Toxic Secrets and Broken Thinking in Sex Addicts Anonymous
As part of a program code of anonymity and trust, members of Sex Addicts Anonymous are pressured to keep the confessions of the fellowship to themselves, regardless of their severity or criminal nature.
Sometimes, this means real criminal acts of sex abuse are shielded from investigation and prosecution, by a large fellowship of men and women already confused by their own sense of compulsivity,
Why? ISO—the parent organization responsible for all the SAA volunteer groups—teaches its membership to conflate the largest and smallest patterns of addiction: “All suffer from the same sickness.”
When the worst offenders are as guilty as the least, shielding everyone seems perfectly natural—even when that places vulnerable parties at ongoing risk.
Originally, 12-Step spirituality came packaged as a program to help individuals who drank too much.
Today, SAA blindly applies the logic of AA to people who have problematic sexual behaviors. The language of the 12 Steps has barely been altered between the two programs, and the stepwork is identical.
The SAA fellowship is a public fellowship which only feels private.
People with compulsive sexual habits are given an illusory feeling of safety and security, coached into openness, and discretely exposed to predatory personalities and data-gatherers.
In this environment of artificial security, SAA volunteers and affiliates have repeatedly destroyed the families and the lives of the people they propose to help, on the pretense that this destruction will be followed with some kind of life reconstruction guided by the group consciousness, the collective consciousness of the group—as long as the victim continues to participate.
The 12 Steps of AA are the backbone of SAA, with minimal adjustments made for the differences between sex and alcohol.
The prayers and spiritual insights of Bill W., adapted out of Ignatian and Jesuit practices and paired with Stoic values of dead emotionality, are often recited by SAA groups at the end of meetings.
The AA text, which likewise blends homogenized Catholicism and Anglicanism with Stoicism, is a frequent source of study and reference, even inside SAA meetings.
Outside of AA and the church groups which promote it religiously, Alcoholics Anonymous is frequently accused of being a cultlike spirituality that mandates rigorous submission to a hivemind.
Individuals are taught codependency with an authoritarian group, as a substitute for their dependency on alcohol.
“Constant contact with God" is a thinly-veiled metaphor for constant program attendance and constant contact with group members in group meetings, social events, and daily phone calls.
This is in addition to daily practices of prayer, and reading "spiritual literature" that includes SAA "meditations" or "reflections" or Answers in the Heart (not to be confused with Answers from the Heart by Thich Nhat Hahn).
There is a constant, steady, unyielding pressure to adopt the hivemind, to overwrite the individual conscience with the group conscience.
For some people, the regimented structures and community-oriented approach of the 12 Steps may work.
By applying the will of the group to their own conscience, a small fraction of participants learn to manage their addiction impulses.
But the AA program has an incredible failure rate.
Almost everyone who attends AA fails to complete the 12 Steps, and leaves.
This reality is rarely disclosed or discussed frankly.
Alcoholics Anonymous, just like Sex Addicts Anonymous, asks individuals to surrender themselves to the will of the group, or the wisdom of the group, instead of relying on their own “stinking thinking.”
Certain prayers in SAA and AA literally beg God to strip the “burden of self” from the addict.
Eventually—even for those people who don’t experience unusual hazings or undisclosed personality adjustments under the program table—the 12 Steps gradually overwrite old identities with new group-oriented values.
Even though sexuality is infinitely more complex than the consumption of alcohol, SAA has only the one solution to offer.
SAA has turned an entire range of human behaviors into a single equivalent problem set.
SAA is very similar to AA in its demand for sobriety, defined as abstinence.
There are no shades of grey in Sex Addicts Anonymous.
All addictive behavior is the same addiction. “All suffer from the same illness.”
The occasional masturbator is the same as porn addict is the same as the compulsive rapist or the pedophile.
In SAA, people are invited to define their addictive behaviors for themselves.
This means some people may choose to define their addiction as occasional masturbation or slips from total abstinence, or as the depraved use of child porn, meth, and rape.
“Addiction” is a relative term with no clinical agreement or standard of behavior between members.
Framing excessive pornography use—enjoying sexuality in adult media too much—as an equivalent sin next to too much adultery or too much child rape leaves members wide open to constant sex-shaming for normal behaviors, like occasional masturbating or lustful thinking, described in literature as “the lust of the mind” that may only “drain away” after many years of program involvement.
Sex shaming happens at every SAA meeting.
It is built into the logic of the program.
It is evident in official and unofficial program literature.
In SAA, the person who looks at vanilla pornography while she is conflicted is as sick and as guilty as the person who rapes a minor while he is conflicted.
Compulsivity is compulsivity.
Addiction is addiction.
The degree is irrelevant.
Often, as in the work of SAA-promoter Patrick Carnes, it is asserted that lesser "addictions" such as frequent masturbation will lead to increased addiction behaviors like the use of prostitutes, or rape.
Sex-shaming every member of SAA into compliance with group values, in affirmation of the organization’s theories of “sex addiction,” is the basic method of Sex Addicts Anonymous.
Those who attend meetings and work the Steps also receive affirmation and accolades from compliant members of the group. This sometimes helps balance or relieve the burden of shame placed on the addict for his or her inflated sense of compulsivity.
Members receive “chips”—or colorful pieces of circular plastic—marking the length of time they have not masturbated to pornography or cheated on their spouses or raped a minor. Everyone gets the same style of chip, regardless of their self-selected standards of sobriety. These are symbols of prestige within community marking out those with higher and lower levels of “rigorous honesty” and commitment.
The only difference is the color of chip, reflecting the length of time one has abstained from compulsively acting out. Major milestones, like 20 years of sobriety, may be marked by chips of bronze or golden material. A fool's gold.
Even SAA's sobriety chips perpetuate this illusion: all sexual excess—real or imagined—is equalized to scale with the worst sexual excess.
Rape is the same as voyeurism is the same as masturbation.
It’s all the same “addiction,” and it all requires the same solution.
That solution is shame, disguised as “grace.” Shame delivered from select members of the SAA group, who delight in emotionally crippling their fellows, and grace from others who validate the survivors.
Sometimes, the shame and grace come from the same party: the victim’s own sponsor, who has been hazed in the same way.
“From shame to grace” is an official SAA slogan, stamped on to the sobriety chips which are handed out to compulsive date rapists with criminal records, and to extremely religious members who struggle with sometimes googling porn and upsetting their priests.
Everyone has the same "sickness."
Everyone shares the same guilt.
Everyone gets the same treatment.
Everyone earns the same type of chip.
Everyone agrees to the same code of silence.
