My name is Ted L., and I’m a gratefully recovering sexaholic. They say that God works in mysterious ways, and for me it’s been a doozy! I was 38 years old, and had lived a life of slavery to lust, sex, and myself. I’d been in prison for six years for rape, and was finally beginning to come to terms with the evil I had done in my life. I thought that it would help my parole chances if I could get some kind of program set up at my facility.
My name is K. and I am a sexaholic. My story began in a small suburban town, a wealthy suburb of New York City. We were a large Christian family and my father was a Marine Corps Captain in World War II. My father grew up on the “wrong side of the tracks” and he was determined that all his children would succeed in the professional world.
Hi, my name is Mike, and I’m a sexaholic. I can still remember the first time I said that at an SA meeting. My palms were sweaty, my heart was pounding, my throat had a lump in it, and I could hardly speak—pretty much the same reaction I used to get each time I approached a prostitute, or did any of my addictive sexual behaviors.
From my earliest recollections at age four, I obsessed over nude women. Any woman I encountered was automatically visualized in the nude. This was true for strangers, relatives, and even the nuns who taught me in elementary school.
I was a lady and ladies just aren’t sex addicts. So I told myself when I thought of joining SA. No, I didn’t have that problem; it was my ex-boyfriend’s problem. The sexual behaviors that we argued about doing were not the problem. He just needed to stop taking care of his ex-wife.
I can hear my sponsor’s voice, passing on the words from his sponsor and his sponsor’s sponsor: “Things get worse; IT gets better.” I do not have to wonder anymore what IT is. For me, today, IT means life, serenity, acceptance, gratitude, living without expectations, finding the power to be useful and to carry out God’s will for me.
My recovery experience as a single woman in Sexaholics Anonymous has been deepened and enriched since my first year of sobriety. Many events compel me to share what I have learned in the course of over six years of sexual sobriety.
My story is not unique, and for that I am grateful. When I discovered I was a classic sexaholic, I became hopeful, realizing my problem had a classic solution. Hope and honesty were small words in my vocabulary and an even smaller part of my life before I came to SA.
The first recollections of my addiction are from the summer of 1961. I would be nine in August and I had just moved to a new subdivision. The only other boy in the neighborhood was four years older than I, and he was pretty lonely, since his parents both worked. We began to spend time with one another, and since he had a house all to himself, most of our time together was spent there.
Sobriety came in the summer of 1985 like an unexpected gift. Just about three weeks earlier I had learned that there were people who called themselves sex addicts and held meetings and worked the Twelve Steps. I had begun making a weekly 200-mile round trip to the closest meeting. I had read the SA manual twice, but — brain numbed by decades of sexual obsession — I didn’t understand most of the basic principles there.
