IN THE CURRENT MAGAZINE

Every morning my alarm goes off at 5:30 am. I get up, put on clothes over my pajamas and go outside for a 30-min walk. This is where my morning ritual begins, supporting the SA program with another method. This method is about mindset (attention, dedication, focus and meditation), about breathing and cold therapy.

In active addiction, my slogan was “Being alone in heaven is harder than being with a girl in hell.” In early childhood, I could not imagine a world without girls. I used to be ridiculed for playing with girls instead of boys. Who cared, as far as I was concerned; I enjoyed playing innocently with girls

You are the mother I have always longed for Showering me with affection and overwhelming me with love You are the father I never thought I had Raising me into a man and leading me from above

Participation in conventions is one of the strongest recovery tools, which I was able to experience again last weekend, together with almost 50 fellows from seven countries. Beginning of January has become a priority in my diary since I first went to the Exeter winter convention last year.

My job has nothing to do with graphic design, advertising, illustration of magazines, or anything like that ... years ago in my beginnings in SA I combined the design of the bulletin of my parish with sessions of consumption of chat and pornography ... only by a miracle of my Higher Power did I never by accident place a lust image in one of those newsletters... And, logically, the quality of my work was barely regular, the time invested twice as much as normal, I stayed up late and I used to be easily annoyed if someone criticized my work.

In my early days in SA I was single, had no job, no car, no money, and a lot of time. It was 2009, and because of the economic crisis I was unemployed. I attended three to four meetings a week, called my sponsor daily, wrote my Step work daily, and translated the whole White Book, Big Book, and Recovery Continues into my native language within a year.

What do I understand by “the joy of service?” When I began attending meetings in 2008, I did not want to do any SA service. But on Saturday, August 5, 2018, my current sobriety date, I began to feel different. On Sunday, the very next day, a local group voted me in as its Intergroup Rep. Before that, I had only done things like putting out chairs, filling in as a back-up meeting secretary, making coffee, serving as a temporary sponsor etc.

My experience of joy in service through making SA a better place for women includes how one individual, then a homegroup, then intergroup, and finally the SA international community made themselves better places by taking measures to more comfortably accommodate me, a woman.

This is Ameer, recovering sex drunk from Iraq. If I wanted to summarize the AA Big Book on the importance of service, it would be in one word: joy! I have been transformed from misery to joy by freely giving of myself to others. I have experienced the principle: “The measure we give is the measure we get back.” It’s true! I am now addicted to service (in a good way!). Joy in recovery is not limited to sobriety; it includes helping others and witnessing their recovery! For years I experienced the false joy, the emptiness of lust.

I’m Mike and I’m a sexaholic, sobriety date Aug 7, 2005. SA has given me my second chance at life and has been central to my recovery, but other things have helped too.