If this is your story, you already know how it ends. It doesn't have to.

How it started

Not with sex. Almost none of us would say it started with sex.

It started with a kid who felt different. Alone in a full house, or a quiet one. Not good enough, not seen, not safe, not sure why. And one day that kid found something that made the feeling stop. A picture. A page in a catalog. A scene in a movie. A body, sometimes their own. It didn't matter what. What mattered was the relief. For a few minutes, the noise inside went quiet and something in there felt alive.

I was off somewhere hiding inside myself, peering out at the world like it was all just another show being imagined in my head. A member, describing himself at eight

Some of us can name the day. A curtain dropped. We decided, without words, that we would never again be on the outside what we were on the inside. We went in, and we took the thing that worked in with us. We were nine, or eleven, or fourteen. We kept growing on the outside. On the inside, a lot of us stopped right there.

That is what we mean when we say it was never about sex. It was about a way out of ourselves that we found before we were old enough to know what we were finding. And it worked. That's the part nobody wants to say. It worked for years.

How it grew

Then it stopped working as well, and we needed more of it.

Every one of us has the same ladder, with different rungs. What was enough at twelve wasn't enough at sixteen. What was enough at sixteen was boring at twenty-five. Each time a line got crossed, there was a new line waiting, and each one was easier to cross than the last. One of us puts it this way: it was as if his conscience hardened, and to feel anything at all he had to go further. Pictures became video. Video became hours. Fantasy became a person. A person became strangers. Chat became a hotel room. Some of us went to places we'd have sworn on our lives we would never go, and then went back.

And all the way up the ladder we swore off. That's the other thing we all share. Delete the files. Throw out the magazines. Cancel the account, change the password, install the blocker, make the promise, pray the prayer, tell God this was the last time. Some of us stopped every single time we acted out.

I had stopped thousands of times; almost every time was the "last time." Staying stopped was my problem. From the book Sexaholics Anonymous

One of us was arrested and stood spread against a brick wall in front of a crowd, thinking, thank God, this is what it took, never again. Five minutes after they let him go he was back looking for the same woman. Another watched a man die in a crash on the freeway on the way to act out, took it as a warning from heaven, pulled off the road shaking, and got back on a minute later, headed the same direction.

If you've ever had a "never again" that lasted less than a day, you are not weak. You're one of us. Willpower was never the tool. We had plenty of it. It's the wrong tool.

The double life

By the time it's bad, almost all of us are two people.

I had built up a duplex inside my head. One side was the husband, father, church treasurer, worship band musician. In the other side I was hopelessly addicted. There was a wall down the middle and I was pretty good at keeping it from leaking. A member

Good employee, good parent, good church member, good friend. The one people rely on. And a second self that lived at night, or at lunch, or in the car, or on the phone in the bathroom. We got very good at the wall. We told ourselves the two didn't touch. We were wrong. Everyone close to us felt the wall even if they never saw over it. The exhaustion of holding it up is a big part of why you're reading this.

The terror

For many of us the strongest thing we felt, stronger than the pull itself, was fear. Not the vague kind. The specific kind. Losing her. Losing the kids. The look on their faces. Everything coming to light at once: the history, the accounts, the money, the nights we said we were somewhere else. Lying awake next to the person we were most afraid of losing, running the scene where it all comes out, over and over, until morning.

And under the fear, shame so total it was physical. Some of us could not look in a mirror. Some of us could not pray. Some of us were sure that if anyone ever saw all of it, there would be nothing left of us worth keeping.

Here is what we can tell you from the other side, and we tell it carefully, because it is not a promise about your marriage.

The fear was real. The thing it predicted mostly did not happen the way it predicted. What actually ended marriages in our experience was not the telling. It was the lying, year after year, and the discovery that came on its own terms, at the worst time, with nothing behind it but more lying. The fellowship's book warns against confessing everything to a spouse in the first days, and not to protect us. It warns because a rushed confession, dumped at midnight to relieve our own guilt, tends to wound the person hearing it and to fail. How the light comes in matters. When it comes in matters. People in our room have brought it in slowly, with a sponsor, after real sobriety, and are still married. Some are not, and are free anyway, and are fathers their children can trust.

The shame is different. The shame does not survive the room. It cannot. It was built on the belief that you are the only one, and the first time you hear your own story come out of someone else's mouth, that belief is gone and it does not come back. What is left is the truth, and the truth is bearable. We know because we're bearing it.

As the burden of guilt and shame is lifted, we have more energy available for family and friends, work and play. From "Why Stop Lusting?", Sexaholics Anonymous literature

The bargains

We all made them. Maybe you're making one now.

• If I just cut down. Weekends only. Not at work. Only the mild stuff.
• If I got married, it would stop. Then: if I had a better marriage. Then: if I were single again.
• If I had the right job, the right city, the right house, the right person, the right church.
• If I just understood why I do it, I'd stop.
• If I could find one person who'd say it's normal.

