Q&A

Why do you keep going back to porn?
Escapism.
What are you trying to escape from?
A mundane sex life?
That's a result, not a cause, of the porn issue. Try again.
The responsibilities of real life?
Can you be a bit more specific?
Boredom. Loneliness, maybe.
Because...?
There's something missing in my life. Something my wife can't provide.
But porn can?
God, no. Porn makes it worse. At least, from the moment of clarity until I next sink into it's grasp.
Then what?
Ever heard of a God-shaped hole?
Is that what it is? You're trying to fill that with porn?
Maybe. Or running away from God.
Why would you run away from God?
I don't know. He probably wants something from me.
Like to give up porn.
No. Well, yes, but something else as well.
Like to be a missionary in deepest Howondaland, you mean?
Maybe. I don't know.
Then why run?
Fear. Fear of the unknown.

Clarity

After every relapse, there comes a moment of clarity.

Everything suddenly hits you at once: you're sat at your computer, trousers round your ankles, some hideously unreal slapper groaning away in a grainy little movie you've spent the last eight hours seeking out and downloading, you reach the last Kleenex in the box and, as you run for the bathroom, you trip over the pile of paperwork you should have been dealing with all afternoon.

The reality of your seedy little habit looms large, blotting out everything good in life. In that moment of clarity, you can see it for what it is.

And after clarity, remorse.

I sit here, post-relapse, and carefully delete all traces of the afternoon's 'work'. Then I post my thoughts here, and try to dissect the relapse.

How do I retain that clarity, so that it hits me before I go off the rails?

I don't get it

There's no reason I can see for my behaviour recently.
The binge-feel crappy-purge cycle - total waste of time. What the f*ck is going on there?
And sex - that's been good lately. The sort of good that should leave me utterly without need for satisfaction elsewhere.
But since when did that matter to my addict?

I have other thoughts, but I'm minimising my time online (hence the week off) in an attempt to get a sober streak going in which to contemplate my deeper issues...

Of course, it hasn't entirely worked, but still... I'm checking out now.

It shouldn't have come to this

It shouldn't have needed someone to die for me to realise it was wrong.
I'm a rational, moral human being. I could have worked it out for myself.
But I didn't. I let someone die.
Left him to die for the sake of my stupid obsession with the female form.
It took that death for me to realise my own stupidity.
But I kept going back.

It's been a rough couple of weeks since this slip. Since then I've had difficulty stringing together a couple of days without some kind of acting out. Maybe it's because I'm being harder on myself, it's easier to fall; maybe my addict is just getting more creative in sidestepping my own rules; more likely I'm just weak.
It took Good Friday to remind me of the consequences.
For every picture I download, every movie I watch, every woman I look twice at... the hammer strikes that nail.
About a quarter of the way through the Good Friday service I got my second wind; a sudden strength, not my own, the will to go back, purge the computer of any filth that remained, and start afresh.
Because the events of that day are down to me. I did it; I sent him to die.
And I do it again, every time I slip.

But Good Friday has reminded me.
It's not porn I live for.
Porn ain't my master.

Something more needed

I can't just white knuckle my way throught this. It doesn't work.

I need to get rid of the stuff that drives me to it - mainly boredom - and pick up the stuff that keeps me away from it - mainly prayer. You'd think, with time on my hands as I have at the moment, I could spend it in prayer, wouldn't you? But no, that's too easy. Far simpler to waste an hour or two finding another website that stupid web filter hasn't recognised yet. Far easier to have a five minute rush from venturing into the realms of the taboo.

And yet, when it's over, that five minute rush done, the feeling that remains is strangely hollow. Guilty, yes, but mainly empty.

The five-minute high has gone, but in arriving it drove out the longer lasting high of sobriety. Now there's... well, not even lows, just now, but... emptiness.

Which sucks.

Place Your Life Before God

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
(Romans 12:1-3, The Message)

Those few verses speak to me on so many levels, about this addiction, about where my spiritual life is right now, about the nature of the culture we live in...

The same passage in the NIV urges us to offer our bodies 'as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God' - which hardly allows space for habitual MB, I'm sure. It also says:

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by
the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2, NIV)

That's been a favourite verse of mine for a while, but it really means something now - now I've realised how messed up my mind has become, and how badly it needs renewing. I need to get out of the pattern of this world, too - the pattern that says casual sex is good; all guys look at naked women; it's natural, don't be ashamed of it; if it feels good, then it's alright.

I never wanted to be part of that world. But I very nearly did, and still it calls me.

Placing my life before God - body, mind and soul - is something I've let slip recently, with stupid consequences. I need to do it afresh now, after falling, and to keep doing it if I'm to regain the upper hand over this addiction.

Good news and bad news

The bad news is that I seem to be suffering a monumental failure to get back on the wagon at the moment.

The reasons for falling haven't gone away, so I'm having difficulty getting my act together and finding the willpower to carry on, and it's easier to settle back into the old habits...

But that's not good. That's no way to live.

I've positively had my last slip today. I've tightened up the filter, added a couple of sites it missed earlier, and made sure that all traces have been erased beyond my ability to recover.

