As a loner in the southwest of the UK, I had been accustomed to keeping in close touch with other members of the fellowship in the British Isles by phone. However, in the Summer of 2011, I became even more of a loner. I moved to China to work for some months.
We in New York are honored to host the upcoming SA/S-Anon International Convention, to be held just over the river in Newark. We chose the conference theme, “Liberty From Self,” because we believe that “self” is our greatest obstacle to recovery.
The SA message first reached Ireland in 1993 when, for a brief period, there was a lone group in Dublin, our capital. Those meetings were short-lived but the seed had been sown. Meetings started up again in 1995.
I recently celebrated ten years of sexual sobriety in SA, so naturally I have been thinking about how I came to achieve this and what steps I took on the way. I then started to think about sobriety itself. What is sexual sobriety?
My sponsor here in Wales suggested that I write an article for ESSAY as an indirect amends for some blatant dishonesty from my past. Simply put, during my teenage years, I made up stories about having a girlfriend in order to impress schoolmates, and with the hope of attracting some female attention.
The SA and S-Anon members of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area invite you to join us for the “Recovery on the (Columbia) River” convention in Portland this July. When you arrive, our local members will heartily welcome you.
Recently I had an exciting opportunity in my recovery—something I had never done before. I was invited to tell my story to a group of Russian SAs. Did I travel to Russia? Not exactly. Am I proficient in the Russian language? No way. Was this all a dream? Sort of. Let me explain.
“Baby, it’s cold outside,” are words from a classic wintertime song. For those of us who live in Southern California, “cold” means that the temperatures have dropped below 70 degrees. 70 degrees will be the average daytime temperature for the January 2011 SA/S-Anon International Convention.
As a member of the SA’s International Committee, I serve as the contact person for the SA community in Russia. I grew up in Moscow and moved to the USA over a decade ago. I found sobriety here after hitting bottom in 2004.
I first went to SA about two years ago, after several years of membership in another S-fellowship. “Knowledge and pride were our chief obstacles here” (SA 91). There was hardly any sobriety in the few young SA groups in my country and no group recovery—and the sobriety definition was being neglected.
