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Post by unbreakable on Sept 10, 2006 11:23:34 GMT -5
I just had a horrible experience.
Cleaning some of my draws out I came across aCD with no label on. I guess I already had an idea that there would be porn on it, and I put it in to check. I should have thrown it away the minute I found it. If there was anything important on it it would be labelled. SO I didn't anyway and when I opened it up to check the contents, the names of a lot of old movies leapt straight out at me.
I've been close to slipping for days and I really thought I was lost. I could hear all the justifications. Was convinced of how good it would feel. I had found another CD too, with less interesting stuff on, but still slip material. I broke that one in half, but left the other one, making lame excuses in my head like the mess that the first one had made when it cracked and flew everywhere.
Every step I took I crept a little closer to putting it back in and watching it.
I checked the 100 days thread and even seeing my 30 didn't really interest me, I put some music on that reminds me of how sad I was back when I first came to this board and how lost I was and I didn't think it was working.
Then I found myself taking my keys out of my pocket and scratching the back of the disc into uselessness.
I was so close...
I can feel a headache throbbing and tears welling
and all I can do is keep playing this song.
I hate what this did to me.
I hate my (expletive)ed up head.
I want back the simple days, I want it back, but it's all gone now. This is here for ever, a fight I have to win every day, or at least every few months when it rears it's head as potent as it ever was, lying in my own head. Just lying to myself about what I need, when what I need really is to never have been here in the first place.
But the moment has passed by me now To have put away my pride And just come through for you somehow
If you ever need holding Call my name, Ill be there If you ever need holding And no holding back, Ill see you through
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 10, 2006 11:26:31 GMT -5
God, I'm just sobbing and sobbing.
I'm so drained so quickly.
When did I get like this...
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Post by MJ on Sept 10, 2006 13:14:03 GMT -5
Hey unbreakable,
For some reason I haven't been following your journal, but I decided to click on it today and I can totally relate to where you are right now.
TOTALLY.
Yesterday and today I've come the closest I've ever come to relapsing since my sobriety date (June 17, 2006). The entire story is in my journal if you want to read it. I, like you, have been feeling on the edge for the last week. One minute I want to act out, and the next minute I deperately want to stay clean.
I've been crying too. Yesterday I cried, and the day before. I do the same thing that you do: I put on sad music to remind me of why I'm here in the first place. I find myself saying the same things that you're saying. Until my recovery, I never cried at all. Now I seem to do it so often. It's crazy.
We've gotta keep fighting this. I'm gonna continue to read your journal.
Stay strong, bud. We're all in this together.
Peace, MJ
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 10, 2006 13:20:32 GMT -5
Thank you man,
just seeing that someone posted on my journal is enough to make me feel stronger.
I'll catch up with yours too, it's nice to know we're not alone, isn't it.
thank you.
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 11, 2006 9:08:47 GMT -5
Just thought I'd journal the good days too.
In fact interestingly, for once I dont feel overwhelmed one way or the other. Most of my posts here are during bouts of either extreme elation and feelings of well being or severe depression.
Today I feel more balanced. I could probably drag out some things that could lower my mood. Equally I could probably think of a few things that would raise my spirits. But actually it's kinda of just nice to feel centred somehow. I dont get this much.
Not numb, I feel it, but not happy, not sad, life moves on, wheels turn, cogs grind and I am at least a part of the machine.
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Post by gordoni on Sept 11, 2006 9:17:32 GMT -5
Sounds good ... that's the way I like to feel, too. Elation has always scared me a little - like I'm setting myself up for a fall.
Keep going ... It seems like you have made such progress in your thinking since the early days of your journal. Actually one of the nicest things about coming to this site is watching people develop out of desperation into hope. I sense a lot more confidence and determination in your writing these days. You can beat this thing, and you know it!
Gordon
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 12, 2006 7:18:52 GMT -5
Thank you Gordoni.
I think you're right, I think I can beat this thing too! I like elation alright, but I find, at least at the moment, that it often turns to depression after the light has flickered out. Level is suiting me a lot better. I actually remember (off topic) when I first stopped drinking and smoking pot that this was one of my joys, I levelled out, all the extremes of emotion I had felt in the past disspiated into me being this calm, level headed amiable guy. I always attributed my wilder mood swings to my pot habit (which was pretty heavy back then) as a kind of mild pyschotic effect.
