My first post is going to be my complete first step from my time in one of the S 12-step programs. You can take your pick as to the program… there are several and they are all basically the same, but each draws a slightly different crowd. I have attended meetings in three of them and found the one I liked the best. They include SAA, SA, SLA, SCA, and more. I always look for people sharing openly, honestly, admitting their struggles and not putting on masks to try and “look good,” to others. I also appreciate when people resist the urge to “fix, analyze, and advise” me. This is a very vulnerable topic, and there is a fine line between seeking answers from those more experienced (positive) or being “taught” in a way that increases, rather than decreases, shame. That religiosity does occasionally make its way into some 12-step programs, but I try to take what I like and leave the rest.
This is a long post, but I think there’s no better way to start than to put it all out there. So here goes…
First Step Inventory
My first sexual experience was being molested as early as age 6. When I was 4, my sister who was 1 year old was discovered to have cerebral palsy. All family attention went to her needs, and I missed out on a bunch of parental love and attention at a critical time. As a young child looking for love and attention, I was a perfect target for a molester. I was groomed by a neighbor down the street.
He befriended me and started giving me comic books. They may as well have been chests of gold. I had done nothing to deserve this, and experienced these gifts as unconditional love. One day he offered to show me a “special comic” and took me into his attic. He showed me pornography and had me masturbate him to orgasm, while he masturbated me. I didn’t know what an orgasm was, and was incapable of having one myself. He told me to keep it secret. I kept that secret for over 20 years.
Now I felt even more special. I had an intimate connection with someone, but he apparently felt guilty afterwards because he wouldn’t play with me anymore. He avoided me completely. I felt abandoned, scarred, empty, alone. This left me devastated, and set me up to believe that 1) sex equaled intimacy, and 2), that there was something flawed with me… since I was so thoroughly rejected immediately following a sexual encounter.
I began trying to masturbate nearly every night. I was 6. I didn’t achieve orgasm, but I didn’t know I was supposed to. I became obsessed with sex. I wet the bed well into elementary school (I later found out this is a symptom of child sexual abuse survivors). I felt deep shame and powerlessness over wetting the bed, so I include it in my sexual history. I played a game called “the girl thing” with a male friend where one of us would pretend to be asleep (the “girl”), and the other one would sneak in in order to “rape” the sleeping “girl.” Around this time, kids started discovering pornography. Other kids would look at it and laugh and then move on. I had to have it. I wanted to steal it, hide it, horde it, keep it. I believe that in some way it connected me back to the intimacy I experienced being molested. This began a lifetime of looking for love and acceptance in the pornographic image.
By third grade I was drawing my own comics, and they all had to do with sex. I knew the mechanics of sex and that it was supposed to feel good, but not much else. An extreme example of my obsession and un-manageability was when I tried to do with my disabled sister what my molester had done with me. I was still a child, well under the age my molester was when he molested me, and only slightly older than my sister, but it bothers me to this day. It is hard to write about. I am grateful I didn’t do as much with her as had happened to me. A huge benefit from my 12-step program is that I was able to make an in-person amends to my sister as an adult. I never acted out with anyone else under age, while I was a child or as an adult, and that is something to be immensely grateful for, as I hear stories from others in program about this behavior and the wreckage it has caused.
A friend and I spent an afternoon making a child younger than us expose himself to strangers. We thought it was funny. Today I wonder if that child is a sex addict; if the effect of our game with him was similar to the effect my molestation had on me.
In fourth grade another friend showed me playing cards with naked pictures. He got them in Chinatown. The next trip there with my family, I separated myself from them in a Chinatown store and secretly bought myself a pack of naked playing cards. I later showed them to friends in a “co-counseling” group my mother was a part of, and an adult feminist lesbian leader caught me, took me aside, and shamed me for 30 minutes. This reinforced the idea that sexual desire was shameful and should be kept secret. In fifth grade we spent the year in England. Upon visiting my uncle (who was manic-depressive, bipolar, or schizophrenic, depending on each new doctor), I discovered that he was a sex addict. I guess it runs in the family. He had literally hundreds of porn magazines, far more graphic than any I had seen in America, hidden under his bed. They literally lifted the bed off the floor. I wanted them for myself. I picked out four to slip into my suitcase. They weren’t enough. I picked out ten. Not enough. In the end I took 27 and snuck them back to our condo in my suitcase. There, I tried to hide them all under my mattress. That night I couldn’t sleep (my first night of anxiety-induced insomnia perhaps? And related to sex addiction – interesting) and went into my parent’s room to sleep in their bed. My mother then got up and went to sleep in my bed, and discovered all the magazines. I got in big trouble and felt more shame. Why couldn’t I just have taken one or two? I was powerless.
