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Post by arctic on Feb 19, 2007 13:42:43 GMT -5
Day 40 of sobriety and I'm finally getting around to starting this journal. I have intended to do this for quite a while now, but somehow always end up hanging around the discussion boards. Now I've really started to realise that those areas of the board are no longer helping me with my recovery and I should just focus on journalling and getting to know myself a little better. Also, half the time I feel like I have nothing sensible to say to others on the board, largely because I'm still at the beginning of my own journey and not quite sure of my own thoughts and emotions.
Anyway I'm going to start with a little bit of personal history, most of which I've never really told anyone. I thought it would be a good idea to let it out. Perhaps there's something I could learn from it.
My first experiences exposure to porn were back when I was a little bitty boy, perhaps 10 years old, when me and my friends would occasionally find porn magazines laying around in empty construction yards, and sometimes even in the woods. Who knows who had left them behind, well I guess it must have been the workmen in case of the construction yards, but I’m not so sure about the woods, but they nevertheless ended up in our hands. Tattered old magazines they were, with water- and god–knows-what-stained pages and faded colours. You could still make out the pictures though and I remember that the reactions I had to these were quite curious. I am not certain that I enjoyed what I saw, or that I found the women depicted on the pages even beautiful, in fact I recall that they appeared almost yucky, but there was still something that appealed to my raw unidentified emotions. I certainly wanted to see more, and was absolutely thrilled every time I would discover another abandoned magazine. I was even excited and full of anticipation when I saw an empty construction yard barrack, the door of which was ajar or unlocked, which I would soon enter in search of abandoned porn mags.
I suppose the emotions evoked during these pre-pubertal browsing sessions must have been pretty intense since after so many years I can still remember some of the pictures that I saw, and even some of the pseudonyms of the models displayed. One of them was called ‘Ursula’ and she was holding a feather pen in her hand whilst striking a provocative pose. … Anyway when we would find a magazine, we would hide it somewhere in the woods (maybe that’s how magazines end in up in woods in the first place), in undergrowth or in the bushes, for later viewing. I guess the pact was that me and my little friends were suppose to go and do these viewings together, but I at least would end up going to do my own private viewings whenever I got a chance. This might also be my first experience of the ‘pull of gravity’ that later on became the hallmark of my various forms of sexual addiction. I would spend time preoccupied with the thought of the magazine in the woods, and soon I would find myself trekking on the path through the forest towards the X on the map. At this time, I had not yet discovered masturbation, so it was all about watching pictures and feeling very strange indeed. A funny feeling in the pit of the stomach, I recall. I’m not sure whether I should call this addiction or just normal little boy’s curiosity towards the opposite sex. It certainly doesn’t fit the definition of addiction in that I only spent a very small amount of time in this activity and most of the time there weren’t any magazines available anyway.
A few years passed and I was perhaps about twelve when porn movies entered the picture. A lot of my friends father’s were really into watching porn and they would store there porn videos among all the other movies, which us youngsters were likely to watch. If you were to run your finger across the titles on the shelve you would find Terminator, Rambo, The Evil Dead, The Fright Night, and then John Holmes’s Marathon… I’m not convinced that watching the The Evil Dead when you are still so little is a such a good idea, but certainly checking out John’s enormous member go on the offensive was much worse than that. Or was it? All I remember that watching porn movies with my friends was something that really turned me on, although I still found most of the close ups quite repulsive and I was sure that there would quite a lot of unpleasant smells and taste involved in what was being shown. Nevertheless, I remember hoping that all the other guys would just go away and leave me to watch the movies on my own. Indeed I did grasp every opportunity to borrow these movies from my friends. When it was someone’s dad’s movies you were after, you couldn’t just waltz in and say ‘Could I please borrow the ‘Massive Melons’ please?’ Neither could you borrow tapes that contained only porn. The porn would have to be preceded by another, acceptable movie, which supposedly was your sole motivation of borrowing the tape in the first place. You see, this was possible because the family of the best friend of mine got a movie channel that would show a few hardcore porn flicks a few times a week. The dad of the family would tape onto a VHS tape a decent movie, which usually happened to be the one that preceded the evening’s porn flick and then let the recording run into the porn flick.
