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Post by abel on Jul 7, 2005 18:23:08 GMT -5
BlackSpiral, my family is in Moscow. In the past several years we have had more bombings than I would care to count. Not to mention the theater, or the blown up highrises. There are certain things that we just cannot help but watch in horror. Fortunately, the sexual addiction is not one of these things. Stay strong,
Abel
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Post by Scott on Jul 8, 2005 6:31:56 GMT -5
Hi BlackSpiral,
It's crazy, I usually work in a building above Liverpool Street tube station but had decided to work from home yesterday. My colleagues were taken to another building and had to wait in an empty room for hours as there were reports of suicide bombers running around being shot by police. They weren't allowed out for safety reasons.
Please God this is the last of it for London and anywhere else. As well as the British people who were injured and died, it makes me sick that these young people are manipulated into giving their lives over for their religion and will blow themselves up becuase they've been promised paradise with Allah. They get taken at a young age and manipulated by their spiritual leaders who I'm sure wouldn't blow themsleves up for the cause.
Sorry about that rant - a little off the subject of recovery. Hope you're doing well.
Scott.
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Post by abel on Jul 8, 2005 22:40:38 GMT -5
BlackSpiral, I was more than 8000 miles away from a little Russian town called Beslan (which I had never heard of before) when my friend told me about local school children taken hostages by Chechen militants and the botched attempt at their resque by Russian special forces. I looked at the pictures on the news that day: they were as gruesome as what you are seeing now in London. That night I collapsed on the floor of my office and wept. Alone in the dark I was writhing in anguish like a beluga whale on the tip of a harpo*n. With no god to call on for help... It is uncanny how human suffering can strike like a hammer blow across vast geographic distances. I have never heard of the place and I am pretty sure that I do not know anyone in this godforsaken town. Yet looking at the little bodybags and the terror in the eyes of the survivors hit me like a locomotive. I felt physical pain in my chest and abdomen and I am otherwise a pretty healthy guy. I guess Beslan was my innoculation against unbearable evil. I no longer react to bloodshed physically. But I feel your pain. And I am mourning for the victims of terror, British and Russian, past and present, Christian and pagan, in my weird atheistic way.
Abel
p.s. I forgot to mention last time that your journal is a big inspiration for me.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Jul 17, 2005 18:31:30 GMT -5
The Warp, and Older Roots One thing I've had cause to consider through my recovery is the source of the warped mentality that I acquired as an addict. When I was working through Tony Robbins, I learned that if you wish to break down a belief, you need to first understand all of the things that drive it, support it, and helped create it. Only then can you really break them down, and create new beliefs in their place - only then can you smash all the legs and bring it down.
In this regard, I had some thinking to do. I had a list of beliefs and attitudes that I held, which empowered the addiction; and although I knew some of them to be false, it still felt - somewhere - as though they were true. And I felt that I needed to get to the bottom of them, and understand where they came from, in order to discredit their roots effectively.
Now, it's easy to point the finger at porn and scream 'Guilty!', but if I was to do that, I'd certainly be bypassing many other elements. I was definitely damaged greatly by porn, and porn certainly created many misconceptions for me, and many bad beliefs; but it also took others that I already had, then stretched them and pulled them, making them worse than they had been.
The key, though, is that I already had some of those conceptions. They weren't handed to me by an evil god of porn in a huge book; I acquired them, over weeks, months and years, and from a far wider source than just porn. It came most heavily from two other sources; firstly, general media, and secondly - and more significantly - from my peers.
There were some very general things which came from my peer group at large; and I wonder how much of that came from porn by proxy. Their own sexual attitudes were driven, at least partly, by exposure to porn; which for most of them came from either a father or a brother. I had none of that for myself, but their attitude permeated the school all the same; sex would be seen in sentences, in classes, in comments, or in books (where the lyrics to 'God Save the Queen', by the magic of white-out and a biro, could easily be adjusted to other things entirely).
More specifically, though, I had attitudes about what should be expected of sex; what was normal, acceptable - and vice versa - many of which came from just one of my peers. Looking back, it's easy to see that some of the core beliefs I held came from him; that he created in me a mindset that justified the use of porn easily, whether in a relationship or not. This, all from a guy who cheated on two women because he 'couldn't find a good opportunity' to break it off with one of them, and whose partners continued to stay the same age while he got older year by year. Maybe he's matured since; I really don't know. But this was the guy that my attitudes and beliefs were so heavily influenced by.
That's only a fraction of what I considered, but it helped me to put many of my own beliefs and thoughts into context with where they came from, and who inspired them. From there, it was far easier for me to discredit them, to understand that my beliefs and attitudes had been influenced by people who I didn't respect, and whose advice had to be considered suspect.
It seems strange, maybe; but being able to recognise this helped me to move beyond it. Once I understood where my beliefs really came from, where the attitudes that supported my addiction were formed, it was much easier to accept that they were false, and start to focus on finding a truth to replace them with; one I could respect, and accept.
It's held true for me in many other areas. Beliefs or attitudes that have held me back, I've sometimes gotten from places that I really should have known better about; but until I took the time to look back and see, I never realised it, and so I carried on with these beliefs - treating them as if they were gospel truths, when at the most, they were really nothing more than false assumptions and lies.
My beliefs, I found, had a lot more depth to them than I really realised; and often, that depth served to do nothing more than support beliefs that had no right to persist. Learning to really look back, and really take stock of the source of my beliefs, has helped me to be able to change them - and in changing them, to change the direction of my life.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Jul 26, 2005 1:43:13 GMT -5
Weight, Procrastination, Dreaming When we choose to act, or not to act, we place a certain amount of weight on each side of our decision. That weight determines how seriously we view each possible choice. For example, let's say that you're hanging from a ledge, with your shoes a foot from the ground. With a drop of just a single foot, hanging on is mostly a matter of pride - if even anything at all. But make that drop one of 25 feet, and all of a sudden letting go becomes a question of life and death.