There is progress though: since November I have not sought any hard-core images, just non-nude stuff. This isn't alright in any way, but it is less bad. The fact that some inadvertant glimpses of sexual acts being performed earlier really didn't excite me as they once did shows progress.

So I'll be taking that victory and building on it from here on in.

Reasons

1. It’s a quiet spot, work-wise, and the couple of tasks I’m trying to fill the day with get tedious quickly.
2. It’s a stressful time at home; especially at the moment with my wife at home sick.
3. Her being sick, of course, also means that she's not interested in any kind of intimacy; fair enough, but not helping my sexual tension.
4. We’re preparing to move house, which obviously ups the stress level, but also means the accoutrements of my other* hobbies are packed away in boxes somewhere.
5. The immediate catalyst for the fall, brought about by a combination of the above, was a row with my wife.
6. The fact that I slipped a couple of days earlier meant that all of the above led to a further episode of acting out.

* The word 'other' slipped in without me thinking about it.... as if I list porn & mb among my hobbies. Imagine putting that on your CV:

Hobbies and interests: Surfing adult websites. Avid collector of pornographic material, especially the work of ******** and ********. Many years experience of masturbation; shortlisted for the 2008 Olympic team.

Aftermath

This is the aftermath. This point in time is the reason I want out. Coming down from the false highs of a porn hit must be the low point of this addiction.

And I can't help dwelling on it; if I shut my eyes - to clear my mind, to slepp, to pray, to blink for Pete's sake, she's there. It's like I've just welded another montage of unsavoury images to the inside of my eyelids.

Any moment of happiness I may have gained from viewing porn has been blitzed by the negativity of the aftermath.

I'm disgusted at myself, for being so weak and choosing porn in the first place; for wasting so much of my time at those websites; for not just getting back on the wagon after the first slip, but letting porn get the upper hand again.

The feeling goes way beyond guilt, disappointment, or even anger. I am really p*ssed off with myself, but more than that, I feel so f*cking wretched, unworthy of God, my wife, my normal bloody life...

Reading the Bible left me cold.

Holding my wife left me cold.

The whole experience has driven a wedge between me and my real life. The lure of porn has dragged me away from everything good and real about my life, everything that really means something to me.

Of course, that's the reason for turning to it, to take me out of myself.

But sooner or later, I have to come back. That's when it hurts. I feel like shit. Like I took three steps forward, just to take two steps back.

At least I remember now.

I remember why sobriety is worth the struggle.

It's hard, but riding the downer from a porn fix is harder.

Surely nothing can be worth this?

Day 1

Yesterday, during a completely innocent web search, I came across something which triggers the MB response in my brain.

It wasn't porn, but, nonetheless, it led me into MB.

Having left MB as a middle circle act, and having not actually found any porn, I should have remained clean. I could have decided it wasn't a slip, and carried on. But that felt wrong.

However, I knew that if I declared a slip, a fall would follow - the addict in me would get the upper hand, and while I was re-setting the counter, he would decide that a porn binge wouldn't be such a bad idea.

So I entertained the idea of continuing, not declaring the slip, saying I was still sober.

It still felt wrong.

So the addict took advantage; and made a slip into a fall. Took me into places I had definitely declared out of bounds, bottom line acts, a fall.

Now I'm back in control. All traces of what led me to yesterday's slip, and today's fall, have been removed from my PC. I'm porn free again.

My immediate struggle will be to keep the slip from becoming an almighty binge.
Then I will need to reassess why I keep resorting to MB, and what status it should have in my life and my recovery plan.
Then, onwards: the nine week barrier remains there to be broken.

I won't feel bad.
I will get up again.

Day one starts now.

Near Mrs

My wife’s been off work a bit recently. This has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, knowing she’s either in the house, or if she’s not, that she could get back at any minute, has been another control measure at moments of temptation. On the other hand, when she is at work, I get up at the same time as her, even when I have nowhere to go. I use the first 20/30/60/however many minutes reading the Bible, praying, generally getting the day started with God.

That’s a habit I’ve slipped out of, and the effect of losing that is clear to see from last weeks blog entries.

The other potential effect I can see is that I become too dependant on her as a control measure, and as soon as she returns to work... bang! I've fallen into my old habits and wasted 2 months of sobriety. Having said that, although most of my porn surfing was done while she was at work, it wasn't exclusively so. I could be doing it now, and she would never know.

That's not good. I'm not proud of that. One day, I hope I have enough strength, enough confidence in my sobriety, to let her in on this.

Until then, I know she won't catch me, because there will be nothing to catch.

Attack of the killer sex-dreams

I'm sure most healthy, red-blooded males, who don’t MB habitually, occasionally dream about sex. That’s alright. I don’t have a problem with that; I can’t control my unconscious mind. But when I start dreaming about porn… I mean, come on. Where does this thing stop? Dreaming about looking at mucky pictures? What is wrong with you, brain?

At the moment, I think it's just that I'm vulnerable to it - it's been almost 2 months and it's trying to get me back - but the dreams aren't a new thing.

To start with I did literally just dream I was looking at a mucky magazine.

