The Problem

Many of us felt inadequate, unworthy, alone and afraid.  Our insides never matched what we saw on the outsides of others.

Early on we came to feel disconnected — from parents, from peers, from ourselves.  We tuned-out with fantasy and masturbation.  We plugged in by drinking in the pictures, the images, and pursuing the objects of our fantasies.  We lusted and wanted to be lusted after.

We became true addicts: sex with self, promiscuity, adultery, dependency relationships, and more fantasy.  We got it through the eyes; we bought it, we sold it, we traded it, 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 produced 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.  We went for the chemistry, the connection that had the magic, because it by-passed intimacy and true union.  Fantasy corrupted the real; lust killed love.

We took from others to fill up what was lacking in ourselves.  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 with out knowing it, through the honest revelation of their lives, confront us with our disease as it really is.  Our cry "Connect with me” becomes "Confront me with myself - the self I am running from - in a way that I can accept.”  And the healing begins.

Adapted from Sexaholics Anonymous, 2.0.02, with the exception of the last paragraph