The first characteristic that makes face-to-face meetings attractive for me is openness and honesty. During the meetings there is an “evil monkey” inside my head, constantly whispering to me, telling me how different I should be to the person that I am, whom I should compare myself to, and what other people think of me. But I am not the person the monkey describes.
When I think of meetings, I think of something that my sponsor said early in our relationship: “Recovery in SA is like a three-legged stool, you have to have a sponsor, the Steps and the fellowship in order for the stool to remain standing.” Meetings are where the fellowship happens.
When I came to SA in 2006, we were holding the meetings in the building of a foundation where a fellow member worked, but soon after it closed and we had to move. For about a year we were meeting in a park, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun. Then we moved to the garage of another foundation, which also closed its doors soon thereafter.
Two months ago, a member told me that several members of our fellowship were angry with me. I told the situation in a very long audio message to my sponsor. He suggested to me to shut up for a while and to not speak in meetings. He also told me that he had experienced that himself, which had been a very enriching experience for him.
When I hit my bottom on April 16, 2014, I didn’t know if my wife would stay with me after I disclosed to her my double life between my family and my secret lust garden. I was not only mentally and spiritually sick but also physically ill because of acting-in. I suffered from terrible pain.
I have no doubt that if every SA meeting was conducted along the lines as prescribed in our White Book (185-187), our fellowship would have thousands of strong meetings globally and many, many thousands of members with strong recovery.
There I was sitting at an AA meeting in early Feb ‘84, when a man announced he was starting an SA group in Nashville, TN. I surrendered six weeks later when I met at his apartment for my first SA meeting. Soon we outgrew his apartment and moved to my office building.
I came into SA in 1987 in Los Angeles. I attended meetings, went to international conferences, had three sponsors in succession, made as many as four phone calls every day and followed directions from those three sponsors. I was never sober for the first six years.
Sometimes when I am on edge, I want to take in lust to calm myself. I obviously can’t look at porn or masturbate (or act out with another person). Because I would lose my sobriety and I’d have to disclose my actions to my wife. So my disease whispers in my ear that a “euphoric recall” is the perfect answer. I tell myself, “This will take the edge off my anxiety - and I haven’t taken any action of lust.”
Can I differentiate the true from the false? In my disease, I never thought about that question prior to recovery. It simply did not matter. I am a pleasure seeker. What makes me happy or comfortable was what was important. In recovery, I have the opportunity to examine my beliefs and ask the God of my understanding to help me see the truth.
