Me Speaking

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 de...

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 p...

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 felt this Step was gonna be a hop skip and a jump Step, a little Step, a relatively unimportant Step in the greater scheme of recovery. Feeling wise.  I've found each Step of the Twelve Steps fitted neatly one atop the prior in the right place at the right time for me the addict person working those Steps in order to recover---each served as preparation for the next.  Step Six: "Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character." I will write about the way taking Step Six best ought to be taken and the way I did it in actuality.  The former fist: Entirely , that's the main word, the hinge word. All the way ready, completely ready, no holds barred ready and ready in the entirety of readiness.  Conceptualize getting ready for a formal dinner; You're the man getting ready to go on a dinner date during which you plan to ask her the woman you love to marry you. You shave the entirety of the scrub off your face, you trim your nails, you shower for...

The font of this post emerges from my readings of the book "Constantine's Sword, The Church and the Jews, A History." by James Carroll.  As such, Christians and Jews, I judge them as I do myself, who being both Christian by selection and Jew by blood, claim entitlement to do so. To a higher standard towards those Chosen, as opposed to the lesser standard I use to judge the heathen. These pagans sin unwittingly as by their un-born again nature they miss the mark by the spiritually blind and deaf being of nature itself.  But as the religious Jew lives and breathes by adherence to the Law, and lives by its Talmudic interpretations, yet confused, yet transgressing that same, to him, to myself, I judge condemned to helpless need of a Messiah. As the Christian Churches claims salvation through this same Messiah, yet still occurred millennia of pograms up until occurred the Nazi Holocaust besmirches the gospel books themselves. The Jews killed Jesus, are Gentiles not inculcated...

Written in my emergency write out journal some four hours ago. I accept I am single and I accept that my single status is only going to change by a miracle. Even though I do believe in miracles, as my recovering from my assortment of addictions so attests, miracles are extremely rare. I am 99 and 9/10 percent likely to remain single for the remainder of my life. I accept these odds as part of the way life is for me and thus decide not to give a hoot about it. As I am a believer in Christ Jesus, I will carry this most heavy cross as did He carry His.   I also know I will choose to continue to torment myself about sex, love and marriage, etc, and my single status. I know I will never have peace about it as well. I accept this self tortured me that I am as well.  As a result, I now choose to cease any and all further searching to find a woman with whom to have a committed romantic relationship.  Postscript: After having written the above, the accepting , I find a pea...

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...