(This is a personal story from one of our members.)
I'm a lust addict. I am a sick person. All sorts of odd things can be triggers and temptations to me. I'm not like "normal" people for whom those things would be no big deal. I am that sick.
But I get a daily reprieve from my sickness based on the maintenance of my spiritual condition. For me that means that I stay rightly connected to God by surrendering those triggers and temptations and my insane thinking and my will and my life to Him. I learned how to do that by working the 12 Steps of the SA program under the direction of a sponsor. That is what the literature of SA suggested that I do if I wanted sobriety, recovery, serenity, and freedom from slavery to lust. As far as I've ever been able to figure out, SA actually doesn't offer any solution other than working those 12 Steps under the guidance of a sponsor.
My experience is that the program of working the 12 Steps simply works. And I know a lot of other people for whom it worked just like that as well. I also know through my experience that everything I came up with on my own as a means of getting rid of my sickness didn't work. So I just accepted that I was sick enough that I had to do what had actually worked for all those other "sick" people who were now living in freedom one day at a time.
It would have done me well to realize how sick I was a long time ago so that I could finally give up, let go, and let God. But I guess I needed more time to experience more pain first. But whatever the reasons are that I refused to really work the 12 Steps way back when I went to me first SA meeting, I'm really happy that I finally did.
