Many of us find that we have several characteristics in common. We felt inadequate, unworthy, alone and afraid. Our insides never matched what we saw on the outsides of others. Our identities came from without.

Early on, we came to feel disconnected- from parents, from peers, from ourselves. And we began the pursuit of tuning-out, plugging in, or both. We tuned out with fantasy, music, and masturbation. We plugged in by drinking in the pictures, the images, and pursuing the objects of our fantasies.

We became true addicts: promiscuity, adultery, dependency relationships, and more fantasy. We got it through the eyes. We bought it, we sold it, we traded it, and we gave it away. We were addicted to the intrigue, to the tease, the forbidden. The only way we knew to be free of it was to do it. “Please connect with me and make me whole,” we cried with outstretched arms. Lusting after the Big Fix, we gave away our power to others.

This produces guilt, self-hatred, remorse, emptiness, and pain, and we were driven ever inward, away from reality, away from love, lost inside ourselves.

Our habit made true intimacy impossible. We could never know real union with another because we were addicted to the unreal, the chemistry, the idol, and the lust. We went for the instant hit, the excitement, the connection that had the magic, because it bypassed intimacy and true union. The fantasy corrupted the real; lust killed love. We took from others to fill up what was lacking in ourselves. First love addicts then love cripples. Conning ourselves time and again that the next one would save us, we were really losing our lives.

In the solution, by surrendering again and again to the discipline of meeting with each other, people, without knowing it, through the honest revelation of their own lives, confront us with our disease as it really is. Our cry, “Connect with me” becomes “Confront me with myself, the self I’m running from, in a way I can accept.” And the healing begins.

[Quoted with permission of Roy K. from the early drafts of The Problem of Sexaholics Anonymous]

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North Texas Regional Intergroup of SAA

Recovery by grace, because you are worth it!

The Problem