One consequence of writing this step is that I am able to see that I am not to blame for being a sex addict. Addiction does run in my family, and I am not responsible for my molestation. I am just as powerless over the causes of my addiction as I am over my compulsive behavior. It may not have “sunk in” yet, but I can intellectually begin to stop shaming myself just for being a sex addict; being human.
In sixth grade I had my first girlfriend. On the day I decided I was going to kiss her, she broke up with me, reinforcing the idea I must be undesirable, a failure at human relationships. At this time I was also taking the bus to the comic store by myself. They had a couple boxes in the back that sold “comedy” magazines, that had photo-comic strips with topless women in them, for fifty cents each. The store had no problem selling these magazines to a 12-year old.
I bought them all.
A sex-themed teen comedy had ads on television. I told my Mother I really wanted to see this R-rated movie. I was well under 17, but she took me. I remember feeling incredible excitement and shame as this story unfolded about a topless older woman who seduced a teenager. I had an erection the entire film. Sitting next to my mother, I felt such shame and discomfort, but it seemed worth enduring to see the film.
Around this time I had my first wet dream. I didn’t know that’s what it was until I later discovered pornography in my mother’s bedside drawer. One day I decided I was going to masturbate while looking at the magazines, and I had an orgasm. I connected that feeling with the feeling I had in the dream, and that’s how I knew it had been a wet dream.
I began masturbating every chance I could. The first thing I would do when my parents left the house was sneak into their room and masturbate to their magazines. I always tried to cover my tracks and remember the order of the magazines in the drawer so I could put them back correctly. I also discovered books of erotica and collections of sexual fantasies that my mother owned. I would read these and masturbate. I found their copy of a popular 70’s sex-advice encyclopedia and would look at the hand-drawn pictures and masturbate. When they were home I would lock my door and masturbate, or masturbate at night before sleeping. In Junior High I began having masturbatory fantasies about several girls at school. If a particular girl lost appeal, I would find another. My friend got a girlfriend and began making out with her in the halls. I would get aroused watching them. I felt unattractive and insecure. I had a secret life that I could not expose to the opposite sex. If they knew how I desired them, they would surely reject me. This was the lesson of my molestation.
A girl wanted me to be her boyfriend. I said yes. Apparently a second girl wanted me to as well, because on the day I said yes to the other girl, the second girl walked home with me and said that if I didn’t kiss her she would tell everyone at school we kissed anyway. So I kissed her. She told everyone, and the next day the girl who wanted me to be her boyfriend broke up with me. I was mad at the girl that manipulated me to kiss her and didn’t speak to her ever again. Once more, sexuality was shameful and I felt like a social reject. That was my first kiss. It occurs to me today that the second girl may have been set up to try and kiss me to “test” my loyalty to the first girl… a very junior high thing to do… but this situation scarred me for years.
I acted out with an animal… A dog that belonged to a family I babysat for. After the child was in bed, I let the dog lick my genitals. I got scared at how excited the dog was becoming and stopped, feeling great shame. The next time I went to babysit at their house, the dog responded to me like I was a female in heat, getting its own erection, whining, and clamoring for me. The parents had to hold it back and were apologizing profusely for their dog’s behavior. The truth was I had sexually abused that animal. I felt great shame and stopped babysitting. I would frequently snoop in the houses I babysat at. If I found pornography, I masturbated to it. I would sometimes try on woman’s panties, but it wasn’t as big a thrill as I expected. I frequently masturbated in other people’s houses, in front of their tv’s or in their bathrooms.
In High School I continued to masturbate daily. Usually to the pornography in the house, but occasionally to elaborate fantasies I would construct about girls at school. I would fantasize about some of the young female teachers while I was in their classes, becoming aroused at my desk. Early in High School I began to develop headaches immediately following orgasm. I was masturbating more than I had stamina for, and continually reaching for orgasm caused intense headaches. I thought I was having aneurysms, that I was going to die. Was this a sign that I should masturbate less? It didn’t matter… I kept at it, told no one, and thought the short spasm worth the pain that would last up to hours afterwards. I could not stop in spite of great physical pain. This pattern of powerlessness would repeat itself.
