Surveillance, Predation, and Abuse in Sex Addicts Anonymous
How It Really Works: The 12 Steps of Sex Addicts Anonymous
SAA Step 1: 12 Step Disclosure Risks in Sharing Your Sexual History
“We admitted we were powerless over addictive sexual behavior - that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Releasing a detailed account of our sexual history to a large public group (without legal privacy protections) which is often dramatized and edited under the influence of a program sponsor to conform with narratives of addiction.
SAA Step 2: Subjective Sanity and Peer Pressure as the Group Deity
"Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."
Defining sanity as relative abstinence, and defining that "greater" "Power" as a God formed by the collective Traditions of the 12 Step program and the ongoing pressure of our peers.
SAA Step 3: Surrendering Yourself to SAA as Property of the Collective Group Conscience
"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God."
Yielding to steady, recurrent pressure to make the Steps and the group our God.
"Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."
Recalling every harm committed, and detailing all motives, and cataloging all flaws and fears in writing, and surrendering that data to nonprofessional volunteer sponsors.
SAA Step 5: Disclosing All Your Faults and Harms to Sociopaths Without Any Legal Protections
"Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."
Verbally detailing every harm and harmful motive we could think of, and sharing that with our sponsors in one sitting, incidentally granting our darkest sexual secrets to a group acting as God.
SAA Step 6: Preparing to Surrender to Shame Disguised as Grace
"Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character."
Embracing any potential cost or loss, regardless of the methods "God" or the group conscience might apply with or without our knowledge, and emotionally surrendering the family, faith, job, privacy, dignity, money, or sanity our peers might discretely strip from us.
“Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.”
Subordinating our character formation to the Higher Power of the greater "group conscience," which is the recovery circle of Sex Addicts Anonymous
SAA Step 8: Obsessively Cataloguing Your Victims for Other Predators and Vice Reformers
“Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.”
Detailing every victim of harassment, exploitation, and abuse in our personal history for the people in your chain of sponsorship.
SAA Step 9: Rationalizing Selective Amends to Your Victims
“Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
Avoiding amends that would implicate those who are complicit in ongoing acts of abuse, and treating program participation as a valid form of "living amends," in order to protect the program over incoming victims.
SAA Step 10: Obsessive Self-Assessment and Perpetual Confession to the Group Conscience
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Creating a dynamic of codependency in which our family systems and others were constantly exposed to sexual data mining.
SAA Step 11: Limiting Contact With Your Higher Power to Protect the Group Conscience
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
Limiting how and when we meditate, and who and what we pray for, shielding ourselves from authentic, disruptive encounters with God that might impact our influence on the group conscience.
SAA Step 12: Do Unto Others - Membership, Sponsorship, and Inflicting the 12 Steps On Newcomers
“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other sex addicts and to practice these principles in our lives.”
Demonstrating our commitment to the SAA way of life by our constant attendance, participation, and recruitment, which is evidence to ourselves and to others of our spiritual value.