IN THE CURRENT MAGAZINE

To seek spiritual progress, I must continue to work the Steps with my sponsor. I must continue reading questions, reflecting and writing answers no matter how many times I’ve done this before. This time around, I found a few Twelfth-step questions online— about reaching out to other sexaholics and how the 12-step program has worked for me.

Initially when I read the theme to submit an article for the Essay, I wondered about the paradox and challenge of finding such growth. I was intrigued by the focus. However, the more I reflected on my experience, the more I could honestly say that I had grown in joy and freedom during these Covid times.

Happy and joyous freedom for me began nearly 13 years ago when the lust obsession was removed from my life. I had become a slave to uncontrollable urges, beginning about 25 years earlier and slowly worsening. Somewhere along the way, I crossed an invisible line into insane thinking and behavior.

Like most people in SA, I have had to make adjustments in the way I practice my program routine. I had been a regular at the noon meeting near where I worked. With four meetings a week, it offered me a safe haven where I could finally face myself and what better way to break up the work day. I have to admit, I really depended on going there.

In this time of disorder, struggle and transition God is at work. Sexaholics Anonymous is emerging as part of the solution. Technology has brought fellowship members into contact with large numbers of fellow sexaholics we would normally not have the opportunity to meet, nationally and internationally.

I joined SA in 2017, but I’d heard about it six years earlier… Yes, it took me six painful years to come to the point where I could say: “I am a sexaholic. I am powerless over lust because I am sick.”

Lust and acting out had poisoned my soul from early teenhood. A double track had developed in me: On the one hand, a deep desire for a true love, a loving union, for family life, house and kids; on the other hand, an ill and poisoned desire to right away have sex with women, without any sense for personal relation, love or respect.

Thank you Lee T. for agreeing to be interviewed for Essay. Your sobriety date is 1986. During your 34 years of sexual sobriety, what have been some of the key habits and behaviors you have built and maintained to stay sober and grow in recovery?

What is positive sobriety? I think that it’s focusing on why I want to stay sober as opposed to why I don’t want to act out. On page 69 in our White Book it says, “Instead of running joyously to heaven, we seem to back away from our hell, one step at a time.”

In December of 1999, I was 10 years sober in SA and working for a defense contractor. It was the era of Millennium bug, and no one knew what sort of effect the change of millennia would have on computer systems (the answer: not much). To help out in this effort, I was sent from my home in Maryland to Tampa, Florida to assist U.S. Special Operations Command with documenting their Y2K compliance.