Support Group for Bali’s Hopeless Romantics and Sex Maniacs

The rest of us Zoom meeting participants fell silent as an American woman was sobbing uncontrollably on camera.

“I’ve been so isolated and lonely lately. I’ve not left my villa for a few days now. I don’t know how much longer I must isolate myself like this. Yet I’m afraid that if I go out, seeing men on the streets will trigger me to act out sexually again. I thought I’d already recovered from my addiction but now I’m feeling weaker than ever before,” she managed to say in between sobs.

It was early 2024, almost a year ago. We were in the middle of a weekly “hybrid” meeting of the Bali chapter of the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA Bali). The hybrid session consisted of an in-person meeting held in a shop/house building somewhere in Seminyak and participants from different parts of Bali (mostly Ubud, Canggu and Uluwatu), who could only join the support group meeting online. I joined their meeting from Ubud, where I was staying at that time.

No different from its more well-known counterpart, the Alcoholic Anonymous (AA), the SLAA is also a form of support group which has chapters around the world. The SLAA program follows the 12-Step Recovery Program modeled by the AA. Also just like the AA, which was founded by a group of born again Christians in America, the SLAA always included in its meetings the Serenity Prayer. It also places “surrender to a Higher Power” as the most important prerequisite of participants’ recovery.

The woman, whom I introduced you to at the beginning of this article, joined our meeting online, also from somewhere in Ubud. Just a week before, she joined our meeting on a particularly high note. Last week, she said that she had just been baptized in a Christian church somewhere in Gianyar and that it represented a very significant milestone in her recovery. In that meeting, she appeared upbeat and happy, after she’d locked herself up in her room during her first months of “sobriety” for fear of lusting after sexy guys which roamed Ubud’s streets in large quantity. How come she suddenly hit rock bottom again?

“I started going outside my house quite regularly again after I got baptized. But then I started looking at these attractive guys on the street… and I simply couldn’t resist them. I got so scared and remembered how promiscuous I had been and then decided to just go home and lock myself inside. Maybe I simply have to leave Bali for good. I simply can’t give a fuck about this island anymore,” she said, still crying.

Well, I think probably leaving Bali would be the best choice for her. She had previously told us about her “bad habit” of hooking up with random attractive guys in Bali.

You can’t blame her for thinking that way. There is a plethora of ridiculously attractive foreigners in Bali’s tourist hotspots such as Canggu and Ubud; they are there like low-hanging fruits. No matter what ethnicity they are: be it Caucasian, Asian (which includes Indian, Chinese and so on), or African, they have the face and physique like supermodels. Maybe the fact that most of them make money as influencers or digital creators kind of explains their exceptional physical specimen. It’s also great that most of these beautiful people are also a flirt, meaning they are more than available to lay down with whomever is not satisfied by simply looking at them but would like to touch, fondle, kiss or even fuck them too.

For some people, endlessly cruising for an infinite number of sex partners in one of Southeast Asia’s most famous sex paradises is the life of their dreams. But not for this crying American woman, who said that her regular hookups with strangers left her feeling emptier and sadder than ever.

She said she had always felt this great void inside herself for God knows how long. After she turned into a freelance digital creator who could work from wherever she wanted, she decided to move to Ubud. Inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2008 memoir Eat Pray Love, she hoped that she could find healing from her heart’s great emptiness there, and hopefully, as a bonus, a fellow expat man who truly loved her.

But instead she got swept away in the excitement of casual sex as a diversion. She joined this SLAA group after she got frustrated, not being able to find new sex partners online and went through “withdrawal”. Then she tried to get “sober” by getting off dating apps altogether, not dating men at all (this included sex dates) and not masturbating. She became sober for a few months before she finally found “true fulfillment” by becoming a born again Christian. A decision which, instead of helping her make peace with her hyperactive libido, I suppose only made her feel more guilt over her sexual habits. Which led to her exaggerated response to herself drooling over hot dudes during our current support group session.

Watching this lady having a live emotional meltdown on Zoom, instead of sympathizing for her, I felt some perverse sense of delight. In my relatively boring, humdrum existence in Ubud (I mean, I didn’t really have any fulfilling jobs or projects at that time, or any exciting island adventures for that matter), her drama lifted me out of my ennui. I mean, aren’t we all attracted to drama, especially when it happens to other people and doesn’t affect us personally?

However, some drama in my life actually became the reason why I ended up among those people. I didn’t have much fun or pleasure in my life back then, because I wasn’t feeling very fulfilled at my job and I also did not have a group of friends I could connect with (my old friends had already returned to their countries at that time).

I ended up escaping my boring life by spending a disproportionate amount of time looking at thirst traps on Instagram. I was also online on dating apps a lot of the time. Unfortunately, I found it really hard to find anyone who’d like to “have fun” sexually with me. As a result I was just fapping by myself. Some days I could fap three times a day, which eventually left me feeling emptier, lonelier and more tired than ever. At the same time, when I went out to eat, everywhere around me I saw people publicly display their affection. I ended up feeling frustrated. I googled “masturbating too much” and it somehow landed me on a page containing a “sex addiction” self-assessment inventory. The questionnaire consists of questions like:

Do you often find yourself preoccupied by sexual thoughts?