That's really what I'm thinking about. The absolute nature of our decisions, and how important we consider them to be. When we know our decision will affect our whole life, we take it a lot more seriously than if we think it won't really matter in the long term.
I suppose this is the essence of procrastination; the ability to put off doing something because you can do it later, or because you have enough time to do it later, or because it doesn't really matter that you do it right this minute, and so on. But it's a dangerous path, because by following it, each day you throw away time you could have used. If you have a week to do a task that should take two days, the essence of procrastination would be to start on the fifth day, when common sense should tell you to start it on day one, finish it, then carry on with the free time afterward, free from the pressure of the task.
The question I found myself asking was; how differently would I think about putting something off, if I knew or believed that my acting today, right now, was a fundamental part of my ever being able to succeed? If I felt that sitting down to work today was fundamental to a project, would I be less inclined to put it off until tomorrow? Equally, if I felt that by not flossing today I was essentially guaranteeing that I'd become a toothless old fool in my future, would I be more inclined to floss every day?
(That last one, at least, I can answer. I've been flossing every day since I thought of it!)
The easy argument to be levelled against this is - if I DID approach things this way, then it'd mean that the next time I fail, I might as just give up. It's too threatening, too damaging, too dangerous to the idea of hope to think that by failing today means that I will keep on failing forever.
If this is what you think...then, perhaps this approach isn't for you. But I don't find much strength and power can be found in presupposing failure. Instead, I am working to try and generate mental energy to focus on achieving success. And one of the most important things to being successful, I believe, is to understand that what you do in this precise moment contributes heavily to it. What you do today DOES matter. And it matters that you do it today.
Okay, you might think. Sure, you could act positively today - but if you don't, then it's not too drastic. You could maybe wait a day or two, maybe a week, and the start then. No big loss. No big problem, really. It's going to be fine then anyway, and you'll only have lost a week. You can start in a week, right? You're too tired to start today anyway. Let this bit of stress blow over, let the current bit of work be finished. Let Aunt Marge get her stuff out of the spare room and go back to wherever she invited herself over from. And then you can start.
But I don't agree. Experience has taught me that this mindset isn't a one-way path; it's a cycle. It's a path that's built by dreaming of success, while avoiding the steps that it takes to achieve it. We're not thinking "I won't walk this path," but rather, we're thinking "I'll start walking this path tomorrow". But every day, tomorrow is still one day away. And whether we like to think it or not, we each of us have only so many tomorrows before they'll all have run out, and all the things we dreamed of doing tomorrow will still be sitting at the wayside, undone, unapproached, unachieved. And we'll have lost all our teeth to boot, so we won't even be able to grind them in frustration.
This is the irony of it. Because we believe we can start tomorrow, we never start today; short of massive changes in our lives that force our hand, we never find ourselves in that magical tomorrow, doing what we should have done. We waste time, push our actions further and further into the future, until eventually we've run out of time to take them.
As a student, I often took a lot of pride in what I was capable of achieving; and even though I would fail to live up to my capabilities, I would hold tight to them, as if they were some kind of talisman. Despite the fact that I hadn't achieved what I was capable of, I was still just as capable of it - it didn't diminish me. But thinking about these things, I came to this realisation. What we can achieve is minor. What we are capable of is minor. Our strengths and weaknesses are minor, too. What is important is whether or not, given these strengths, weaknesses and capabilities, we choose to use them. This is why a top class athelete deserves respect; because it is not the gifts and abilities that made them who they were, but their determination to take those gifts and use them, to work hard, to fight, and to push themselves to the limit. Not tomorrow, or in a week, or in a few months, or next year - but today. The same goes for all those who are at the top of their field. They are not there because they had the talents, or because they had the gifts, or because they were capable. Those things merely gave them the OPPORTUNITY to be there. It was their decision to USE those gifts, to TAKE those steps, that put them there at the top.
One thing separates them all; they acted, where most of us might simply dream of acting. That's also why you see people doing things that you're sure you could do better...but you don't ever actually try. Maybe you could - but you don't. And while you persist in that pattern of thinking, in that attitude, you never will. After all, how often have you put off doing something you'd been planning on doing, or hoping to do, because you wanted to do something else important instead - like lie in bed, or watch TV?
In the end...that's what I realised. Like it or not, what we do today is massively important. Not because it is done today, but because of the clear, mental distinction between doing something, and putting it off to be done at another time. Whether we take the step toward achieving something we want to achieve in our lives, or put it off until tomorrow, or give up because it's getting hard and - after all - we'll always have tomorrow to start again, or try again, will shape our lives significantly. That pattern of putting things off becomes easy and comfortable - but it never achieves what we want. And ten, twenty, maybe thirty years down the line, we'll still be where we were, still putting it off, and still clinging to the fact that we CAN do it, even though we aren't.
So...there's my revelation. Much of it is things I should have known...but recently, they have settled in my head with an iron coherency. But now, what to do with this new-found knowledge?
It's somewhat ironic, but just to learn from this requires that I act on it immediately, rather than putting it off. One thing I've learned through my recovery is that it's one thing to discover some new idea, some new approach, that obviously has some weight or importance; and quite another thing to take that and turn it into practice. The knowledge could very easily slide back into the back of my mind; and I could start to think, well - I'll start applying it tomorrow...