One day my mother came home and I was masturbating on the couch in front of the TV, to a sitcom, and didn’t have time to close my pants as she opened the front door, so I sat hunched over my knees, leaning all the way over, as if I had suddenly become a yoga devotee, having a conversation until she went in the other room. All of a sudden she seemed to have a litany of items to address with me. It was interminable. She asked me why I was sitting so strangely. I tried to play it off like it wasn’t strange at all.
I was already a victim of shame and profound demoralization. While my friends started having girlfriends, I saw myself as a wretched creature. Perhaps because of my molestation, and what I had done to my sister, I was certain that even saying “hello” to a girl I liked was reason enough for her to scream “rape,” that I was to be feared because I desired these girls. Consequently, a profound split started in my sexuality. I found I could not have sexual fantasies about those girls I had romantic crushes on. Romance and sex did not go together in my head. I could only fantasize about “bad” girls, girls I judged as unworthy of affection.
As lead singer in a band during High School, I felt profound unworthiness and unattractiveness. The drummer and the sax player were hopping from girl to girl, while I was trapped in insecurity, fear and shame. I wanted to be a “man,” like they were, never mind if they were hurting lots of people. I finally got a girlfriend because she pursued me, Sophomore year of High School. We fooled around, but I was too scared to take it further. Later I found out from her ex-boyfriend that preceeded me that they had had sex. We went out for about six months and never did. I took this as more evidence of my unworthiness. As a victim of sexual abuse, I expected her to take the lead. When she didn’t, I interpreted that as my own undesireability. I now see that I had/have a victim mentality as a result of my abuse that leads me to feel profoundly uncomfortable in positions of leadership, and especially when it comes to being sexual, whether with my wife or any prior partners.
I broke that relationship off when I started playing the lead in the Spring musical opposite a girl I had a distant, crush-from-afar infatuation with since I first saw her in middle school. I would be lying if I said the attraction wasn’t sexual — it was, but I fell for this girl in a big way. We had to kiss in the play, and had our first kiss in rehearsal. Opening night we confessed our love for each other and began a relationship. We went to prom together and shared a hotel room with another couple (friends). After a long time of making out she asked me if I wanted to be on top or bottom. She wasn’t a virgin, but she knew I was. When I was 10 or so my father sat me down and talked to me about sex, and he told me that sex felt great, but it was only beautiful with someone you loved. I felt in love with this girl, and wanted to lose my virginity to her, but not in a cheap hotel room with my friends in the next bed. I wasn’t ready. Again I felt like a sexual failure.
I got her flowers and a card for understanding my reticence. I was worried she would break up with me because I didn’t have sex with her on prom night. She didn’t. Two weeks later, at the end of a date, we were kissing goodnight and it was time. I lost my virginity in the back seat of a car. Cliche.
My parents were splitting up around this time. They had announced to my Grandmother, Sister and I that they were considering a “trial separation” when I was 15. Now I was 16 and it was happening. I cried when they first told us and didn’t cry about it again for over 20 years. Instead of feeling the tremendous grief this caused, I had begun truly medicating with sex. I had lost my virginity, and my girlfriend and I did it all the time. Her mother let me stay at their house, and I spent more time there than at my own house while my family fell apart. I had always been the “good kid,” an adult before his time, able to “take care of myself.” Really, I was a hurt child that had learned to medicate.
My girlfriend was an alcoholic. I was the codependent. We would fight over how much she drank. When she drank she would also make out and even sleep with other guys, which happened at least twice during our six-month relationship. She told me about one time. The other I found out about by reading her diary. It was the codependent-addict dance. She had betrayed our relationship, and I had betrayed her trust by reading her diary. Somehow my crime seemed worse than hers. She eventually broke up with me because she “needed her freedom.” I was trying to recreate my family and my abuser all in one relationship. I have continued this pattern throughout my life.
