Be an ISO Outreach volunteer and help make SCA YouTube videos for our channel. Our next project is to make short (2-3 minute) videos on your shares about Chapter 2: The Twenty Questions (from our Big Book). I would like your input (either audio or text) on any of the following questions. You can send it to me either on here scannereditor@sca-recovery.org or at outreach@sca-recovery.org. Your voice and personal information will not be used and your content may be edited . Please consider helping us out by sharing your experiences, hopes and program tools that may have helped you with the question: Chapter 2: Twenty Questions
1. Do you frequently experience remorse, depression, or guilt about your sexual activity?
2. Do you feel your sexual drive and activity are getting out of control? Have you repeatedly tried to stop or reduce certain sexual behaviors but inevitably found that you could not?
3. Are you unable to resist sexual advances or turn down sexual propositions when offered?
4. Do you use sex to escape from uncomfortable feelings such as anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, guilt, etc., which seem to disappear when the sexual obsession starts?
5. Do you spend excessive time obsessing about sex or engaged in sexual activity?
6. Have you neglected your family, friends, spouse, or relationship because of the time you spend on sexual activity?
7. Do your sexual pursuits interfere with your work or professional development?
8. Is your sexual life secretive, a source of shame, and not in keeping with your values? Do you lie to others to cover up your sexual activity?
9. Are you afraid of sex? Do you avoid romantic and sexual relationships with others and restrict your sexual activity to fantasy, masturbation, and solitary or anonymous online activity?
10. Are you increasingly unable to perform sexually without other stimuli such as pornography, videos, “poppers,” drugs/alcohol, “toys,” etc.?
11. Do you have to increasingly resort to abusive, humiliating, or painful sexual fantasies or behaviors to get sexually aroused?
12. Has your sexual activity prevented you from developing a close, loving relationship with a partner? Or have you developed a pattern of intense romantic or sexual relationships that never seem to last once the excitement wears off?
13. Do you only have anonymous sex or one-night stands? Do you usually want to get away from your sex partner after the encounter?
14. Do you have sex with people with whom you normally would not associate?
15. Do you frequent apps, websites, clubs, bars, adult bookstores, restrooms, parks, and other public places searching for sex partners?
16. Have you ever been arrested or placed yourself in legal jeopardy for your sexual activity?
17. Have you ever risked your physical health with exposure to sexually transmitted diseases by engaging in “unsafe” sexual activity?
18. Has the money you spent on pornography, videos, web-camming, apps, phone sex, or hustlers/prostitutes strained your financial resources?
19. Have people you trust expressed concern about your sexual activity?
20. Does life seem meaningless and hopeless without a romantic or sexual relationship?
Tag: #Anonymity
Trauma and Addiction
The following are excerpts from an article by Robert W.
For a very long time in the world of psychology, when clients manifested symptoms of trauma and sought help to understand their feelings and behaviors, they were “diagnosed” as weak-willed and inherently emotionally unhealthy. Therapists of this particular era had little to no training or understanding of trauma and its wide-ranging, long-lasting effects, so they mostly avoided the issue, providing neither resolution nor hope.
This began to change when countless Vietnam War veterans returned manifesting profound emotional, psychological, and behavioral problems (including addiction). And it wasn’t just the soldiers who identified this change; their friends and families also noticed a huge difference. Psychologists finally took a serious look at the ways in which past traumas can impact a person’s current thinking and behavior—an idea that immediately resonated with both mental health professionals and the people who’d experienced severe trauma.
Can the symptoms we see with combat veterans also manifest in the general population in response to other forms of trauma? The answer was an undeniable yes.Research has made it clear that trauma as seen in war veterans are no different, in terms of later-life manifestations, than trauma experienced by victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence, racial intolerance, homophobia, gender discrimination, violent crime, misogyny, bullying, neglect, chronic family dysfunction (including addiction and mental illness), and intimate betrayal. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added its first trauma-focused diagnosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The new diagnosis identified three primary symptoms:
- Re-experiencing trauma—in flashbacks, nightmares, and even in response to loud noises and stressful situations
- Numbed response, including depression and abuse of addictive substances and behaviors, as a way of coping with the pain of re-experiencing
- Hypervigilance, including anxiety, psychological arousal, jumpiness, overreactions, etc.
