Me Speaking

My last SPAA recovery themed post wrote about taking AA Big Book Steps One, Two, Three and Four. This post delves into experience taking the supremely confessional and purgative Step Five. ( SPAA stands for Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous)  I consider it a sacred step; its process breathes with lungs of prayer and connection with God and man. After Step Five, I had no more hidden secrets, none in my awareness, and this released an enormous burden of weight I didn't realize I had been shouldering until after having taken the step.  Step Four's fact-finding mission of self-discovery revealed the faults of my character which I had hidden from myself. I had been too often reacting to faults in others, faults inside me which I had projected onto them--- an escape hatch out of avoiding responsibility for fixing my own self. Step Four opened the curtain. It allowed sunlight to shine upon what darkness had previously hidden.  When I took Step Five, I admitted to this newly disco...

  Gracias Emily por tu obra al este blog. Emily es una immigrante desde Venezuela ahora viviendo en Ecuador. Pero el viaje de ella a Ecuador no solo era una transicion a un pais extranjero. Era una transicion del alma de ella, del espiritu de ella y el corazon de ella. Nadie te dice por cuánto tiempo será, y nadie te dice que será tan difícil exponerte a un nuevo mundo, dónde eres vulnerable para todo. Caminas confundido entre la gente esperando que alguien te diga que todo va a estar bien.  Es una sensación de adrenalina, de ver lo desconocido para ti. Miles de preguntas pasan por tu cabeza y sin encontrar alguna respuesta, solo eres tú y tu maleta, que por cierto se vuelve tan pesada por todas esas espectativas, sueños, ideales que terminan convirtiéndose en miedo.  Pero la vida es así te presenta momentos donde debes tomar decisiones, las personas te dicen "debes arriesgar si no nunca sabrás si lo puedes lograr o no", pero en el fondo saben que será difícil. Pero...

  Been going to the SPAA meetings less, now only on Mondays and Thursdays. I pushed myself away from attending daily meetings in order to distance myself from listening to litanies of depressing shares I often encounter in the meetings. But the two days of meetings capture my interest and convince   me to share more often and more willingly. Despite the above sentiment, I find a tiny glimmer of light in the pitch-black cavern of despair about addiction to pornography, because that glimmer is what SPAA offers to its members. Hope. As of this publication date, I have 200 days of back-to-back SPAA defined sobriety, a gift of this hope; That definition is no viewing of pornography, no masturbation and no sex outside of a committed relationship. Here is a Doctor's opinion about the SPAA program of recovery. I offer two major highlights to stress what I find prospers my recovery from my sex and porn addiction. One is to work the 12 Steps, this post about Steps One through ...

Women. Young and beautiful. I deep inside my gut sense the hurt I would feel if a woman in a relationship with me were to eye flirt at another man.  I myself feel entitled to eye flirt, and that's one form of what SPAA terms "edging." It's a precursor to acting out. My main goal in life is to stop acting out, and today, I have 156 days of back to back SPAA sobriety. I am helpless, without the power needed to stop edging and acting out. However, I find and utilize the Higher Power of the SPAA fellowship, plus my personal "concept" of a Higher Power, which is Christ Jesus. I do sometimes in my bones share that gratitude expressed by members who voice a sense of peace and tranquility, despite their having two days of SPAA sobriety. I lived through decades of life completely incapable of stopping myself from masturbating for even two days in a row. Two days of SPAA sobriety IS a big deal.  Here are three reasons  I value my membership in SPAA. Through SPAA mem...

I am an addict in various programs of recovery. But the most problematic, the most egregious cast me by the fortunes of Divine Providence into the fellowship of SPAA , Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous. Inside the bottomless pit of that abyss of hopeless enslavement to edging , when I admitted to myself my utter powerlessness over mastery of this disease...I took Step One. The first of the twelve steps of the ladder I climbed to freedom out of the abyss. Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson co-founded the movement that constructed the manual of suggested instructions on how to work these twelve steps. Simple, but not easy, but for those of us who had no choice but to live or die, die literally and figuratively, who chose life---the 12 step work incarcerated these addictions in a maximum security prison, an Alcatraz so to speak. The continual working of the steps provided to me the security of that prison by a spiritual growth vibration of frequencies of alert living in the moment. The bad vibes rea...

  Last night, today, an awful damaged rotator cuff pain, and yes, as a seventy-three-year-old 12 Step recovering alcoholic, drug addict, food addict and sex and porn addict, I do my best to keep a clear head. But the level seven on the one to ten pain scale demanded relief measures. So, I swallowed the pain killer pills; got skyrocketed into a drug like high. And it drove me to a place of reflection about my body. Deprived of level headedness, I laid in bed, and my body embarked on its craving for a happy ending massage. Radical honesty. It’s emphasized repeatedly in the AA Big Book as an absolute prerequisite in order to recover from addiction. What’s my radical honesty now? I don’t care how much numbing myself with pain killers endangers my SPAA defined sobriety status --- no looking at pornography, no masturbation, and no sex outside of a committed relationship. However, I lock and jail these addictions, a day at a time, and the counter statistics echo the handiwork of a Mirac...

As of this writing, I have 60 days of back-to-back SPAA defined sobriety. The relapse excuses? There are no excuses. I went to my pre-programmed always-works-never-lets-me-down escape valve. I watched porn and masturbated. But indulge the writer as he writes about circumstances, compares, and offers estimations of progress despite the book cover of defeat.  For about four months, I had had absolutely no access to my monthly pension money. I had been unsuccessfully, desperately seeking resolutions while my supply of savings dwindled to a one month capacity to meet minimum financial obligations. I felt like I was in a bed of quicksand in a night so black not a glimmer of light could be seen. At that point in time, I lost about seven and a half months of back-to-back sobriety. But I did not lose the progress of that change in mentality, what’s called the psychic change sufficient to bring about a radical change in attitude and outlook upon life. When I first started the porn free liv...

  Examine, question motivations for doings? Making progress, but often I summarily barge into action.  What's this have to do with my sex and porn addiction? Man, it ALL has to do with it! My addictions drive me to counter by almost literally praying without ceasing, to tap into the Power I don't have to NOT indulge in edging. Integration smacks of the appropriate word. To weave, to absorb opposite/same sex physical sensations---yet to synthesize, to amalmagate.   To abandon flights of escape from feelings. (although recently I retreated to sleep to escape a self inflicted maelstrom of turbulent emotion) Living life on its own terms means accepting that the enticing young woman seated in the restaurant next to me is a person with a soul of incalculable worth to God. And that for the sake of my sexual sobriety, it behooves me to give thanks to God for her creation, to pray to God He bless and keep her. The guys and gals with a day's SPAA sobriety teach to me perhaps ...

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 SP...

The recovery ride has been, especially of late, an emotional roller coaster.  Mired in a seemingly everlasting tar pit of depression, then---two hours later, not a cloud in the sky! That's porn addiction withdrawal symptoms, par for the course.  Today I celebrate, rejoice in having accumulated more consecutive days of SPAA (Sex and Porn Addicts Anonymous) sobriety ---  than ever before, 142 days. The definition of SPAA sobriety: "No sex with one's self, no sex outside of a committed relationship and no viewing of pornograpy."    Some context. I'm 73 years old. Since puberty, at age 13, my now most ingrained addiction began to develop --- to have orgasms. Nothing could stop me. Not conversion to Christianity. Not getting married. Not getting publicly embarrassed. No matter the shame or the cost. The $20,000 I charged to American Express for a weekend with prostitutes at Mustang Ranch in Nevada.  I lived for the unreality of not living genuinely. Women becam...