Me Speaking: The Rotten Fruit of Mindless Scrolling

Me Speaking: The Rotten Fruit of Mindless Scrolling: The Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous (SPAA) definition of acting out is: viewing pornography, masturbating, and having sex outside of a comm...

The Rotten Fruit of Mindless Scrolling

The Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous (SPAA) definition of acting out is: viewing pornography, masturbating, and having sex outside of a committed relationship. 

The major culprit that entices to acting out? Edging! (SPAA's Edging Definition) 

What's related to edging? Mindless scrolling. (I just got done doing an hour of it.) It's family to edging. It's why I've started counting my scroll free days. (0 days now) News stories, movie scenes, Ted talks etc....you, glad to have reader, if you're like me, know what happens when you go online and start scrolling without purpose. I go on and on and on in a type of rapture. Time vanishes. The mini-skirted girls appear walking in Manchester and I oh "so accidently" start watching the Bangkok street girls parading at night, at times for hours. My brain and body get injected with the dopamine that never supplies me with enough. All the while, being online itself pumps dopamine into my system. That's why I detoxify. I follow the following personal rule fairly well because doing so relaxes me. All cellphones and computers! Shut off after 9:15 pm daily!

It has been said that the medium is the message. The being online message says "feel good now, you need to be online now as now is all you've got." Like all stealthy lies, that's  partly true as now IS all we've got.

These unhealthy dopamine levels start begging me to watch porn and masturbate until either I do or don't. (I did four months ago, before that, nine months ago.)

When I started in SPAA a little over three years ago, if I did look at  porn, I reasoned, since I broke my abstinence definition anyway, I might as well go on and masturbate until ejaculation. When I did do that (because of lonliness, stress, boredom etc) the depression and despair afterwards were almost always so severe --- only another round of acting out would  momentarily relieve me of the depression and despair itself. Talk about a vicious circle!

So, in my book, the scrolling has got to stop as  much as does the edging.

Daily attendance at SPAA's meetings also are a virtually irrevocable personal rule. I am willing, although often not wanting, to go ---  to any length to keep myself unchained from the slavery of my addiction to sex and pornography.

 

It's More about the Shame

It's 3 a.m. at the railroad tracks in Palo Alto, California. I'm a security guard responsible for insuring no one stands on the tracks to commit suicide. (the wave of suicides of Dunn High School students)

An African American homeless woman walks on the sidewalk where I sit, and we start to talk. Suddenly, she said "You are so full of shame." Never have forgotten that night. How could she tell? How could she know what even I didn't know? How could my denied sense of shame be so blatant that she could feel it herself? 

As I write, like a flood, personal memories encompass me of shameful acts which thanks be to God did not then nor do they now define who I am. Thanks be to God for the SPAA (Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous) member who reminded me of that during one of our ZOOM meetings. What I am is ...  a child of God. 

For me, shame is mostly about sexual shame. That pernicious influence upon me, like ink spilled onto white paper, is that sex is sinful, even my parents' married sex which inaugurated my life meant that I'm an incarnation of sin and shame.

I have felt and at times still do feel shame at the incontrovertible fact that I do not have the will power to keep myself from looking at pornography and masturbating. Shame because I am powerless to keep myself from objectifying women as sexual gadgets. Shame because my proclivity is to seek comfort by sexual fantasizing. 

But my shame materializes into various other forms. Shame at being single for a decade. Shame at permitting fear to direct my behavior. Examples include shying away from sharing my faith, failures to finish a task once started,  ignoring the voice of my conscience, and acting at the behest of my emotions. 

What is the primary solvent to the pigmentation of my shame? 

Experience teaches me that the most effective healing ingredient subsides in sharing the shame with others, aka, other SPAA members. They understand. They have felt the same. And the sharing itself dissipates the secrecy in which the shame festers. 

More solutions.

The intensive cultivation of my relationship with my Higher Power, Jesus Christ. Why? Because prayer (Step 11) engages me in the changes God is bringing about inside me; those changes nourish my character towards factors that dispel shame. Self respect. Caring love of myself. Courage to defend my boundaries. Acts of compassion kindled out of reflective consideration as to how to best employ. 12 Step work, consistent and thorough. 

SPAA has an approved document on shame which is read from time to time at meetings. Shame at times becomes the topic upon which to share. It is said among us SPAA members that shame is as problematic for us as is resentment for members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Why so vital for us, for me to apply its treatments. 

Two Promises Proved to be True

The Promises, as referred to in the AA book, in my experience, have never been broken promises. 

However, patience, while working the Twelve Steps, was essential to obtain the promises. They didn't  come true overnight. But after more than a year in the AA program, some promises did come true in the form of a pink cloud---a splendid beauty of a recognition of God's love accessed through the step work itself. 

What a price I paid in struggle to be entirely honest about my character defects---my false ego fighting to maintain its sway. Simple but not easy? An apt AA saying aptly put.

That first pink cloud passed, as all clouds do, yet it put an indelible impression upon me. Where there was despair hope had blossomed forth in a tulip called a Faith that Works---a believing that stilled the agitations of doubt. Misgivings disappeared to be supplanted by confidence in my Higher Power, Jesus Christ.

                                                                

I will write now about two ways in which the Promises have come true for me. 

First, my self-conscious fear to speak in meetings has entirely dissipated. I extemporaneously share openly and honestly in meetings with twenty people participating. I speak from my heart while pondering the most apt words to express myself. Before, I cringed at the very thought of sharing. My blood raced and my heart pumped so much so that I shared  only at meetings sparsely attended. I feared bored or objecting looks on faces. "Fear of people will disappear" is one promise The Promises guarantee. Now, after about thirty years in recovery, that promise has come true for me.

The second promise that came true branches off "fear of people will disappear."

Before, I would slip unwittingly into "catching the eyes" of men. I feared in a homophobic way. Gay men would hit on me and I had no consciousness of why. I plagued myself with doubts about my sexual orientation. 

Now those symptoms have almost all completely disappeared. I no longer fear doing nor do I "catch the eyes of men." Although in the past homophobic, now good friends of mine live out of the proverbial closet and some  in married relationships with their partners.

Although in the past I have had same sex encounters, I now realize I am predominately heterosexual. I didn't get any "conversion" therapy that brought about this change. The change took place from working the 12 Steps of the Big Book of Alcoholocs Anonymous, particularly inside the SPAA program.

Thus, that is the second of one of many, many other promises that have come true for me.