I cried more about the loss of that relationship than my parents’ separation. It was a substitute. I continued masturbating constantly. One day the college girl hired to look after my sister and rent a room in my father’s house walked past my window with my sister while I was masturbating. I felt deep shame and left the house. I was so powerless over my need to masturbate that I could not wait until the house was empty. I couldn’t fantasize about my ex, it hurt too much. I fantasized about her friends. I used the porn and erotica in the house, but that was getting old. I masturbated in public — in the school library. I masturbated on a public school bus, in the back row. I was looking for anything to make it more thrilling. I wonder how thrilling it would have been to be arrested. Unlike some in my fellowship, I never was. One night, hanging out with a friend, smoking pot, and walking around town, we came across a couple doing it outside. I wanted to stay and watch. He laughed so loud they heard us and then he ran away, so I had to run too.
After 6-8 months of mourning and masturbation, I picked another girlfriend. I say picked because I liked her but I didn’t have that romantic crush that I had for my first real one. We started having sex pretty quickly and she was a lot wilder than I was. She was very reserved in life but not in private. I was intimidated. Due to my molestation, or for some other reason I don’t fully know, I liked, and still do, “gentle” sex. Multiple sex partners have complained that I wasn’t “aggressive” or strong enough. I never gave my first two partners orgasms, despite voraciously devouring any literature I could on the subject. I felt incredibly lacking in the manliness department. I was referred to as the “Sensitive New Age Guy” at High School — I hated that moniker. It seemed like all the guys who were assholes got all the girls. I wanted to be like them, but felt trapped in my identity. Learning to accept and love myself is a goal for my program.
That girl and I were together through half of senior year and the summer, then I went away to college. I was incredibly depressed. I was away from my separated family, away from her, my band had broken up (we’d been together since middle school and, frankly, had gotten really good). I was sharing a room with a roommate I didn’t know, in a condo with 5 other guys, and it was difficult to masturbate. I had a nervous breakdown and went home within four weeks.
I lived at my father’s house and got a job at a video store. This store had pornographic videos, which I had still never seen. One time during high school a friend had showed me their satellite TV. There was porn on it, and I couldn’t understand why no one else in the group of guys wanted to keep watching it, only me. I felt “dirty.” My girlfriend was still in HS but didn’t want to be “tied down” to me. We would still date and have sex, but only in MY mind were we exclusive. I didn’t have the self-worth to see the situation. One day I drove to the house of two friends to meet up with her after work. I walked in and the female friend was sitting on the sofa. I asked where the other two were, my “girlfriend” and the guy. They were making out in his bedroom. We ran into each other as they ran out of his room. These were the same friends that had thrown me a surprise 18th birthday party. Suffice to say, I was devastated. Very soon after this I took home my first pornographic video from the store. After my father went to bed I snuck into the TV room and put it on. I never knew exactly what they showed in those videos. I was shocked and even disgusted that they showed, well, everything. I was also incredibly aroused. Up until this time my sex life had consisted of partner sex, fantasies, erotica, and magazines. Now, It was as if I had found pure heroin. How tame that video would seem compared to everything I saw in later years, and yet, it had more than the desired affect. This was a full-body high. It was better than anything I’d tried up until then. It took away my pain. It numbed me out. It helped me avoid the abyss of pain within… Feeling unmanly, unworthy unloved, unable to hold my relationships or my family together. The unrealistic, unreasonable expectations I had of this inexperienced young man vanished in videotapes. I was hooked.
I wouldn’t have another girlfriend for three years.
This time of my life was marked by depression and addiction. For as long as I worked at that video store, I would sneak home videos without checking them out, isolating and keeping secret. I ended that job because I thought it would help me stop watching porn. It didn’t. I got a membership at the only porn shop in town and I would rent four to six videos at a time and copy them all onto my own tapes when my father, who I was living with, was out of town. I would binge, tell myself I would stop for two weeks, stop two days, and binge again. I began experiencing infections and cuts and even blisters on my penis during occasions when I would “overdo” it. But that didn’t make me want to stop.
I found porn online before “online” was even a common term. ASCII porn. Erotica. I got an email address at college in 1989. Something called the “World Wide Web” was still in development, but I was already logging in to BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) on my 4800 baud modem at home. I found pornographic images on these Bulletin Boards, and erotic stories on the pre-web internet. It would take over 5 minutes to load one picture, but I was hooked. The anticipation only fueled the fever. All through High School and college I would occasionally drink, smoke pot, and even take hallucinogenic drugs, but I never got hooked on any of these activities. But I began smoking pot alone, by myself, in order to have a better sexual high during masturbation. Trying to escape anything?
