Lust is not sex.

The fellowship's book gives it a definition, and it is worth reading slowly.

Lust is an attitude demanding that a natural instinct serve unnatural desires.From the book Sexaholics Anonymous

Unnatural desires. Not the desire for sex. The desire to stop feeling alone. To stop being afraid. To feel alive for ten minutes. To feel nothing for ten minutes. To escape being you. To fill a hole that was never sexual and never will be. Every time you reach for the screen, or the stranger, or the memory, lust is offering to meet one of those needs. It has never once done it. Not one time. You know this. You have the receipts.

The alcoholic has a first drink. You have a first look. The look is the drink. Everything after the look is the drunk.

One of us, eighteen months sober, lingered on a photograph in a news magazine. Third look. He writes: "The first drink got me drunk. Within a matter of hours I was out on the streets again." A three-month binge followed. It began with a glance he could have ended at the second look.

That is what lust does at the moment of the look. It takes a real person and turns them into an object. Then it takes you and turns you into an audience. Then it takes the two of you and makes a connection that isn't one, because neither of you is there. The book calls it "mental-spiritual noise that distorts and perverts sex, much as a raucous radio interference distorts a lovely melody." It is anti-real. It works against reality, and reality is where your life is.

I can't have true union with my wife while lust is active, because she as a person really doesn't matter. She's even in the way. She's merely the sexual instrument.A member, from the book Sexaholics Anonymous

And with yourself, alone, it is the same. The fantasy partner in your head is a piece of you, split off. Lust splits you. It has been splitting you since the first time, and the split is the loneliness you have been trying to cure with more of it.

The book traces what happens to a person, not a behavior, when lust runs the inside. It is the hardest passage in the literature and we won't soften it.

We set ourselves against someone. Usually early, usually a parent. We chose to resent, and to do what we wanted in secret, and to keep the resentment alive because it felt good. The book says resentment itself became a drug. "I get a hit off that resentment every time I play back the scene."

We punished ourselves. Every wrong we did went into the stream of our own life and stayed there. "Polluted me, polluting me."

We made ourselves god. The center of a universe that kept failing us. "It got to be awful lonely, sitting on that throne of God." The book's line on this is one we say to each other in the room: self-obsession smells bad to everyone but the obsessed.

We walled ourselves in. From the people we love, from ourselves, from God. Charming on the outside, as long as it served the self. "We cannot hang on to resentments or practice our addiction without negating true union."

We went blind. The one thing we could not see was the thing running us. "Even though part of us knew the habit controlled us, it was often the one thing in our lives we thought we were controlling."

We plugged the soul into the wrong socket. We are made for union, with other people and with the source of our lives. That drive has to connect to something. We connected it to lust, and lust connected us "with the worst in us and others." Idolatry is the book's word. It is the right word.

And we died. Not the body, yet. "Doesn't all this add up to spiritual death? The stakes are higher than we figured."

Thus, we destroy ourselves.From the book Sexaholics Anonymous

Lust tells one lie, and it tells it in a thousand voices. The lie is that it is life. That without it you would die, or go mad, or have nothing. That it is the one place you get to be free.

The founder of the fellowship, after decades of it, wrote that he had spent his life "seducing and victimizing myself into a great lie: The wages of lust is life." And then, in the garage he was living in, at the bottom: "I had never come to terms with the true nature of my problem. The wages of lust is death."

Here is the truth, and it is the opposite of the lie at every point. The more you indulge lust, the less sexual you become. The more freedom you take, the less free you are. The more it promises connection, the more alone you get. It began as the cure and it is the sickness. It began as the medicine and it is the poison. It began as the answer and it is the problem. It does not stop. It has never stopped, for anyone, on its own. It only ever wants more, and there is no bottom to more.

And lust does not stay in its lane. Let it live in one place and it will, in the book's words, "try to express itself in every form." Members find they have a lust to resent, a lust to control, a lust to be looked at. "Lust becomes the indicator of not only what I do, but what I am."

Lust has a weakness, and it is the reason a room full of people who could not stop are sober.

Lust hates the light and flees from it. It loves the dark secret recesses of my being. And once I let it lodge there, it's like a fungus and starts flourishing. But as soon as I bring it to the light, exposing it to another recovering sexaholic, the power it has over me is broken. Light kills lust.A member, from the book Sexaholics Anonymous

The secret is the fuel. That is why every private attempt failed, and why every blocker, every deleted account, every vow made alone in the dark held for exactly as long as the dark did. Lust needs you to be alone with it. That is the only condition under which it wins.

So we don't fight it. One of us calls it an eighteen-foot giant, and says that fighting it "gave the thought even more power to hold on to me." We surrender it instead. Out loud. To another person who has done what we've done, and to a Power greater than ourselves and greater than our drug. The words are almost stupid in their simplicity: "I'm powerless over this. Please take it." Sometimes a hundred times a day at first. And what the alcoholics promised turns out to be true: God could and would, if sought. We did not stop lusting. We stopped fighting, and we let it be taken.

The book says lust "only yields to the slow, patient working of the program in the context of others who are doing the same." Slow. Patient. With others. Not tonight, not alone, not by trying harder. And on the other side of that patience, a member writes, "wholeness is being restored: true union within myself first, then with others and the Source of my life."

That union is what you were looking for at the very first look. It is real. It was never on the screen.