One of us got the right job, the right town, and the right wife all at once, burned every magazine on his wedding day, and was back within days. Another was told by a professional that what he was doing was a natural urge, and by another that he simply wasn't getting enough at home. He wanted very badly to believe both of them. He couldn't. Understanding it didn't stop it either. Some of us understood it very well.

What it's really for

Here is the part that took most of us years to see, and that we'd give anything for you to see tonight.

The thing you're reaching for is not on the screen and never was. Ask what it does for you and the answers are all the same: it makes the loneliness stop for a while. It takes the edge off fear. It covers something you don't want to feel. It's the only time you feel alive, or the only time you feel nothing, and you'll take either one. It's an escape hatch from being you.

That hunger is real. We are built to be connected, to other people and to something bigger than ourselves, and when that connection isn't there the hole doesn't go away. It has to be plugged into something. We plugged it into this. It's a connection to the worst of ourselves and the worst of other people, and it never once delivered what it promised. But the hunger under it is the most human thing about us. You're not looking for filth. You're looking for home, at the wrong address.

What was used as the cure becomes the sickness; what was used as the medicine becomes the poison; the Answer becomes the Problem. From the book Sexaholics Anonymous

What's underneath

When we finally stopped, most of us found out what the thing had been covering. It wasn't pretty. Resentment we didn't know we carried. Anger at a parent, a spouse, God. Fear of nearly everything. A conviction that we were the center of a universe that kept failing to notice. One of us said that when the lust went, resentment burst out like a dammed-up volcano, and that controlling it was like squeezing jello: press here and it bulges out there.

We tell you this so you'll know two things. The behavior is the symptom, and stopping the behavior alone won't hold. And the work underneath is exactly the work this room is for. Nobody does it alone, and nobody does it all at once.

The lie that keeps you out

"I'm the only one this bad."

Every person in the room walked in believing it. Some of us believed it after our first meeting: sure, these people have a problem, but mine is different, mine is worse, mine is stranger, I'm the real sicko here. One woman said she couldn't call herself a sexaholic because that would make her the kind of person who does what she was doing. Then she heard her own story told, out loud, by someone else. Then again. Then again.

To my surprise, I heard my story told over and over again. I began to feel alive again. A member, on her first weeks in SA

Whatever it is. Whatever you've done, whatever you look at, wherever you've gone, whoever you've hurt. Someone in a room like ours has done it, said it out loud, been met with a nod, and is sober today. The details are yours. The disease is ours. You are not the only one. You are not even unusual.

What the bottom actually is

Most of us were waiting for a bottom that looked like a bottom. Jail. Divorce papers. Fired. Sick. And some of us got those. But that isn't what the bottom is.

Our bottom came the moment we admitted our problem was bigger than we were, and that we needed help. Nothing more and nothing less was required of us. From SA literature

For one of us it was a curb outside his office on a Monday morning, twenty-four years old, crying, out of answers. For another it was a kitchen table: "Something's wrong with me and I don't know how to fix it." For another it was the passing lane of an interstate, in tears, with a thought he'd never had before and a promise to his wife that was the only thing keeping his hands on the wheel. For another it was a garage he was living in, at the end of a three-month binge that followed a year and a half sober.

A lot of us thought about ending it. If you are thinking that tonight, know that you are in the company of most of the people in our room, and that for most of us it was the last stop before the door, not the end of the road. Then call 988, and then call us.

The fellowship's own literature says something about despair that we've found to be true: if reading this leaves you in despair, that despair may mean you're willing to face the truth about yourself for the first time. That's where all of us had to get to. It's not the bottom of the well. It's the door.

What we found on the other side

We didn't die. That's the first thing. Every one of us was sure that stopping would kill us, that the need was as real as air. It isn't. One of us, decades sober, still asks why nobody ever told him that sex was optional.

We found out that fighting it doesn't work and never did, and that surrendering it, out loud, to another person and to something bigger than us, does. One of us calls lust an eighteen-foot giant: you don't beat it in a fair fight, so you stop fighting and hand it off. We found that the secret was the fuel. Say the specific thing to one person who's done it too and its grip breaks, right then. We call that bringing it into the light. Lust hates light.

We found people. That's the thing most of us were actually looking for the whole time. Not an audience. People who know, and who pick up the phone at midnight, and who tell you the truth when you're bargaining.

And we found, slowly, one day at a time, the things the literature promised: no more hiding, no more lies, no more double life. Some of us got our marriages back, and met our spouses for the first time as people. Some didn't, and are free anyway. None of us are cured. The pull still comes. We just don't have to drink it in anymore, one glance at a time.

I've found something better than lust. Reality. From the book Sexaholics Anonymous

If you got this far

You read the whole thing. Most people who read the whole thing are already at the door. Here's what we'd ask: one call, or one meeting. Not a decision about the rest of your life. One hour in a room with people who've heard all of it, where nobody will ask your last name and nobody will look surprised.

Find the meeting What happens when you walk in I need something tonight

Quotations are from the book Sexaholics Anonymous and from SA pamphlets and member writing published by the fellowship, reproduced here for the newcomer. Members are never named.