know less today than I knew when I came in here. When I came into the program I thought I knew everything, but I was wrong.

I’m the oldest male child of a family of five siblings. My sisters are eight and nine years older, my brothers, five and eight years younger. My parents stayed unhappily married for 60 years. There were three pairs in my family of origin and I was the odd man out. My mother is an unrecovered adult child of an alcoholic. My father, until his death 2 ½ years ago, was a self-proclaimed workaholic and probably a sexaholic.

When I was 18 months old, my mother seriously contemplated killing me with a pair of scissors. Frightened by this, she rushed off in the snow with me in a stroller and had herself hospitalized. She had electric shock treatments. She told me about that as a kid. I lived with an aunt and uncle for months. I believe those early experiences created the background of isolation, anxiety, and fear that have always been with me and fueled my addiction.

My parents fought constantly. I was a pawn in their battles. Their favorite topic was my lack of masculine traits and behaviors. My father was movie-star handsome, a high school football star, and a marine during WWII. Despite these macho credentials, he was a sensitive, charming man who never drank or swore, and who, I think, was worried about his own masculinity. I was an embarrassment to my father. I was his sensitive side, for all the world to see. One of my earliest memories was of him pitching whiffle balls to me, which I could not hit. Neither of us knew that I had needed glasses since birth.

Another early memory, at five, was being with him in the car when he heard on the radio that a famous actress had died. He cried. I mention this because that actress might have been the model in the first pin-ups I saw at about that time. They were hung on the various barrels of scrap at a scrap yard. I thought they were pretty. My father told me not to tell my mother. I told her everything. That was the beginning of aligning myself with my mom against my dad and naked women.

In primary school, I made friends at first but they gradually fell away. I didn’t know how to do the normal give and take in a friendship. I desperately wanted to connect with other boys. Unfortunately, I found my connection playing strip poker with my next younger brother’s friends. We did it on a weekly basis in the summer. I was the ringleader. I felt a lot of shame about this. I also started masturbating in front of mirrors. I didn’t believe that what I saw in the mirrors was me. As I have read in Sexaholics Anonymous, I was disconnected from myself (SA 203).

I became my mother’s ally and her surrogate spouse. When my parents fought, I would run from the house to a nearby park and cry and masturbate and ask God to take me home to be with Him. Walking back home, I’d see other people sitting down for dinner, the golden glow coming from their homes, and I’d think, “I want that.” That’s not what I had. Home for me as a kid was church and the library and music lessons; those were my favorite places.

After finding my dad’s stash of pornography, I was never again free not to use it when home alone. At 14, I was already swearing off with New Year’s Eve resolutions. Then I’d go masturbate because I knew I couldn’t keep the resolutions. At 15, my parents found me acting out with pornography. They said nothing. I don’t think my father ever talked to me about sex.

At 16, I had my first connection with an adult man. At 17, I lost my virginity to a 19-year-old divorcee. At 19, I left home to live with a man in a three-year committed relationship. We called it a marriage. But I never stopped going to church. In fact, at 17, I found a very loving church family. Most of the members had gone through some kind of emotional wringer. Unbeknownst to me, quite a few of them were in recovery. I found my spiritual home at that church. I got to see loving families in action. However, by age 22 I was ready to enter a monastery. It seemed like the perfect answer. I could live a life of prayer, solitude, books, music, and manual labor.

I went on a 10-day retreat with the intention of entering the monastery. I talked openly with the spiritual director about my struggles—and he said he didn’t think that this would be the place for me, living with a bunch of men. I was crushed.

One afternoon, reading my sacred scripture under a juniper tree, I felt God leading me to go back, join the church community, and be open to marriage. I went to a meeting for new members and I met my wife. It was not love at first sight, but she felt safe. She lent me a book by an author we both admired, and I started courting her—something I had never done before. I shared with her about my struggles and she didn’t run.

We went to mandatory couples counseling at the church and we flunked the compatibility test. Our first fight was the week before the wedding. We got married anyway. I thought the marriage would fix me.

My wife was a nurse and could work so I would not need to be the sole provider. She is an extrovert so I, the introvert, would never have to answer the phone again. I resisted the idea that she was a person separate from me and not just an extension of me. If she disagreed with me, I thought she was against me, not that she had a different opinion.

Neither of us was prepared for marriage. We knew something was wrong and went to a recovery meeting for children of alcoholics. My wife was so upset at hearing people share their secrets that we left. We couldn’t stay through one meeting.

I was afraid of responsibility. When my wife got pregnant around our second anniversary, I felt abandoned and cried, explaining that I wasn’t ready. Then I pulled myself together. Shortly after our oldest daughter was born, I forced myself to get a professional job in the field in which I was educated—after a memorable scene of me writhing on the floor in an infantile fit of fear and frustration.