Do you feel controlled by your sexual desire?

Do you think your sexual desire is stronger than you are?

Desperate of not being able find a fuck buddy at the time I was most horny and losing pleasure in my masturbatory activities in the end, I answered YES to most of those questions. My test result came on my inbox instantly, milliseconds after I completed that test. My diagnosis came: I was a sex addict.

Looking back at it, the inventory actually consisted of laughably simplistic and generic questions. Lust is a natural part of human emotions and probably the majority of us would be classified a sex addicts if we took that test. Unfortunately, my sexual frustration caused me to buy into it. I began watching lots of YouTube videos about sex addiction and my led me to find out that there was a support group for us called SLAA, which had a chapter in Bali.

A few months later, when I returned to Jakarta and told my friend about this sex and love addicts support group, my friend said, cynically: “I’m sure all the members of this SLAA support group are handsome and pretty. After all, only beautiful people could have the luxury to become sex and love addicts. Ugly people wouldn’t even think about this nonsense.”

I hesitated to make remarks on the looks of my fellow SLAA support group members because I didn’t want to be shallow or inappropriate. But let me tell you now, honestly, when the Bali support group coordinator put me in the SLAA community’s WhatsApp group, I was afraid that joining the group would trigger me to act out sexually. Why? As I could tell from each member’s WhatsApp profile picture, all of them were temptingly gorgeous. There was not a single one of them who was ugly. And all of them are sex maniacs, which means that they are very likely to accept an invitation to get laid.

Therefore, I never used my laptop during our Zoom sessions, which would force me to look at their faces. Instead, I used my smartphone. I was on my Bluetooth headsets and instead of holding the phone in my hand while I was sitting on my home office desk, I put it in my bookshelf. The temptation was too great. I only looked at the screen when I heard the American woman crying and I wanted to look at her meltdown.

Week after week, I heard the other participants talking about their “withdrawal symptoms”, both from love and from sex. Nobody could top the American woman’s story, but here’s one of the most exciting revelations that I could recall:

“I had stayed sober for a few weeks, then last night I felt the urge to call the prostitute that I slept with again. I think I already developed some feelings for her. My core problem really is love addiction. I only use the sex to cover it up. So when she said no she didn’t want to see it again, I suddenly felt this pain so great that I was paralyzed in my bed. I was just lying there, numb, unable to move or feel anything,” one male sex addict said.

“Oh, so how long did you stay in that state?” the group facilitator asked.

“Like for 3 hours,” replied the sex addict.

“Don’t worry, it happens sometimes. I used to have a very rocky relationship with my ex-girlfriend. A while after she had left, I got this panic attack while I was in the kitchen, trying to prepare some food. I ended up lying on the kitchen floor, overcome by this pain. Luckily a friend of mine came to help me,” he said.

One afternoon, a new member, an American man, caused a bit of a commotion in our WhatsApp group. When he introduced himself in the WhatsApp group, he said he was a “painfully shy guy whose social anxiety is so great he could never have sex with a woman”. Because of that, in the past 14 years or so he could only satisfy himself sexually by masturbating to 2D pictures of naked women (which is unfortunate, because he too, like everyone else in the group, is a very handsome man). Of course, like in my case, you could only maintain the excitement of masturbation up to a certain point before it got boring. Except his case ended with an ED – erectile dysfunction.

That was why he was desperate to join our support group to help him address his anxiety-induced masturbation problem. He wanted to be able to have sex with a flesh-and-bone human being, not just fapping himself til his penis got sore. He said due to his social anxiety, he would only join the meeting online in the first few weeks. Gradually, he would start joining the meeting in person.

However, that afternoon, he was unable to sign in to our Zoom session. In addition to his social anxiety, sex addiction and erectile dysfunction, did he happen to be a technologically handicapped person too? What a poor guy. He was panicked by his inability to sign in because he said he desperately needed to join our meeting that afternoon; he was horny. Some other members tried to instruct him on how to sign in to our meeting, but he said when he was horny he simply couldn’t think. Long story short, he ended up not being able to join our meeting and he said he had a panic attack. As a result, we got distracted and could not really concentrate on our discussion.

Actually, that incident, which happened four months after I joined the support group, was the reason why I ended up leaving that group. All they could do was talk about their emotional meltdowns; the discussions were not well-moderated, so we never talked about the possible solutions to our personal problems. Plus, I suppose I simply had no time for all the nonsensical drama caused by these super-attractive people whose only problem in life was their inability to control their libido. Luckily I found some new friends and a more fulfilling job shortly before that, so suddenly my sexual frustration did not bother me anymore; it simply disappeared magically.

However, if you find yourself preoccupied and controlled by sexual thoughts that are stronger than you are, feel free to join the group. Who knows, unlike me, you might find it helpful.