A real recovery option for sexual abusers

In the months since the seismic expose of Harvey Weinstein, more than 120 high-profile men have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct, often with serious consequences. When they first get the news, many toss it off — or rage, lawyer up and sue.

One thing they don’t do — lately, anyway — is admit to a psychosexual problem. Even those with brutal erotic practices have stopped confessing that they’re sick puppies. Perhaps this is because Weinstein said he was an addict when he flamed out, an admission that did little to win back anyone’s trust or money. He quit in-patient rehab after a week.

Maybe it’s best — for modern optics, anyway — for sex abusers to skip the invocations of personal demons and the medivac to a secluded clinic. There is no consensus, after all, about what “sex addiction” is, and many regard the phrase as a way to slip the knot of moral responsibility. Newsweek has called sex addiction “a condition that doesn’t exist.” The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has identified in some of these men “an itch to identify some pathology, render a diagnosis, layer science onto sheer boorishness.”

But if the last few months have shown us that victims have no handbook for coping with lechery, assault and extortion, we’ve also seen that leches, assailants and extorters don’t have a handbook either.

Yet one does exist: a program of recovery that is less science than moral reckoning, less luxury clinic and more church cellar. The program uses the word “addict,” but not in a 2018 sense; no brain science — nor science at all — is integral to the treatment. Instead, it’s a spiritual program in which perpetrators confront their selfishness and cultivate ruthless honesty. They also create a searching inventory of what might be called sin and make amends to those they harmed.

This is Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which was founded in Boston in 1976 by a recovering alcoholic. He thought that the 12 steps that had helped him overcome alcoholism could also help him stop compulsive philandering. SLAA often serves as a punch line, and its meetings can easily be imagined as a pickup joint for the promiscuous. They’re anything but that. Recovery in SLAA is not sexy: there’s prayer and chores like floor-mopping that might be just the thing for a vain maestro or architect.

SLAA sometimes goes by a more dignified and evocative name: the Augustine Fellowship. St. Augustine of Hippo is rarely invoked in the context of #metoo, but maybe he ought to be: He was a man of restless sexual energy who in his famous “Confessions” copped to harming people for his sexual gratification. The story of Augustine’s redemption — a dividend of his own moral commitments, as well as God’s grace — is foundational to Protestantism.

Those in the Augustine Fellowship hardly let themselves off the hook for the sexual harms they’ve committed. Everything from harassment to infidelity to the wanton consumption of pornography goes on their inventories. Whether or not they believe in God, they commit to the 12 steps not to repair their reputations but to save their souls.

Several men I respect have stopped compulsive and cruel sexual behavior in the Augustine Fellowship. Their recoveries are both arduous and admirable. For one of them, the strict policing of what the fellowship calls “people, places and things” — triggers — has continued for years. He avoids all pornography, red-light districts and even roads with strip clubs along them.

His amends to the women he harmed have all included taking full, un-defensive responsibility for all the suffering he caused. No “our recollections may differ” here.

Such forthrightness requires humility. The Augustine Fellowship exists for abusers and others who can find humility in their humiliations.

It’s a shame the SLAA program has been lumped in with tony rehabs, fake addiction science and tepid apologies as just another refuge of scoundrels. Feminists rightly say that victims don’t need to learn self-defense; perpetrators need to learn “no raping.” The Augustine Fellowship has been teaching no raping for 42 years — and evidently that simple lesson continues to come as news to men who sorely need it.