I remember in particular this one VHS tape which contained a movie dealing with the politics of South Africa during apartheid, and I think it was called ‘A Dry White Season’ or something, which was followed by a porn flick. Who knows how many times I borrowed this one tape from my friend under the pretext of being extremely interested in human rights and politics. I knew he didn’t believe any of it, but at least when he’s dad came looking for Dry White Season, he could tell him that I still I had borrowed it yet again. I still haven’t seen this movie to date, which I frankly think I should, because now I am genuinely interested in human rights and the situation in Africa. I also watched Conan the Barbarian a good few times, or wait, maybe it was the piece of porn that followed that got viewed. Oh yeah, so it was.
I even remember stealing a porn magazine a couple of times, which is really quite strange because I would otherwise never steal anything. As a matter of fact, stealing was completely against my principles, and I would even resent those friends of mine who would occasionally engage in petty shoplifting. However, when an opportunity came to thieve a porn magazine, on one occasion from the bed side table of my best friend’s dad, and on another from underneath the driver’s seat of truck whose driver I had been assisting for a couple of weeks during the summer, I hesitated not. I didn’t even think of it as stealing, or maybe I did, I can’t remember, but somehow my desire to have the magazines seemed to outweigh anyone’s legitimate ownership of them. I even remember thinking that I doubted very much that in case the owners suspected me, which I think they did, that they would come and tell my parents that I had stolen their porn mags.
Anyway, all of these things I’ve described so far didn’t really feel like an addiction, in that I was leading a pretty normal life and my porn video watching or porn mag browsing was not consuming that much time at all. I was highly active in sports and would spend entire days outdoors playing with my friends. However, the first truly addictive experience came when I turned into a peeping tom.
I'll continue this story as soon as I have a chance. That' probably tomorrow.
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Post by MJ on Feb 19, 2007 16:57:53 GMT -5
Hey arctic, Thanks for sharing your story here. Glad to see you've started a journal as well. It's a good tool for recovery. Keep up the good work. ---MJ
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Post by arctic on Feb 20, 2007 13:55:07 GMT -5
My second day of journalling and my 41st day without P and MB. (By the way, I welcome any comments on my journal or on the way that I'm thinking about things.) I am not much of a journal writer I must admit. I guess in the past the problem has been that whenever I decided to start keeping a journal, the thoughts I ended up putting down on the paper were so dark that they would just depress me. But then again, I was pretty depressed those days, which thankfully I no longer am. So perhaps I should expect more success this time around. At least now I have a clear goal of keeping a journal, which is to clarify my thoughts on recovery, unlike before when I would hope that just going through the motions of writing a journal would lift me out of darkness without any additional effort on my part. I want to pick on the story that I started writing in my first journal entry, but before I do that, perhaps I should remind myself of some of the things that I have learned on this board during my short stay. Metaphors, lessons, tricks, concepts. Not in any particular order. Just whatever pops into my head. I won't have time to list more than a few of them here today, but I'll keep doing it as I continue to write my journal. 1) Remember to remember. Someone on this board used this expression to describe the process of reminding oneself in moments of temptation of the reasons why one is committed to quitting using porn. I think that it is so easy, once the initial pain is gone, to forget how much suffering porn used to bring into one's life, and instead, just think of those brief moments of high that you and your addiction had together. This is actually analogous to ending up together with you ex, only to be reminded afterwards of all the reasons of you breaking up with her in the first place! So whatever you do, remember to remember before you do anything stupid. Not remembering to remember is actually one of the main reasons why I always used to fail at my attempts at sobriety after having promised my wife to quit for good. She would catch me porning one day and I would feel so shameful and full of pain that I could easily see myself never going back to my old habits again. After a few days, however, the pain would start to ease, and accordingly, I would find less and less motivation to stay sober, until eventually, I would slip. Actually, I wonder if this phenomenon might account for the enthusiastic entries of many new members to this board that often seem to be followed by their complete dissappearance... Maybe not. I don't know. 2)Willpower alone is not enough. I consider myself to have buckets of willpower, which comes from my life long involvement in grueling physical exercise as well as my more recent commitment in the academia. However, I think that if I had not started on this board, I might have thought that I can just grit my teeth and remain sober for good. Although I think that willpower is absolutely essential to my recovery, I'm also actively trying to change the way I look at things. For example, I'm very aware of my low self-esteem and I am trying to improve it by helping others at work and being a good husband. I also try to stand up for myself if I think that I am being trodden on, and that seems to be helping. Ok ,that's a bit of a digression, but realising that I have to change as a person to acquire peace of mind, has been a major step for me. I really need to find a therapist who specialises in sexual addiction soon. 3)Middle circle behaviour and triggers. Before I started coming to this board and learning about sexual addiction, I thought that as long as I didn't look at porn, my recovery was going well. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Now that I have really committed to recovery I've come to realise that there are so many things that I have to kick because they titillate me in one way or another. For example, watching a lot of TV channels and shows is absolutely out of the question because of the semi nudity that they contain. Also, I can't watch women's tennis (which is a shame because I really like tennis), track and field (again a shame), figure skating (too bad because my wife likes it), and many other types of sports, I'm sure. In addition, I can't look at real-life women too long, especially not at their bodies, because as I've said elsewhere, I have voyeristic tendencies, and so looking at girls is definitely a no no. I'm actually getting pretty good at not looking these days, and I'll be sharing my experiences on the topic later. I've also stopped reading fitness magazines and many other types of magazines. The internet I use strickly for work purposes. I don't even have an internet connection at home because I don't want to have an additional temptation around. So anyway, before I never used to pay any attention to middle circle behaviours, which is one of the reasons I would always slip. Man, time flies. I guess I ought to be going home now, since I'm writing this journal after work, which is when I have time. I did call my wife earlier though, just to let her know what I would be doing. I think she trusts me though this time around because she can see that something is different. By the way, these moments after work used to my porn-time and I would always walk home after my 1-2 h session feeling absolutely drained and ashamed of myself. But now I can actually go home to my wife feeling full of energy and ready to share a nice and loving evening together. That's something to stay sober for. Will be continuing tomorrow, hoping to find time to get on with the personal history too.
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Post by arctic on Feb 22, 2007 7:22:39 GMT -5
Day 42 and still no P or MB. I’m actually writing this entry from my house instead of the office, since I find that there is so little time to do it after work. In particular my wife was not feeling that well today and wanted to go home (we sometimes work in the same building) so I decided to go with her and use my laptop at home. It was a good choice though, because I now feel rather comfortable (and well fed!). In addition, I finally have time to focus on writing; most of my posts to this board have been written online at work during breaks or after hours and therefore were often rushed and not well though-out. Maybe what I’m doing right now could be a solution to that problem…
The day started really well because last night I had planned out many things to do. Planning the day in advance is something that I know that I should always do, but it’s so damn easy to just postpone it until the next morning when you come home after a long day. And every single time I end up wishing that I hadn’t postponed it. So maybe I should make a commitment right here to start planning all of my days ahead. Starting now. I’ll come to this journal to report on my sticking to this commitment and whether it is helping with anything at all. I’m sure it will though, provided that the plans are realistic and that I follow through with them.
I’m bringing up planning the day in advance because I think that it has a strong correlation with my addiction to porn. You see it was always in the moments of not knowing what to do next that I ended up shying away from serious thinking and starting to surf porn instead. I’m saying ‘serious thinking‘ because my job revolves around research and the way I carry it out is pretty much up to me, as opposed to having my duties prescribed, and requires that I keep up to date and knowledgeable of what is going on elsewhere. Every freaking time that I was faced with a difficult decision (or it wouldn’t even have to be that difficult) I would find myself escaping to the predictable world of internet porn. Just for a few minutes of course, until my nerves would calm down and I could again get on with work. Yeah right. All it would take was a quick look at the porn pages and I would stay online for a really long time, or not given a chance to stay online uninterrupted (I share an office with a few others), I would remain preoccupied with thoughts about getting back online for the rest of the day. And back on I would get. At every opportunity when the others left the room to go for lunch, for example. When things started to escalate, I couldn’t even wait to be alone; I just tried to make sure that the others were not looking when I surfed for porn. I still don’t know if they ever noticed what I got up to.