Forcing myself to think like this is what's important. The more I make myself apply this thinking, the more natural it will become to think like that. I've done it with thought patterns in the past; I've forced myself to think a certain way until, eventually, it was simply the way I thought. And that's what I need to do here. With every decision I face, I need to consider the worst possible consequences to my not acting; if I choose not to pursue a dream, then it may mean that the dream will never be realised. If I choose to put off my work, it may mean that my work does not get completed, and that I lose my position. If I choose not to floss, I'll end up as a toothless wonder one day.
Is it all true? Well...I think so. But beyond that, I don't think it necessarily matters. Truth is a mixture of fact, and perception - and I think one of the most important skills we can learn may well be to choose a perception that is the most effective for us. For me, this one feels like that. It creates weight; and that weight compels me to act.
Far better, I think, than a softer, more acceptable truth, that allows me to relax and let my life escape my grasp with little more than a whimper. And through toothless gums, to boot...
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Post by BlackSpiral on Aug 12, 2005 19:53:48 GMT -5
A strange view of time? Somewhat related to procrastination...I've been thinking a little bit about how addicts in particular seem to view time as if it's a series of totally detached moments. For example, we may think we can quit tomorrow; and because of that, all of a sudden, today becomes unimportant. Somehow, we've managed to persuade ourselves that what we do today will have no effect on what we are able to do tomorrow. It's slightly insane, when you think about it, but it's often how we see the world.
I mean, think about it. If you spend six hours staring at porn, getting absorbed and lost in it, will that REALLY mean it's no harder for you to quit tomorrow? Personally, I doubt it. Tomorrow, you'll still be full of the memories; and day-old memories are so clear and crisp that it's as close as you can be to actually doing it. Tomorrow, the memories will be nearly as appealing as the stuff itself, and they'll draw you back. Because, after all, you can quit the next day.
And that's the first part of it.
It's strange, but we seem to think of time in an odd way. If we stepped back and looked at it - I mean, really looked at the way that it has worked for us, how the accumulation of our time has built and progressed our lives, we'd understand the way that our lives are built, and through that, perhaps, understand the value of a single moment. We can only read what's here, because somewhere in the past, we were shown our first letters; then our first words; then given a book. Each one of those events has built us up. Each moment, minute, hour and day that we spent on building ourselves has brought us here, to be able to do something as remarkable as read a word; an entirely human construction. Two or three hundred years ago, few of us could have read this at all.
The value of a moment can't be underestimated; and it is thrown away at our peril.
Each moment we throw away is one we won't get back again; each we use badly is one that we'll have to spend another repairing. And it's all the worse, because our time is cumulative. For every positive choice, positive decision and positive action we make in the moment, the next moment is heightened, strengthened, grown. Our lives expand, swell, and begin to grow into something they could never have been if we left those moments. And against that, every bad moment, every bad decision, drags our lives down. We should understand this naturally, and deeply - because it is our bad choices and bad actions that have brought us to this place, to the point of having our lives so far away from what we hoped or dreamed for them that we realised we needed to take action.
And yet, we still seem compelled to take action tomorrow...
But our actions today build up tomorrow. What we do today sets the stage for what we CAN do tomorrow. A person could spend years training in martial arts; in three years time, he could hold a black belt. If he had thrown away those years, though, in three years time he could still choose to start studying martial arts - but he couldn't, that day, be where he would have been if he had started three years earlier. Used well, those years could have seen him where he wanted to be already, but instead, those moments were thrown away. And it is true of anything. If you want to build, you have to build now. Because every moment wasted gives you less time to build; and less time to take advantage of, or enjoy the benefits of, the things you build.
Time is not distinct, separate, broken. Time is cumulative. Tomorrow is built by today, and in a week, what happens may depend heavily on what happened over the next six days. Time adds together, and every piece we spend well adds to our life. When we are old, and our time and energy has faded, what we look back on will depend on those moments, and how well we chose to use them. Whether you choose to use your time well today, or choose to do so tomorrow, will change the view drastically. You could chase your dreams, you could catch them, you could make them reality. We can look back on our lives and be proud that we did what we dreamed, that we took the time we had and used it well.
Or we can look back, and wish that we had.
It's our choice. And the first time we make that choice is today - right here, right now.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Aug 22, 2005 2:07:39 GMT -5
Marital Bliss One thing you see a lot of in this addiction is couples breaking up. It's natural, I think - at the beginning, to some extent, both partners seem to lean a little toward it. To the addict, the breakdown of the relationship offers the freedom to continue in their behaviour without any real sense of guilt, since the consequences no longer go any further than them. For the partner, in contrast, the break up of a relationship - or perhaps, closure on it and independence from it - allows them to distance themselves from the emotional pain that goes along with the behaviour. Because of that, a lot of partners leave, or distance themselves from the impact of their partners' behaviour; for some addicts, that becomes the trigger for recovery. For others, it is nothing less than an addictive liberation.
When my wife and I were at the beginning of our recovery, that was part of where we both were; and for anyone looking in, it would have been easy to justify us breaking up. My wife was in pain, hurt by the way I was behaving, and had behaved; she felt dishonoured, used, betrayed, disrespected, unloved. Any number of friends might have advised her to leave. Any number of people could have said "the man's not worth it", and told her to go and find someone who'd really respect her. But she loved me, and felt that what we had was worth working for, worth trying to save. So despite all that, she stayed with me.
My addict side didn't like her much for that, because my addict side really wanted an excuse to act out more. Not just to continue - but to get worse. There were things my addict side had wanted to do, but which it hadn't been allowed to - because throughout my addiction, another side of me felt loyalty toward my partner and guilt about my behaviour. That side of me never allowed my addict to sink as low as it had sometimes wanted to. But my addict side still wanted that chance, and had hoped for a collapse; had hoped that the pain would drive my partner away, and that the relationship would end.