Anyway,
I'm on today journaling about that book I was talking about a few posts back. I do want to read this, but I'm still not sure how appropriate it is, I've been digging through reviews of it to try and make a decision and I thought I'd post a few. If anyones reading and wants to give me an opinion it would be appreciated, but be warned, there are things in here which I'm sure would be triggering for some people
[trigger] Review One Reviewed by Neil GaimanAlmost 10 years before his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction on a remarkable romp, Alan Moore, in collaboration with underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit: that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy and the Wizard of Oz, meet in a Swiss hotel shortly before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women—one jaded and old; one trapped in a frigid adulthood; the last a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl—provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different (and, for this is a pornography, very sexual) versions of the stories we associate with them. We go with the girls, in memory, to the incidents that became the Rabbit Hole, Oz and Neverland. As a formal exercise in pure comics, Lost Girls is as good as anything Moore has written. (One of my favorite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows to appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied.) In addition to being a master-class in comics technique, Lost Girls is also an education in Edwardian smut—Gebbie and Moore pastiche the pornography of the period, taking in everything from The Oyster to the Venus and Tannhauser period work of Aubrey BeardsleyMelinda Gebbie was a strange and inspired choice as collaborator for Moore. She draws real people, with none of the exaggerated bodies usual to superhero or porno comics. Gebbie's people, drawn for the most part in gentle crayons, have human bodies,.Lost Girls is a bittersweet, beautiful, exhaustive, problematic, occasionally exhausting work. It succeeded for me wonderfully as a true graphic novel. If it failed for me, it was as smut. The book, at least in large black-and-white photocopy form, was not a one-handed read. It was too heady and strange to appreciate or to experience on a visceral level. (Your mileage may vary; porn is, after all, personal.)Top Shelf has chosen to package it elegantly and expensively, presenting it to the world not as pornography, but as erotica. It is one of the tropes of pure pornography that events are without consequence. No babies, no STDs, no trauma, no memories best left unexamined. Lost Girls parts company from pure porn in precisely that place: it's all about consequences, not to mention war, music, love, lust, repression and memory.
Review Two Although Moore (Watchmen, 1987; From Hell, 2000) is arguably comics' most popular writer, many fans and more libraries may be scared off from his latest project, an unabashedly porno graphic novel in which Wonderland's Alice, Oz's Dorothy, and Neverland's Wendy reveal their carnal natures by relating their past sexual encounters and coupling in the present, especially with one another. While explicit sex, including incest, is on virtually every page, Moore has an agenda beyond titillation. The work voices an impassioned defense of artistic freedom that stresses that fiction and fantasies aren't the same as actual events and behavior. "Only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them," one character proclaims. Gebbie's delicate, painted style, rife with art nouveau references, somewhat mitigates the sensational subject matter. She and Moore have labored on Lost Girls since 1991, and the book's lavish production (three oversize, hardcover volumes in a slipcase) monumentalizes their dedication and adds a high price tag to the red-flag contents to put off all but readers and collections highly tolerant of the transgressive. [/trigger]
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 12, 2006 9:59:26 GMT -5
Posted verbatim from Wes's post on the main board,
I've been kind of thinking about words we use in recovery, and how they might be detrimental.
For instance, I always cringe in meetings when someone says, "I was on the subway, and there was a lust object." Actually, he or she is a person. Yes, I may have been lusting after them, objectifying them for my pleasure, but the reality is my lust doesn't make them less human. However, it might make me less human when I lust after others, and as long as I see people as lust objects, I think my recovery is stunted.
Another word that's used a lot on this board is "trigger." It means different things to different people here... SO's who have been harmed by a spouse's porn use usually use the word to indicate when something fills them with rage or self-doubt. It triggers an emotional response that links them back to the betrayal they have suffered.
Addicts say, "I was triggered, so I acted out."
It is the latter use that I've been thinking about. Someone was recently asked what triggered him. His response was the suffering of a loved one (very serious). Someone else might say, "I was triggered by a sexually oriented billboard, or cartoon, or magazine cover, or newspaper ad, or television show, or..." well, the list goes on.
In both cases, I've been thinking they weren't actually triggers. In the latter case, they were temptations. In the former case, it was anxiety. In both cases, they were merely excuses. MB and porn are still choices. Even in the deepness of our addiction, it is still a choice, even when we feel like we've given up our capacity to choose.
The addiction beast in my brain wants me to think I have lost my ability to choose. It wants me feel powerless. It wants me to believe that only a miracle will save me, and since I am unworthy of a miracle there really isn't any hope. The miracle occurs when we realize that a Higher Power wants us to choose, will help us do that, and we choose to abstain NOW.
Triggers are just excuses not to abstain. To enjoy all those great chemicals that rush through our blood. To enjoy instantaneous *rgasm on demand. So quick, so easy, and it feels so good. The Beast in my brain wants me to foget the emptiness that follows, the broken hearts and broken trusts in my selfish wake, and the massive disconnect. My beast wants me to only think of me (It), so that It can enjoy the drug one more time. Just once. And then he'll leave me alone.
So, for me, triggers are handy excuses. But abstaining is what really brings happiness. And abstaining is a choice I can make every day from now on.
I like the word NOW because I can only lust in the now. I can't lust tomorrow, I can't lust yesterday, I can only lust now. And I can abstain now. And when I tell my beast, I never use porn or masturbate now, It really hates that. But It tends to shut up.
