I am a gratefully recovering sexaholic living in California. My sobriety date is November 26, 2009. At my first SA meeting, there was one other woman in the room who had joined SA four months before. She became my first SA sponsor.
Hello, my name is Ilona and I am a sexaholic. My sobriety date is January 14, 2016. When I walked into SA I was the only female in the room. This was expected, if at first, unsettling. I discussed this with my sponsor. She told me “What better way for your recovery being in a room of recovering men and learning to relate to them non-sexually?”
I found out when I started to sober up and get into recovery that part of not lusting required keeping physical boundaries. In my active addiction, I did not pay attention to this and had no idea that there are healthy boundaries. For me, this means no intimate hugging with men and women and making sure I have enough space around me to stand or sit.
I’m a sexaholic from Luxembourg, sober since May 31, 2004. My first SA meeting was at a convention in Germany in 1995. I was in a lot of pain and went after one of the meetings to one of the women and asked her to be my sponsor. She agreed.
In my mid-forties I found myself full of fear, uncertainty, and loneliness—not knowing why my life did not have the shades of color I saw in nature, the sunsets, the immensity of the flowers. I felt that I did not belong—that perhaps my Higher Power had made a mistake. Lust had always been there, but at a very high cost.
This is what Step 4 is designed to achieve. The question “What was my part?” is not designed to blame the victim who has a resentment against a wrong that was done to them. The question goes to what part of me is broken that keeps this pain alive? How have I taken myself out of the land of the living because of this resentment?
When I entered the room of my first SA meeting in September 2018, I was the only female. I sat down at a table with five men of varying ages and I felt very alone and fearful. What would these men think of me? It wasn’t until the meeting progressed and these men around me started sharing their thoughts and feelings about working their SA program that I began a slow journey towards being able to view men as people rather than as objects.
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.
None of us can carry the pain of finality of letting go alone. That’s why we are here. Lean on us. The best advice a guy gave me in a meeting one day was, “Be a burden.”
My first memories are of fear, resentment and separation. Lust first came on the scene when I was four, my mother moved with us to a foreign country without my father. During my first few months in this new place I was sexually abused by kids several years older than myself. I was terrified anybody would find out, I was sure it was my fault and I felt guilty for enjoying the physical aspect and attention.