For the next 20 years my addiction looked like this: acting out for an average of two hours a day, until I would get a girlfriend. I would experience an inability to orgasm with my partners for the first few attempts at sex. I took this as being a failure as a man. The truth is I was becoming more and more dependent on the hyper-aroused state induced by hours of pornography viewing.
When I lived in the Bay Area immediately after college, I would deliberately walk through the Tenderloin district in order to see the prostitutes. Thank God I never had the courage (or the funds) to solicit them. Isolated masturbation was my drug. At least three times during college I turned down three different female sex addicts who came on strong to me and wanted sex with me at various parties. Something about being a sexual abuse survivor made me turn down this kind of come-on… My fear of intimacy and perhaps the lesson of my father kept my sexual activity confined to masturbation or monogamous relationships… Though my partners consistently cheated on me. In college my third sex partner left me for a woman. Twice. I buried my resentment and turned around and fell in love with someone else. I waited to get together with this other woman until we were officially broken up… I should have had the guts to end the first relationship, but I didn’t. Then the second woman left me for someone else that she had cheated on me with.
Every time I was cheated on, my victim mentality increased and I medicated my pain, resentment and depression with deeper dives into pornography addiction. I lived in Chicago for two years after college. I would watch porn tapes I had brought from home on the community TV after my roommates were in bed. I think my roommates found out, because they dissolved our living situation after 6 months with no explanation. I couldn’t just do it when they were away from home… I had to do it. I was medicating the break-up of a girlfriend number 5, whom I thought I was going to marry… and who cheated on me. All five of my first five girlfriends cheated on me. What helped? Porn. Or so I thought. When I moved into my studio apartment in Chicago I discovered I had free cable channels, including those that showed soft-core movies after 11pm. I would stay up every night and be angry when there weren’t soft-core movies. When I visited my parents I would try to watch the squiggly lines on the blocked channels for the occasional glimpse of sex or nudity, and I would masturbate to that, or just the audio of those channels. I got my first home internet connection in 1994, in my studio apartment, and I would stay up for hours and hours seeking arousal. I tried chat rooms, but they didn’t really do it for me. Nothing went straight to the vein like porn. During this time I still got incredible headaches that left me home from work on a fairly regular basis. At the time I did not connect them to how much masturbation I was engaging in. Looking back, it was exactly like what happened to me in middle school, except it wasn’t happening after each orgasm… It would build up and take me out for a full day every 6 weeks or so. A benefit to being in recovery is that I don’t have such debilitating headaches anymore.
I moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1995, and it was soon after that year that I found my first pornographic video online. There was no DSL yet, so it was agonizingly slow to download, but I felt like I had conquered Everest when that first video appeared on my desktop. I owned it. I got a job as the manager of a computer department at Kinkos. And I was Kinko. They had an ISDN connection. I began downloading and saving all the porn I could, burning them to Zip drives or CD-ROMs, later DVD-ROMs. I became the porn dealer for my roommate and extended friends. My work productivity suffered because I was downloading porn in the background all the time. I was downloading lots of music illegally as well. Today, downloading illegal music is in my middle circle. The activity is so similar to downloading porn that it is a warning sign. I visited strip clubs with friends 3-4 times, but honestly, I found them disconcerting and weird. For all the fantasizing I used to do, I couldn’t buy in to the fantasy that strippers wanted anything other than my money, and frankly, I was too cheap. I got all the porn I wanted for free on the Internet… Why would I spend as much as a year’s worth of internet connectivity on one night out at a strip club?
I continued to choose partners or potential partners that were bad for me. I would choose them solely based on sexual attractiveness. I didn’t know how to be intimate… I would act for them and try to be who I discerned they wanted me to be. Early in my addiction I would stop acting out whenever I got into a relationship, only to medicate when the relationship ended. By now I was medicating while I was IN the relationships. Early on I would go through periods where at the beginning of a new relationship I had to adjust to having “real” sex again… I would go through a period where I was unable to achieve orgasm with a partner for a few days… Or weeks (the periods kept getting longer with each new relationship). Now, since I was acting out while in the relationships, I would experience this inability to achieve orgasm intermittently. This led to severe confidence issues that spiraled into more acting out. It also led to partners questioning my “manliness,” which only led to further hiding and isolation and trying to “perform” on my part. It is a vicious cycle.
