The SA/S-Anon International Convention in Chicago, IL

This tape is produced in the spirit of essays 12 steps to carry the message. Members of the Fellowship should bear in mind essays 11th tradition regarding anonymity at the level of press, radio, TV, and films and the use of this tape. Anonymity to this respect is actually the practice of genuine humility. We are sure that humility expressed by anonymity is the greatest safeguard that SA could ever have. Terry sex holic,

everybody. I'm here to introduce Mike. See our speaker,

our journey together, Mike's, my journey together started many years ago and I won't tell you the whole story because I'm sure he's anxious to get up here.

What I do want to say is

I love Mike.

He and I have been in probably some of the most intense battles

and also the intensest friendship that I know

and I feel very blessed to know him, a very big part of my program. I call him a few times a week, call him this week, and

you heard a lot last night about Saint Teresa's Wednesday night meeting. And that meeting is a combination of all the members that got up here. But

you can't single any one person out. And I don't really want to do that. But any Stew has to have a stock, you know, the meat. And Mike is certainly a big part of that at the Saint Teresa's meeting.

Umm. So we thank them for that. And, uh, I'm proud to call my brother Mike.

I'm Mike Sexaholic. Glad I'm here sober today. Through God's grace and you people.

I asked Brian if Terry could introduce me. When Terry says he's proud to call me his brother, he means that in a literal sense, he's my older brother and he is the reason we're here today. In the sense that he brought this program to Chicago 1516. I don't remember, but many, many years ago. And he was the first person I told my story to that allowed me to be here. So when all of you are thanking me because you know you heard me on tape and all that,

don't forget to thank Terry. Umm, I have 4 scars on my body

where I have received stitches or such things. Three of them come from Terry.

I want to thank all my sponsees who are here. And I also want to thank, as Terry mentioned, the Wednesday Night Saint Theresa's group for all of your support over the years. And I especially want to say, yeah, I had this experience in Nashville a few months back,

a powerful experience of getting a chance to speak to them down there.

And I was really nervous about a talk on sexuality that I gave thanks to my friend Harvey. And I, I got through the thing and it turned out to be, you know, a really good talk and everything, but I was really nervous with the Essenons there. And it turned out to be really great. And I know there's some discussion about how the conventions are going to proceed from this point forward. And without wanting to enter into controversy, let me just say

to each and every person of the S&M program who's here today,

thank you for being here. Thank you for coming to my talk. Thank you for helping me stay sober. I need you every bit as much as I need my brother and sister essays in a different way, but I need to every bit as much.

So if for no other reason than to help keep me sober, please keep coming back to these conferences.

Thank you. I'm supposed to talk about spiritual action. I don't really know how to talk about spiritual action. I look through the steps and the only

time I saw the word was in a 12 step, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about that to me. I don't. I can't do any spiritual action if I haven't had a spiritual awakening as a result of the 1st 11 steps.

Many of you have heard me before. I'm I'm not going to go through my whole story. I just want to tell you about a recent failure I had. I was down in Aruba, a trip I had won through my business. I was down there with my wife and when I got down there,

I lost my spiritual awakening. What happened was that, umm,

it was real expensive to call home, and those of you who know me well, including a guy who just introduced me, was out there laughing his head off. No, I'm cheap.

And I was saying to my wife, man, it's almost impossible to call home. You got to jump through 62 hoops and you know, 5 minute call, I'm going to be out 50 bucks

and you know, she didn't realize that. Well, whatever, I'll leave her out of it. Let's just. But anyway, I didn't make my calls.

I didn't call anybody, and I got triggered the very first night someone did something inappropriate

toward me,

reminding me of of some of my family members from my youth. I used to have aunts who like to sit on my lap. I don't know what their problem was. And

I had a similar experience in Aruba. And then the next day I got triggered, you know, just the usual way, my own lust. So

a combination of other people's bad boundaries in my own. By the 2nd day there I was. I was just

mentally not in a good place. I wasn't that horrible place that's even worse than just

out and out lusting. Wasn't that horrible place of trying not to lust but not being surrendered

and debating and going back and forth and I was just in my head

and I was lost.

It took me, I think 3 days. I was on there five days. It took me 3 days to finally get on the phone, live and in person with another recovering sexaholic.

So that's my story about non spiritual action. It doesn't work for me,

and I share it because after 19 years of sobriety, I'm just as powerless over lust as I was the day I walked in here

and it can hit me in a minute.

