Chris W (NY)
My first "S" meeting was in the late 1980's and I got sober, one day at a time, thanks to HP, in the fall of 1996...many years later. Which is not to say that I didn't have many stretches of ten day periods - or two weeks, or, less frequently: 30, 60, 90 or 180 days of sobriety (and, once, nine months!) – with program help, in between those two dates.
I began in SA (now SRA). A month or so of SA’s plan of no masturbation (as I was single) helped me feel truly marvellous. Then I went running from the rooms as those constraints, and the added shame of not being able to live up to them, were too much for me at the time. Eventually, I found my way to SCA. Virtually from my first meeting, I felt dubious that I could continue to masturbate (as I could not avoid euphoric recall of past acting out experiences at such times, which, indeed, only acted to fuel more and other acting out). However, I was unwilling to give up what, at times, then seemed like my only "friend" or pleasure, and my hard earned gay sexuality.
As compulsions are progressive diseases, not only did my previous AA, Al-Anon, and DA work allow me, positively, to realize that my core issue was sexual (for which knowledge I was often NOT grateful) but my acting out worsened (a lot) as I tried to get sexually sober. I was risking my life, my business, arrest, friendships, family and disease; at best, I was totally stressing myself out. Relationships became shorter and shorter, less and less complete, illusory, and then ceased totally. But, if I was failing at everything else, "at least I was good at sex...".
A week long rehab in 1987, a five week rehab in 1994 (during which sexual abstinence for at least a year, which seemed impossible, was recommended strongly; and a week after the end of which I was acting in, i.e. trying to convince myself that I could have sober sex as I lied to myself that I was in sober relationships, then plain old acting out), several 90-and-90s, hundreds of meetings ( up to one or more a day when I was in real crisis), having sponsors (and firing sponsors when the interaction became un-sober), using the phone frequently(cellular if will help me or a friend stay sober), working the steps, SCA meetings with sex-offenders in prison, sexual recovery plans, therapy with sex abuse specialists (who also saw abstinence as necessary for me), ditching all pornography, blocking hotel TV movies, avoiding steam rooms and saunas...all helped, on and off, but not consistently.
I could usually get two weeks of sobriety together, and then I’d fall off the wagon. I did begin to glimpse that it became easier "physiologically" for me to stay sober the longer I stayed sober: usually after 30 days, definitely after 60 or 90 days. Anniversaries, as program says, were ironically and "unfairly" difficult (30, 60, 90 days, etc.), however. Friends remind me it is easier, also, to stay sober than to get sober. Going to more and more meetings helped me to also be able to hear that I am simply not able to go into any public men's room (except with a sober friend) - and that it's possible not to! And that I could not travel for a while, then I could only travel with a friend and needed to go to meetings in other locales when I did, or at least call for meetings and numbers.
And still, I could not stop acting out. I'd go to bed determined at least to not act out with anybody else, or outside my home, masturbate (or not) wake up fifteen minutes later, not bookend with anyone in program and, powerless, dress, leave the house and act out 'til the next morning, or longer. And I'd wonder why I constantly had colds, and was angry and tired at work! And why the homeless person on Thorazine, and living at a half-way house, I'd picked up at a toilet and asked to sleep over at my house was unwilling to become a boyfriend.
I want to stay away from triggering details; the truth is that I was killing myself, and (A) I did not want to (B) if I had to, it seemed it would be better to not draw it out endlessly. I felt hopeless, desperate...suicidal. For me, ANY sex led to a sex slip, if not a sex binge. I was thrown out of my gym, legally, for trying to act out. I only just talked my way out of being arrested in a hotel by being indignant, and well-dressed. Why, I asked myself again and again, had years of effort not paid off? Was I stupid? I'd LEARNED that I couldn't do it alone. Counting the approximate number of my sex partners had helped put things in perspective. I'd BEEN able to come to see at least the "rooms" (people in meetings), as well as brief periods of sobriety, showed there WAS sometimes a higher power - despite my agnostic upbringing.
Then it came to me, thank god: MY way simply did NOT work, and does not work. Only that, in a way, made room in my life for ANOTHER WAY, higher power's! The first three steps became real. I again remembered a favorite slogan: "half measures availed us naught". I surrendered...and simultaneously tried the only two things I'd been reluctant to keep to: sexual abstinence, and the new generation of seratonin effecting drugs (and I did NOT lose my personality..!). I had tried and tried to reach sobriety, and I had equally resisted it as well.
Without abstinence, I can forget any hope for my life. My addict wants me dead, and wanted to scare me with the specter of "celibacy", I am not celibate, I am abstinent. I do not know when, and if, I will again be sexual. AND, for the first time in years, I don’t need to know. Truly, anything ( and everything!) is better than acting out and the devastation it creates in my life. I now can face what I used sex to cover, one day at a time AND work with it. One day at a time, I miraculously have two and a half years of total abstinence today! Yet, may I never have "too many years of sobriety and not enough days of sobriety..." Equally miraculously, I have been able to date three men, consecutively and soberly, on and off, for the last year. Actually not even getting to the point where sex was appropriate, nurturing and wouldn't have been re-traumatizing!
There have been times when I wanted to act out in the last two and a half years. I guess my sobriety muscles ARE toned: HP did not even bring acting out partners near me! Letting go is easier; life is more fun, and runs with more and more joyful synchronicity... I feel I actually may grow up after all!