I get a lot of emails and comments about our website. Most of them are from Latter-day Saints and most of these communications are positive. I am grateful for the encouragement and even more grateful that Mormons are finding answers here to what had seemed in the past like unanswerable questions. This website–and those of the LDS faith who are contributing content, reading it and sharing it with others–are making a world of difference.
Something occurred to me recently. It was a tiny whisper of inspiration. I suppose the whispering had been going on for some time, but I hadn’t been attuned to it. The whispering in my heart and mind was in essence this: “Tell them to start their own meetings!” It was kind of like my very own “Field of Dreams” experience except that I’m not Kevin Costner and it had nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with the souls of men and women. The stakes are so much higher with what we’re dealing with.
One of the oft-repeated laments I get in emails is that there are no local meetings of Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) and S-Anon for a lot of Latter-day Saints. Many of them have already tried the Church’s Pornography Addiction Support Group (PASG) or the Spouse’s Support Group, but have found them fatally deficient. (If you want to know why, I encourage you to read the rest of the articles on this website.) They are literally in a life and death struggle–and I do mean that quite literally: Addiction is a fatal disease! “Supporting” the Church’s programs has taken a back seat to maintaining or recovering their sanity and saving their families. They need something that works!
The Thirteenth Article of Faith states that Latter-day Saints seek after “anything that is lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy.” That is a core tenet of our faith! There is no rule that says, “Everything of a spiritual nature must originate on North Temple in Salt Lake City and must bear the imprimatur ‘Approved by the Church Correlation Department [month/year]‘.” The Scriptures don’t say this and the Brethren don’t say this. Nevertheless, somewhere along the long, many Mormons have started to believe it.
Sexaholics Anonymous works! Ask any Latter-saint (and there are many!) involved in SA and he will tell you immediately and with conviction, “God’s hand was clearly guiding SA in its formative years and SA has made me a better Christian, a better Latter-day Saint, a better priesthood holder, a better husband, a better father, and a better member of a the human family!” There is no disloyalty to the LDS faith in such an acknowledgment.
I go further than this. I am on record repeatedly for the following and I know I’m not alone. “If it weren’t for Sexaholics Anonymous, I would be dead today!” That’s coming from a lifelong Latter-day Saint of pioneer stock, a returned missionary, married in the temple, with faith in the Savior, a love of the Book of Mormon, confidence in the priesthood and hope for eternal life.
“If it weren’t for Sexaholics Anonymous, I would be dead today!”
[Photo courtesy of Christoph van Bracht through Wikimedia Commons]
So in case it wasn’t clear, I feel strongly about SA. This is why I make a plea to all of you who have looked but can’t find a local meeting of SA or S-Anon. Start your own! Whether you like it or not, you are pioneers! You are blazing a trail to recovery that Mormons for generations after you will follow. You will learn what is necessary to overcome porn addiction and then you will teach it to others. That is the burden of those who have found recovery–to share it with others who are still suffering in silence. Start your own meeting!
How do you do that? Well, I’ve got a post following shortly that will talk about that.
Andrew, your book prompted my husband to [admit] to many years of sex addiction. Thank you for your hopeful message. I have passed it on already to many, many people.
I would like you to address the “lust hits” my husband gets looking at other women in public. I know that there is a “progressive victory over lust.” for the addict. My husband has 4 months of sobriety and is on the path to recovery. BUT, when I am with him in public, I cannot handle him even practicing looking away quickly or trying not to stare. It is all so painful for me to be around. I find myself avoiding public situations with my husband, because it causes me so much pain. How do you and your wife handle this?
J: Thanks for reading and commenting. I hope you’ll continue to pass the PDF book along to anyone who’ll read it.
Regarding the trouble you’re having when you’re out in public with your husband, I’m going to suggest that you take a look at a few other websites that approach addiction from the spouse’s perspective. They’ve got some pretty great insights but they also explain some things that most wives of porn addicts don’t expect and frankly don’t welcome. The whole idea of co-addiction is kind of shocking at first.
Most wives believe that if the husband will just stop binging on porn, all the wife’s eating problems, weight problems, shopping problems, dependency problems, sleep problems, anxiety problems, anger problems, etc., will just disappear. They are often surprised that those issues don’t go away once the husband gets into recovery through the Church’s Pornography Addiction Support Group (PASG) or Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) or both. It turns out that many women have their own set of addictive or compulsive behaviors that plays off of their husband’s behavior. Like the husband, they often brought their addictive behavior with them into the marriage.
This is one of the reasons that I encourage women so strongly to get involved in S-Anon–or at least to get the the literature and read it. It helps spouses recognize where the problems caused by the husband’s sex addiction stop and their own problems begin.
I’m not suggesting that you have addictive behavior. That’s not my job. What I am suggesting is that you take a look at what’s going on inside yourself and keep working on your own recovery separate and apart from your husband’s. You can’t go the rest of your life with your personal peace and serenity constantly dependent on what another person (your husband) is or isn’t doing. It will drive you crazy–you’ve already experienced this.
How do my wife and I handle this? It’s tough. We’ve have slowly come to recognize that my behavior as I work on recovery can’t be dependent on what she wants me to do or not to do. I have to work on my recovery because I need it. Likewise, she has to work on her separate recovery. She is learning to separate her personal peace and serenity from my behavior. She is coming to understand that her happiness depends upon where she is in her relationship with Heavenly Father–it doesn’t depend on me.
In the Church, with our belief in eternal marriage and eternal progression to perfection, we are ripe for the troubling idea that we need to perfect not only ourselves, but our spouses as well. Perhaps that works when two healthy people are in the marriage. But when one or both of the spouses are addicts (or co-addicts), constantly trying to fix one another and to control one another’s behavior is craziness in the making. Again, I encourage you to check out the website I mentioned above.
Thank you for taking time to answer my question. It was helpful, however, I don’t see where you listed any websites. Did I miss where you listed them? I would like to read more about sex addiction from the spouse’s perspective.
Sorry. I’m a web-design neophyte working off my iPad lately and have trouble figuring out how to put links in comments. In the meantime, check out the recent guest posts by a couple of LDS women who blog about their recovery from their husband’s sex addiction. There are links to their blogs at the bottom of their posts. They also have links to many other women’s recovery blogs.