Umm,

But all I have to do

to regain my spiritual awakening is do what I did 19 years ago when I sat in the car with my brother Terry, and he was telling me some stuff that he was doing. And he'd been telling me for months.

And then he was starting to tell me about a solution that he'd found about the things that he'd been doing. And I said to him, and I quote me too.

And then I burst into tears. And my memory of it, I got to check this out with them someday, is that he immediately whisked me to a meeting. Now, for all I know, it was five days later. But you know, my memory of it was he said, oh, really? Come on, we're going up to the Glenview Naval Air Station,

Harvey said. Something really important at the birthday meeting last night. He got up and he said

it just keeps getting better.

He's right. That's my experience at every single moment. Better than the one before. Not in my experience, but 90% of them are. And if I look at the, you know, the graph, you know, the graph still has some bumps, you know, but I'm doing a lot better than the stock market has been the last the last few years. I'll tell you that.

So I want to talk about and that's, you know, this is in case you haven't figured it out, I'm doing a talk on the 12 step. I just talked about my spiritual awakening. I've just carried the message. That's it folks. It gets better. And even when it doesn't, you do. If you work the step,

I'm going to devote the rest of my time to practicing these principles in all our affairs.

Some of you over the years have heard me talk about my family.

Some of you may have heard about about five years ago, and after another rageful blow up at my wife, she rolled over and said every time you do that, a piece of me dies

about 25 minutes later. Again, it might have been five days. We were in a therapist office starting marital counseling.

I thought this might last a week or two. We're in Year 5.

I could tell you exactly how much we've spent, but I don't have that much time.

I could tell you about, and I may have already, I don't know,

about two years ago, when I went after my son and grabbed him,

he had just called me a name referring to a particular part of the anatomy. In a way that was certainly

inappropriate, disrespectful and all the rest of that. But that was preceded by a lot of inappropriate, disrespectful things I'd been doing for about an hour.

And the thing just blew up. And I grabbed them. And my wife separated us

and my son grabbed a knife. And I thought, is he coming after me with this thing or what? And he made it clear it was just for purposes of self-defense.

And, umm,

somewhere in that time period,

I grabbed a couple members, some of whom are in this room, and I said I need to meet separate from our regular meeting just to talk about rage. And I've been doing that now for two or three years. And it's been a little rocky from time to time, but my rage is doing better than the stock market's been doing lately, too. And I need to tell you that because for me,

and I don't understand it nor pretend to, but I know there's a connection between my lust and my anger for me.

And I've learned that even in recovery, my anger

was hurting my family and it was diminishing my own recovery.

Very good in many other respects.

So I've had some great victories of late

that I think may be worth mentioning.

For years, last 2-3 years, I have been saying to my wife, I want to go somewhere just with my son.

So, you know, we always travel together, you know, and I didn't want to repeat the dynamics from my family, which was the boys and girls went on separate vacations.

So we've always done everything together. But I said I've never just gone away with my son. And he's 14.

I started this when he was about 12. I started this mantra. He's 12, he's 13. I just for three or four days, I want just to go on a baseball trip or something with my son, but I never did it.

So this year when I started the routine, my wife said, what are you waiting for?

You know, another three years he's not going to be living here and probably another year or two he's going to say no

just because you know, he's 17 and he's going to say I got better things to do.

Now you got to understand something about my 14 year old son. On a daily basis. He tells me, Dad, you're Gray. Your hair is getting grayer all the time. Thanks son. Appreciate it.

Dad, you're going bald.

Dad, do you want me to buy you some Grecian formula?

I can't leave the house without an inspection as to whether I'm dressed right or not

because he doesn't want me to embarrass them.

I'm usually OK because my wife, generally speaking, you know, tells me what to wear.

But on those days where she has to go to work early, he's taken over.

When we play catch he basically tells me I'm no good anymore.

And what I'm saying is he's 14 and I'm a 46 year old recovering sexaholic rageaholic who's trying to go on a trip with him. And so I decided that a successful trip would be not yelling at him for the entire four days,

and that what I was going to do was pay careful attention to each time

I felt a little anger trigger and that when it happened, I was just going to pray.

And that if that was not working, I was going to get on the phone, unlike Aruba, and

and I was going to try to get through four days without yelling at them and I had to keep off. So that was the negative side. Then on the positive side, I had to keep surrendering the fantasy that this was going to be the idyllic perfect trip, four days tension free, where James just looked into the eyes of his dad and said, geez, you're the greatest guy in the world because you took me on this trip.

