The Road to Happy Destiny
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.”
Often when I’m in an SA meeting, I’m not really listening to the words of the readings. I’ve probably heard the words “Many of us felt inadequate, unworthy, alone, and afraid . . .” (SA 203, “The Problem”) a thousand times. But one day, the meaning of these words really hit me:
At the beginning of Sexaholics Anonymous (15), the narrator says in part: “Then one night out of nowhere a prostitute jumped into my car . . .” (emphasis added). I used to think that my own behaviors occurred “out of nowhere.”
About five years ago, my sponsor in another fellowship talked with me about Step Eleven. This was before I found SA, and I was busy imposing my self-will on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was the epitome of “half measures availed us nothing”—nothing except for maybe a check mark on Steps One through Ten, indicating I had completed them.
For me, lust is an attitude. It begins with a desire to covet. It is a desire to take (even if only mentally) something that is not mine to take. My acting out always begins with lust. Why? Because I am powerless over lust. I do not have the ability to control it.
I’m the type of sexaholic who likes to do everything by myself. I started my own business, did my own accounting, and wrote my own contracts. When I play music, I only want to play my music. I don’t want or need any help because I can do it all by myself!
