What Makes Sex Addicts Anonymous More Dangerous than Other 12 Step Programs?
Sex Addicts Anonymous extracts highly sensitive data from its members in circles that feel confidential while exposing members to predation from unlicensed, unregulated specialists. Eventually, vulnerable members are targeted with classic gaslighting techniques, and pushed into devastating psychological collapse. Members are shamed into "sexual sobriety" and forced into compliance with the sexual values of the group.
Since the 1940s, when AA was first manufactured and promoted by private groups advised by the Catholic Church, the 12 Steps have been idolized as a go-to program of treatment for regular men and women looking for free help overcoming their addiction and compulsion issues (that’s a true story, by the way—that’s how AA got its start. The Lodge, with support from the Church. You can Google Bill W. and his Oxford Group buddies any time).
Historical controversies aside, the Steps began with Alcoholics Anonymous just before the second Great War. Now there are all sorts of 12 Step programs, for issues like eating too much, or smoking too much, or for recovering from spiritual abuse.
Despite an extraordinarily high failure rate, the Steps are doggedly promoted by those who advocate for the Steps’ religious principles of repentance from sin, dependency on their private God and the 12 Step community, practices of constant and neuerotic soul searching, and perpetual confession to the group and its leaders as a means to maintaining an indefinite sobriety, regardless of your vice styles.
In popular films and shows, the 12 Steps are normalized as a reasonable option for recovery. The 12 Traditions which sustain the 12 Steps mandate that all members of the circle represent the program positively to the outside world, regardless of their lived experience—especially Tradition 11, which states that “Our public relations should be guided by the principle of attraction rather than promotion. There is never need to praise ourselves. We feel it better to let our friends recommend us.” 12 Steppers are pressured to refrain from advertising themselves aggressively—their programs and circles of membership are supposed to appear (like furniture) as part of a blended background, ordinary and routine and definitely not a threat to public privacy or safety. This rule is drilled into the membership with every recitation of their foundational Traditions, as a subset of a larger principle—keep the program from looking bad.
As a consequence, when the Steps are promoted in a popular venue, it is almost always indirectly, as part of something else: they are slipped into the background of a plot of an action movie by a scriptwriter working the steps, or into the recommendations of a therapist bulking up the local circles. Almost always they are featured in at least one episode of any given detective show. Go figure.
But outside the recovery rooms, the nonprofit programs inspired by the 12 Steps are often accused of being cultish, and dangerous, for a variety of reasons. You really don’t have to take my word for it. You can just google it, right now. You should. I wish I had done this much sooner in my own “journey of recovery.”
What complaints will you find?
12 Step programs push nonprofessional theories of addiction treatment onto the general public, by promoting irregular Higher Powers and relative standards of sobriety. Anything can be God, as long as it enables your participation in (and enmeshment with) the group conscience. The 12 Steps may be used by professional recovery centers, but for those who authored the original program, the circles were intended to be “forever nonprofessional,” and subject to no professional medical oversight or moral authority beyond the majority will of the local circles (Tradition 8). No church or psychiatric department should officially run a 12 Step program, because no deity or doctors should impose a clear moral order on all its members; the intention was so ironclad that the first fellowship manufactured multiple rules to drive the point home (Traditions 6-10).0
Although the 12 Steps are historically Christian, groups try to hide that theology behind generic language, in order to pressure non-Christian or nonreligious participants to adopt a falsified Christian faith in nondescript terms. “God” was stripped out of the language of the original Steps, and replaced with the empty words “Higher Power.” But this conveniently distracted the bankruptcy of the concept of God in the 12 Steps. Anything could be God—Satan. Your puppy. Your sponsor. Your 12 Step program. Even evil itself could be God, as long as it kept you sober.
The 12 Steps are filled with classic “loaded language,” or words that appear normal and routine on the surface, but which contain special subtexts to those who have been initiated or hazed into the deeper culture of the Steps. Just as “Higher Power” masked the original concept of “God” when Bill W. and his cohort manufactured the program for public consumption, many core elements of the Steps rely on language that masks undisclosed practices of reverse psychology and doublespeak that are common to the group culture. Centrally, “sanity” is redefined as sobriety—good and evil, knowing the difference between right and wrong, even being grounded in reality itself cease to be elements of sane thinking. All that matters, beyond what is real or what is good and evil, is that a member remain sober. There is no higher value (and no greater good) than sobriety, inside the 12 Step circle. Ordinary words (“God;” “sanity”) like this are fundamentally redefined to mask the real application of the group will in the daily functioning of the individual who continues to participate in the Steps.