One study looking at the long-term effects of unresolved early-life trauma found that survivors are:
- 1.8 times as likely to smoke cigarettes.
- 1.9 times as likely to become obese.
- 2.4 times as likely to experience ongoing anxiety.
- 3.6 times as likely to be depressed.
- 3.6 times as likely to qualify as promiscuous.
- 7.2 times as likely to become alcoholic.
- 11.1 times as likely to become an intravenous drug use
In time, we began to look at family-wide issues wrought by global traumas, such as how addiction affects everyone close to the addict. About the impact of trauma, secrets about trauma, and shame. This is the basic idea of trauma. It happens to us and it happens to those we love. And if we don’t find a way to recognize it, call it out, and find better ways to cope with it, it will color our thinking and behavior indefinitely. Also prior to this, addiction was considered by most to be a moral failing, a lack of self-will, or a deep psychological flaw (a personality disorder), rather than an emotional illness. Part and parcel with implementation of the disease model was recognition that addicts are nearly always survivors of severe or chronic trauma. It is clear from both research and clinical observation that addictions are not about feeling good; they’re about feeling less. Addicts turn to addictive substances and behaviors not because they want to have a good time, but to self-medicate and self-regulate their emotions. Their primary goal is to escape from life and not feel stress, anxiety, depression, fear, and other forms of discomfort. And they continue to do so even as their clearly (to an external observer) out-of-control behavior creates significant problems: relationship issues, trouble at work or in school, declining physical and/or emotional health, financial turmoil, legal concerns, mood disorders, and more. Addicts cope with stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, attachment deficits, and unresolved trauma by getting high (via a substance or behavior) instead of turning to other people who might emotionally support them. As they do this repeatedly, this choice becomes a pattern, and then an addiction.
Addicts are almost universally traumatized as children, which affects their ability to attach in healthy ways as adolescents and adults. Thus, they learn to use fantasy and dissociation via substances and behaviors for emotional regulation, rather than relying on intimate family, friends, and community for emotional support as a healthier person might. In time, they become compulsive and obsessed with this substance or behavior, using it as their primary emotional and psychological coping mechanism. Today, both the disease model and the role of trauma, especially unresolved early-life trauma,are well-accepted. The “Minnesota Model” of viewing and treating alcoholism as a disease rather than a moral failing took root. Addiction programs (heavily based on the experience of sober members of Alcoholics Anonymous) began to be developed. These treatment programs chose to view addiction as a primary disorder (rather than a symptom of some other psychological disorder) best treated with long-term abstinence and sobriety-focused social supports.
I am Powerless but not Helpless
I’ve told this story before, and it has evolved as I understand it more and more. I hope this is a faithful telling of my experiences. I hope you might find something in it that you can relate to.
Before I knew I was gay, definitely before I ever accepted it, I had another identity that eclipsed everything else. As a young teen, I wasn’t the most cautious about clearing my search history and by 14 my parents confronted me about my “deviant” online behavior. You’d think a couple of adults who found a teenager’s online gay porn collection would conclude this was a pretty clear indication of my homosexuality. For my conservative Mormon parents, it didn’t mean I was gay at all, it meant I had broken my brain. I was clearly just sick, influenced, corrupted. It was impossible, or, more accurately unacceptable, to be gay. We needed a scapegoat, a diagnosis, something to fix. Enter porn addiction. This became the epicenter of my life and my only real identity; porn addict.
I don’t really think this was an incorrect label. The combination of shame, repression, trauma, and denial fueled my compulsive relationship to porn. However, this label was not given out of serenity, courage, or wisdom. It was a scapegoat, a smokescreen, and a mask. It gave me, my family, my church, everyone something to say and permission to keep the rest unsaid. It was more of a gag order than an authentic admission.
