A Special Welcome to Women
Ideas for Beginning in SAA
The San Francisco Bay Area fellowship of Sex Addicts Anonymous has made it a priority to ensure that women who are interested in our fellowship feel welcome and safe in our meetings. Many women have found serenity and freedom in the rooms of SAA. Please join us.
Local Resources for Women
If you would like to speak to a woman sex addict in the Bay Area about our program, call (925) 338-0996 or email women@bayareasaa.org and leave a message stating that you would like to talk with a woman about your situation. A woman from our fellowship will get back to you. We can arrange for a woman to accompany you to a meeting or to give you the code for special women’s teleconference meetings.
Other Resources for Women
If you wish to tap into the international network of women via e-mail, visit saa-recovery.org/ForWomen.
A Woman Sex Addict Shares Her Experience
I am very grateful to have found SAA and sobriety in 2004 in Miami Beach, Florida. SAA had just started there and meetings were often 2 or 3 people, if that. There were only 2 or 3 meetings a week. The shame I felt at facing my sex addiction was overwhelming. I cried at every meeting (and as a home group friend recently reminded me, all the way through every meeting!) During that first year, I finally learned that I didn’t have to act out, and I learned that I had never known that I had that right. As my sobriety took hold, I started to have a sense of personal dignity I had never before experienced.
There were always women at those early meetings, and I was the one who spoke to every woman who called the number on our little website. We learned to be creative, grateful for what we had, and put each other’s sobriety first. I got sober in a group of people who had to learn by getting sober together.
When I moved to San Francisco in 2005, the picture was truly different. There are 48 meetings a week here, some with a hundred people, and I am frequently the only woman. I was warmly welcomed and invited to meetings and fellowship everywhere. At the beginning, I pretty much hung out with the gay men until I got to know everyone. Now I have so many friends and I am involved in service and love my SAA life. sobriety, and spiritual growth.
We are working hard to make it easier for women to join the fellowship and stay. The truth is, it’s hard for all of us—men and women. It takes such tremendous courage to take that first step, to pick up the phone and call, or to walk in to a meeting. Please know that there are so many of us who have been where you are, and we are all waiting to help you. You don’t have to suffer alone any more.