So those were the kind of days (full of porn and desperation) I would end up having when the day was poorly planned. On days when there was one thing after another to do, however, staying clean was no problem and I would go home rather pleased with myself. Well, actually, even well-planned days would sometimes deteriorate…
Today was supposed to be planned out pretty well, but there were a couple of distractions that disrupted my flow, and I ended up feeling a little afloat, not sure what to do next. I didn’t surf for porn though, because that no longer is an option for me, nor did I ogle women, which I’ve also decided to quit, but there certainly was a really strong desire to escape and procrastinate. This goes to show that now that I’ve taken away the porn viewing habit, the underlying problem still persists, which is to do with having a clear-cut plan for the day and the commitment to follow through with it. Isn’t that what they say (Carnes for example) that porning is a symptom, not a cause. For me it appears that porn is the symptom of the inability to face the tough demands of a demanding job. (Gee that sounds like an old story, told over and over again in the addiction literature. But hey, if it’s a well known story, then someone should have figured out a remedy for it by now too.) Incidentally, I found it very interesting to read about the research showing that the most common environment in which addiction to internet porn develops is a highly demanding job, which comes with very little structured time and day to day supervision. Enter post-graduate research, the ultimate journey to unstructured time and pointless floating around! Good heavens I love to fit into these stereotypes! Carnes, you got me figured out all right, old boy!
Just now it feels that I’m wrestling with the symptoms of my addiction and failing to address its causes. I have no trouble staying away from internet porn, although sometimes if I accidentally end up on a site where there might be some pictures of women (just normal non-nude pictures) I ‘secretly’ hope that I could look at them. But then I catch myself and wonder what the hell I am doing. Sure it hurts a little to not to look, but I know that to look would hurt even more. Remember to remember, old friend, remember to remember.
The same thing happens with TV. For example today, there was movie on with a beautiful actress in it, and I found myself thinking somewhere at the back of my mind that wouldn’t it be nice if the was a scene in which she took some of her clothes off. And low and behold there was one (I kind of knew that there would be such a scene, since the movie was Chevy Chase’s Memoirs of the Invisible Man…what a fantasy for an ex-peeping tom) but when it started, I switched the TV off and came to write this journal. Hitting that off button actually felt really good, although the desire to look was pretty strong. The same happens with some of the UFC matches that I like to watch, with me wanting to look at the girls that carry those signs announcing the number of the next round. I really would like to look, but I always look away when they appear. Sometimes, however, the cutting is such that the girls appear quite unexpectedly and I catch a view of their body, and that makes me feel very uncomfortable. Not exactly like wanting to slip, but uncomfortable, that’s the best way I can describe it. There is a lot of tension in my body and I feel anxious and almost desperate for something. Such moments remind me of the fact that I am still very much an addict and must remain vigilant, so that I don’t think that I can get away with watching sexually stimulating material.
Often I think that I should stop watching TV all together, and come to think of it, I’d probably be doing myself a great favour in many ways if I did. There would be more time to read and to think and to talk with my wife. Hmm, maybe I should actually make a pact with myself and perhaps with my wife to stop watching TV, perhaps for a few months or a year. I’ve done this before you know, when I and my wife decided to give our TV away. We lived without it for about a year and a bit and felt that this actually enriched our lives. (If you ever read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’, a book for aspiring writers, you’ll note that he actually advices that you throw your TV out of the window. Good advice no doubt about it, as long as you ensure there’s no one walking past your window at that moment.)
