I had to be told there was a way out of my addiction.  In the world I inhabited before, there was no solution.  If I saw solutions, they didn't seem to work for me, or I couldn't find the will to want them to work for me, which amounted to the same thing.

I found an SA group that told me something I didn't know: that this addiction would kill me.  This was news to me because I'd heard specifically that the reason many in the mental health community would not accept sex as an addiction was because you can't really over-dose or die from it, like you can from a narcotic.  It's still not easy for me to put into words what it means to die from this addiction. Physical death is possible - sexually transmitted diseases, deterioration of physical health, suicide - but the death that comes from the addiction is more than that.  There is a light in the soul that can be extinguished, a light that makes life good, and that's what the addiction goes after in me.

The second thing they told me, and it wasn't so much in words, was that there was a solution.  I had the blessing to find a group where almost half of the members had more than 3-4 years sobriety, and some 7, 10 and more, and their lives "told" me that long-term sobriety was not only possible, but very possible, if I did what I was told by sober people.