I'm not sure why I'm rambling on about this, but I guess I needed to remind myself to stay sober today. No big temptations, but I can see my mind easily opening the beast's cage. Good thing I have this gun handy... and I'll just pull the trigger and shoot it. Now that's a use of the word I like. I never use porn or masturbate now. Bang.
Wes
This made me feel strong. I want to read it and feel that again some time.
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 12, 2006 17:32:35 GMT -5
So I slipped again.
Like minutes ago. I watched porn and masturbated. I even came here to ask why I shouldn't just before hand. Someone even gave me an honest and caring response and I just walked the (expletive) away from it.
Ugh! I'm pissed that I broke that 33 days. That's what I'm pissed about. It wasn't much fun. It was a release, but ultimately I waas proud of the time I had abstained and I threw that away.
I dont want to do the 'what lead to my slip?' (expletive). I'm back and I guess I will keep trying, because I want someday to be able to commit in a normal relationship and give myself properly.
I kinda guess I feel like the fact that I'm not in a relationship is an excuse. After I did it I came and checked my responses to my cry for help and a new one had appeared. All the reasoning was to do with his family, his wife, not lying, not cheating. I dont have that to worry about. I'm only answerable to me.
But I'm pissed at me.
I did it again.
Seems, I can never say never. I dont even know if I'm allowed to be here. Isn't there a rule about only people committed to recovery? I'm not showing much committment right now am I?
Did I do it to just punish myself? I dont feel punished, I feel like an obnoxious naughty child who's been caught and told off but is glaring at his mother with eyes that say 'I'll (expletive)ing do it again, you wait till the next time you turn you're (expletive)ing back!'
Is that me trying to strengthen my resolve as an addict before the opportunity passes? If it is, I guess recognising it as an obnoxious child is a start.
So I (expletive)ed up, and I (expletive)ed over the nice guy that tried to stop me on my lame, 'Please pet me, I need attention' thread just before I did it. How must he (expletive)ing feel? (expletive)! (expletive)!
So, don't reply. I'm not even sure I should be here anymore. I dont want anyone else investing anything in me because I'm not a healthy person for anyone who cares about recovery to be around right now. I'd kind of appreciate you not reading anymore if you can help it to, if I'm going to do this I think I need to do it on my own. I just leech off support and then throw tantrums when I dont get the attention I want.
(expletive)!!!
Day 0
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 12, 2006 17:45:30 GMT -5
Look, I dont want anyone to worry too much, I'm not beating myself up unneccessarily. I'm aware that after quitting for the first time 6 months or so ago I've only actually watched porn maybe 6 times and from a daily habit to that isn't a bad thing, so I see the light ok.
I dont feel half as hopeless or depressed as I have expressed in previous posts. Just a little petulant, I guess that's a pretty good description.
Someone told me to just switch the computer off and walk away and I KNEW that that was the right advice. I (expletive)ing KNEW it!
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 12, 2006 18:54:29 GMT -5
I'm od'ing on self hatred.
I just stood naked in front of the mirror and I hate it. I'm kidding myself that I'm losing weight, I'm sucha fat mess of a man at 27. I have this stupid short hair, bad skin, psoriasis, and ugly big nose, fat legs, fat behind, hige (expletive)ing belly, man breasts. Jesus, I'm a (expletive)ing disgrace.
I should have run tonight, but it's 1am. (expletive). Running isn't even making a (expletive)ing difference. I look as bad as I ever did.
I hear people saying, this is because you slipped, tomorrow is another day, but tomorrow is just the same (expletive)ing day again.
(expletive).
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 13, 2006 11:50:14 GMT -5
So disclosure for yesterday.
I lead myself to slipping.
All the way up the garden path. First thing I remember was ogling a girl at the bus stop on the way home for far longer than was appropriate. Secondly, read a message board thread (another board) that I knew would build feelings of lust in me and I knew would make things worse (it had images of women I'm sexually attracted to in in - not porn, but ...). Next, I further investigated the theme of the thread, googling what I pretended (badly) things that weren't 'as bad' as porn. Fourth, an online conversation with someone I really should stay away from lead to some VERY innappropriate text messages. I instigated that.
This is when I really start to suck...
Came here, to try to put myself off, it was clearly already to late. Tried seeking a little attention, didn't work for me and then just did it.
Weird thing, my conscience (who seems to have the voice of my ex) says, 'I'm not pissed that you've masturbated maybe 6 times in 6 months, I'm kinda proud of you there, but I'm pissed that you have to watch porn EVERY time, because they are so inextricably linked in your diseased brain.'
If anyone ever needed proof about the old, I'm addicted to porn so I'll stop, but I don't see why I should stop masturbating argument, well I'm it.
................................................................................................................