Each acting out “session” became longer and longer. I would lock myself in my room and lose hours. Time I intended to use for other pursuits got swallowed up in acting out. I used to compose songs and perform live music everywhere, but I stopped being able to compose a song, and I didn’t know why. Ads on television for ED medication would come with a warning that people should visit a doctor for erections lasting longer than four hours. I didn’t consider that a warning to be heeded. I considered it a goal to be achieved.
In 2001 I became a touring comedian / performer. Lots of hotel rooms with Internet connections meant hours acting out after performances, or during the day before performances. Each time we were in a city for 4-5 weeks was an opportunity to try and find a local girlfriend. In my fantasy I was the kind of guy who could meet a girl, get her to have sex with me, and not become attached or have any emotional involvement whatsoever. Reality was much more complicated. I wanted romance, love, closeness and intimacy, but didn’t know how to be/do those things. I pretended like I had those things with my partners, but more often than not I was putting up an act, trying to recreate some love/acceptance I had felt with my family, or with my abuser, and feeling a lot of anxiety about life and relationships because they weren’t “perfect” or left me feeling empty. I would medicate this with more porn. I was living a double life.
In 2002 My roommate got his “friend with benefits” pregnant and they moved in together. I started living alone. Not a good situation for a sex addict. My acting out intensified. I thought about soliciting prostitutes – for real this time, because I felt so lonely. I would binge on porn then swear I would stop for a month… And then two days later I would do it again. I was powerless to stop. During this time I had a sexual relationship with a girl that was 16 years younger than me (but above the “age of consent”). It was unfulfilling and did not live up to my fantasy. But it did lead me to recognize there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t ready to call myself an addict yet, but I didn’t want any more empty relationships. Near the end of 2003 I decided I didn’t want to have sex without love again. I made a decision to be “celibate” until I fell in love again… Of course, my definition of “celibacy” included lots and lots of porn and masturbation. I mistakenly thought I wasn’t hurting anyone but myself. I wanted to stop time and time again. I would become disgusted with my self and would throw all my videotapes out… Then all my magazines, and finally, trash all my digital files… Only to sincerely regret doing so within a few days and scramble to re-assemble my collection. This happened multiple times.
A year later I met the woman who would become my wife. We met in November of 2004 and began dating in February of 2005. She was a Christian, and didn’t want to have sex before marriage. I agreed, and thought that being married would cure my addiction. I had begun to think that I was a sex addict, and was ready to try something different… which involved praying to Jesus, because all my efforts to stop had not worked. I prayed, “lots of people say you work when nothing else has, so, Jesus, help me if you can.” I started going to church with the woman that would become my fiancé.
I met a pastor (the pastor that ended up marrying us) who led a men’s group for Christian guys who struggled with porn. We didn’t have the 12-steps. We had a limited understanding of them but were really trying to do it on our own. This was basically a binge-and-purge group. What happened to me happened with all the guys… I learned to white-knuckle and not act out for months at a time, but without a real understanding of recovery or serenity. After a time, I would flame out in a spectacular fashion, hours-long porn binges while my wife was at work, unable to escape the lure of the addiction. All the guys would accept me and show me grace and I’d be able to white-knuckle for a time again. If I relapse in my program, this is what it looks like now… not the same bottom, but not “sobriety.” Many of the tools I now know about and understand were unknown to me then. I was calling myself an addict now, thanks to my wife’s gentle prodding and this pastor, but I didn’t think I needed 12-step. “Those” people were worse off than me. So much for calling myself a Christian and being non-judgmental.
During courtship of my fiance I would try to stop, and would stop for a time, but then have a binge again. Each time during our courtship I told my wife, but this was about dumping my guilt on her, not about cleaning up my side of the street and making an amends. I caused my wife intense pain. I regret this deeply. Once we were married, and I had been unable to have orgasm on our wedding night, my fantasy that marriage was going to cure me was broken, I felt more depressed about the state of my sexuality than ever, and I began acting out again, but now, instead of dumping it on my wife every time I relapsed, I began lying and hiding. The men’s group knew about my relapses, but I led my wife to believe that I was being perfect. I was again leading a double life. I had peaked out into the light during our courtship, but went back underground. Around our one year anniversary, she asked the right questions and I came clean. I was devastated, crying on the floor of the kitchen. This should have been my rock bottom, but it wasn’t. I continued to struggle with acting out and trying to cover it up for at least two more years.