Fortunately, the other side of me knew the addict side was an idiot, and proceeded to beat it black and blue with a rather large bat. From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to save the relationship; because I loved her, plain and simple. And no matter what happened, I wanted to be with her. The side of me that wanted to say "you should be with someone better" was trying to cop out - because, really, I wanted to be the someone better. I knew I could be. But I also knew it wouldn't be easy to achieve it. And part of me wanted to run away from the difficulty, just as part of my wife wanted to run away from the pain.
But in both of us, it was the smaller part. So we endured the difficulty, the pain, and the struggle...and grew closer through it. I grew, I learned, I began to see how I had changed through new eyes. I began to really see the progression of my life with a crystal clarity that I had never possessed before. My wife, meanwhile, began to discover new things about me; some bad, some good. But through it all, I was changing to become the man she'd always thought I was. We were working, in the end, to fight to build up a relationship that we'd both believed in, but which perhaps had never really existed.
Exit stage left, then return, a little less than 2 years later.
Today...well, here's the thing. I'm still not perfect. I still have issues; they've improved. A LOT. Some of my issues have changed completely. Some have vanished. But as I worked through recovery, I discovered some entirely new issues that I never knew I had before. So today, I still have plenty. And today, they still cause us both pain sometimes.
So, if someone was to look in on our relationship from the outside...they'd be able to find good reasons for us to get divorced. For my wife, they'd be able to say, look - you go through all this pain. Look at the way he thinks sometimes, the things he struggles with, the issues he has. Look at the way that he can be sometimes, the way that he'll sometimes shut down. They could build a compelling case, and they'd say - you should go and find another man, one who'll really respect you.
And for me, they'd look...and they'd say, hey. You struggle with all those issues, with trying to deal with them, with trying to aspire to this ideal you've built up, but you know, you don't need to put yourself through that. If you were on your own, you could probably live with what you do, it wouldn't be too bad. You already dealt with the porn; you should be proud, satisfied. You could just kick back and enjoy yourself. It's all normal guy stuff anyway. And they'd say, you should get out of there. You're expecting too much of yourself in that relationship, and it's not making you happy. You'd be better off.
And that's why we don't listen to those people.
See...in the end, none of that matters. I put myself through pain and struggle. I deal with issues that other people accept as normal, I feel guilt and discomfort over seeing or thinking things that other people hold up as fine, or even as some kind of ideal. But it's what I do, because it's what I believe. I believe I owe these changes to my partner. Not because of past transgressions or past issues, or because of a debt to pay, but because I love her, and I feel she deserves this from me. All the issues I deal with, and pain I may put myself through from time to time, couldn't outweigh that.
For her...she endures the pain I put her through sometimes. She struggles, and she hurts. But she knows I don't do it on purpose, and that I fight against it, to change the way that I became - and that if I could change it all in a moment, I would. She sees the changes I have made already, and recognises how hard I have worked to make it; and never stops believing that I will continue to change and grow, even when sometimes, I begin to doubt myself. And the growing pains and heartache she endures she never enjoys, but she's willing to endure it - because she loves me too.
And that's it. We love each other; more than enough to endure the pain, to fight, to deal with the struggle. We love each other enough that the pain we cause each other, and the pain we cause ourselves, is a price worth paying to still be together.
Love hurts, it's true. But if it's strong enough, love survives it.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Sept 6, 2005 1:30:03 GMT -5
Memory Memory is a funny thing, and it seems bound to be an issue for recovering addicts. When I first entered recovery, the recent, vivid memories were a major cause of concern for me; I struggled to shake some of them from my head. I could recall images, sometimes sounds and other things that went along with things I had seen or watched shortly before entering recovery; and those memories were a powerful problem. More often than not, they would be the reason I would be drawn to return; not to seek out anything new, or to find something that I hadn't seen before, but rather to return to things I had already found once.
At the time, I remember it feeling like wanting to see them for "one last time". The idea that I was never going to look at them again in my life; that I would never, ever go back to experience those same old things again was something that I struggled to even conceptualise. It didn't seem or feel real to me; and it felt threatening at times. Not all of me wanted to quit. Not all of me wanted to give it up. And the idea of giving it up forever, when it sank in, was somehow close to heartbreaking. Fighting against that was the hardest part of my recovery; fighting against the memory of things recently encountered, that seemed to be calling me back to them again.
But I struggled. And as time went by, those memories faded, so that they weren't so vivid. So that they weren't so strong. What sounds there were vanished, and the images faded, so that what I had left was more like the idea of a memory; I could recall what it was, but I couldn't see it vividly as I once had. They were still there; still powerful, as my mind could (and would) still flesh out the hollow memories, providing some colour and some brightness, even if it couldn't recall the truth of them exactly. They were potent still, if they were given the time to be. But they were still little more than shadows when compared to the gut-wrenching memories I had once had to deal with; and more importantly, I had moved past simply needing to resist them, and onto moving beyond them.
Part of it was that, as I put some time between myself and the events that created them, the memories simply stopped surfacing as much. Time is a healer, I suppose, and it does a good, if imperfect job. But I added to its work, learning to shut down the memories that came up; a technique which I still apply today. When memories arise, I discovered that the single worst thing for my recovery is to entertain those thoughts; to entertain the old memories; because they lead back to somewhere I simply don't want to be anymore. They are all in the moment, and ignore the events that surround them. The memories are still there, and they still have that potency buried with them, but I learned how to push them behind a door and close it, to protect myself from them.