For most of my young life, I was terrified that if people saw the full truth about being gay, I would lose love, safety, and belonging. Instead of learning how to be honest, I learned how to hide, manage perceptions, and tell people what I thought they needed to hear. Over time, dishonesty stopped feeling like dishonesty to me. I convinced myself that as long as I meant well, intended to change, or eventually “fixed” things, I wasn’t really lying. That mindset hurt people I loved, but mostly it damaged my ability to connect authentically with people. From a young age, I would split myself in two and only show people the half I wanted to. I don’t think there is any way to do that and not feel broken.
A lot of my unhealthy behavior became tied up with shame, secrecy, fear, and, of course, compulsive sexual behavior. For years, I understood all of that through the lens of addiction. Specifically, the version of addiction and recovery that the Mormon faith prescribed. Later, after coming out and doing trauma therapy, I genuinely believed I had healed the deeper issue underneath it. In many ways, I had. Parts of my life became healthier and freer than they had ever been before. I abandoned the label of addiction and felt vindicated doing so. I wasn’t a porn addict, I had been hurt and traumatized. This new shoe fit, and wearing it was a huge relief. The relief of being able to walk away from the label of addict is part of why it was so hard for me to admit when things started getting bad again.
Moving on with my life I went back to school to study clinical counseling and become a therapist. I met a beautiful, kind man and feel deeply in love. Around 10 years after coming out, if you looked at my life from the outside you’d see a great job, an attractive husband, a close group of friends, a cute home, a lazy dog and a mischievous cat. I was also so deeply entrenched in compulsive sexual behavior that my life was becoming totally unmanageable.
When my ex would catch me in lies, it felt like my world was collapsing. I eventually found a therapist and, after describing my behavior honestly, he said “yeah, sounds like sex addiction.” I hated hearing that. I did not want it to be true. I think part of me felt that if I accepted it, it meant I was fundamentally broken all over again. So even after recognizing I had a serious problem, I stayed in some kind of denial for a long time. Looking back, I think I started living in two contradictory realities at once. On one hand, I was terrified of losing the people I loved, which made me hide more, lie more, and avoid honesty at all costs. On the other hand, I felt safe and deeply loved in my life and relationships, and that safety became part of how I justified my behavior to myself. I kept believing I could contain everything, manage it privately, and eventually stop before the consequences became real. I couldn’t.
The old rules I had lived by had come back in full force: tell people what they want to hear, and never allow yourself to sit with pain, fear, shame, or discomfort for longer than you have to. Whenever I felt exposed, anxious, guilty, lonely, or ashamed, I reached for something that would numb me or make me feel temporarily free. The more dishonest I became, the more shame I carried. The more shame I carried, the more compulsive my behavior became.
It began with sexting and hiding it. Then camming and lying about it. When my ex told me it was hurting him and making him feel unwanted and unimportant, I promised to stop. I promised to stop every time he asked me to. I did not. I repeatedly chose secrecy over honesty, even while watching the damage it was causing.
Over time, the behavior escalated further into cheating, anonymous hookups, cruising, and increasingly risky and compulsive behavior. I would binge, immediately try to shut the shame down with avoidance, denial or justification, promise myself it was over, and then repeat the cycle again. I became increasingly compartmentalized; split in two all over again. I would act in ways that violated my values and harmed people I loved, then try to shut the door on it emotionally and pretend everything was normal.
One difficult truth I have had to confront is that a lot of my compulsivity became tied to transgression itself. Basically, I got hooked on breaking a rule, or the feeling of doing something I “shouldn’t.” As a kid growing up in shame and repression, even small forms of sexual expression felt dangerous, forbidden, and emotionally charged. I remember shaking so hard my teeth would chatter just from typing something erotic in a search bar. I think over time my brain became wired to seek intensity, secrecy, and risk. As my shame around sexuality decreased in healthier ways, my compulsivity adapted by seeking other forms of intensity and rule-breaking instead. I used to try to dismiss these instincts as sexual quirks and pass them off with jokes. That does not excuse what I did. The powerlessness I felt makes it more heartbreaking to me, not less.
