When I started sharing my participation in SCA with friends and family, the experience was very different than my coming out as a lesbian in the late seventies and early eighties. While a typical response to my coming out as gay was, “I don’t care if you sleep with ____ (fill in your choice of bizarre classifications); I still love you and support you.” The SCA revelation has been met over the years with one thing: silence.

I told my father and stepmother in a letter after being in SCA for a few years. Either I blocked out their response, or there was none, more likely the latter. My brother and his wife know about my being in SCA, but I don’t remember how I told them, or when, or what their reaction was. In both cases, my family members already knew I was in Al-Anon, so this was not the first time a 12-step program came up in conversation. My sister-in-law’s family has experienced dealing with alcoholics, so the Al-Anon thing proved somewhat useful, and I gave one of her family members an Al-Anon daily meditation book years ago.

Several friends know about SCA, and how important it is to me, but I do not remember much discussion about it or specific questions. Again, maybe I have blocked some of this stuff out, but my sense is that the people I have told have not known how to respond or what to ask, so they don’t say anything.

What all of this has taught me is that I don’t need to tell people I am a sex addict in recovery, unless there is some good reason. It does not bring me closer to people, in my experience, and it may push people away, since they really have no idea what being a sex addict or romantic obsessive means, and what it feels like to deal with these issues.

As a person with an intimacy disorder, I have an uncanny ability to say the wrong thing, which puts up a wall between another person and me. Before I choose to tell another person about SCA and sex addiction, I need to check in with my higher power and maybe a program friend, to make sure my motives are good ones. The goal is to be more intimate in a real way, rather than falsely intimate where I am almost intentionally making someone reject me.

On Saturday, I was out at fellowship with people from another program, and I got into a private conversation with a young woman that I never spoke to before, but that I felt drawn to. We started talking about being groped on the subway, and I ended up telling her that I was also in recovery for sexual issues. I don’t know if I told her because I thought she might be a candidate for SCA or another S program, or because I was attracted to her and thought I would create some false intimacy (instamacy, as some of us call it) to feel closer to her.

I do know that if I hadn’t agreed to write this, I wouldn’t have told anyone about that moment, and that choice, and would have kept my motives unexamined. The grace of recovery lies in humbly sharing what I know, and especially what I don’t know, and being willing to listen to what you know and don’t know about being a sex addict trying one day at a time to recover.