IN THE CURRENT MAGAZINE

Last year the Central Office Oversight Committee (COOC) felt that the high cost of producing and mailing the Essay should be offset by a subscription to cover these costs, and beginning December 1993, the newsletter was sent to subscribers only. An immediate result was an unforeseen and regrettable drop in readership. Although subscriptions have increased steadily in 1994, circulation is still only about 25 percent of what it was in 1993. That means less than one-fourth of the fellowship can participate in fellowship-wide communication!

We had our “International Convention” here on October 22, 1994. There was some great sharing about recovery. We had one member with over a year of sobriety and another with over six months. The others had varying times of sobriety. I had the privilege of hosting three of the members at my home. We are hoping that numbers will increase and our fellowship will grow spiritually and that we will be able to enjoy a quality of life which we know is available if we work the Steps and abide by the Traditions.

What a fantastic one-day SA seminar I attended yesterday in Montreal. We were 33 SA members, and most benefited from intensive sharing and discussions about the powerful spiritual program provided by our SA fellowship.

Thank you for sending the September ’94 issue of Essay, the pamphlet on the International Unity Conference in January ’95, and the International Directory. I thoroughly enjoy the Essay, especially the stories of those who have experienced healing in their lives.

My name is A.G. and I am a sexaholic. I have been in SA for two years and since then my life has changed and is still changing a day at a time. I can see what my sexaholism did to me and my wife and also to our child. I am grateful to God and the other members in SA for keeping me on the good track of recovery.

We’ve recently made some changes in our group meetings. We’ve been meeting since 1987 and our weekly meetings were primarily discussion meetings with a monthly Step meeting. After reading in the Essay about meetings, we decided to center more on the solutions rather than just our problems.

Greetings. I wanted to let you know what's happening in our group in Japan. We have a small group of four to six regular members. Two of us are foreigners, and the rest are Japanese. We all speak Japanese. I joined the group this January, and the meetings are held every Saturday afternoon, in English. In May, we started a meeting in Japanese one hour before the English-speaking meeting to attract more Japanese newcomers.

Hi, my name is Mike B. and I’m a sexaholic. I’m on the SA Service Structure Committee… With the help of other SA’s, a service structure was written and later adopted during the January 1994 Rochester Conference Business Meeting. The work we wrote is in the June 1994 Essay. As stated, the SA group is the basic unit of the SA structure which will be represented in the Intergroup.

My name is Harry, I’m a sexaholic. I’ve been sexually sober since February 3, 1986. Expressing my gratitude to God and the fellowship for my recovery will take the rest of my life, and beyond. Jess promised he would help me with this talk if I volunteered to give one, and so I volunteered, and he also said it might be good to prepare the talk and then have a trial run to see how it went….

Hi, my name is Mike, and I’m a recovering sexaholic. And I’m grateful to be here sober tonight through God’s grace, and all of you people. A couple of years ago we had Thanksgiving dinner at my house for the first time. My whole family came. I figured I should say something before we all ate, but I knew there were lots of things going on in the family, so I didn’t know quite what to say.