12 Steppers frequently promote habitual reliance on group thinking, or the "will of the group," as the only realistic and sustainable path to sobriety, and—without exaggeration—idolize the program, the groups, and their compliant members as "God," using the generic label "Higher Power." While official literature may commend any God to its participants, the subtext of many publications (and sometimes, the direct text) will insist that people give the 12 Step program itself the supreme “God” place, allowing authoritative members and even program literature to guide addicts as if their fellow addicts and volunteers were the will of God, collectively together. Anonymous personalities in a circle, applying massive group influence to one person to enforce their sobriety from any vice (not just the original alcoholism of AA, but to any vice of a particular program: lust, gluttony, anger, greed. Sex Addicts Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Rageaholics Anonymous. Gamblers Anonymous. All driven by the will of a group demanding constant contact and participation from newcomers who probably don’t know about the complex culture of AA beyond the printed words of The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.
What else?
12 Step organizations demand "radical honesty" from members, but frequently encourage groups to operate in secret, without reasonable standards of transparency or accountability. It is not unusual for primary circles to operate private subgroups—small “accountability” circles with private connections and intentions, operating discretely within and without program boundaries.
12 Step programs rely on addicts, volunteers, and nonprofessionals for complex and longterm therapeutic work, often on behalf of the court system, without professional supervision or public accountability. Probabtion departments and police departments frequently send offenders of all types to these circles, where they may be further surveilled as they confess their darkest addiction secrets to a group where no legal protections against datamining and data sharing exist.
12 Step programs create informal environments of anonymous confession which feel safe, but which are, in reality, open to religious specialists, law enforcement officers, “psychic detectives,'“ social justice warriors, data miners, deceptive personalities, and psychological predators of all sorts.
There are rarely adequate means for reporting abuse which occurs in a 12 Step program. 12 Step programs provide little or no protection for members who are targeted, inside or outside of their rooms, by people who abuse their expectation of anonymity, either by
(a) hiding behind anonymity while abusing other members, individually or in groups, or
(b) directly or indirectly violating the anonymity of other members after gaining their trust.
This means anonymous persons may target addicts for abuse for any variety of reasons, all while knowing that addicts have poor self control, and that they will be reluctant to report abusive episodes if it means exposing their own history of poor behavior to the public eye.
Despite the heavy risks associated with volunteer-led 12 Step programs, the promise of free help based on generic religious principles is still an attractive one.
There are approximately three hundred different 12-Step programs available to the general public, many of them with fluctuating memberships numbering in the tens of thousands at any given time.
Alcoholics Anonymous, the Great Mother Program, numbers over two million members, worldwide.
Among these, the S-Programs, or sex-addiction nonprofits using the 12 Step model, are among the most dangerous.
The cult-like demand that you surrender yourself to the group affects not only your sexual privacy, but the sexual privacy and data of your loved ones.
Among the S-Programs, Sex Addicts Anonymous is perhaps the most dangerous, because it has a wide program circle, open to literally anyone with any sex issue, great or small... including a general vendetta against sex addiction.
Unlike Sexaholics Anonymous, which has extremely narrow relationship standards (male-with-female pairings only), and narrow sobriety standards (sex between married partners only), Sex Addicts Anonymous draws in people with sexual orientations, habits, and identities of every type.
SAA also invites anyone with any type of sexual compulsion issue to participate, and to pursue their own styles of sobriety—any effort at any scale is welcome in the SAA circle. Want to abstain from porn? Want to abstain from molesting children? SAA is a circle of equal opportunity. They don’t care what your sex issue is. To them, all sexual sin is the same. There is no degree of distinction. “All suffer from the same illness.” The pedophile and the OnlyFans model are morally identical people.
Significantly, SAA runs its meetings hand-in-glove with a program called COSA.
COSA was founded originally for female "codependent" partners of male sex addicts.
Today, COSA is open to anyone of any gender identity who has ever been negatively affected by sex addiction, in any way, whether or not they are in a relationship with a sex addict. This means literally anyone who feels offended by the idea of sexual vice may join COSA without violating the program ethos.
Volunteers members of COSA may maintain simultaneous memberships to COSA and SAA, and travel both circles, with the goal of “stopping addictive sexual behavior” (SAA Tradition 3).
This is more than inclusivity. The SAA circle is wide to draw in more big fish.
This means that the SAA program exposes more members and bystanders than other S-Programs (like SA) to
undisclosed surveillance,
the gathering and cataloguing of their intimate sexual and psychological information, and, eventually,
predatory gaslighting and sex-shaming.
These are part of an under-the-table culture of force and control carefully kept from the public eye, the reason that so many 12 Step traditions exist which mandate non-entanglement with any other group, institution, or organization which may require accountability for its leaders or participants.
Deceptive gaslighting, extensive shaming, trauma bonding or hazing, and other types of complex abuse is understood—by the abusers—as part of an anti-addiction therapy, meant to drive the addict “out of their minds” and out of their addiction simultaneously. It is a type of Jungian overexposure therapy, attempted wholly by amateurish “nonprofessionals.”
The SAA program demands information and radical honesty around your sexual history. This includes information like the interests or excesses of your current spouse or partner, or ex-spouses, or ex-partners, their ongoing fixations and foibles, and even their sexual histories as it pertains to you, your shortcomings and your resentments.
