Me Speaking

Call it osmosis. Transformation. Call it growing a new skin. It's turning me inside out and upside down. Before, I actively sought to look at beautiful women. I yearned for the longing stares of mutual attraction. No matter religious faith nor sexual codes of conduct, women were statues of goddesses erected on pedestals in temples of idolatry. Their marble material didn't threaten. Flesh and blood women scared me to death. Now, women are people to me, imperfect and sharing the equalities of imperfection. Now, not only women, but the whole world about me transforms into a present moment of living vitality. I see what before I didn't notice. Now, I do not seek to look, and when I do, I seek to not look lustfully.  My lizard drive urges, almost compels my innermost self, the sex and porn addict, to objectify individuals onto the screen of my mind, to liken them as porn actresses in a sex video. I am urged to feed the demand that porn advances towards the enslavement of women i...

If ever I, myself, needed the understanding and support of those in the tribe of us, the recovering sex and porn addicts, it is now. Truly, if I can speak truth, this need largely escaped me until I joined the fellowship of SPAA. (Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous) It's repeated all over the earth. Addicts in 12 Step programs cannot recover alone, on their own resources, but must need have community and fellowship with those who share the particular addiction disease. So, it is. Particularly in SPAA. This disease murders hope. My hopes of abstinence, when I entertained such hope, dashed countless times over decade upon decade. Perhaps I can find the words to explain. In my family of origin, a shadow of shame darkened the light in the house. A lock on authentic expression curtailed capacity to learn how to feel. From my perspective, an admonition in the household acted like a curtain in a  movie theater. If the curtain could have been opened, the movie would have been like a world of...

  I cut the rope. I don’t see where I came from. I go into the unknown. What do I find? Change is my fear. Being different is my fear. Being queer. Being forever ruled not by purpose but by the emotive waves of stormy emotion buffeting me. Being a quitter. My fears tie me down to the way I used to be, to my past.   My fears comfort me. However, a broken record player repeats a truth I grasp, that... “Fear knocked on the door, and faith answered.” Faith in Jesus Christ. Faith. Blind faith? It’s not blind, my faith. And all of everything lives inside the moment of now. My job is to cultivate, water, hoe the ground of my faith so that it works, rain or shine. I choose to feel. (Not to say that I also choose not to feel) The dragon is that I am a coward, a sissy, a fraud who does not have sufficient masculinity to win the heart of a woman. This is where an Evil One enters the picture. This Liar well realizes my hatred mistakenly directed at God on account of my year aft...

 It's chastening to post honestly. I don't want my sexual sobriety more than anything else. I say to myself I need wiggle room, and myself agrees.  Rome wasn't built in a day is my argument. I argue the Capital of the Roman Empire had been fearfully and painfully growing during hundreds of years.  And picture the mental constructs of French and English mindsets, perpetually contending.  Believe not what I say --- that's not what truly counts; what does is whether I do what I say. Today I kept one of my words and honestly, not just in the technical sense but in a whole hearted sense. There is something going on. A sense of an orderly retreat in the face of an unstoppable force that releases a hundred different and interesting directions. Imagine the freedom to be able to say what it is one feels no matter what fear of giving offense nor what fear of appearing foolish or intemperate. I am struck by the depths of the  soul-searching honesty shared amongst those of ...

If I look at porn, I lose my SPAA sobriety, and recent times past, nothing, nothing on earth wanted I more than to look at pornagraphy. It's my bread and butter. One goal: Go to 90 SPAA meetings in 90 days; today is 61 of those 90. Here's the stats. 41 days back-to-back sober, day 42 a slip. Next 10 days sober, day 53 a slip, day 55 a slip.  These "slips", well, put it this way. I tell myself, damn, I slipped, so...all bets are off, I'm going to milk this cow for all its worth, and the slip on a day turns into 3 or 4 slips in one day.  I intend to continue going to SPAA meetings daily, indefinitely. I now have a sponsor, and have started working the First Step of the 12 Steps contained in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, adapted for sex and porn addicts. To repeat, according to the SPAA definition of sobriety, if I watch porn, even if I don't masturbate, I slip. If I have sex outside of a committed relationship, I slip. If I masturbate to completion witho...

Well, I slipped again, three episodes of one time each. But I wanted the rushes. Cannot call a deliberate fall a slip, as if it was accidental! I can refine those lies to myself and say---"I'm an addict! Heh, what can you expect from an addict except to act out and to be what he or she is!?" Folks, I do not give a shit what or how I categorize my slips and relapses. I am a dyed in the wool porn addict!!  In SPAA , the 12 Step porn recovery program, the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop acting out sexually. I do most of the time have this desire, but to be honest, not all the time. An aside here. I have not ever, not once, felt negative judgement by other SPAA members based on the length of time of my sobriety. I have been attending and participating in SPAA meetings daily for forty-six days. I see guys and gals with two days sobriety being respected, being listened to, being genuine brothers and sisters with members who have five and seven and thirteen y...

Thirty-three days of no porn and masturbation sobriety  today. But I sure wanted to act out, and not too long ago. I watched and listened to a man during a SPAA meeting (Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous), about my age, who had just lost his sobriety,  a man who had regressed back to day one, and sadness was written on his face and in his voice. I am at risk myself, and almost literally at any time of day or night. When the urge arrives, it seduces without remorse and can leave the man or woman so seduced in a pitiful state of affairs. The question becomes how, how could I do what it is I most do not want to do? The conclusion I've reached is because I am powerless to prevent myself from indulging in pleasures that dress in the clothing of sheep, but are in fact rapacious animals clothed in the innocent appearing make up of "benign" addiction. Do you relate, reader of these words? The heart of my current strategy to incarcerate my porn addiction is named the "aversion...

