The addiction itself could no longer deliver that formerly reliable, thoroughly engrossing sexual and emotional return.

What we were really after was not just the relief of confession, of having completed a specific

First, it means that whatever power is usually involved in making sound choices in our sexual and emotional behavior did not reside with us.

times a wide range of strategies to control our behavior

we faced a real dilemma concerning our personal identity.

As we looked at our current lives and at our past, we saw that virtually everything we did and everyone we knew was exploited to satisfy our addictive needs. We may have started our inventory with the relationships that were particularly troublesome in our lives. But we soon began to see the patterns: we gave away our lives to blondes, or to succes

sex.

spouses. These experiences became overwhelmingly compelling, carrying us along with them, exuberantly at first, and then less and less willingly.

We could not outwit our own addictive natures. The enemy was US.