SA Stories

Every time we say—and it sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?—we are trudging the Road of Happy Destiny, trudging sounds like a burdensome sort of thing, and Happy Destiny a bit odd, too. And every time we say that, which is at every meeting, there’s a sort of a snicker, or you feel a heaviness, or there’s a bit of a smile as you say “trudging the Road of Happy Destiny.”

I write this to express my gratitude to my Higher Power and SA for the gift of sexual sobriety. It has been a goal all my life but I could not attain it on my own, no matter how I tried. God knows how hard I tried! I grew up in an alcoholic home with a lot of violence. My father was an alcoholic who never got into recovery. My mother was a devout Irish Catholic who taught us children to be loving, decent and above all, to be chaste. I could not live up to that and consequently, I was prey to a lot of shame and guilt as I grew up.

When I was a small boy of three or four years of age, I was the first to go to bed. I used to hide my head under the pillow and dream about women of beaming beauty. There wasn’t anything explicitly sexual, but I fused with them. I remember at that age walking with a two-year-old girl and immediately getting a weird feeling of being “connected” to nature and the whole universe — and being afraid of that small creature.