Ooops

I'm not sure how I went from all that thinking to ending up slipping later in the day, but...

Well, I'm not going to dwell on it. It was one little slip, I'm not proud of it, but I didn't start to binge, and I'm moving on. Let this be my confession - 'fessing up and moving on straight away is the best that can happen following a slip. That, and it prompts me to get on and do something about the stupid web filter I know how to cheat; an issue I have now addressed.

2006: so far 75% free of porn & MB.

I've been thinking too much...

On the higher-calling forums I have a Max Lucado quote in my signature:

Could it be that you are under attack - not because you are weak but because you might become so strong?

Reading that today reminded me of something. Last week, a couple of days before the temptations really clobbered me, I was out on business, and had the opportunity to have lunch on the beach. Just to turn my back on the world man has made and look out at the unspoilt ocean as God made it. Just to sit there, on my own, listening to the sea, and trying to reconnect with God.
Think back over those temptations today, I came to link them with that time on the beach.
Was that why I felt so tempted? Because I had started to move back towards God, and discover who I really was, beneath the recovering addict? Was it some futile attempt of the enemy to keep the addict in control? Could it, in fact, be that I was under attack precisely because I was starting to grow stronger?
That's the point of the quote, of course, to remind myself and my fellow strugglers that we will grow strong in the Lord if we resist the attack.
Yet it seems a little hard to believe that anything I can do would be that important. Why should keeping me in sin be that important to the devil? Can I really do anything that would be that important, that would hurt the enemy that much?
Of course, I can't, but in the Lord's strength...
I guess the question should be: What can God do with me that would be that important?
Well, I don't know. But, in God's grand tradition of pulling something good out of an otherwise bad day, those temptations and the thoughts that have followed them have led me to a realisation.
I want to know what the devil is trying to prevent. I want to find out what God can do with me.

Some questions

Have I left myself open to temptation?
In the past, I've kept a stash back, and found ways to rationalise it. I don't do that now. In fact, I have got into the habit of cleaning out my PC quite regularly lately, not because I have anything to hide, but in case I found myself somewhere tempting by accident, or some nasty bit of spyware slipped something onto my hard drive.
So my PC - my primary source of acting out - is clean.
I haven't bought any 'men's' magazines for over a year, and don't have any old ones lying about.
I don't watch much TV of any sort, especially not that I would find triggering, and can't limit my choice of channels any further without chucking the TV out...
Those are my only avenues of acting out in the past, and they're controlled at the moment.
The only potential problem area is one of necessity: being online a lot of the time. Working from home requires it, and although I have the option of working in close proximity to my wife at the moment, the baby's gurglings ar not always condusive to a good day's work for one reason or another.

So what can I do about it?
Well, I have a web filter, but I know how to bypass it, I know the kinds of sites it won't block but that will go some way to pleasing the addict. I can change my filter, or get an additional one, and not put it to the test.
Even simpler, and I've had this rule before and kind of forgotten about it: not open my browser without a specific purpose. Don't use the web as a tool for procrastination, whether or not that involves porn.
And I can recognise, and make plans to avoid, my known triggers:

Stress. There's a lot of this at the moment, brought on mainly by a baby and a depressed wife. The baby bits I can mostly enjoy, especially now my wife has started to express her appreciation for my efforts (a major source of frustration and pent up anger in the past). I'm still looking for the best way to deal with the depression, but having identified it as a major trigger, I can try to avoid porn as a coping mechanism.

Boredom. This tends to come during a quiet spell at work, which happens from time to time. But there is still that Jet Set Willy game to design, and that sci-fi epic isn't writing itself you know... but on a more serious note, there's a Bible to read, a God to get to know again. If circumstances provide the time to do that, I shouldn't waste it.

My wife's moods. They can bring about all kinds of negative emotions, from rejection to anger to following her into depression. I need an alternative coping mechanism for this; until I come up with a suitable one, I'll try using prayer.

These are going to need refining, but the bottom line is this: to shift up a gear in recovery, I need to seek God more.

Now, how exactly do I go about that?

