Glimpses of Sanity
SA CFC
Dear ESSAY, I am one of the twenty-five inmates, here at Adrian, MI, that Keith S. wrote about in your last issue. Thank you, Keith, for so many things.
Dear ESSAY
Have you reached the point where you can admit that stopping lusting might be possible, but you cannot slow down? When I first started going to SA, I just wanted to slow down. I was so deep into the lust world that I did not see lust as a problem. I just wanted to stop masturbating compulsively and have a real relationship with a woman.
Editors’ Corner
Dear ESSAY Reader, Thank you for reading this issue of the ESSAY, our Fellowship’s quarterly magazine. Our hope is that the ESSAY can increasingly reflect the breadth of sobriety and recovery in SA and also be a “meeting in print.” Here we can share our experience, strength and hope with one another as part of our Twelfth Step work.
SA Haiku
Surrender I must. That simply means to give up My right to myself.
Step One
Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 5 (“How It Works”) says, “Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery.” The recovery programs of AA and SA are the 12 Steps. Going to meetings is not working the program. Calling your sponsor is not working the program. Participating in the fellowship is not working the program. All these actions can strengthen our recovery, but unless you are actively taking the Steps, you are not working the SA program.
The Final Straw
Although I had owned a computer since 1994, I never once ventured into the murky seas of lust-driven Internet surfing — not even through four years of graduate school during which I spent hours doing online research. Not until June this year. This proved to be the final straw that led to acting out after thirteen years of sobriety.
Internet Recovery
I was a pornography addict working for an internet service provider who developed video over the internet. This was a blessing (if you ask my sponsor) and a curse (if you ask me). Like a drunk who went from hard liquor to beer, I shifted from hard core to chats, from chats to personals, and then from personals to on-line games with chat capabilities.
A Plan for Internet Heroin: Cybersex Got Me Into SA
For over 30 years I had pretty much controlled and enjoyed my acting out, or at least (in my pre-recovery, delusional thinking) thought I had. Nine quick and horrific months after gaining access to the Internet, I was in a sex-addiction therapy group and had become an active member of Sexaholics Anonymous.
Don’t Quit!
As I sit here on the New York City subway, I have seven years in the program and one day of sexual sobriety. Triggers of every kind surround me and it seems impossible for me not to lust. Add this all up, and it equals just one thought in my mind — FAILURE!!! And that is exactly what my disease (my addict, the devil, whatever I call it) wants me to believe.
Glimpses of Sanity
Sobriety came in the summer of 1985 like an unexpected gift. Just about three weeks earlier I had learned that there were people who called themselves sex addicts and held meetings and worked the Twelve Steps. I had begun making a weekly 200-mile round trip to the closest meeting. I had read the SA manual twice, but — brain numbed by decades of sexual obsession — I didn’t understand most of the basic principles there.