The memories faded; greyed out; became hollow. They lacked the strength to move through that door anymore, and when they tried, I had become expert in closing it; so much so that I barely needed to concentrate. Closing down an old memory and focusing away from it had been hard at first, but experience made it natural and comfortable. On top of that, I had learned to meld the old, positive, enticing memories with the memories of the life around those events; I had bound them not only to the escape and the high, but also to the damage, and the desperately low lows that went along with them. It worked beautifully.
It wasn't simply that memories all faded out, though - rather, it occurred almost as a journey backwards through my memories. I would push one memory behind the door, and later - sometimes after some time without any recall at all - I would find myself falling onto another, older memory that I had not dealt with so strongly, one that I had forgotten until now. It would usually be a powerful memory, too, which would be why it had survived as long as this. That usually meant that, for some reason, the images had been significant to me at the time; they had maybe been a particularly good source of comfort, for example.
In each case, I would have to take stock again; I could lock it away at first, and once it was gone, I would take time to take stock of my life around it. I learned to understand where the actions had come from, and how they impacted my life at the time, or how they were driven. Why I used, why I was drawn, what it was I was trying to find. All those things I would try to fold into it, to try and reduce the impact of it. With some things, I was much more effective than others; and at all times, one of the strongest weapons I had was to understand its context within not only where it was, but where I would eventually end up, later on. That was my darkest, most unpleasant moment; my most potent weapon. That was what I bound to much of it; that dark hole in the ground, which I fought so hard to climb out of.
One set of memories in particular it felt strange to bind in this way. Like the rest, I wasn't comfortable recalling them, and I put them back behind that door, just as I did with the others from my more recent years. But they felt somehow important; as though they, more than any of the others, represented building blocks for who I am. It's not that they were clean; though they're cleaner than a great many I have had. And it's not that they were nicer, or better, or anything like that. They were old, dating back to the very beginnings of my sexual development, and it felt as though to separate myself from them entirely would be to separate myself from me, in a very fundamental way.
I remember feeling that way about everything when I first started recovery. I've also felt the same thing, from time to time, when separating myself from other activities which would conflict with my recovery; as though somehow, I was sacrificing a core part of myself in order to pursue this "recovery". But recovery is now a core part of me - more central to the person I am than almost anything else. The other things, though sometimes feeling important, simply have to take a back seat to it. It can feel strange at times; but at the same time, I know it is important for me.
The fact is, those events did contribute to who I became; maybe very fundamentally. But importantly, this does not mean that the memories of them are healthy to recall, any more than the more recent memories I have. And if anything, perhaps, they are more dangerous; their context is robbed of immediate consequences, because of how long ago they were. To the 12 year old me, these things were simply another of the joys of life. That held true for some time. But to the adult me, these things had darker and deeper implications; addiction took them, warped them, and changed them, so that this could never again be what it had once been.
And that is the truth of it all. No matter what I recall, it needs to be bound up with the reality of what I have discovered and learned through my recovery if it is to be understood. The 12 year old who created these memories did not know the path he would be walking; the adult can look back, and recognise the footsteps and where they lead. And that is the truth of it. No matter how old the memories may be, no matter how fond they may have been for some time - and many have been exactly that - today, they are not seen in the same light, because the implications are understood. The results of the actions are known; the walked path has already been mapped.
So just like the others, the memories are bound into the grand scheme of things; they are tied to the chain, and locked into sequence, so that they no longer exist independently of their consequences. The chain stretches forward for ten years and more, and always ends in the same place; with me, in tears, struggling to deal with an addiction that I never even knew existed.
It does feel strange at times, that I'll warrant. But I think, by doing this, I lend myself a great deal of strength; not just to avoid a set of actions, but also to understand my life. I tie it all together, so that rather than a series of independent events, I have a chain. Understanding that chain is important to life, I think, because once you understand it, you understand not just the concept of action, but the value of action. The world around us is built on the concept of the here and now, of the immediate, of quick responses, fast feedback, rapid service, rapid gains. But an action that feels like hard work for no gain today may result in a different life within a year - just like when I first fought those memories.
I couldn't believe I would quit. It felt like such hard work, so emotionally draining and exhausting that I sometimes felt I would never make it; and to so little good purpose, it often seemed. But a year later, I felt clean and proud, and I was married.
Usually, even with old memories, it's the long term view that's most important.