Correction

For the sake of clearing my conscience, I'm not going to claim Friday was clean, as I said in my last post.
Truth is, although I didn't go the whole P&MB distance, I did allow the temptations brought on by the dream and a bit of work-related procrastination to get the better of me, and I played with fire. I found myself half-heartedly looking for websites with pretty girls that wouldn't count as porn...
But of course, they only 'don't count' in a technical sense; had I not wised up and stopped when I did, that spiral into binge porn would have started over again. Seeing what I did, of course, just heightened the existing temptations, and made the rest of the day that bit harder. Managed to hold out and not MB even having seen what I did, which is, even given the rest of it, good.

So: Friday was technically clean, no MB, no deliberate or excessive use of hard porn, but there was borderline stuff that shouldn't have gotten as far as it did.
The weekend has been clean in every sense, and has, I hope, cleared my head ready for the week.

On the brink

This isn't good.

It's been less than two weeks, I had a porn-related dream last night, and this morning stumbled into a slightly dodgy website (left again without seeing or doing anything) but the temptation is huge today. It's that pesky subconscious of mine; it was a dream (along with all the stress of the day) that set me off on my last porn adventure, and it's trying hard to do the same again... :-(

OK, let's think tactics:

1. have lunch
2. go for a walk with wife & baby
3. file tax return
4. complete Jet Set Willy: Path of Neo
5. write 90,000 word science fiction epic

That should keep me occupied for a minute or two...

Thursday & Friday (so far) - still hanging in there.

Back to the Old Skool

Yesterday was clean, but there was a slightly odd moment when, having popped into a newsagents in a little town 100-odd miles from home, I realised I could buy one of the top-shelf magazines, pay in cash and disappear from the place never to return again, and nobody would ever know...

Printed pornography? Very 1980s. Not something I've done since becoming a connoisseur of the stuff, and really, at this stage in life, do I want to be reminded of how I got into this stupid situation? Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.... *groan*

Anyway, I left without so much as a copy of FHM to call my own, and a car mag to while away my lunch hour (although increasingly they seem to be about cars & girls, or in some cases girls & cars, these days).

Another minor victory in the ongoing battle...

Progress report

At the end of today it will be a week without porn or MB. That puts my progress for 2006 up to 80% clean - hooray! - for what that's worth at this stage.

Temptations show their face occasionally; there are still a lot of unpleasant memories I need to purge, and that is currently my main problem.

As for acting on those thoughts, however; so far so good.

At the moment I'm keeping myself busy - I guess by some definitions I may just be white knuckling and setting myself up, ultimately, for a fall.

Family stuff has recovered from last weeks low, but still pretty hard at times, and as a result I have let my prayer life and related good habits fall by the wayside a bit. From here on, picking those up again needs to be my priority in the slightly-less-bad times.

Struggling to cope

Not just with my own problems, but with my wife's deepening depression.

I am supposed to be working at home today, but I've had Mrs 386 crying in one ear, the baby in the other (as I've taken her so she doesn't pick up on her mum's negativity), and I ended up losing my rag at one point which just made things ten times worse...

With all this going on I'm having enormous difficulty keeping my head above water at the moment, behaving normally around the baby and actually getting a bit of work done, that I can't cope with my wife's extreme moods.

Hiding what's going on in my head is making it worse for me, but to tell her how I feel - and the sort of sordid crap that goes through my head at those times - would be an incredibly bad thing at the moment. All of which is just piling frustration on top of frustration and making an escape into porn-land look all the more tempting....

But I won't allow myself that. I'm about 48 hours from the end of my last binge, which makes me clean for about 60% of 2006 so far...

I guess the aim should be to keep increasing that number from here on in.

Riding the crest of a slump

The last two days have been bad. Really very bad.

Suffice it to say that events over Christmas, combined with a sudden attack of extreme temptation, triggered the biggest, longest bout of acting out in a long time.

Sometimes, I just wish I could excercise some control over the part of my brain that insists the answers to life's problems can be found on an adult website.

There's an overwhelming sense of pointlessness to the whole process: give in to it, download lots of nice pictures, add some websites to your favourites, get bored of the repetetiveness of it, repent and clean up your PC, go straight until you forget all that, then give in to temptation and start all over again...

Too much of yesterday just disappeared before I'd even noticed. That's probably the worst thing, if only because it's the part of the process I can, in theory at least, control.

This addiction sucks.

Can I have my life back please?