So let’s think about this… if I were to give up TV I would be a) eliminating a big source of triggers, b) increasing my knowledge by committing more time to reading, c) improving my writing skills by reading more, and d) enhancing my recovery by having more time to understand myself. And oh, eliminating TV would also be eliminating one big instrument of procrastination, which in turn is one of the underlying causes of my addiction. What underlies procrastination though, is another important question that I should probably aim to answer. Lack of plans, fear of failure, lack of external pressure, habit, unclear goals and values, among other things, I’m sure. How about these then? Perhaps low-self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, not really thinking that you deserve a great future, and all that kind of thing, I suppose. So logically, all I now have to do is to start feeling worthwhile and having a healthy self-esteem, and I am cured. OK, let’s try it…OK, now…why isn’t anything happening? I still feel the same. Hmm, maybe it’s going to take a bit more work than this…
But giving up TV would once again be trying to stamp out the symptoms of addiction without addressing the causes of it. But then again, when you’re still trying to get to those causes and work them out, it’s better not to have so many triggers around you. It’s like taking yourself back to the drawing board before testing the newly designed you in the real world, with its casual triggers, again. I would of course still have to avoid all overt triggers such as sex scenes, but perhaps I would not have to go to such extreme lengths to avoid all the things that I now consider triggering or unacceptable. We shall see, but I am convinced that at this stage of my recovery I should eliminate all the triggers that I possibly can.
Anyway, I’m feeling a little strange today, with a bit of restlessness and tension, almost like sexual tension. I don’t know where it is coming from but it sure is not feeling nice. Perhaps I’m obsessing about my recovery too much and thereby making myself feel even worse, constantly focussing on how I’m feeling. I honestly don’t know, but I have to figure out a way to feel normal again. I’m not worried that I would go back to acting out again, because that option no longer exists for me, but I nevertheless would like to feel at peace. There’s progress in my thinking though and I’ll keep working at it and coming back to this journal.
I still didn’t get to continue writing my personal history today, but writing stuff about the present seemed more important than revisiting the distant past. I will now plan what to do at work tomorrow. Need to think how to work through the day differently too, so that I don’t end up making the same mistakes… One thing would be to stay away from this support board until after hours so as not to create distractions. Just now I think that I will probably end up posting this entry in the morning and checking out who’s been around. Is this a sign of a new addiction?
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Post by arctic on Feb 23, 2007 4:15:42 GMT -5
Day number 43 and I have not looked at any porn or MBd yet again. I have not watched TV either, as I decided not to do yesterday. I’ve told my wife about my decision to kick TV watching on the grounds of minimizing the unintentional receipt of sexual imagery, and she says that she understands and respects my decision. I can feel it in my consciousness that quitting TV is the right thing to do and this makes me feel all the more in control of my life. This is a decision I should have made earlier, but still, it’s better late than never. Can’t say at this stage how long I will remain TV-free, but I’ll see what seems to be necessary as time goes by.
Today at work was excellent! Just like a promised myself, I had planned my day in advance and was able to use my time efficiently. I also find that our research team is working really well together and that I am able to contribute both professionally and on a personal level. In particular, I think that I have managed to motivate a couple of PhD students to become much more interested in their projects, and this, more than anything that I achieve in terms of my own output, gives me satisfaction. It’s certainly a great source of self-esteem, seeing that you actually do matter, despite all the crap that your internal oppressor is feeding you. Before, my constant viewing of porn and preoccupation with thoughts on viewing porn, were holding me back so much. God, it was so difficult to get any work done. But hey ho, that was then and now I’m moving on, wiser than I used to be. Being effective is also positive feedback loop in that having a great day makes you more confident in your ability to have more of them.
I tried to spend a little less time on this board today, just to make sure that it was not becoming my new obsession. I have to admit, that there was a pull to come and have a look around, but most of the time I managed to convince myself that there were more important things to do, which there were. This I feel good about. I can always write these journal entries from home on my laptop you see. I realise that with a head like mine, you really have to be vigilant against all sorts of obsessive behaviour.
Speaking of being vigilant, I was looking for avatars on the net because I would really like to have some kind of symbol to go with by posts. But I’m really not sure how to go about such searches safely. I went to one site that has avatars of many different descriptions and it seemed respectable enough a place, and then in the side bar out pops this (expletive)ing porn advert with a picture of a topless woman in it. What the (expletive)? To my pleasant surprise I didn’t feel triggered to start surfing porn, but instead, the feeling that I got was more like ‘you (expletive)ing (expletive)s, trying to force feed that drug to me where ever I go’, and I quickly shut the site down and buggered off home. This sort of thing just angers me so much and I categorically refuse to be a slave of the goddamn porn industry. They don’t give a damn (expletive) about us. But not to worry, I’ll figure out how to get a super duper avatar incorporated in my posts safely soon. And if I won’t, I shall remain avatarless. After all I have been just fine so far.
