Sydney SLAA Men

Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Tradition of Anonymity:
Whom you see here; what you hear here;
when you leave here: let it stay here.

Third Step Prayer
To the GOD of my own understanding:

God, I offer myself to You,
to build with me
and to do with me
as You will.
Relieve me of the bondage of self,
that I may better do Your will.
Take away my difficulties,
that victory over them
may bear witness to those
I would help
of Your Power,
Your Love,
and Your Way of life.
May I do Your will always!

Thanks for sharing – keep coming back!
It works if you work it, and you’re worth it!

The HOW Concept

The S.L.A.A. HOW concept was devised to offer an alternative path to long-term sobriety. It was created for those of us who had tried other ways of working the S.L.A.A. program without success; those who knew that we needed a disciplined and structured approach; and members who were not experiencing the level of sobriety we had hoped for. Once we chose this path, we adopted the HOW tools as requirements for our recovery. We committed ourselves to a black-and-white sobriety in order to deal with the gray areas of living.
In HOW we found that if we used the tools of recovery, our disease of sex and love addiction could be arrested one day at a time.

The HOW Tools

1. Bottom-Line Sobriety: In HOW, each sex & love addict works with a sponsor to identify their personal bottom-line behaviors. We become sober when we have a minimum of thirty consecutive days free from our bottom lines.
2. Literature and Writing: We use daily writing assignments, based on SLAA and AA literature, as tools of examination and release.
3. Meetings: We attend a minimum of three meetings per week. Meetings are dedicated to the concept of remaining honest, openminded, and willing to listen. This is the “HOW” of the program.
4. Telephone Calls: We make four calls a day: one to our sponsor and three outreach calls to other SLAA members. The phone is like a lifeline; we need the contact. It can be like a mini-meeting.
5. Prayer and Meditation: We practice daily prayer and meditation to develop a relationship with a power greater than ourselves that can guide and sustain us in recovery.
6. Service: Whether it’s helping out at meetings, setting up, welcoming newcomers, organising literature, or facilitating group-level decisions — service frees us from the bondage of self. It’s how we give back what we’ve freely and lovingly received. Sobriety is a service to ourselves and to the group.
7. Sponsorship: A SLAA HOW sponsor is a member with at least 30 days of continuous sobriety who has taken the first three Steps in HOW. Discretion, common sense, and our Higher Power guide us in our selection.

With the exception of bottom-line sobriety, after the first three Steps the requirements set out above become suggestions.

Some sponsors and sponsees agree to continue the approach outlined above, others reduce the frequency of required meetings or the number of calls to be made. Some establish new approaches to answering and sharing the answers to the Step Questions—for example, by calling their sponsor once or twice a week, or meeting face-to-face to read through all the answers for that Step.

We invite you to join us in working the steps, and we encourage you to be rigorously honest from the outset. This is a simple program. Those of us who have suffered from grave emotional and mental disorders have noticed that we can recover if we are willing to be rigorously honest and work the steps.
Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have — and are willing to go to any lengths to get it — then we invite you to work the steps with us. At some of these steps we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we encourage you to be fearless and thorough from the start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil, until we let go absolutely.
Remember that we deal with sex and love addiction, which is cunning, baffling and powerful. Without help, it is too much for us. But there is one who has all power. That one is God. May you find God now!
Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at a turning point and asked for God’s protection and care with complete abandon.

Here are the steps we took which we suggest as a programme of recovery:
1. We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with a Power greater than ourselves, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to sex and love addicts, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.

Many of us exclaimed, “What an order! I can’t go through with it!” Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints.
The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
Our description of the sex and love addict, the chapter on the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after, make clear three pertinent ideas:
a. That we are sex and love addicts and cannot manage our own lives.
b. That probably no human power could relieve our sex and love addiction.
c. That God could and would if God were sought.

Tuesday and Thursday Men’s Zoom 7th tradition:
Account: 4 Recovery
BSB: 670-864
Account: 1078-4093

Donate to the SLAA Australian Intergroup here.

The men’s meetings that are listed on this website are in AET (Australian Eastern Time).

– Sunday 6:30-7:30am (click here)

– Tuesday 6:30-7:30pm (click here) – may continue to 7:45pm if needed
– Thursday 7-8pm (Express Share Meeting)

Tuesday and Thursday have our own Zoom meeting address

• Meeting ID: 813 8736 5955; Passcode: 123