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pasa
Junior Member
Posts: 54
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Post by pasa on Sept 6, 2005 8:04:16 GMT -5
But a year later, I felt clean and proud, and I was married. This is exacty what I want to be able to write a year from now. What must it feel like to be proud of oneself ? I can't remember ever having had that feeling. Thanks for putting this out there, it's great to know this is achieveable.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Sept 12, 2005 4:19:01 GMT -5
This post is, essentially, a copy of what I posted in the Addicts forum a few minutes ago. It belongs here, though, because it is a key point in my recovery; a darkest-before-the-dawn kind of personal growth experience. Time, Transitions and New ProblemsWhen I had my first real sober day, back in 2003, I had a lot of reasons to quit. First of all, I had the motive of my partner; our relationship was being damaged, and my partner was being hurt. None of that sat well with me. Next, I had personal motivations; my addiction was interfering with my work and my self esteem, and had caused me a great deal of emotional pain. All of those motives piled together. On top of those, I added many motives that I had come to realise were good; the loss of time, the exploitation of abused people, along with a great many others. They piled together to swing the scale very decidedly against the porn, and against everything that went along with it. So I had great motive to attack the addiction; to push with all my emotional strength against it, and try to recover. Every single day for some time, I would spend some time focusing on my recovery, and making sure to plant one more good step towards making it secure, making it certain. Through my recovery, too, I discovered that much of the reason I had used in the first place wasn't to do with the porn itself, but instead, to do with the stresses I was going through in my life. So, through practice and a little discipline, I managed to establish a habit of addressing those stresses directly; and by doing so, I sidestepped the big cause of my addiction. I attacked the root, and by doing so, I killed the plant. Step forward a little over a year, to several weeks ago. I realise now, though I didn't realise before, that one thing that had changed significantly since the beginning of my recovery was simply the distance; time had diluted and weakened many of my original motives. I still had some, but my personal motives; the pain I had gone through, some reasoned moral motives, the fact that the addiction had interfered with my life; those were still remembered, but no longer felt. My only immediate, strong motives were the rational motive of time wasted, and the emotional motive of protecting my wife from emotional pain. The weight against it had weakened significantly. All of that probably didn't matter for a little while, though; sobriety was the habit now, and I no longer needed some mighty impulse to pull me out of the tendrils of the addiction. But then, up came a major life stress. Not an unusual or unpleasant one, by all accounts; simply one of those that everyone goes through sometimes. And a large one. But much more significantly, the stress was something I had no control over. I couldn't, and can't, address or resolve it in any way - and today, this stress is still persisting, and will for some time yet (though it WILL be resolved, in due course). However, what I didn't anticipate was that, in response to the stress, my mind would start returning to old, old chains of thinking. I didn't see it coming at all; and as I've mentioned before, it didn't turn up as some sudden intense wave of addictive craving. Truth to tell, it never reached anything even approaching an addictive craving; but I have no doubts that it would have, had the pattern been allowed to continue. The wrong questions started to be asked; at first, whether I was bashing my head against the impossible, or whether I was capable of achieving the kind of cleansing I was aiming for. Was I expecting too much of myself to be completely clean in body and mind? Shouldn't I aim for some kind of compromise? Then, next, to the issues I would have sometimes. Weren't they normal? Didn't all men think this stuff, and is it perhaps even healthy?And then, eventually, somewhere down the line, it would have come back to the issue of porn; my brain never quite got around to saying how it was perfectly normal, just part of male sexual expression, and so on, but I can't help but think it would have made it there eventually. I've seen that chain of thinking before, of course. But it's been a long, LONG time since I saw it in MY head. And that fact as much as anything else was disturbing. A year ago, when I sat down, I could have told anyone - with absolute confidence - that if I was single, it wouldn't have affected my recovery or sobriety at all. That they would continue on, strong and solid. But after three weeks or so of a steady, slow regression in my thinking, I realised that I could no longer be confident of that. And that was the shock to my system; the cold water that woke me up, and made me realise that I was moving in entirely the wrong direction. I knew, right then, that I didn't want to lose my sobriety; but I knew, too, that my reasons had grown far less personal. I stepped back, and I thought for a while; and then I sat down with my sponsor (my wife, for those who're not aware of my recovery path) and talked with her, for a long time, about what I was going through, the way my thoughts had been going, the why, the how, and the what-to-do. The conversation was a great relief to my wife. She'd seen it happening, from the outside; she'd noticed the shifts in my thinking, and the way that I was struggling, and she'd tried to talk to me - it was the fact that she did try to talk to me which triggered me to think about my current state, and realise that the addict part of my brain had exerted a tighter grip. Once again, as always, she has been a massive ally and a wonderful guide for me in my recovery. During the conversation with her, I realised that the addiction had reclaimed a level of hold that it hadn't had in a long time; that part of my brain, I realised, hadn't wanted me to start thinking, and as I thought about it, I felt it fighting jealously to dissuade me from changing the course of my thinking. It knew it was opening a door back to the old behaviours, and it resented having it closed again; but I closed it tight, and kept it closed. It was necessary, I knew, and easy; because once I realised that the addiction was gaining control, that door was surprisingly easy to slam shut. That, as much as anything else, was a surprise to me; to realise that, somehow, I had missed the fact that the addiction had reared back up to influence my thinking again. All the time, through those weeks, I had felt as though I was thinking clearly, rationally, and even in a healthy and reasonable way. And all the time, my thinking was anything but. Complacency, anyone? My wife and I talked for a long time, and managed to dig down to the roots of what was going on, and understand how it had all been kicked back up again - to the point where, once more, I come out of it feeling that my recovery has been strengthened and bolstered in a fundamental way, with some new understanding added into the old. It's been a long time since we talked about my addiction in such great depth, and at the end of it, we felt very connected, and very happy. For weeks, I had been struggling with a sense of being unable to make the pieces "fit" - my thoughts, actions and beliefs were no longer meshing. At the end of this, though, everything felt right again; the pieces all fitted back together, and I felt more comfortable and settled than I had in a while. In fact, beyond this, our talking opened up a new perception of the way in which my addiction had grown, and how it had influenced my thinking and behaviour; a step-by-step path of events in my life, with the added perception and observations of my wife to put them into an entirely new context than the one I had given it myself. And in that, I found the next path for my recovery; the next step forward. Just as important for me right now, though, is recapturing the essence of my motivation. The old motives have faded, and so - over the next few weeks - I will be applying myself to rebuilding them again. For many, that will simply mean refreshing and recapturing their heart and soul; but today, I know I have other motives which I can call on. Today, I am confident that when I am done, my recovery will be stronger than ever. The whole episode, quite definitely, was disturbing for me; but at the same time, it was enlightening, and opened the door for me to move forward again. I learned many things about myself; about keeping faith in my ability to change and succeed, and about how dangerous losing that faith can be for me; and I discovered new strengths and possibilities than I didn't know I had. So, in the end, I chalk it up as another one of those "it really, totally sucked, but I'm actually sort of glad it happened" moments.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Sept 12, 2005 20:52:54 GMT -5
Like as not, I think this post will end up being a kind of brain-to-keyboard spiel - so bear with me if it doesn't read as well as it sometimes might.
