Honesty. Not one lie, today, a day at a time, not even to myself. Work the 12 Steps of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Reader reading this post, a fellow SPAA member, chairing at a recent SPAA meeting, asked me to explain how I managed to gain six months of sobriety. SPAA sobriety defined as "No viewing of pornography, no sex outside of a committed relationship, and no masturbation."
Love did it was the gist of my answer, and to me, my Higher Power is Love. My sex and pornography addictions are biologically and neurologically integrated into my mind and body, and they are not calculable. But I'll do the math anyway. They are a thousand billion trillion times more powerful than the power of my will.
HOWEVER, my Higher Power broke the bond of death, which, admittedly, is an absolutely absurd proposition to make. Logic can't make sense of it. Logic can't make sense of how agnostics and atheists merit the reception of one, two, three, four and more years of SPAA defined sobriety. No matter. We sex and porn addicts in recovery and united in the working of the 12 Steps and united in frequent participation in SPAA meetings work miracles in ourselves through ourselves. I like the expression, God in skin.
My sick porn mind. I know the woman walking towards me is not a female acquaintance, but she looks very similar. So, I pretend to myself that I'm only just making sure she's not this acquaintance while I look to surreptitiously gawk at her. That's defined as edging. What is edging? A couple examples selected from the SPAA edging document. "Looking in public spaces for people we find attractive, then fantasizing about them, staring at their body parts, or following them around. We've done this on foot and from our cars."..."Fantasizing---often by replaying our past sexual escapades or pornographic images we've seen (sometimes while having sex with our committed partner)"
I go to Mass. Three young women seated across the aisle attract me. I struggle to not look at them, to not want to look at them. I'm not paying attention to the liturgy while I engage in this struggle. But I do not edge. It's worth the price of not having paid attention.
I go to SPAA meetings and don't hardly ever talk. I mostly listen. Time after time I hear stories by people being bare bones honest about their dishonesties and denial syndromes. I realize SPAA is where I belong.
How can I ever hope to be a faithful partner in a committed relationship if women are little more than sex objects to me? Women have to become people to me, more and more, just plain individual people. I'm staying single on purpose, until this transformation becomes more embedded in me.
My goal towards the achievement of this transformation? An additional six months of SPAA sobriety. I CAN stay sober for a day! If I can stay sober for a day, I can stay sober for another 182 days. My strategy. Cultivate my personal relationship with Christ. Water it. Till it. I best do this by continuous study and working of the 12 Steps. Continuous participation in SPAA meetings. Continuous outreach calls to fellow SPAA members. Physical exercise. Journaling. Healthy eating. No drugs and no alcohol because I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. No compulsive eating because I am addicted to certain foods. And loving MYSELF! Am I not to when my Higher Power does??