As things escalated, I became desensitized to behavior and content that I always recognized as deeply unhealthy, risky, and inappropriate. I was unwilling to admit how unmanageable my life had become. Toward the end, there were moments where I barely recognized myself or the life I was living. I can only imagine how disturbing and disorienting it must have been for the people around me when those realities came to light. I also understand that the deepest harm was not only the sexual behavior itself, but the deception.I repeatedly denied reality to people who trusted me. I did not trust anyone to see my whole life. I manipulated situations to preserve my own safety and avoid consequences. I made people question their instincts, their trust, and their understanding of our relationship.
In all the work I have done to learn and heal, there has been one piece that I have struggled the most to accept: porn addiction was just the tip of the iceberg to my deeper codependency and love addiction. I hated that term. How could love be the problem? Porn and sex were the problem, love was the solution! Wasn’t it? My entire life I had treated compulsive sexual behavior like my one and only problem. What I didn’t notice was that I never really saw changing my behavior as the solution. The solution was my relationships. I saw everyone around me as better, more righteous, more worthy. I didn’t need to change, I just needed to earn more love. Growing up, I saw my family and church communities as saviors. Everyone became a surrogate for God and atonement. They were perfect, I was broken. It wasn’t my role to recover, it was my role to be ruined.
I remember one particular session I had with the first real therapist I had who introduced me to trauma therapy. I must have been really down on myself that day because she stopped me and asked “R—–, why are you trying so hard to convince me that you are a bad person?” My answer was “because if I’m not, the people I love hurt me for no reason.”
If I wanted people to be perfect saviors, I needed to be the perfect sinner. As beautiful as my marriage, my ex, my job, and my friends all were, I didn’t notice that I had fallen into the trap of turning them into perfect saviors. I lifted up the fantasy of my life and began denying myself and my authentic experience. I stopped thinking as a “me” and only thought in terms of “we.” I became more and more codependent to that dynamic and more and more entrenched in all of my old maladaptive coping strategies. I didn’t realize how desperately I began to want to be rescued, just as I had when I was young. The problem with wanting to be rescued, is you need to believe you are helpless. You need to foreclose on every strength, value, and even authenticity. If you really want to be rescued, you have to prove you need to be. In this whole process, it was the hardest to let go of the desire to be rescued. Now, I know I am powerless but not helpless. I cannot do this alone, but no one will do this but me.
Did You Know
July 6, 2026 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the inauguration of the SCA online meetings and, stemming from them, the Online Intergroup.
In fact, this month sees Online Intergroup celebrating all of:
- 30 years of online meetings.
- 15 years of telephone meetings.
- 5 plus years of their own, independent website.
The Online Intergroup is the original provider of electronic meetings to the SCA Fellowship, they provide online and telephone meetings, and do not hold any in-person or hybrid meetings.
The Online Intergroup’s online meetings are traditional message board meetings, also known as discussion forums, where members post shares and other members can reply later, where allowed. They are not chat rooms, with real time interactions between participants, but asynchronous platforms.
The Topic Meeting, our oldest meeting, began on July 6, 1996. Organized by John F. of New York and later Paris, the online meetings grew out of the establishment of the main SCA website, SCA-Recovery.org. The first poster was SCA Co-founder Frank H. of New York. He suggested that the new online meeting should have a topic, and the meeting became the Online Topic Meeting. Typically, the meeting has had two topics per month over the years, but we currently have a monthly topic. This month’s topic is a golden oldie, Step One. We are now posting an extract from recovery literature on the topic for members to reflect on as well. Members share on the topic for themselves, and are asked not to comment on what others have said.
The Feedback Meeting, for more general sharing on SCA-related subjects, soon followed the start of the Topic Meeting, and allows feedback from other members. Its formal name is the “Feedback for Recovery Meeting.” It quickly became and remains the most visited online meeting. Feedback is not advice or criticism. It can simply mean identifying with the poster, sharing words of encouragement, or relaying program slogans or tools that have helped the responder. Through these discussions, we deepen our understanding of the subjects raised in order to further our recovery.