Long story short, the men’s group pastor had a falling out with the Lead Pastor at the church. Amidst a lot of drama and, frankly, Spiritual Abuse, my wife and I left the church. Eventually the men’s group dissolved as well. I was still trying to stop on my own. I was looking for a spiritual solution, I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, but I didn’t know “how.” When we had been married 3-4 years, we stumbled upon a new church that had a porn recovery ministry called “Pure Desire.” I learned a lot in this group. There were some people with 12-step experience, and I gravitated to them. The workbook basically mixed Christian theology with a therapeutic approach from Pat Carnes. The founder of the ministry was a former Pastor and a registered CSAT (“Certified Sex Addiction Therapist”). I began to understand why I was an addict. I began to fill in the jigsaw puzzle. I saw the links in the chain. I first learned about circle plans, and I made an important discovery about fellowship. I worked something that looked like a first step and a fourth and fifth step, but they weren’t labeled as such. I was pursuing recovery now, but not strictly working a 12 step model. I discovered after committing to calling at least one brother every day, my obsession lifted and I felt a measure of serenity. In this ministry I had some breakthroughs. I went 6 months without acting out for the first time. I was still holding on to it as a backup, though. I had a stash of porn saved. After 6 months I thought I was cured and threw it out. Within three days I had so much anxiety that I was frantically searching the Internet trying to find it all again and restore what I’d thrown out. I was definitely not “cured.” Today I know I may never be cured, but that if I take my medicine every day, the disease can lie dormant for longer and longer periods of time. During this time my bottom line was masturbating to pornography. Plain masturbation (without any visual or other aids) was allowed in my middle circle. I would put together time between 3 and 6 months without looking at porn, then relapse.
After the recession my career took a turn for the worse. I was frequently without work between 2008-2011. In 2011 I began working at a real, 40-HR a week job. I was calling a brother in the ministry every day and staying sober when I started at this job. About 10 months in it was getting more difficult. There was a lot of tension at work and I was so much better at this job than the previous guy had been that I began having a lot of downtime, which I used to start downloading music at work. The downloading of music led to searching for other things. I never downloaded porn at work, but I would find it by using innocuous search terms and then comb the results. On at least one occasion I left my cubicle to masturbate in the restroom at work. I was fired soon after this happened, but no mention was made of whether or not my porn viewing had been discovered. They had fired my boss, and were reshaping the whole department.
Another instance of spiritual abuse happened at our church when the Pure Desire ministry leader asked me to keep a secret from my wife that directly impacted her. This led to a lot of hurt feelings all around, a new type of betrayal of my wife, boundaries that I didn’t even know I had being crossed, and we ended up leaving that church, and the porn ministry. I was at a cross-roads. Knowing what made me an addict didn’t keep me sober. Knowing all about trauma and neural pathways and neuroplasticity didn’t make me clean. It helped a little, but I needed a proven program. I attended my first S meeting in 2012. And at my first meeting, I knew I was one of “those” people, and that I was home.
I wanted to impress my new meeting, so I got my first thirty day chip with no relapses, and on the night I got it, decided to celebrate by looking for sexual imagery. I didn’t stop there and ended up masturbating to porn and lost my time. So I lost my 30 days and knew I needed to find a sponsor and work the steps. I picked up my first sponsor at my very next meeting. I was ready and hungry and I felt relieved that he expected me to call him every day. I began working the steps. We discussed my circles and how I always relapsed after 90-180 days, and we switched things up. Having masturbation without pornography in my middle circle was not helping me. So we made my bottom line, “no sex with self.” We put seeking out pornography in the middle circle. We considered it a warning sign, but that the real problem was masturbation. The next thing I knew I was up to step four and had put together 6 months of time… A milestone I hadn’t really ever crossed before. I got scared of taking such a close look at myself as the fourth step and stalled working on it. I relapsed at just over 8 months of sobriety… Because I had stopped working my program. I am still powerless.