Hope. Can't live without it. Especially when, after almost three years of concerted effort to cease and desist,  the practice of looking at pornography and masturbating continues practically unabated. I am seeing men and women in the SPAA (Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous) group with two, five, seven and thirteen years of sobriety. The view offers that vital ingredient of hope. And the men and women who share their experiences on the road of recovery unanimously agree that one vital key to their success is to stop edging. I did not realize before participating in SPAA meetings that I have lived almost sex decades of my seventy-two years of life as an edger---my imaginings alive for the purpose of stimulating my inordinate drive to feel lust. I spent $20,000 at the Mustang Ranch house of prostitution in one weekend. I spent my father's inheritance of $15,000 on happy ending massages in San Francisco, CA. Every beautiful woman I saw became an object upon which I fixated, in order...

Today is twelve days of porn sobriety. My body is lethargic, slow, medium depressed emotionally and also sensitive, which are manifestations of withdrawal from the dopamine hits of ejaculations. I go to the Zoom Morning Brew SPAA (Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous) meetings daily, and listen to men and women share their stories in a language I understand. Note taking helps to reinforce particularly on target nuggets of wisdom.  The ten-and twenty year lengths of sobriety from acting out that more than a few people in the Morning Brew meetings, that these people have accumulated, renders considerable hope to me that I myself can arrest this compulsion. It is in the end more about quitting self-centered focus. I am totally and absolutely self-absorbed when I am acting out. I do not care about anyone or anything other than getting that relief that solves the momentary issue. And the sexual release of one pornography ejaculation leads automatically to the next, and for me, the reason is t...

Three days now I have both participated in and attended SPAA meetings. Got a question for you, reader? Did you believe I would write every other Friday, like I said I would? I did. I broke my own word to myself, and so what that I did? Actons count, not words. Not to say that words should not count, but my experience is the ideal of having concord between words and deeds is an ideal often mis-stepped. The SPAA meetings are  pumping hope into my soul, I say. Guys have one year, three years, five and ten years of porn sobriety through the working of the 12 Steps of AA, modified to fit the porn addict condition. I am just going to keep on talking about what comes to mind, brothers and sisters. Just as a farmer cannot grow corn without getting dirt soiled hands, perhaps none of us, especially those of us with devastingly destructive addictions, can bear the burdens of existence without some or other manner of addiction or compulsion. However, my porn addiction, I am beginning to believ...

No second guessing here. I'm at the third stage of the porn addiction cycle. Last time I relapsed? Forty nine days ago. I spiked on four days of dopamine rush to the max.  Feeling despair after each hit, I repeated the acting out, to relieve the very despair I had created. That was Stage One, and then next, Stage Two. Remorse, regret and lethargy. Lack of drive. Hopelessness. The big question resounds inside:  "How could I do what I want most of all not to do?!" Slowly, hope revives and with it return to exercise, meditation, prayer, evaluative thinking practice and the reading of uplifting books. Those ingredients that coagulate and synthesis the re-wiring of the brain biology. However, dear reader, the lizard exists inside and it is reptilian. I can't reason with it, but I can outsmart it. Still, the beast is wanting to continue the cycle, and I am now at the Third Stage of that cycle.  I find that sex connect passion in the eyes of beautiful women. I'm watching...

  The mentor asserts that only uncommon men end their porn addictions. I believe the assertion. God knows. The depth, the weight, the integration of the addiction into my biology, decade after decade so much so that one could truthfully say that I lived to porn and masturbate. God knows how many porn quitting programs I have tried unsuccessfully. God understands why, at times, the feeling of despairing sentiment that this enslavement to the addiction is permanently glued onto my soul. Yet, if others have escaped…if others are escaping…if others with dependencies no less grave than   mine are shaking themselves free, I can! I not only can, I am. The acting out that three years ago was normally two times a day is these days normally two times every three months. The red scars and painful disfigurements on the organ have almost all been healed. I would not and still cannot have achieved these landmarks of hope giving accomplishment without the ongoing support and brot...

  Been finding that the System holds water. Been finding the brothers are dead serious about navigating the currents, the ebb and flow of the river that leads to regenerated life. That I too can fly like an eagle, that the pain of the wound feeling unendurable I can endure. I did not go mad when the manic upheaval was prompting to that escape. I gripped the marble of the lars god and held tight for the dear and sweet savor of life. I am a porn addict. My addiction thrives in the dark, and I am done with it. In the writing of these posts, I cast the light that exposes what needs and wants the secrecy. Without the secrecy, the addiction cannot do what it lives to do. Dear reader, please, read no further if your sensibilities might feel offended by the explicitness that adherence to honesty requires. I will slip. I will relapse and I will report in these posts when I have slipped and when I have relapsed. I will analyze to the best ability what contributed, where I was takin...

  Venture with me, dear reader…on a journey into the unknown.   I am petrified. My fear shudders. I consoled myself this afternoon with a love letter to myself. And did what I have never done. I forgave myself for the wreckage I smashed upon my life.   Have you ever believed you are a slave? I have. I am enslaved, truth be told. At least, from a certain perspective, I am. From the perspective of the accuser, I am. From the perspective of the liar who seeks my death, I am exactly that.   A slave. I advance to this liar plenty of evidence to support the untruth that I am a slave. Who enslaved me? I did. I enslaved myself to survive, first off by eating sweet foods compulsively.   I still am a compulsive overeater. I have been since I was five years old, and now, at 71 years, I still falter and slip and eat to escape feeling. Feelings, my friend. Those feeling I most need to feel to know how best to care for myself. This journey into the unknown of myself, ...