The Acting In Meeting is our newest meeting, some 5 years old, and is where members can share experience, strength and hope on subjects relating to acting-in behaviors connected with sexual compulsion as they choose. Again, feedback is not advice or criticism. Broad expressions of acting in can be things like the compulsive avoidance of sex or sexual anorexia, fear and avoidance of intimacy, romantic obsession, love addiction, obsessive preoccupation with sexual or romantic fantasy, over-exercising, social anxiety, social anorexia and similar issues. For some, this might involve sexual codependency, such as a person not paying attention to what they want, or do not want, sexually.
There are other areas of our site separate from the online meetings, such as the Recovery Lounge for socializing and fellowship, and the Chips & Medallions Area where members celebrating a recovery anniversary can request and be awarded a chip or medallion.
Online Intergroup also hosted some very popular daily IRC (Internet Relay Chat) meetings for a number of years, starting in 1999, but those closed down in around 2008.
In July, 2011, Online Intergroup began putting on weekly telephone meetings, beginning on Sundays but soon expanding to Wednesdays and Fridays as well by April, 2014. All three phone meetings are still being held weekly. These are voice calls offered through a telephone and internet conferencing service that is free to members, barring exceptional cases where charges may apply depending on the dial-in number called by the member, if they are not participating via the app online. July 17, 2026 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the telephone meetings.
Online Intergroup hosted its meetings on the main SCA website for 24 years, until June, 2020, when we moved to a separate website. We maintained our original site format for several months, then inaugurated our brand new, independent, modern, custom-designed and custom-built website on September 30, 2020. This hosts all of the above online meetings and the sign-up information and mechanism for the telephone meetings, together with copious recovery resources.
All of our meetings can be reached via our website:
Online Intergroup experienced some challenging years during and after the pandemic with the transition from our previous telephone conferencing service to our current, newer-generation one, and persistent technical difficulties with the registration system for the online meetings, but we have now put those behind us and are up-to-date on member registrations and general site functioning. Next on the agenda is to update some texts and restore some degraded content on the site, for which work is getting underway. We are also aiming to add content and return to some planned parts of the website that did not get completed previously.
All SCA members and all those with a desire to recover from sexual compulsion worldwide are welcome to join our meetings. Online Intergroup has had its ups and down over the years, and our meetings are generally smaller and quieter than they have been historically, but we are set on maintaining, restoring and growing our recovery community. We are happy to have reached these milestones in carrying the SCA message of recovery, and look forward to arriving at many more in the coming years!
Happy anniversary to all online and telephone meeting members, past and present!
Can You Recognize Your Own Denial?
from a blog by Scott Brassart on December 29, 2025
One of the interesting things about addiction is that most addicts think they don’t have a problem. They think, Sure, if someone else was engaging in the same behaviors that I’m engaging in, that person would have a serious issue, but it’s OK for me because…
This is their denial.
Generally speaking, denial is a series of internal lies and deceits that manifest externally. In other words, addicts lie to themselves first, and then to others. It is lying to themselves that is most important because, based on that imperfect foundation of manufactured truth, their behaviors seem utterly reasonable to them in the moment of their obsession. Outsiders can easily dismantle this house of cards, but addicts cannot (or will not). They repeatedly defend their manufactured truth (their lies and deceit) until their world disintegrates into one crisis after another after another. And even then, they don’t give up easily.
With addiction, denial takes several different forms, the most common of which are listed below.
- Blame/Externalization: My partner has gained a lot of weight since we got married, and that’s unattractive to me.
- Entitlement: I work hard and I support my family, so I deserve to have some fun.
- Justification: If I was in a relationship, I’d be having sex all the time, so why can’t I be sexual all the time when I’m single?
- Minimization: All I’m doing is snorting a little cocaine when I have sex. It’s not like I’m using meth or injecting.
- Rationalization: Everybody looks at porn and plays around with hookup apps. That’s just life in the modern world.
- Victim Mentality: Everybody wants so much from me. I just feel overwhelmed and at the mercy of everyone in my life. And my only relief, the only time I feel in control, is when I’m using porn.
