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 this: Not only am I an addict, I hate myself for being enslaved to the condition. I do it again for a minute or two of "vacation" from the self-hatred, the despair and the despondency.
My main focus now, readers, is to attend 90 SPAA meetings in 90 days.
While driving towards this end, I incorporate this incomplete list of tools into my life style.
Prayer in faith---to a Higher Power to remove urges to edge. (Edging is doing and thinking motivated by desire to experience sexual arousal) Today on the street in Cuenca, Ecuador, I could not help but notice a beautiful young woman who was driving a motor scooter, stopped at a red light.
I immediately averted my eyes after that first look, and prayed to God to aid the person in the way that she most currently needed help.
Calling or texting a fellow porn addict in recovery---this tool grates against the guy in me that shudders to admit he needs help.
Imaginations---instead of an edge fantasy, an imagining of an eagle flying above a forest, a sunrise upon a beach or the movement of tree branches in a mild wind.
Getting distracted---cook up a meal, play darts or watch an edifying movie.
The recurrent theme in the SPAA meeting is that edging eventually leads to acting out.
Readers, to bring this post to its conclusion, I exclaim that my whole world is being turned upside down.
Almost all I desired for five decades of living this life on earth was to seek and to find womanly beauty and to suck on it like an infant sucking mom's nipple to the very last drop of its milk. I lived for that lingering, longing stare of erotic suspension. Every mini-skirt, all hot pants, never mind if in a movie, a video or in a corner street bar were candy to my sugar addiction. My own power is insufficient to stop the staring, the looking and the wanting.
Other men I've worked with to solve this addiction have achieved one and two years of sex addict sobriety, so I realize that working the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as adapted for porn addiction is not the sole and only way to recover.
That being said, there is that slang saying which rings true. "There is more than one way to skin a cat!"
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