Progress... Really, just a stream of consciousness going out here. Firstly, I want to write about a change in the way I have been feeling; it's significant, while at the same time, being subtle. For a little while, I think I had lost a little hope; and when I had looked out onto myself, and the thoughts and behaviours that I wanted to address, I had begun to feel that perhaps, they would always be there. I'd lost sight of the bright light of hope that it would eventually change.
Today, that light is back. So, even though I still see some of those thoughts in my head, they don't feel like they did; they're viewed, now, through the eyes of someone who knows they're on the way out, who knows that they're going to be changed again. The difference is immense, while - as I said - at the same time, seeming quite small and almost insignificant.
Hope, though, is never insignificant. And having it back is a wonderful feeling, after several weeks spent having lost sight of it.
One of the things that I discovered through my recovery is that finding out your weaknesses; finding your flaws, and growing to understand them; is often one of the joys of self-exploration. Too much time and energy can be spent denying our own problems, our own weaknesses and issues - too much time can be spent saying the words, talking the talk, and too little spent looking closely at the weaknesses in ourselves that seem to be leading us the other way.
But looking close at those parts, learning to understand them - demystifying some of our beliefs and impulses - is a very important thing. And it's a joy, when you understand what it means. Some of my highest and happiest times have been when I have come to understand one of my darker traits; because with the understanding of why and how it happens comes the understanding of how to change and overcome it.
And shackled with that understanding comes a blinding ray of hope; brilliant, and wonderful.
...and work. Along with the positive realisation, I also discovered that many of my old motives had drifted away from me. So a big part of my next step forward will be to redevelop those; that, I think, will involve mainly pen-and-paper writing, rather than anything here in this journal. No matter how similar the two may seem, I've found that there's something both powerful and therapeutic about putting pen to paper, rather than simply typing. Perhaps it's the difference in speed; pen and paper is slower and quieter, where typing is much faster.
At any rate; I have much more success with making my feelings stick - and provoking emotional growth - with pen and paper than I do with typing, be it here, or be it anywhere else.
What I'm going to address, though, are two sides to the same coin; on the one hand, the pain and damage that my addiction caused in the past; the things I went through; the struggles I had. By writing about them, I find I can often revitalise old memories and experiences; so I will be seeking to do exactly that. Equally, I will be looking to focus on the pain and damage that it would cause, if I was ever to allow it back into my life. Those two are the first side to the coin.
On the other side, there is the positive side to sobriety; all the things I have gained or achieved, since achieving sobriety, and how important my sobriety has been to all of them. I know it has been, but time seems to have eroded this connection for me too; and I need to rebuild it. From this vantage point, I have a lot of positive things; dreams pursued, others caught, a happy and close marriage, and other little things besides. I have a lot of positives to call on, and those I will pull together.
That, right there, is something I have gained from having stayed sober; I have a year and more's experience of sobriety to look back down on, and recognise all the joys that it has brought me. When I began my recovery, while I hoped it would be that way, I didn't know it in the same way that I do now; those hopes and dreams, at least, have become concrete for me. And I will be using them to reinforce the foundation of my recovery.
And that, I think, is where I am - and where I am going - today.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Sept 19, 2005 21:32:48 GMT -5
So, an update, then... As I said before, I planned to sit down and do some old-fashioned pen to paper writing again. So, I figured I would come back here and make a note regarding how it's been going.
Firstly - just as when I began, I've been finding it to be very effective and very powerful. I'm trying not to do all my writing in one sitting; although it's tempting, I also don't think it's as effective as drawing it out. So each time I sit down to write, I focus on one element only, and limit myself to writing out roughly two pages. I always have an idea of what I'm going to write about, but it's usually quite hazy and a little bit ethereal at first.
By the time I'm done, though, it tends to have solidified; often, I've been working through memories I have and beliefs I hold, and as I was writing, they became more concrete; more powerful and immediate to me. Instead of the ethereal ideas of motives that I held, it has evolved into something much stronger, and feels much heavier. It's a very reaffirming process, and each time, makes me feel more centred, more focused than before. It brings all my motives into focus, and - by doing so - simply helps me to remember why I have chosen this path. Not simply in terms of logically knowing, which I did anyway; but in terms of actually feeling those motives, deep down inside.
They feel, again, like a core part of me. I never forgot them; but I had stopped feeling them in the same way I once did.
Finally, in brief, I recall that someone mentioned that they wanted to see what things would go together to form my motives; so here's a summary. To date, what I've written about has included :
- the emotional pains I went through as a result of being caught up in the addiction. - the fact that porn leads me to a loss of control, to where I can no longer effectively choose my own actions based on my beliefs and moral values. - the fact that porn use, and many of its spin-offs, violates my loyalty to my partner. - the fact that, while I was in the addiction, although it seemed to help me sometimes, I actually lost my ability to cope with life. - the fact that while I was in the addiction, it consumed as much of my time as I could spend on it - essentially, it was consuming and wasting my life away. - the fact that the use of porn, on some level, had always left me feeling unclean, feeling lessened by my own actions. - the pride I am able to feel because of the choices I have made. - the delight I am able to feel, now that the simple pleasures of life have become simple again for me.
