The Solution

 (The following is a personal post from one of our members.)

Recently our local group read "The Solution" on pages 204-205 in the Sexaholics Anonymous book. Those two pages are a great summary of the process of working the 12 Steps.

I noticed that the first sentence starts with "We saw that our problem...." Yes, we certainly have a problem, a seemingly impossible problem, a problem of being powerless over lust with no way to escape. That was my problem, and my problem brought me to SA.

Fortunately it doesn't stop there, mired in the problem forever. As we read on, my mind drifted to a short paragraph in the first section of the SA book titled "To the Newcomer". Here is that paragraph from page 2: 

"We have a solution. We don't claim that it's for everybody, but for us, it works. If you identify with us and think you may share our problem, we'd like to share our solution with you."

I am so grateful that the SA solution was available to me when I was completely demoralized and without hope of ever being free of my slavery to lust and sexual acting out. As one of our members likes to summarize it, the SA program is to work the 12 Steps as directed by a sponsor within the fellowship of the group. And that worked for me, thank God!

The final paragraph in "The Solution" summary section shows me what we can look forward to when we've have had the promised "spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps" mentioned in Step 12.

"We began practicing a positive sobriety, taking the actions of love to improve our relations with others. We were learning how to give; and the measure we gave was the measure we got back. We were finding what none of the substitutes had ever supplied. We were making the real Connection. We were home."

It feels great to be at home, living in a right connection with God and others. Yes, I did have to walk the Steps to get there, and those Steps were hard work and sometimes painful to take. But it certainly was worth it to find freedom by surrendering to God. 

Dying from lust, or dying to lust

 (The following is a personal post from one of our group members.)

I'm a recovering lust addict.  I was fully enslaved to lust, unable in my own efforts to break free from the prison and chains by which lust held me in bondage. Lust was slowly killing me, taking my joy, my good desires, my right purposes, my relationships, my freedom and my life from me. I was dying inside, and I hated myself and what I had become.

And yet lust still attracted me. This was the insanity of it all! I longed for, sacrificed for, pursued, cherished, coddled, pined for, begged for the illusion of what lust could do for me.  The fantasy of lust remained attractive to me no matter how much I hated the bondage it brought. 

Something deadly serious had to happen. Either I was going to die from lust,  or I would have to die to lust.  But I had become powerless over lust, unable to be free of it, and certainly unable to kill it in me.

Instead of fighting lust and successfully killing it myself, I needed Someone to be my Savior over lust. I needed a Power greater than me and greater than lust to win the fight for me, to take on my lust for me, because I could not bear it or be free of it. 

"Every time I surrendered a wrong in process—temptation to lust, resentment, or fear, for example—and would say something to the effect, "I don't want to bear this; I want You to bear it for me; I cast it onto You," it worked. Someone has to bear my wrong, and Someone does." (SAWB, p. 121)

For me, God does make this happen. God, in his graciousness, accepts the lust I surrender to him and puts it to death. He makes it possible for me to have life in him. But God is not my errand-boy who simply wants to keep taking my lust while I go on about my life playing my own games and living life as the master of my own destiny. Believing I could be the master of my own life got me into this trouble in the first place. No, I needed a new Master, one who knows what is best for me. I need to surrender my will and life to the "One who has all power," to a "loving God" who "could and would" restore me to sanity. 

I must be willing to be changed by God from the inside out. And this is where the Steps of the SA program come to bear on the whole process of recovery. The Steps can, if done with the proper attitude and actions of surrender, bring me into a right relationship with God and others.  And when that happens, lust begins to lose its attractiveness. Its dishonesty and delusion become transparent. I find that I really do want to be rid of it, to be dead to lust. Surrender becomes easy as the default action to take when temptations to lust appear in my sight and mind. 

God takes care of the lust, and in that moment of renewed freedom, I respond, "What's next God?"