You're a wife and a mother, and it's you.

You are not the first

A woman in the fellowship's literature writes: "On the outside, I was the good girl and on the inside I was full of rage and rebellion." She found pornography at a neighbor's house as a child and "stored the pictures deep inside," then built a fantasy world out of romance novels, fantasized in church, and at sixteen could not stop. "The guilt and shame was huge and I could not stop." Another was a happily married Sunday school teacher whose compulsion came back after ten quiet years. Another married her boyfriend to cover the shame, then sat alone at the computer in her parents' house, deleting a video in disgust and opening another.

Why it's worse for you

A man in your position is afraid of losing his family. You're afraid of that and of a second thing: that a mother who does this is a different kind of monster than a man who does, and that the one place you might tell, the church, the women's group, the other moms, is the place most certain to turn on you. So you tell no one, and the isolation feeds the thing. The fellowship's word for what you're carrying is shame, and shame does not survive being said out loud to someone who has done the same. That's not a slogan. It's what each of these women reports.

What it looks like for women

The fellowship's own list, in its pamphlet for women: jumping from one relationship or lover to another; emotional or sexual affairs; compulsive masturbation; pornography; wasting time in sexual or romantic fantasy; being addicted to a person as one would be to a drug; doing something against your values because you wanted it so badly or could not say no; feeling shame and self-loathing after. If you recognize yourself, you are, in the pamphlet's words, not alone, and there is hope.

What happened when they went

The Sunday school teacher threw up before she could get out of the house. A woman sat in her car outside her first meeting, watched five men walk in, and drove home; she came back the next week. Another kept her head down looking at everyone's shoes for weeks. Then: "To my surprise, I heard my story told over and over again. I began to feel alive again." "I started to share at meetings and I did not die. I was welcomed as one of them."

What to do from your kitchen

Call or text the line. Say you're a woman and you're looking for a women's meeting. Depending on your circumstances you'll be invited, or connected with women in SA who meet by phone and online every day of the week, which for a mother with children at home is often the only kind of meeting that fits. You don't have to tell anyone else first. You don't have to have stopped. You only have to want to.

Call or text 417-501-9395 Read how it starts and where it goes Find the meeting

Sexaholics Anonymous in Springfield, Missouri, the only SA meeting in southwest Missouri and the Ozarks. People drive in from Nixa, Ozark, Republic, Branson, Bolivar, Lebanon, Joplin, and the towns between. A closed meeting; members are primarily men, and anyone who calls is welcome. Nothing on this site is professional or medical advice.