That relapse led me to recommit to working my program, and I finished my steps four, five, and began working six and seven, the steps that “separate the men from the boys,” as my sponsor put it. I discovered a daily morning ritual that really seemed to work for me… Meditation for 10 or more minutes, followed by 10 minutes of journaling, praying the serenity prayer, 3rd step prayer, 7th step prayer and St. Francis prayer. During this time I was not seeking out pornography and experienced my longest bout of sobriety. I also felt like I was experiencing a great deal of serenity. I took a long time to work my eighth step and only made a few stabs at Step 9. I put together just over three years of sobriety from my bottom line. During the last six months of this time of sobriety, around the time I stopped working step 9, I began to seek out sexual imagery again, including pornography. The old pull was back, with a vengeance. I began to seek it out more regularly and was not working my morning ritual. When a particularly emotionally stressful event happened (my wife’s grandmother being put on hospice, and my wife leaving to visit her), I relapsed. I think I would have been okay if I had been regularly working my program, as there were many emotional shocks that occurred at the height of my sobriety that I weathered without acting out, but I had opened the door enough times that when the stress and fear became too much, I masturbated to pornography once again after three years, in early October 2016.
That was almost a year ago, and I have acted out on my original plan 4 times since – all masturbation without pornography. After the first time I felt led to change up my program. I found a new sponsor whose compulsive behaviors were closer to mine. I have had a hard time finding the willingness to work my new program. It has taken me two months to write this first step, missing several self-imposed deadlines. Perhaps my desire to be exacting has caused me to avoid doing it. My new bottom-line behaviors are “no sex with self” and “no active engagement with pornography.” That definition, “active engagement” includes behaviors that were allowed under my previous circle plan.
In this adjustment period, I have masturbated without pornography three times. I have compulsively looked for porn on sites where it shouldn’t be – sites that are usually well policed, but where it occasionally gets through. At first I had a hard time admitting this to my sponsor. I didn’t want to sound like a broken record because things weren’t getting better. The truth is, if I really wanted to find porn I could go buy it somewhere, or could not care about my emailed browsing reports and I could go directly to a porn site. For some reason, I get a dopamine hit from looking for it where it isn’t supposed to be, whether or not I find it. On the occasions I have found it where it wasn’t supposed to be, I haven’t watched a video or masturbated to it, but I was trying to do the “me” program, not the twelve-step program. It is crazy and baffling, this disease, that it leads me to this behavior that is unfulfilled. But I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I am buoyed by the fact that I am not acting out the way I was before admitting I was an addict. I stalled on writing this first step, but have recently started a 30-in-30, and have been keeping up with that level of meetings. Since I’ve started that commitment I’ve had sobriety and a level of serenity, and I haven’t acted out despite having such emotional shocks as passing a kidney stone.
Looking back at this inventory, I estimate/average the portion of my life acting out to be:
Between ages 12-18: 1 hour a day (7x52x6 = 2184 hours)
Between ages 19-36: 2 hours a day (14x52x18 = 13104 hours)
Between ages 37-48: 10 hours a month (10x12x12 = 1440 hours)
Total: 16,728 hours – that is about two full years.
I am grateful that I did not suffer significant financial losses as I rarely spent money on my addiction. I never solicited sex via prostitution or massage parlours, and I did not spend large amounts of money the few times I went to strip clubs. Pornography is my drug, and I was able to get it free most of my life. I probably spent $100 over my life renting adult videos / DVD’s. I probably spent less than $50 total at strip clubs. I never paid money to any online pornographic site. I did subscribe to usenet news groups for music and pornography/erotica, and that cost $10 a month, for about 10 years. That works out to $1,200. That’s not a lot of money over a lifetime. However, I recognize that there were strides I could have made in my career if I had spent time differently – if I had pursued work opportunities and continuing education with the fervor I pursued each high, I know I would be further along in my career and more financially secure today. When I reflect on that I feel great regret and shame. However, if I multiply the time spent acting out by the highest hourly wage I have ever earned, it equals over a million dollars in lost wages.
I trust the steps. I believe the program works. I have a higher power and I try to connect with God. This time through the steps I hope I can incorporate them more into my daily life. As my sponsor puts it, I need to develop a “lifestyle of recovery.” With my higher power, and the experience, strength and hope of those that came before me, I know recovery is possible.