Within five years we had three children. I cracked under the strain. I may have used some pornography and masturbated prior to this, but I had been pretty clean. Now, I started going to parks and video stores in search of anonymous sex to try to feel better. I thought I needed this to handle life. It rapidly grew out of control.

I had sought out individual counseling in my early 20s but at this point I turned to my pastor. He counseled me with the Third Step prayer. What stuck with me was the part about bondage to self. He told me about SA. He gave me a number to call. I threw the number in a drawer, not knowing that one of the two SA meetings in Cleveland at the time was at my church. God works in mysterious ways.

I provided a significant share of the parenting because of our work schedules. I loved my children but had nothing to give to them. I needed help. In desperation I sought out another fellowship for help with my problem. A member of that fellowship directed me to SA. God doesn’t give up. It was 1989.

At first, I didn’t think SA was Christian enough. But as I read Sexaholics Anonymous, I found nothing incompatible with my faith. I am thankful for that book. I wouldn’t change one word, including the Cleveland clarification. I am powerless over the nature of my addiction, as well as society’s views on sexuality and homosexuality, but I need this fellowship—where I can share all of me, be totally accepted, but not be encouraged to act on it.

My first years in the program are a foggy blur. We were the blind leading the blind in those days. I was a chronic slipper. But some of the members at my first meeting were helpful. Some of those early members still come back. I still talk with one of them every day, doing a sobriety renewal.

One night, after about four years, two new guys showed up. One of them had loads of sobriety in AA and a fair amount in SA. The other was his sponsee. From these men I heard for the first time that AA literature is invaluable to recovery, especially Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions for working the Steps. I asked the sponsee to be my sponsor. He started me on working the Steps and giving up my rights. We started a new meeting 50 miles from my home.

I worked Steps One through Nine for the first time between 1993 and 1996. I bought lots of tapes of conference speakers and listened to them as I drove 50 miles to and from my home group meeting. I heard about a God who loves me so much he was with me even in a video booth. I heard a member talk about his daily habit of reading two pages each every day from SA, AA, and the 12 & 12. I made THAT a habit of my own.

I attended a number of conferences. I was so shy that I would only speak at the open mike at the end of the conference just to prove that I had been there. At those conferences, I observed healthy, recovering couples who gave me hope. I became aware of the sick dance that my wife and I were involved in, and I realized that we needed to work on our relationship. She joined S-Anon, which has helped.

Together, my wife and I served on the 1999 convention in Cleveland. In January 2000, we attended the convention in Nashville. During that convention—after a relapse that had sent me into despair just days before— I made the decision that I was done with lust and wanted to live a sober life, one day at a time.

My wife and I have never had an abstinence contract, but at times we have gone without sex. Today, we truly believe that sex is optional. At one convention, we heard a woman and her husband explain how sex had found a natural place in their marriage. They said it was like the tides. Sometimes the tide is in for her and not for him; sometimes it’s in for him and not for her; and sometimes the tide is in for both of them. And they have true union and sexual intimacy together. That also works for us.

On this recent vacation, our kids emphasized again and again how happy they are that we stuck it out together. They have friends and parents of friends who have not stayed married. They just think it’s great that we are still married, after 27 years. One night I had one of those priceless moments with my 22-year-old son. We were talking about a relationship that he had broken off with a woman. He said, “Dad, a lot of kids my age think that if they get married and it doesn’t work out, they can just get divorced. You and Mom have set the bar so high that I really want to be careful about who I marry.” That is God’s miracle, that he could say that today.

Today I realize that lust-filled sex is a cheap, empty substitute for the partnership that I share with my wife. It is our relationship that is the most precious thing. As described in Sexaholics Anonymous, “True Union” (148), “We found that we were just as powerless over trying to relate rightly to others as we had been in putting down our habit; it was part of our habit. Thus, we had to approach it the same way, using the Steps—the miracle workers. When we did, we could literally watch ourselves grow into true manhood and womanhood.” That is what my wife and I have found in these programs.

I have become so blessed by my relationship with my wife—a direct result of my working the SA program of recovery—that I wrote a tribute to her in honor of our 25th wedding anniversary:

In gratitude for your willingness to take a chance on me, I honor you. I was a man with good skin but no money. It took me 25 years to figure out that you really did want a diamond engagement ring. It hasn’t all worked out exactly like we planned. We walked hand-in-hand as a young couple, saying we would only work part-time. We’re working overtime. We planned on running a Catholic worker and architectural firm in Cleveland. We find ourselves working in a psych ward in the suburbs. We hoped for just one child in religious life. We settle for knowing that at least one child is at church on any given Sunday. I wanted a historic home, you wanted a new one. We settled for one built in 1950. Through it all, you’ve been my soul mate, my helpmate, the mother of my children, my friend. You taught me how to really love one woman; that it’s not about loving a thousand women, but learning how to love one woman in a thousand ways.