The disease of sex addiction was destroying our lives, our self-esteem, our relationships, our careers, our family life, our physical and spiritual health. Many of us feared sexually-transmitted disease, physical assault or suicide.
Sex had stopped being “fun.” It could no longer fill the emptiness inside ourselves. We dreamed of romance and found only a nightmare. We could not stand who we were becoming and the pain we were causing ourselves and others. We could not go on living the way we were.
Though our individual behaviors may have been different, our feelings were similar: despair, shame, hopelessness, and anguish, mixed in with intense excitement and forgetfulness. These feelings were always followed by still worse pain. We were starting to see the truth—our problem was progressive, it always got worse.
The illusion that the next time would “fix” us, that we would feel better and could then control our behavior, was revealed for what it was—a false promise. We began to sense that we were spinning downwards, out of control, toward a life of loneliness, misery, jail, insanity, perhaps even death. In these moments of clarity, we were frightened.
We could not stop or control our behavior by ourselves. Our lives had become unmanageable. Finally, when the pain grew great enough, we were ready to try anything, and we came to Sexual Recovery Anonymous.