To combat denial, addicts must first uncover the lies they tell themselves (and then others). Then they must reframe those lies into truth by using responsible language. Typically, healing from sex addiction, porn addiction, and paired substance/sex addiction presents challenges that can’t be dealt with solely in one-on-on therapy. In fact, most sex, porn, and substance/sex addicts require external reinforcement and support from fellow recovering addicts if they hope to permanently change their deeply rooted patterns of behavior.
Language Without Accountability
- I only did a few lines.
- I usually wear a condom.
- I get sensual massages.
- One thing led to another.
Language With Accountability
- I was high on cocaine.
- I’ve had unsafe sex four times.
- I see escorts.
- I decided to get high and act out sexually.
When denial is uncovered and addressed in this way, it loses power over the addict. Without such work, addicts can (and will) find ways to ignore the seriousness of their addictive behaviors so they can continue with those behaviors. Unfortunately, without honesty, this willful ignorance – this denial – can go on for years.
SCA Womans Meeting
For Women and Non-Binary People
The Deadly Subculture of Internet Video Vigilantes by J.L.Flatley (edited for the SCAnner)
Predator catchers are social media influencers conducting amateur sting operations to expose alleged child predators. I first learned of the death of Craig Gertz when an activist in San Diego told me about a YouTube livestream he had witnessed in 2021. In the video the vigilante chased Gertz down the street to his house and waited outside until Gertz killed himself inside the residence. The gunshot could be heard on the livestream. The video was then removed from YouTube. These tragedies highlight the potential consequences and harm to addicts from the actions of predator-catcher vigilantes.
These vigilantes pretend to be minors looking for sex online. Once they’ve made contact with a “suspected “predator, they arrange a meeting, videotape the encounter, and then post the video online to shame them publicly. They think they know more about stopping sexual assaults than law enforcement, public health professionals and the courts. They can become very aggressive, seeking financial incentives for making videos registering over 300,000 views.
Suicide is a real possibility anytime you publicly shame, or threaten to publicly shame, an alleged predator. There have been many other predator catcher suicides around the world. Few of these sting operations lead to arrests; even fewer result in convictions. One issue is that the evidence obtained rarely stands up in court. Another is that many of the targets have serious addiction issues that allow them to be enticed into meeting with the vigilantes. Many police departments will not work with civilians acting as undercover operatives and do not condone such activities.
Alleged predators often face harassment, with some committing suicide, as seen in the case of Craig Gertz. However, a significant portion of those targeted seem to be guilty of nothing more than being catfished. This entrapment is usually initiated on “dating or hook-up” apps. And their anonymous nature makes it easy for real minors to put themselves in harm’s way. There is no real way to keep minors off these platforms. It’s also an ideal place for homophobes to create false profiles to dox, harass and entrap people that have not committed any crimes. Usually when a complaint is filed against these vigilantes their attorneys file an anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) motion to have the charges dismissed to protect their right for free speech, so they can speak out and participate in public discourse without fear of reprisal. Is harassing protected under the First Amendment?
What often happens is the victim may be cruising a “dating” app and may get a message from an anti-pedophile vigilante posing as a minor in order to lure the adult into a real-life confrontation. When finally meeting it is patently obvious he is not a minor and that they are being videoed. The target is then given a choice to help create content (for social media) by appearing in their video, or have all the evidence (texts, calls, pictures, etc.) turned over to the police. Often the police are called anyway while they film the target’s confession or story and possibly their arrest. Once the information is leaked, it becomes the news of the day. The media does not seem to be interested in the problematic nature of the predator catcher community or how it conducts its sting operations.
Whether they are fueled by social media and the drive for viral content or because they believe the justice system isn’t acting quickly or effectively enough, vigilante justice involves individuals or groups taking the law enforcement into their own hands without legal authority. We are not condoning these activities or those targeting under-age adolescence/children. Both have serious problems and my be breaking our laws. We do support the SCA (Sexual Compulsives Anonymous) Program as a means to help those that may be suffering from Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD).
Questions & Thoughts
“I am hopping and trying to find meetings with open communication. This will only help me with my own Honesty, Shame, Trust, Hope, Strength & Willingness to Learns and to Stay & Remain OPEN Always .. Please 🙏 Any HELP IS & Will be Appreciated” – D.W.