When I entered the room of my first SA meeting in September 2018, I was the only female. I sat down at a table with five men of varying ages and I felt very alone and fearful. What would these men think of me? It wasn’t until the meeting progressed and these men around me started sharing their thoughts and feelings about working their SA program that I began a slow journey towards being able to view men as people rather than as objects.
Hi Mike, thanks for your time today in sharing your experience, strength and hope. Could we begin by asking your sobriety date and home group? Yes, June 3, 1984 and the Holy Innocents group in Chicago. For a long time previously it was at St. Teresa. We have been on Zoom for about a year now; when we were face to face, attendance was around 55-60 and we meet for 90 minutes.
In February 1995 an Irish SA member living in the USA, was informed by a friend of another “S Fellowship’’ meeting in Galway. He carried the following message to that meeting: “You are all newcomers. You will only relapse back into your disease unless you get a sponsor, make calls and have fellowship after the meetings.”
The first characteristic that makes face-to-face meetings attractive for me is openness and honesty. During the meetings there is an “evil monkey” inside my head, constantly whispering to me, telling me how different I should be to the person that I am, whom I should compare myself to, and what other people think of me. But I am not the person the monkey describes.
When I think of meetings, I think of something that my sponsor said early in our relationship: “Recovery in SA is like a three-legged stool, you have to have a sponsor, the Steps and the fellowship in order for the stool to remain standing.” Meetings are where the fellowship happens.
When I came to SA in 2006, we were holding the meetings in the building of a foundation where a fellow member worked, but soon after it closed and we had to move. For about a year we were meeting in a park, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun. Then we moved to the garage of another foundation, which also closed its doors soon thereafter.
Two months ago, a member told me that several members of our fellowship were angry with me. I told the situation in a very long audio message to my sponsor. He suggested to me to shut up for a while and to not speak in meetings. He also told me that he had experienced that himself, which had been a very enriching experience for him.
When I hit my bottom on April 16, 2014, I didn’t know if my wife would stay with me after I disclosed to her my double life between my family and my secret lust garden. I was not only mentally and spiritually sick but also physically ill because of acting-in. I suffered from terrible pain.
I have no doubt that if every SA meeting was conducted along the lines as prescribed in our White Book (185-187), our fellowship would have thousands of strong meetings globally and many, many thousands of members with strong recovery.
There I was sitting at an AA meeting in early Feb ‘84, when a man announced he was starting an SA group in Nashville, TN. I surrendered six weeks later when I met at his apartment for my first SA meeting. Soon we outgrew his apartment and moved to my office building.
