God Gives Us Courage
A member asked, “Do you feel connected to people?” She was feeling uncomfortable in mixed meetings, after one year of sobriety.
Letter to a Young SA Woman
My dear friend, I’ve been masturbating since the 6th grade and found SA in 2003 or 2004; I don’t remember exactly when. I went to some meetings and then stopped for several months. I came back in 2005 for good.
A Woman Survivor Finds Hope in SA
In the 2005 movie Crash about race relations in Los Angeles, a cop sexually assaults a woman, while her husband stands by, completely powerless to save her. Husband and wife both fear for their lives. The experience devastates her, and threatens to destroy their marriage. Weeks later the same woman is in a car crash, trapped in a flaming wreck in the middle of a highway. The officer who shows up to rescue her? The same cop who attacked her.
Freedom
SA’s sobriety definition says “for the single sexaholic, sexual sobriety means freedom from sex of any kind.” It does not say that we endure the endless torture of chastity.
Withdrawal
A newcomer recently asked how long withdrawal from lust could possibly last, and I want to share my personal experience, strength, and hope on that topic from my current vantage point of one year sober.
San Diego Women’s Group Celebrates 5th Anniversary
In the summer of 2001, I spoke with women in other 12 Step fellowships who identified themselves as having SA issues. At the time, only two women were active in SA groups in San Diego. Other women were reluctant to come to SA because the fellowship was mainly men. I began to think how lovely it would be to gather all of these women in one room so that they could hear that other women have similar issues.
Getting Started
Before recovery, whenever I tried to stop acting out, my life went insane. I started doing stuff that was so strange that I thought I was literally losing my mind. I’ve since learned that what I was doing is not all that uncommon. I simply couldn’t cope with living without acting out.
Women Helping Women in SA
Hi, I am Judy, a sexaholic. I live in a small town in North Idaho. When I was six months sober, God and I started a meeting. It was small, but it lasted for three and a half years, and was instrumental in my sobriety. Then the meeting folded, and I was without a face-to-face meeting.
Lust Unclothed
The other night I had a dream which stripped my lust of its pastel pink and purple euphemisms. I have avoided the word lust in my litany—preferring to tell myself that I crave “an affair of the heart”—further dressed up by such phrases as “out of my deep loneliness and chronic disconnection from others, I have sought soul mates, persons to join me in (at worst) the warmth of romantic fervor.”
Resources for Women
Are you struggling as a lone woman in a meeting room full of men? We know how scary that can be! We need to be accessible to the newcomer as well as the old-timer woman. What can we do to help?