There's more to write; but that's what I've gone over so far. I'll be writing more today, and in a little while, I'll come back to this journal and write more about what I've gone over. But again, today, that's roughly where I've gotten to.
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Post by a day at a time on Oct 2, 2005 16:06:47 GMT -5
Hi Black Spiral,
I must say that your Reply #61 on Memory is quite a masterpiece, full of courage & hope. I have read it several times. I printed it & the stuff is finally sinking in. This week end as I was working on my PC I was editing a video of my daughter & some how there were still some Porn files in my PC. I was very surprised since I could swear that there was absolutely nothing left in it. Well I saw the thumbnails of a couple of movies which I didn’t play & which I immediately understood that If I was to play them it wouldn’t be anything else than just the “idea of a memory” trying to rise again. Thanks a lot to you & the recover that you bring to this board.
Day 036
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Post by BlackSpiral on Oct 10, 2005 17:30:08 GMT -5
Today, I replied to a post that hit on something I've been thinking about recently. A pattern that frustrates me is that often, people get to a place where they seem to be accepting of a slip - because they learn something from it. And while they may learn something from it, I think that the understanding of what is gained, versus what is lost, becomes massively skewed. Anyway, this was my reply... Learning from Slips (a reply to Choselife) By the time I was recovering, I was really PAST the point of a slip having anything more to teach me. I had already had several slips; and everything there was to know about where I slipped, how I slipped, why I slipped, et al, was already sitting there in my memory, just waiting for me to take the time to dig it out. If a person DOES slip, I'll tell them - look at it. Take time right now, to dig out all the good you can from it, to learn about how and why you slip. But I ALSO think...if you've already slipped before, chances are, you could already have learned this stuff, if you had only taken the time to look at the times you'd failed in the past. There's no such thing as an unavoidable slip. All there is, is a slip you DIDN'T avoid. If you had taken the time to look at your past behaviours, the way you thought, the way you felt, what preceded or surrounded your struggles in the past, then in all probability, all you needed to know was already there to be learned; what you needed to know to avoid this slip was probably just sitting there, waiting to be found. A trend that bothers me is the mindset that slips are okay, because you learn from them, and they make you stronger. The trouble with that idea is that you only learn because you didn't already put in the time to learn by a better route. And while they may make you FEEL stronger, that's just because the enemy has won a battle and is taking a nap at the moment. Preventing or avoiding a slip makes you stronger - staying sober helps your sobriety grow stronger. Slipping simply doesn't work that way. It's rather like saying, you'll build more muscle if you drop the dumbell on your foot. People get caught up in that cycle, though. They slip, they see the lesson, they say "Hey, I have learned this," then they run around for a bit, and forget to study the lesson. Then they slip, and say "Hey, look! I was right, and I have learned it again, so I will fix it this time, honest," then do the whole thing over, ad infinitum. The cycle is missing the final piece of the puzzle, the part that allows them to break free of the pattern - to learn, and to apply what is learned. It is a relatively easy, self-satisfying cycle, where the addict can feel good about themselves because they're 'in recovery', but at the same time, get to soothe themselves with their addiction and 'learn a lesson'. Chances are good, the same lesson they'll learn next time, and the same one they learned last time, too. I get the impression that this cycle of slip, "learn", burst of energy, struggle, slip, "learn", etc., can become a habitual one; and breaking that habit is probably an extra step for those caught up in it. I don't doubt that the people who get caught up in this truly want to recover. But I also know from my own experience than the pattern of 30-days-clean-then-a-slip, for however long you want to keep it up, is so, so much easier than stringing together the longer periods of sobriety. It is missing some of the hardest mental steps - the idea of NEVER looking at it again. The idea of ALWAYS being clean, rather than MOSTLY being clean. And when you're feeling so weak, when you're emotionally beaten up, you get to quit, rather than keep on pushing. You do the fighting fresh; and when you're tired, you fall. You never have to go through that sapping stretch of fighting, even though emotionally and mentally, you're simply exhausted from it all. You never have to go through the pain barrier of recovery. Instead of running a full marathon, you're running a marathon with easy chairs at the end of every mile. Simply, slips don't teach you anything that you couldn't learn another way; and once you accept that, and determine that you will learn what you need to learn by OTHER means, then a slip loses ALL of its positive value - something which, for me, helps put a slip into far better context of what it REALLY means for your life. So long as you are slipping, you are still trapped, still in the pattern, still in the pit. You can only get out of it, if you DON'T slip. It's not the whole battle - but it's definitely vital. If you are still willing to slip, that means that firstly, the value of the addiction to you is still being allowed to exceed the value of staying sober. That either means that the positive side to the addiction is being given too much air-time, so to speak, or - and in most cases, probably as well as - the positive side to sobriety isn't being given nearly ENOUGH air time. And secondly, chances are good that you haven't done enough work to understand how, when and why you slip, and to resolve or prevent those things from occurring or being allowed to play out fully. Or so I see it, anyway. I think I may be a teensy bit of a nazi with some of this stuff...
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Post by Covad on Oct 10, 2005 18:32:07 GMT -5
"It is missing some of the hardest mental steps - the idea of NEVER looking at it again. The idea of ALWAYS being clean, rather than MOSTLY being clean."
A light bulb went off in my head when I read this. The idea that I will NEVER look at pornography again is absolutely liberating. I will ALWAYS be clean!
That is a powerful thought. One that should have been quite obvious, but powerful nonetheless. I am only about 3 months into sobriety, but I can begin to see this as reality.
Still, I hear a small, whimpering voice deep in the recesses of my mind saying it doesn't believe me. I plan to hunt that voice down and step on its head!
Thanks BlackSpiral.
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