Two years ago, I was halfway through graduate school and living in Nashville. I thought I was doing pretty well for myself—until I sat down with my girlfriend in a student counseling session and explained my acting-out behaviors. To the therapist and my girlfriend, I recounted all the ways in which I’d been completely powerless over lust: the all-night pornography binges, the chat rooms and dating sites, the phone sex, the manipulation, and hardest of all to admit, the lying to cover up my disappearance for hours in the world of online intrigue. I had become expert at keeping my behavior secret. Now I no longer had anywhere to hide.

Even after I realized I needed help, I could not stop acting out. In college and for a few years afterward, I had been only dimly aware of a progressive powerlessness, as I objectified countless women online and in my day-to-day life. Many nights, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, the thought would cross my mind: “I could spend 30 minutes trying to meet someone special on the Internet,” or, “No point in just lying here awake, I might as well invest time looking for my future wife.” Funny how, in my shame of the next morning, I never wanted anything to do with the women I had objectified the night before—so much for investing!

What I did “invest” was often an entire night, clicking through thousands of profiles and images in a trance. I sent messages to these virtual women, sometimes portraying myself honestly; other times assuming a different persona, with photos to match. Not until I had several months of SA sobriety did I realize that the phrase “We bought it, we sold it, we traded it, we gave it away” (SA 203) actually applied to me (even if no money ever changed hands).

As far back as I can remember, I was always obsessed with lust. In the seventh grade, I was already making up fake online identities to talk explicitly with girls. In college, I remember sitting in the library obsessing over a woman sitting nearby, secretly gathering information about her online. I remember once in grad school making a U-turn to follow a pair of women for about a mile before realizing how crazy my action was. I stopped only because I had no idea what I would do when they arrived at their destination!

I once heard someone share at a meeting about the cycles of his relationship with his girlfriend: acting out then confessing to his girlfriend, followed by the emotional pain of a brief period of separation, and then the resumption of sex with his girlfriend as a kind of absolution. This was also my pattern. If my girlfriend had understood the difference between an apology and amends back then, she might have seen sooner that her forgiveness was being abused.

After a few months in couples therapy, I relapsed with the Internet and consulted an addiction psychiatrist. Though two previous therapists had been inclined to “normalize” my behavior, he immediately recognized the gravity of my problem and said, “I think you ought to go to SA.” I am forever indebted to him for his advice.

The week after my first SA meeting, I announced in our couples therapy that I probably would not return to SA because “those SA guys were different than me and a little strange.” Yet some part of me identified with them, and thank God, I did go back. I found relief there. After a couple of weeks, I even asked someone to sponsor me.

My sponsor told me to call him every day—another gift. During my first two months, I would tell him I was “sober” while my girlfriend and I continued to act out together. When we broke up, I finally told him the truth. Even then I justified myself by saying, “SA sobriety doesn’t really apply to me, because my upbringing supported premarital sex as a stepping-stone to marriage.”

He replied, “That’s very interesting that you thought that didn’t apply to you.” When I asked what he meant, he replied, sarcastically, “Oh nothing, it’s just very interesting.” I was furious! I acted out once more that week, arrived at a Sunday SA meeting the very next morning, and decided to give SA sobriety a try. And for good measure, I decided I might as well also work the Steps.

Over the next few weeks, I experienced the pain of not acting out in any form while being separated from my girlfriend, the object of my emotional dependence. This was unlike any pain I had felt before. I wanted to get my girlfriend back, but a voice inside me knew that something fundamental about me had to change before I could ever be with her again. As the White Book says “…most of us don’t have pure motives in wanting to get sober. Recovery is a slow process” (SA 66). My motive in starting the Steps and working them intensely (30 minutes each morning) was to somehow get my girlfriend back without being at odds with SA. What a motive!

At the same time, I had committed to attending 90 meetings in 90 days, and in each meeting I heard maybe one or two things that sustained me for another day without running back to her. One day I heard, “You can’t go around it, you have to go through it.” Another day someone said, “When you give it up to God and He gives it back, it’s so much better.” Without surrender, how could a sexaholic like me know if someone was really “right” for him anyway?

My sponsor told me there’s never a bad reason to stay sober today, although some reasons are better than others. Similarly, my impure motives for starting the Steps did not stop me from having a spiritual experience. It’s funny how God can work through things like that. Besides, I could only get “promoted” from one Step to the next when my sponsor signed off, and somehow he could sense the true degree of my surrender (or lack of it) between the lines of my Step work. I’m grateful that he put the brakes on my bright ideas for an immediate reunion with my ex-girlfriend. In fact, today I can even say I’m grateful that God’s timeline is different from mine.

During the period when I was both single and sober, I learned many important things that I’m not sure I would have learned otherwise. I learned that being at home alone wouldn’t kill me, nor would crying. I learned that I enjoy being with myself, but that I still need to give myself breaks from the intense “productivity” demands I put on myself in my work. That means that if I have to choose between making some deadline and taking a break to relieve stress, I take the break. My Higher Power has taught me that sobriety and recovery must come before career—in fact before everything else in my life—because my addiction is simply too powerful to withstand.

A lot has changed since I started working this program. After a few months of sobriety, another member asked me to sponsor him. Since then, working with sponsees has been one of the greatest joys of my recovery. I’m often reminded of a story in the Big Book of an early member who couldn’t keep anyone else sober, but then realized after a year that he was still sober from trying. This has been my experience.

I’m 28 now and I just celebrated two years of SA sobriety. I still attend meetings regularly, although not every day anymore. Still, whenever I feel I need another meeting, I get myself there, by phone if I have no other options. I still get up 30 minutes early each morning to say my prayers, write in my journal, and meditate. I know my addict is off somewhere in training, so I need to keep spiritually fit. It’s helpful for me to remember that when I think I’m in neutral, I’m inevitably going backward. I want desperately to go forward, and I hope I never lose that desperation.

When I was almost six months sober and had completed my Seventh Step, my sponsor gave me permission to date my ex-girlfriend. That relationship was restored only by God’s grace. Eighteen months later we got married—it was actually a lot simpler using SA’s sobriety definition rather than my own! But though it was simple, going from dating to marriage in SA recovery was not easy. It required much recovery work for both of us.

One of the biggest challenges in our relationship came when we had been back together about 10 months and my girlfriend decided to read my journal while I was out. I was devastated by this breach of trust, and she was devastated by some of the things she read—but ultimately we both learned many things from the experience, and it pushed us to seek greater recovery in our relationship. By surrendering to God and this program, the results have been nothing short of miraculous.

Just yesterday morning, as I was meditating and writing in my journal, I realized that I had lost four friendships in college (two men and two women) because of my sexaholic behavior. It took almost two years of SA sobriety and recovery for me to see my part in that! For me today, a positive sobriety means that if I do this work for the next 24 hours, tomorrow I may see reality a little more deeply and clearly. That vision is what SA is giving me, one day at a time.