Just Cannot Live Without It

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 to experience the rush of a rise of sex desire. I started at age thirteen and continued unabated, until about three years ago, when I discovered that my habituation to sex and pornography was my complete and total master, and I, its slave. But then, when I interrupted the practice, I could look men in the eye without over extending the look, and I could also quit smoking nicotine cigarettes. A fog in the mind of my thinking lifted. The cessation of the practice benefited, but the truth is that if I did it once, I would do it again. 

As of this writing, I have twenty-six days of SPAA sobriety, and my goal is to, at a minimum, to go to 90 Zoom SPAA meetings in 90 days.

The reasons why I am a pornography addict are not what matters. What matters is that I am, and that I accept that I am (a sex addict) and that I do not have the personal resources to overcome the condition. 

This is where the spiritual solution suggested in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous enters the picture.That solution is to turn my will and my life over to a Higher Power who does have the power I lack. For my food addiction and my drug and alcohol addictions, doing just this resulted in freedom from these scourges. I lost weight, and kept it off. I stopped drinking alcohol five years ago, and have not had a drop since, regardless of inner conflict or outside tension. So, I have resolution backed by prior experience. If I work the 12 Steps of AA,  in regard to sex and porn addiction, I can be freed of this most terribly self-destructive addiction as well.