Actually, seeing that uninvited picture did make me feel something else, as do a lot of things that I find to be little bit triggersome such as attractive women whom I happen to look at inadvertently. What happens is little bit strange and I’m not sure if anybody out there is even able to relate to it. When a visual stimulus of a sexual nature enters my eyes I get an instant jolt of anxiety and nervousness in my body, but my mind remains absolutely clear and I don’t feel like acting out. It’s like the stimulus is able to reach the more primitive parts of my central nervous system but is subsequently unable to penetrate the more sophisticated levels of cognition, which would be required for the rationalization that leads to a desire to act out. I don’t know if the blockade is caused by my strong decision to stay sober, which completely eliminates the possibility of being seriously triggered. I really don’t know, but I am nevertheless very happy that I am able to react this way instead of having sights and images haunt me all day long if chance upon some.
Moving on…I also went and wrote a little post in one blokes journal (codename fiddler). Anyway, he had just started his journal and seemed to be struggling a lot with staying sober. I think he was trying to kick internet porn and was feeling tempted to shift to porn DVDs or something as a substitute. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but this nevertheless reminded me of a mistake that I used to make in the past. There were times when I for what ever reason didn’t have access to the internet. Perhaps I had just moved to some temporary halls of residence or was on holiday somewhere with no internet connection. During such periods I would hardly ever crave for internet porn. I could almost see it for the poison that it was, and was happy to be unable to access the world-wide web. However, I never quit MB, because I seriously thought that this would be an unnatural thing to do (thanks to all the bollocks you read in health magazines), and since I found MB without P rather boring, I though it would be good idea just a have little bit of porn around to make MB a bit more interesting. So I would buy a porn DVD or two. Maybe a magazine. And so, although I didn’t view any porn on the internet, I would still continue viewing porn. The consumption would always drop drastically though when using DVDs and magazines, because internet porn had made the kind of guy who gets fed up with the same stuff pretty easily. So if there weren’t any new faces to look at all the time, I would in a way lose interest and just look at the stuff only occasionally, if I felt that I needed an avenue for escape. I also remember thinking, that if I just had a few porn movies around I could always look at them a little bit to avoid developing stronger urges to go look for internet porn. You know, that kind of thinking. But in doing so, I never cleared my mind of porn and it was very easy to return to internet porn when it became available again. Periods like this could last up to 3 months, and during them life was much better, I recall.
So perhaps I should add something into the list of things that I’ve learned during my sobriety and stay on this board:
4) A man does not need to MB in order to stay healthy and in fact, MB is harmful to person with addictive tendencies and can be door back to using porn. This is particularly true in my case, because I’ve never been very good at sexual fantasies, and instead have always relied on visual stimulation. Therefore, MB without some kind of visual data was always very dull for me. Hence, when MB begins, porn slowly creeps back in. Then again, I have never tried to stop my porn habit seriously before, I mean seriously seriously. All the previous attempts have been half-hearted and not based on a good reason. Hence, I cannot state with certainty that if I were to start MB now that I have reached a firm decision to remain sober, that I would drift back to porn. Better not start performing any experiments though.
There are other things that I would like to write about, but it’s getting late and it’s time to plan my coming day at work. I really like doing this, and I can yet again see a positive feedback mechanism operating here.
Overall, today was a good day. And oh, by the way, I’m reading a book called Addiction is Choice, and I have to say that this strikes a chord with me much more than has Out of the Shadows, which was eye-opening but didn’t leave me feeling very positive about the future. My wife read it too (out of the...), and she liked it a lot less than I did. We’ll see how things go and which school of though I will judge to be more useful in my recovery.
