I left home at 21 and moved in with my boyfriend. I had been attending college full-time and had two part-time jobs, but I dropped out of school and work so I could spend more time acting out sexually. I felt a lot of shame, so I convinced my boyfriend to marry me. Sometimes we acted out by watching porn. When my husband wasn’t home, I would look at the porn and masturbate. We were both sex addicts, and we raged at each other daily. Lust killed our relationship.
I discovered lust around puberty through a porn magazine and quickly became addicted to masturbation and fantasy women in stories, pictures and eventually clips and movies from electronic sources.
I have to remember that my lust has not gone anywhere since I got into recovery. I’ve just been holding it at arm’s length. If I think I’ve got some sobriety so that now I can relax and I don’t need to work so hard to stay sober, my lust is right there ready to step back front and center in my life.
I am a technophobe, and clumsy at best when it comes to all the gadgets today. I miss the simple life of rotary phones and typewriters! I realize that technology neither caused my disease nor is responsible for my recovery.
On July 3rd, 2004, I left a family holiday party early to go to my first meeting. I even changed from shorts to long pants as I knew shorts were not supposed to be worn at meetings. My family assumed I was going to a church meeting, and I did nothing to correct them.
As a sexaholic, I have been blessed with five and a half years of continuous sobriety and recovery from lust. Much of my recovery is due to a high amount of service work in order to give back what has been so freely given to me. This includes attending International conventions when I can. I recently returned from the Jersey Strong SA/S-Anon/S-Ateen convention. The Saturday lunch S-Anon speaker was an S-Ateen instead.
Good morning recovery family. My name is Esty L. from Miami and I am a recovering sexaholic. My sobriety date is February 26, 2012 for which I am never sufficiently grateful. I am the fourth of 15 children. I grew up in a loving home with two devoted parents who did the best they could to provide me with a stable home.
Our program offers us the Promises; but, when we are swept up in the throes of our addiction, those Promises seem far off, transitory, unreal. Though I can only speak from my own experience, strength, and hope, I can attest to those Promises being fulfilled.
My roommate has a cat named Elway, and used to have a dog named Ginger. There is a pet door for the cat and dog that allows them out into the backyard. Ginger was old and had liver cancer, so my roommate put her down last October. Now that there is no dog around, my roommate is concerned that a coyote might attack the cat. We live near enough to wild space that this is a possibility. So we now close the pet door at night.
I arrived 45 minutes late to my first SA meeting. Actually, I was a lifetime late, but that is another story.... It was also the 20th anniversary of the death of my mother and the beginning of my connection to a fellowship of people around the globe that has supported me into my seventh year of sobriety, which has seen fruits in my personal and professional life I would never have even dreamed possible, even before my life fell apart. Other than that, it wasn’t a remarkable evening.
