The high point of the Sacramento conference for me came when my friend Alex* asked me to attend a check meeting. He was dealing with the difficulty of a separation from his wife and had sought the counsel of an old-timer who had many years of experience with check meetings. The old-timer offered to lead the meeting and gave Alex the names of some women to ask as well.
What do frogs, Bill and Lois W., and kisses have in common? For me, a sex addict, each can trigger my obsession to act out sexually.
Recently a former sponsee came to me in a personal crisis. He was in a financial jam that I saw was clearly the consequences of his disease. I “let him have it”—for his own good of course, and with the best of intentions.
For the typical lust addict, our whole system screams out that we’re going to die if we don’t take that “drink.” It’s too fearful not to drink. Lust is our spiritual life-support system. Yes, the fear is that real. So, we wind up drinking. We’re hooked on it and remain a slave. It’s the fear of this kind of death that keeps us in bondage and forces us to keep slipping with lust.
As the Essay goes to press, groups around the country are voting for the second time in the history of Sexaholics Anonymous on matters concerning the Fellowship’s sobriety definition and the interpretation of the words “marriage” and “spouse.”
Dear God, So far today, I’ve done all right. I’ve kept my mouth shut, I haven’t gossiped, haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish or over-indulgent. I’m really glad about that.
The more I am in the program, the more I see that this is a God-centered program. I am not only powerless over lust, I am powerless over people, places and things. When I depend on them, sooner or later they will disappoint me.
When I hit the bottom and crawled into the rooms in February 1990, I was a crawling contradiction. On the one hand, I was — as I learned painfully in the following months — spiritually bankrupt. However, I believed I was spiritually put together. Didn’t I know all about God? Couldn’t I teach others about Him? Hadn’t I established an identity as a religious person? The sad truth was that I knew a lot and understood nothing.
When I came to the program I had a lot of religion but I didn’t know or have God. The only real power I believed in was my power to control. I always wanted God to just zap me and take all my sex problems away. I really had to come to believe in a Power greater than myself.
Just to let you know that SA in Montreal is still going good. We have one meeting every evening except Thursday, and one noon meeting downtown on Friday.
