My sexual history involves a long list of adulterous affairs, pornography, strip clubs, videos, and acting out—but those things were never really my problems; they were the results of my not facing my problems. My problems included loneliness, fear, insecurity, frustration at my inability to get my own way and my inability to deal with the hurts in my life, and all of the rejections (real or imagined) that I suffered. The rejections included childhood beatings and the girls who wouldn’t let me date them. I was enveloped in feelings of unworthiness and shame.

At first, I dealt with my feelings by immersing myself in athletics, for which I had some talent. During my teens and early twenties, athletics allowed me to build some self-esteem as well as use the physical energies that might otherwise have gone into sexual activities. Then a severe injury ended my career in athletics and I became emotionally lost. I was no longer able to live out in sports my obsessive and compulsive self. I found a girl and got married.

I turned to my wife to help me overcome my insecurities, but she either didn’t know how, or could not. I began to masturbate compulsively and soon was addicted to it. Unconsciously, I became angry at my wife for not fixing me.

I continued my education beyond college and developed a career in business. I felt some satisfaction in these activities, but they also gave me a cover for a second career of lusting after women. I pursued this second career with all my energy. This was an attempt to overcome my previous rejections, but I only vaguely recognized my feelings or the reasons for them. This all seemed too shameful in my eyes to share with others, who would probably only reject me. I believed that only weak people seek help.

This is actually my second time in SA. The first time was a failure because I didn’t seek help. I tried to do it all on my own and I ended up botching any recovery through emotional isolation. But the second time I was really scared and ready to seek help and be helped. Now, 12 years later, I’m still here and still sober because of the help members have given me.

When I first came into SA in California around the summer of 1996, I simply wanted to be sober. Only later did I discover that there is a difference between sobriety and recovery. I had wanted to stop looking at pornography, going to strip clubs, and masturbating. That’s it, and that’s why it didn’t work for long. I gained five months of physical sobriety, but I certainly had no emotional sobriety. My spirit was still diseased with fear, frustration, and hurt, which often showed up as anger or self-righteous behavior (though I couldn’t see it at the time). I hadn’t learned that until I faced my many character defects, my spirit would remain an emotional wreck, and I would soon act out once again. Still, as my own sponsor, I pronounced myself cured and stopped going to meetings. After all, I had stopped acting out. I was sober.

But not for long. When an email invited me to look at a porn site, I rationalized that since I had proved that I could stop acting out, then obviously I could now look without experiencing harm. Suddenly I was off to the races once again, and this time it was worse than ever. I was even more obsessed and more compelled than before. I was trapped. I couldn’t go back to my group and tell them I had failed, because failure at that time meant that I wasn’t trying hard enough. Furthermore, I didn’t know how to stop. So I continued going deeper into my disease and became increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t stop my behavior.

I was also afraid that my wife would find out. For years, I had taken great effort to live a double life so that she would not know about my secrets. The stress of being two personalities took its emotional toll. When I had announced to her in 1996 that I was a sexaholic and would seek treatment in SA, she simply said, “Okay, that’s good,” and that was the end of it. She thought I was referring to my earlier adulterous affairs and I had told her that those would stop. When she did find out in April 1999 that I was a practicing sexaholic, she announced that if I continued to live that way she would leave me. I immediately returned to SA.

This time was different. My wife and I were in Germany at the time, visiting our daughter, and I actually began reading the White Book. In it I discovered things that had eluded me for all of my life. For example, “. . . just as the admission of powerlessness over lust is the key to our sexual sobriety, so the admission of powerlessness over our defects is the key to our emotional sobriety” (88). Defects? Me? Yes, me. Early on, I discovered that I could not have any lasting sobriety from lust if I did not have lasting emotional sobriety.

This drove me into examining my emotions in every relationship and every event of my life. In time, I began to see many of my character defects, and began to see that they were energized by my many fears, frustrations, and unresolved hurts, all of which fueled my lusting. Obviously I had much to surrender, and much to change in me.

One fateful night in Germany, when I was all alone, I read the words in SA: “I couldn’t just surrender my lust; I had to surrender me” (80). I was stunned. Such a thought had never occurred to me. In fact, it was foreign to my approach to life. I had always fought to win, whether in athletics or in business. Success came from never giving up, from trying harder, from being smarter and better educated. Yet one day, in April 1999, something inside me saw the truth, and for the first time in my life, I closed my eyes, put down the book and said, “Okay God, you win.”

At that moment, I felt all the negativity in my life flow out of me. A sense of peacefulness took its place. I finished the chapter, turned out the light and went to sleep. I awoke the next morning refreshed and thought to myself, “I think I’m going to be all right.” That night I continued to read the White Book and gained more understanding of my disease. During my time in Europe, I read the entire book twice. It made a profound impression on me.

In my reading, I discovered that the energy of my lusting comes from my many character defects. That’s why I like reading “The Problem” (SA v). While it is not my story in all the details, it captures the essence of my feelings and experiences. I am struck by the sentence, “We lusted and wanted to be lusted after.” It took me a long time to realize that behind my lusting behaviors, what I was really looking for was for the object of my lust to lust after me. Once I realized that, then it was a matter of acknowledging it to my sponsor and to my groups, and surrendering that to the God of my understanding. This surrender, like some of my other surrenders, has to be repeated every time the desire to lust arises in me.

A program friend taught me that to live in the solution, we have to practice the Solution: “Forgiving all who had injured us, and without injuring others, we tried to right our own wrongs” (SA 62). He further taught me that I had to [begin] “practicing a positive sobriety, taking the actions of love to improve our relations with others” (SA 62). In no time I was doing all the washing, drying, and putting away the laundry at home; doing all the vacuuming; taking an interest in things in which my wife was interested and asking for her input about decisions that would affect our present or our future.

This wasn’t easy, but it was rewarding because it brought happiness to each of us. Much praying to the God of my understanding as expressed in the Eleventh Step prayer opened my heart and mind to healthier attitudes and actions on my part. The hardness in my heart toward others melted away. Our children noticed and wanted to be around me more; my brother even told me that I had become easier to live with. Today my life is much less stressful, because I am not attempting to live a public life and a secret life.

Lest I not be clear, I know for certain that: “God has apparently not chosen to eradicate my defective self so that I am no longer capable of lust, resentment, fear and the rest” (SA 188). My old habits, my old attitudes and behaviors are not gone, they just don’t have the power they once had to dominate and direct my life. They are becoming less powerful with good reason.

I have discovered that: “I can live free of the power any and all these defects have over me by resorting to God instead of such negative emotions. I thus have a daily, hourly reprieve from my lust, etc., based on maintaining the right attitude, by working the Steps and Traditions and going to meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings” (SA 168).

Today I’ve been sexually sober since April 2, 1999. As I contemplate my journey, I am grateful to all of you in the fellowship for your kindness and helpfulness to me and for speaking the truth into my life during my 12 years of sobriety and recovery.