IN THE CURRENT MAGAZINE

I attended family counseling for six years; my wife was crazy and she wasn’t getting any better. Did it have anything to do with the fact that I was having several simultaneous affairs? I was a respected professional in a small town. Some of the women were my clients. This was in violation of the ethics of my profession and whatever ethics I might have thought I had for my marriage.

Recently my sponsor in another 12-Step program pointed out a sentence in the Big Book that I hadn’t paid special attention to before. It comes in Chapter 11, A Vision For You. The reading has to do, in part, with events surrounding a business trip by Bill W., the co-founder of AA, when he was just six months sober.

Here are two ways I practice Step 12:

That’s the message my addicted mind keeps trying to send to my Higher Power. It has never ceased to amaze me how God lets me get away with being as stupid as I want to be sometimes!

I have so often felt that if only I could achieve a certain level of skill playing the guitar or learn enough history, politics, math, and science as I felt I wanted or needed to, I could then be the person I wanted to be. Then everything would be okay, and I could live a meaningful and happy life. Of course I could never be accomplished enough in my own estimation no matter how well I performed or how much I knew.

One of the concepts that I learned early on in SA was that the problem was not my behavior, the problem was my thinking. Acting out starts in my mind. If I entertain lust, it eventually will lead to acting out. In order to relapse, I have to have made the decision to allow lust in my mind without having surrendered it, probably repeatedly.

Asking for something means that I am not in control of the outcome. I may get what I asked for, I may not. It may look like I expect it to, it may not. I never was very comfortable with this before. I strove to set up my life so that no one could refuse me what I wanted. Sometimes I demanded, sometimes I manipulated, sometimes I threatened, but I never just asked and let go of the outcome.

When I was new in the program, I was justifiably angry with someone I had resented for years. My sponsor told me to pray for the person I was angry with every day and every time he came to mind. I said, “You’re kidding, right?” Of course, he wasn’t. He said my prayers should be honest.

In meetings, I have often heard sexaholism referred to as “it.” It is cunning and baffling. But my experience has revealed that there is no it in my life, there is only me. By making my sexual compulsiveness an it, I’m trying to minimize my problem in order to make it seem more manageable (by me). It is not cunning and baffling; I am.

In the summer of 2001, I spoke with women in other 12 Step fellowships who identified themselves as having SA issues. At the time, only two women were active in SA groups in San Diego. Other women were reluctant to come to SA because the fellowship was mainly men. I began to think how lovely it would be to gather all of these women in one room so that they could hear that other women have similar issues.