Today Sucky.Lame.*#&$#@ing.Day.*#&$#@ing.One
Do you know what, today I didn't think anything. I just didn't think.
I was out exhibiting at a conference, and I took a book (pretentious tool that I am I took an Anton Chekhov book - and I'm telling you why? For the same reason that it's pretentious that I took it!) and on the bus on the way home I'm thinking, how did I not even think about it today?
And I'm lying to myself...When I was setting up the stand this morning I got a text message. Seems the final message in last nights (expletive)ing rampage hadn't actually reached my phone, so even though I deleted all the others immediately last night, this explicit thing slapped me down first thing this morning and reminded me how bad I'd screwed up. Wahey!!!
Oh yeah, plus I was *#&$#@ing miserable in the car on the way there this morning (my mum gave me a ride.
maybe I should get the *#&$#@ing internet connection killed at home, that might just save me a lot of bother, although I always objected to taking stuff away from myself like that, I ought to have the will power. Not that I did with pot ever, if it was there I'd smoke it, even if I'd been crying the night before about being a pothead. I'm the same with food, I should never buy like a tube of Pringles or a packet of biscuits or a tray of lasagna, because I can't just have a few, I gotta have it all, I even get to the point sometimes where I eat just so it's not there to eat anymore (what the *#&$#@ kind of logic is that?).
Anyway, I'm out, I'm in a bad mood and about to experience my caffeine crash (I had three coffees today after my coach last week told me explicitly that I should watch caffeine as HSPs are particularly susceptible to it.
Blah, blah, blah...
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Post by justmehere on Sept 13, 2006 21:34:03 GMT -5
Okay, I have permission...
Sounds like a kind of hangover, doesn't it?
Not much to add here other than that there have been massive improvements in acting out, self-awareness and a good level of conscience that tells me you're not unsalvageable. lol.
Just wanted you to know I'm still keeping up even though I don't always know what to say.
The only 2 things I can suggest to you at the moment are to try the recoverynation workshop and find BlackSpiral's journal and go read it. I'm sure there's others, but I saw him on the board recently and wasn't sure if you were acquainted with his writings. Cool guy who's really really wise in recovery.
Take care,
jmh
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Post by unbreakable on Sept 14, 2006 7:25:26 GMT -5
The support I've been offered over the last few days has left me in awe of you all.
Thank you, it's reminders like that of why I'm here that touch me to the very core of my being. and I like that feeling.
So back to work ...
JMH, I think you're right, I hadn't quite realised, but your hangover analogy is a really good one and given my feelings about alcohol are probably highly appropriate.
I think the day count thing isn't as important as I might be making it.
What I do worry on is the apparently unbreakable link in my head between masturbation and pornography. The two seemed joined at the hip and I'm resolved that I need to sever that. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I feel ok today, productive, sort of, strong, happy, ish, kind of levelling out again I guess.
Why do I feel support is so bad sometimes? I can't accept it as something I will allow myself so I put up barriers (like the No Replies thing) and I dont really know why? It could be a punishment thing, low self esteem related. ie: I feel like I'm undeserving of support for some reason.
I think self esteem is at the root of a lot of this, I'm not sure I know how to combat that.
Actually maybe I do. Last night was ticking away, I hadn't eaten badly, exactly, I ate before 7 and not too much, maybe not the right thing, but not so bad if I went for my run. But time was ticking on and I hadn't been. I started to get angry as I convinced myself that I wasn't going to go and even got up and started making more 'bad' food (00.30). I then had a 'moment of clarity' that I can control this, and got into my running clothes and just went out and did it. I was good last night too, I ran an extra half lap, so 2 laps without stopping (about 6-8 miles) at 1am !!! I know, I just need to get out earlier, but I'm still thrilled I did it, I proved a point to myself. I can change my moods, I can take that power for myself.
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Post by gordoni on Sept 14, 2006 7:56:32 GMT -5
Hi unbreakable, I'm glad you're allowing replies again! IMO, you're absolutely right. In fact, I would go further and say that self-hate is at the root of it - not just low self-esteem, which is more of an everyday problem that will always be with us, to some extent. I don't think there's actually a world of difference between a PA and people who compulsively cut themselves with knives. That must release a lot of endorphins or whatever too, right? How to combat it ... as you say, it's very tricky! I haven't found the answer yet, and I suspect there isn't one - not a simple one, anyway. One technique might be to write about something that makes you feel proud and that generates strong positive emotions. Stillhopeful got me to write about my kids in my journal the other day, and that really helped me. What are you proud of? There must be something?! Another trick that worked for me a couple of times before I joined this board - actually helped me avoid a couple of slips - is to look at yourself in the mirror and say "I love you." I was surprised at the strength of feeling that saying that generated in me. Not a long-term solution, of course, but just something to try if you're feeling desperate. Good to see you back on track! Gordon
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