Too Much Focus On The Problem

Gene D

My discontents with the program of SAA as it presently operates are legion. I hardly know where to start. But begin I must, I will begin with a central error: the SAA program is all problem and no solution. This is of course hyperbole, but only slightly.

Our first question must be: what does our program promise? Read the steps. Read the Promises as they appear in the discussion of the Ninth Step in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous; those promises are the best description of the fruits of recovery that I know. Nowhere do those sources promise abstinence. They do not promise sobriety. What the Twelfth Step promises us is a spiritual awakening as a result of working the steps. Inferentially, the Eleventh Step promises us conscious contact with God as we understand Him, an indispensable component of that spiritual awakening.

What the Promises describe is an entirely new way of living – and of seeing and dealing with the world. It is nothing that we work to get; it just happens. We just wake up one day and realize that we are living a wholly different kind of life, and, at the same time we also realize that this state is nothing that we have earned or deserve, it is simply the breathtaking and wholly unanticipated action of God’s grace in our lives. Inexplicable. Magical. In a word: a miracle.

The Twelfth Step is explicit about what we are to do once we have our spiritual awakening: we are to “to carry this message to other sex addicts, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.” And the fifth tradition tells us “Each group has but one primary purpose – to carry its message to the addict who still suffers.” And the message that we are to carry is that if you work the steps you will have a spiritual awakening that will alter every aspect of your life.

But our conference approved materials take a different tack. The suggested format materials state in the “Who We Are” section that “our primary purpose is to stop our sexual addictive behavior and to help others recover from sexual addiction.” That is different from what we say in our Fifth Tradition, that our primary purpose is to carry the message to those who still suffer. Our website is of the same mind; it states that “Our common goals are to become sexually healthy and to help other sex addicts achieve freedom from compulsive sexual behavior,” which is language taken from our conference approved description of our program. The difference is not a trivial one.

This approach is the kiss of death. Once we have stated that our primary purpose is to stop acting out, then our program loses its spiritual focus and our meetings degenerate into a litany of woe, wailing and weeping about how to stop those behaviors. I have sat through more meetings than I care to remember – and walked out on not an inconsiderable number of them – where the topic was what our compulsive behaviors were or how we could recognize our addictive behavior or how difficult a time we were having not looking at Internet pornography or how to avoid masturbating, or some such other topic. That ain’t solution. That’s problem. That’s what we have sponsors for; that’s not what we have meetings for. The conference approved description of meetings includes in its list of possible formats the “check-in meeting.” In my experience, check-in meetings are simply an invitation to whine.

The classic description of appropriate sharing in a Twelve Step meeting is sharing our experience strength and hope. A meeting with such a goal has no place for the kinds of topics I have listed above. But our materials that say that stopping our sex addiction is the focus of our program encourage those very topics. If you go to an AA meeting and find people talking about their problems in staying sober or digressing into drunkologues, you know you are in a sick meeting and you want to get out in a hurry. Our meetings should be no different. In the many meetings that I have attended – their number is presently somewhere in the thousands – the percentage of meetings where the topic is the steps or a specific step is well under 10%. And, up until I started a Step/Tradition meeting in March of this year, I had never attended an SAA meeting other than a group conscience meeting where the traditions were discussed. Pitiful! This is a ship without a rudder.

Our addiction is no more than our ticket for admission into the program. The Third Tradition tells us that the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop compulsive sexual behavior. I doubt that there is anyone in our fellowship who needs to have this set out in any detail. I have heard hundreds of sex addicts’ stories in SAA, and the basic topography is the same: at some point in our lives we discovered that we were seriously out of control, that we didn’t have a sex life – it had us. Perhaps it was because of an arrest, perhaps it was because our spouse caught us, as it were, with our pants down, and maybe we just reached the point where we had exhausted our powers of denial. Nobody comes into our rooms on a lark. We are each of us there because we have no other place to go. We don’t need to talk about how bad it is or was. If we didn’t know how bad things were we wouldn’t be in the meetings in the first place. At our meetings, we don’t need to spend our time wallowing in our addiction or comparing techniques for white-knuckling. We need experience strength and hope; it ain’t easy to find.

The conference approved booklet, Abstinence and Boundaries, is a flat horror show. It gives us the examples of a small group of newcomers who relate their problems and then tell what they do in order to avoid those problems. If we accept the definition of sex addition embodied in the First Step, that we are enmeshed in compulsive sexual behavior over which we are powerless, this booklet is advocating pure insanity: that we try to control our addiction by setting up boundaries — that is, by making a list of things that we will not do. If we are in fact powerless, this is an approach that guarantees failure. This booklet manifests no spiritual program; it’s a let’s-control-our-self-will-runriot- on-our-own program. There’s no God in that booklet; it’s just a guide to white-knuckling.

When a newcomer enters our meetings and hears what goes on, he will not, unless he has had some experience in a sound Twelve Step program, know any better and will join the group in wandering in the wilderness, every now and then kicking in his two cents worth about how tough it is to stay sober or whatever topic has raised its ugly head that day. His chances, to coin a phrase, are less than average. Not because he is incapable of honesty, but because he is involved in a program that is leading him away from the source of real recovery, involved a program with no fruit but sour grapes. And he will probably drop out. I love the dozens of friends I have in SAA recovery. But I truly mourn the hundreds I have seen come into the meetings for a while, usually a matter of days or weeks, occasionally a matter of years, who have simply disappeared without a trace.

In my experience and observation, ours is not an uncommon addiction. The widely touted figures on the profits of the various sex industries, figures in the billions of dollars, confirm to me that there are plenty of us out there. Where are they? They aren’t in our meetings. SAA is over 30 years old. When AA was ten years younger, it claimed roughly 6,000 groups with over 150,000 alcoholics in recovery. We aren’t playing in that league. Don’t give me the line that our number is scant because of the stigma attached to our addiction. The stigma attached to alcoholism was just as strong when AA began. It was AA’s success that started to change public opinion. For my money, SAA’s root problem is that we aren’t really a Twelve Step program. In our heart of hearts we as a program simply do not believe that our God can restore us to sanity. I’m not quite sure what we are, but a genuine Twelve Step program is the one thing I’m sure we aren’t.

We need to start cleaning up our program and our meetings, and to that end, there needs to be mature, focused guidance from the ISO. From what I can observe, presently the ISO is simply the blind leading the blind.