New Life MeetingAm I actually an addict?
Nobody can answer that for you, and nobody here will try. What we can give you is the same twenty questions each of us was handed on our first night.
The questions were written for everyone. Porn reaches people younger every year, and the shame that follows doesn't check whether you're a man or a woman. It just tells you that you're the only one this bad. You aren't.
Answer them alone, honestly, and without arguing with the question. Your ticks live only on this screen. Reload the page and they are gone. Nothing is sent anywhere.
A note on the word. The fellowship calls itself Sexaholics Anonymous and its members sexaholics, on the pattern of alcoholics. The forms it takes vary: pornography, compulsive masturbation, affairs, anonymous encounters, obsession with one person after another, paid sex, or thoughts you've never acted on but can't turn off. What we share is not the behavior. It's that we could not stop.
What the fellowship says about your answers
Here is the honest part. The fellowship does not set a passing score, because the number was never the point. In its own words: "You have to come to the realization for yourself. Recognizing our own powerlessness is what we call working the First Step." Most of us didn't need twenty questions. We needed one: can I stop? If the truthful answer is no, and you're tired of it, you belong in our room.
The one-question version
How many times have you stopped?
If the honest answer is "more than I can count," you already have your answer. The literature says some of us stopped every single time we acted out. Staying stopped was the problem, and willpower was never going to fix it, because willpower was what we were using.
The five-question version
If twenty was too many, the newcomer pamphlet asks these five:
- Have you thought of getting help for your sexual thinking or behavior, or have others suggested that you do so?
- Have you tried to control or decrease sexual thoughts or behaviors and failed to do so?
- Do your sexual thoughts or behaviors interfere with your relations with your spouse or your responsibilities to others?
- Despite negative consequences of your sexual behaviors, such as humiliations, lies, diseases, jobs lost, arrests, divorces, or immoral acts, have you continued those behaviors?
- Have you ever been told you were a sexual addict or been arrested for a sex crime?
"Can't I just cut down a little?"
You can try. Most of us tried for years. SA is for people who have lost the ability to choose to stop, whatever their particular behavior. If you can still choose, this may not be your room, and no one will think less of you for finding that out. If you find you can't, we'll be here.
The twenty questions are from the book Sexaholics Anonymous and the five from the pamphlet SA To the Newcomer, both published by SA Literature and reproduced here for the newcomer's use.