So I found out that I had to do this surrendering about on average 8 to 10 times a day,

that he would say something that would absolutely drive me nuts 8 to 10 times a day. And I don't know how much of that's about him and how much of it's about me, but I'm the guy standing here talking, so it must have something to do with me.

Umm,

but I did it, and at the end of four days, it wasn't the greatest four days of my life. I got a hunch it wasn't the greatest four days of his life,

but we built some nice memories together

and I'm grateful for that.

And that to me is taking spiritual action

businesses. You can't go. I can't live without you for three weeks. And then a couple years later we were back in Ireland and some of you heard the story when he come running out of the house. We were staying in a House of a member here who was kind enough to let us stay here. And he says, dad, you're going to die someday. And he's weeping and I start weeping too. And I'm thinking, Jesus, that is sad, Joe. And, and,

and he says you got it. Your dad died of a heart attack. You got to get your heart checked, which I'd been avoiding for about, you know, 25 years. And, and, and I promised that I'd do it by Thanksgiving and the day before Thanksgiving, I, I did it. You've heard some of you have heard that. And now in a different stage, you know, now we're in a stage where

he's challenging me and I do not like to be challenged. And, and we're and we're, and we're trying to get through that.

And I'm doing it all sober. I'm taking what I perceive to be more often than not, spiritual action. And I'm doing it because I know you and you've given me a chance. Talk a little bit about my marriage.

I said this down in Nashville and I I'm, I can't do that whole talk again, but it's on tape somewhere if you want to hear it.

My wife, my wife

as an issue, it doesn't matter what it is, and I'm not going to say what it is, but she's got an issue. And part of the issue that she has is that I've been criticizing her about this issue off and on for many, many years.

And recently she was able to tell me

about her issue in a different way. She was able to tell me how sensitive she is about this topic,

how hard it is for her to talk about it, how impossible it's been for her to talk about it with me

because as soon as she does, I immediately chime in with my critique. And sometimes I might even be in agreeing with her in my critique, but it doesn't matter.

And so she's telling me all this,

and what dawned on me is that I'm color blind. This is my issue. I can't believe I'm saying this in public, but it'll make sense in a minute. I'm color blind

and when I was a kid, a guy in a classroom figured out I was color blind and basically humiliated me in front of all my classmates for 25 minutes. Had me stand up in front of class and try to guess what color things were for 25 minutes. I've never gotten over it and so nobody talks to me about the fact that I'm colorblind. My wife made that mistake once at her family. Her family's never seen my anger 'cause you know, I'm on good behavior.

That was the one time I looked it across the table and I said would you shut up?

Because she was talking about the fact that I was colorblind. And so when she was telling me about her issue,

it dawned on me that I'm color blind.

And for the first time in 20 years, I said to her, Oh my God, you must feel exactly the way I do

about being color blind. That's what this issue must be like for you.

And she said, for the first time in 25 years, you've heard me.

And the mantra that I'm using in my marriage and recovery today is

I must decrease and she must increase.

And the reason I'm using that mantra

is because

in my marriage,

I'm sort of the initiator of things. I'm sort of the talker. I'm sort of there. Everybody knows that Mike's in the house

and Kathy's finding her voice, and it's a lot easier for her to find it if I keep mine quiet every now and again.

Like kind of a lot.

And this all has to do with why I need the ethanol to keep coming to these conferences. See, I, I need you because I can sit around with my fellow essays day and night and talk about this program and it's great stuff. And we can really help each other do the basics of these first eleven steps and the 1st 2/3 of this 12 step. But the last part of this 12 step,

it doesn't have a hell of a lot to I can talk to Harvey all night and it's great stuff and I, I love it.

But at the end of the day, I got to go home

to my wife and to my kid, and I got to learn how to practice these principles there. And that's for me where the rubber meets the road. It's the hardest thing to do. People who think I'm the greatest guy in the world have never seen me at home. And I'm not saying I'm not a great guy at home, but I'm nowhere near as great as I am with my fellow recovering psychoholics. And that's reality. It's just this and it isn't good enough for me anymore.

Because I made a promise when I came here and some of you've heard me say it and that's it. I'm not going back.

I'm not going back to that old way of life. But then I only have one other choice

and that is to go forward. And so for me to go forward,

I need all of you to keep coming back, and I sure hope you will.

And thanks for listening.