Although I’ve been a member of SA since January 2000, my sobriety date is January 1, 2007. At times, I’ve felt extremely frustrated with my lack of continuous SA sobriety—especially when compared with my 23 years of sobriety in AA.
What it was like. I enjoyed my first convention in the place where it all started. My cell phone’s background screen now has a picture of the gatehouse where Dr. Bob and Bill W. first met. When I open my phone, I say a prayer of thanks to God for the Twelve Steps.
God led me to a place I hadn’t been before, to be with men I didn’t know. Why? To allow me to build on my experience, strength, and hope in recovery from sexual addiction. He took me to the Big Bear men’s retreat this past spring.
Yesterday marked two years of sobriety for me. Prior to my sobriety date of May 24, 2006, I can’t remember having gone two days without acting out in the previous 30 years. For my sobriety and so much more, I am forever grateful to the program and to the fellowship of SA.
My name is Will. I’m a sexaholic and part of a recovering couple. I’ve been sexually sober since January 5, 2000.
Dear Fellow SA Members: I look forward to seeing many of you at the Convention July 11-13 in Akron, and I hope that you will attend the SA business meeting (“SA Today”), which will be held during the convention.
My Lord, I thank you for again providing us the opportunity to come together, to share, to help and be helped.
I’m just an ordinary person, but special in the eyes of God. I’ve been involved with SA since 1993. It took me six years to be able to maintain any sort of sobriety. Until then I had not surrendered my “right to lust.”
How did my addiction to lust begin? There are many ways I could explain it: my childhood; my parents’ relationships with themselves, with me, and with others; genetic predisposition—it can be looked at from different angles. Today I believe that my addiction stems from my relationship with myself, from my unhealthy self-talk.
In one of the Harry Potter books, the defense against the Dark Arts teacher would shout, “Constant vigilance!” He meant, of course, that constant vigilance is necessary in order to stay safe from practitioners of the dark arts. When I read this, my first thought was “That’s how I have to be with my sexaholism.”