Later I dreamt about my friends rejecting me when they found out about this addiction. I'll try and relate the dream as I recall it, but you'll have to bear with the fact that dreams don't make sense to the conscious brain. But there will be a pay-off; this dream taught me something. Anyway:

My friends - a group of them, not just my immediate circle - had found out I had been into porn. I think in my dream world, porn was illegal, and as one of them owned a corner shop, they had good reason for not wanting a known porn addict within their inner circle, especially when the porn inspector came around. On the day of the porn inspection, I happened to be in the shop with them, against their better judgement.

So the porn inspector - who, this being a sex dream, was a rather attractive woman -comes in, makes a cursory show of her inspection, whatever that may entail, and then comes for me. My friends disown me again, assuming she knows I'm a user, and I'm left alone to face the inspector... who, it turns out, was one of the internet models I'd been obsessed with, stalking me.

I probably didn't do it much justice there, but the message it clearly spoke to me on awaking was that if I'm not careful, this obsession I've turned away from having nurtured it for years will come back. It's stalking me, and if I don't keep walking away, it will catch me and attack me.

On a positive note, I had another dream last night. I forget most of what happened, but I think, even in my dream, I stopped without going beyond a google image search.

See, even my subconscious is in recovery.

Umm....

To lighten the blog's mood, and to remind me in future that there are other things to do at your computer, here's a link:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/numa.php

Getting dark in here, isn't it?

I seem to have unleashed my dark side lately. It’s partly because I’ve hit a rough patch in the recovery process, partly because these slightly unnerving memories have been unearthed, and partly, I hope, because it needs to happen. I need to come over to the dark side. I need to confront what’s unpleasant about addiction, about what I’ve seen, about who I have been.

Hopefully, confronting the dark side will help me move away from it.

So, I apologise to anyone reading these less than enjoyable posts. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

The Young Exhibitionists Club

To continue...

I was 14 when I discovered masturbation, and feeling a bit of a late developer, I tried to make up for lost time and quickly got hooked on it. I did it anywhere and everywhere. The urinals in the school toilets were a spot I tried a couple of times. There were secluded spots in and around the neighbourhood where I could go on a dark evening.

My first remotely sexual experience with a girl was outdoors, in a quiet, but nonetheless public, place. Although the reason for this was to avoid getting caught, the whole outdoors/in public theme has been repeated, no doubt related to those early experiments.

As teenagers, a group of us often talked about playing strip poker. I think the main reason it stayed talk was that none of us could actually play poker, but had that not been the case, would I have done it? I think I might have felt a bit self-conscious displayed next to some of my male friends, but I think I might have done. I certainly didn't feel self-conscious among the girls in our group at the time.

So, whether it's the possibility of getting caught, the feel of a fresh breeze, or just showing what I'd got, something about all this makes me feel good. It adds to the normal sexual thrill.

Perhaps this is how porn stars feel. Perhaps, on this level, I relate to them. I understand why these girls (and guys) are doing it.

I think they enjoy it, because I think I would enjoy it.

Childhood memories...

...but not particularly of the good kind, have recently been called to mind, and I'm wondering what influence these experiences have had on my porn addiction.

I don't think I've been repressing this, but as I started to write on the subject on the support board more memories came back. This was a bigger thing than I've been remembering it as, for sure.

It all starts with myself and two (male) friends playing "I'll show you mine if you..." type games. I can't recall exactly how old we were, but we were certainly under 10. Previously I had jusr written this off as childish experimentation. But where does it stop being that? And when you're 9 years old, what does it become?

It wasn't just a one off. It started off with the three of us in the garage of my friend's house, but for my best friend and I it grew from there. I recall at least a couple of occasions when we exposed ourselves (for want of a better phrase) outdoors in a couple of places, although, not knowingly where anyone would actually see us.

There was no touching, and I've certainly never thought of it as any kind of homosexual experiment, but I don't remember any girls being involved. What I do remember is having an erection in that garage, though at the time I had no idea what it meant.

Did it mean I got a kick out of exposing myself, even at that early age? Has that ultimately led to my affinity for porn?

This has started quite a train of thought, which I shall have to follow for the sake of my recovery (and this, within 24 hours of telling the support board I had no deep emotional issues or buried pain).

To be continued...

The post that nearly wasn't

As if to prove what I wrote yesterday about taking my eyes off the Lord, this morning got off to a bad start. I had to post on the support board in the vague hope that some of my compatriots would spare a prayer for me, then logged off.

But before I did that, I had cause to scan a few earlier entries in this blog. That made me realise how different I am now, how much I have changed in the relatively short time I've been blogging, which effectively represents my serious attempt at giving up. That gave me a boost; not only by showing me what I used to be like, but focusing my mind on something positive, and convincing me that doing this, blogging, is helping.

So now I'm back online, to post something of my thoughts on the day, in the hope that it may help in the future. It may not be too coherent. It's been a slow working day, which never helps, and I've made it through partly by white knuckling (a term I've never fully understood until it happened to me...) and partly by getting out of the house, away from temptations, and trying to pray.

A positive focus, that's what I need. Be it God, the novel I hope to use these experiences to write, or, at a push, work...