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.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings (AA 59). 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.
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!
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.
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.
The following suggested policy on how to deal with abuse disclosed at meetings first appeared in the ESSAY in October 1990. It is reprinted here at the request of the Delegates and Trustees, who discussed this and related issues at the General Delegate Assembly meeting in St. Louis, on July 7.
Thank you God for SA with a very tough bottom line; recovery came to me because of this program. Thank you for teaching me that every person has dignity. No matter what their station in life, economic status, addictions, and illness, no matter what they’ve done—every person has dignity.
Sometimes, in meetings, I would share about the “amazing insights” I had, but these are all things I now see in my rear-view mirror. My motives and drivers were revealed to me after I did the work of the Steps. My insights did not lead to recovery. They are knowledge I had been given as the result of working the Steps.
As a child, I was lonely. I may have felt love-deprived or full of harbored resentment, but I needed some sort of outlet. Then I discovered a strange pet: Lust. This little creature seemed harmless as I studied it with my wide, innocent eyes. The most convenient thing about my pet was that I could keep it a secret from the rest of the world.
Before joining the Program, I didn’t realize how mean I was to my wife. It’s not that she’s perfect; after all, she married me. But something would happen, I’d get angry because something wasn’t going right, and I’d yell at her. I’d often blame her for things she had nothing to do with. Or I’d just yell at her because I was upset.