SAA members are encouraged to detail, to various degrees, the sexual histories or activities of their spouses, former spouses, children, step-children, siblings, relatives, close friends, even spouses or partners of close friends or coworkers or acquaintances. Anyone they might have had some kind of sexual contact with.
New members are constantly pressured to share this information with fellow addicts, men and women who have their own histories of sexual predation, abuse, and compulsivity, including physical, mental, and online sexual abuse, who have been encouraged to retrain that impulse for the anti-addiction agenda of the SAA program and create sobriety for the fellowship “at any cost.”
Also in the group? Anti-addiction vigilantes, who have joined the program to find creative ways to stop addiction behaviors: the only requirement to join SAA is a prejudice against addiction, a desire to stop it (Tradition 3).
If you experience traumatic abuse inside your sexual addiction recovery group, there are no legal mechanisms in place to protect you inside the group.
If you want to file charges, you must do so outside of program structures... if someone does something demonstrably illegal, that you are also willing to report to the police, pay lawyers to pursue, and make public in court, and against program traditions which encourage you to constantly represent the program in a positive light.
This might be harder than you expect, in a group where many people are using fake names and burner phones, where leaders are pressuring the entire fellowship towards secrecy, and where participants are well-practiced at deception. These abusive practices were not manufactured recently or practiced in isolation; they are part of an archaic religious practice associated with soul alchemy, or breaking someone down mentally and emotionally in order to rebuild them from scratch. To do this, the group has always needed social isolation, discretion, and deniability. These elements have always been built into the program because they are essential to the therapeutic intention of its engineers.
"Anonymity" is in the group name. Public forgetfulness of each other's sins is part of the program code.
But group accountability is mandatory.
If you do experience abuse inside SAA, but don't have enough evidence or confidence to approach the police, you may:
lodge a complaint at the volunteer-led meeting where your also abuser attends and has an equal voice
lodge a complaint at the volunteer-led "regional" meeting where your abusers may be given equal time to speak or (mis)represent their case to a sympathetic audience
email ISO—the International Service Organization which runs SAA from Houston, Texas; ISO may ask you to give #1 or #2 another try
But each group functions as its own group conscience.
According to the official policy of SAA, no officer or member of a group may override the group will, as expressed in a group vote (Tradition 2). Leaders are temporarily voted in, and absolved of any personal responsibility for what happens in their groups. There is no real leadership in SAA (or in any 12 Step program); there is only group obedience.
The fundamental priority of SAA "Tradition" is to protect the group over the individual (Tradition 1). No individual experience of abuse or trauma is more important than group unity and reputation. This is spelled out plainly in the 12 Traditions which sustain the 12 Steps.
SAA’s governing organization, ISO, will only get involved directly in a dispute or issue if one SAA group causes problems for the SAA program at large (Tradition 4). If confronted, ISO will definitely, certainly, and with positive evidence, disavow every incident of abuse as an isolated case of bad training, relapse, or unfortunate circumstance. ISO is the problem; they will not help with the cure.
SAA "TRADITIONS"
To prevent grievances from going beyond the private boundaries of SAA, there are heavily-promoted SAA Traditions which
Prohibit the disclosure of specific cases of abuse to public media outlets (Tradition 11)
Prohibit entangling the program with other organizations which have additional accountability standards, or professional standards of conduct (Tradition 6, Tradition 8, Tradition 9)
Prohibit bringing the program any negative attention in the public sphere (Tradition 10, 11)
These 12 Traditions of SAA (adapted directly from AA) are framed as ways to keep individual members sober.
Violations of these Traditions are represented as a betrayal of your fellow “addict.”
Really, these Traditions protect the program and its ability to operate under-supervised.
The Traditions encourage members to prioritize the wellbeing of the program over SAA members at every level.
The "collective" emphasis of the Traditions
prevents abused members from sharing their experiences of SAA-enabled abuse in meaningful ways
keeps SAA-abuse victims mentally and emotionally reliant on their abusers,
shields the program from serious public scrutiny, and
shields ISO from accountability to state and federal courts. Courts often require convicted sex offenders to attend the SAA program as part of a plea deal.
If you report in-program abuse to ISO you will most likely be asked to shift your continued SAA participation to a parallel group nearby, where your abusers may also freely attend, or coordinate with other members.
ISO may also ask you to pursue your grievance locally, with the group or groups that "you feel" mistreated you.
Solutions like this return abuse victims to the environments where they were abused, and where their abuse may continue.
ISO has no legal responsibility to protect or prosecute individual members in cases of volunteer abuse.
Unless mandated by state law (as in the case of minors who attend meetings) ISO has minimal legal obligation to inform authorities about those complaints it does receive.
People who attend the SAA program therefore have minimal protections for themselves and their families inside a program that seeks to protect itself and its volunteer structures over and against the interests of its individual members.
This lack of meaningful protection, this total lack of real accountability, is just one more thing that makes the SAA program the most dangerous 12 Step program for participants and their families.