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Post by arctic on Feb 26, 2007 4:37:14 GMT -5
(Note to anyone: Although I finished my first entry in this journal by saying that I became a peeping tom, that was about 16 years ago and I have not returned to that activity since. I thought I would make it clear here, because it now seems like that I never get around to continuing my personal history. I don’t know why I’m saying this here, but there you go. I guess on some level I feel that it is worse to be a peeping tom that it is to be a good old internet porn addict.)
It is Sunday, day 45 of sobriety, and I am not even contemplating looking at porn or MB. I have also refrained from watching TV, like I decided to do a few days ago. I am already thanking myself for deciding to kick this commonplace but so debilitating habit of TV watching. More time to read, learn, talk, do sport, relax, basically do everything, really.
I’m a couple of days behind with this diary writing, since on Friday I worked pretty late and then me and my wife headed straight to my colleague’s house warming party. I was perhaps a little bit concerned how it would go, because I’ve recently been a nervous kind of guy who feels a bit uncomfortable with people. Therefore it was great to find myself socialising with many people I had not even met before, and really enjoying myself too. This is such a triumph in me and I believe it to be a reflection of my improved self-esteem. It wonderful to be able to enjoy people’s company again, because what could be more pleasurable than that to the social being that I am. Well, that everybody is, I should say. There were also a few very attractive women present at the party, women that I would in my old state of mind have ogled with no shame at every opportunity. And I have to admit that I felt something of a pull to check out the bodies, but I resisted the temptation, and it passed and I felt great. Well worth it, all this resisting, that is. I even ended up having a long and interesting conversation with one of the girls, and the whole time I looked her in the eye like a fellow human being and not some kind of an object to be desired. That was a triumph too and I feel that I am making progress in my sobriety by chancing a few things such as behaviours and perceptions here and there.
Oh yeah, here’s another important thing I should mention. On Friday at work I interacted with a girl whom I don’t really know from before or work closely with. It seemed like she might have liked me a little bit, just from the way she was being so overly helpful and nice (I know this could be a misinterpretation, but it makes no difference in this story). Now if this kind of thing had happened back in the bad old days I might have been quite flattered and felt a nice and warm feeling inside. But now I just talked with her like a professional to professional, without feeling any attraction whatsoever, or feeling obliged to reciprocate any signals she could have been sending. It’s just so clear to me now that I love my wife and there will be no room for any flirting with other girls, and this again is a massive thing for me. I guess I used to be a bit of a romance junkie, a characteristic that probably stemmed from my low self-esteem which needed buttressing, but it appears that this tendency too can be beaten with a bit of rearranging of ones values and re-habituation.
Saturday started out pretty well, although I felt pretty tired after having stayed up late on Friday. I nevertheless did a bit of reading in the morning before breakfast, following which I nipped to work for while to get some essential things done. The thing about going to work on weekends is that there is practically nobody around and if you wanted to, you could sit there undisturbed and view porn as much as you wanted. In fact, that’s exactly what I used to do almost every time I visited the office on weekends. Sure I would go in determined to actually do some work, but typically, I would begin by going onto porn pages, and then doing some work if there was some time and energy left. Sometimes I would try to get the work done prior to even going on the web, but very rarely could I resist the temptation. Now, however, I am able to be in the office, completely alone, using the internet for useful purposes and not even want to view porn. The feeling of control I derive from being able to do this is incredible! Admittedly, I sometimes feel a bit uneasy when I’m in the office alone, but my decision to pursue better things in life makes the thought of surfing porn unthinkable. I think the key to my newly found safe use of a computer is that I have managed to flip around the pain-pleasure relationship of porn vs. sobriety. Before porn used to = pleasure and sobriety = pain, whilst now porn = pain and staying sober and coping with life = pleasure. This has probably been my most significant development during the time that I have stayed sober. Back in the days when I tried to quit viewing porn I thought that I would be giving up something and in so doing, missing out on all the new stuff that was becoming available. Has she gone nude yet, has she started doing harder sets, what new galleries are there etc. Now, however, I know that there is nothing to miss out on, just pain waiting to be realised. I now know my ex for what she is and I’d rather die than get back together with her.
I know that I’m making it sound as if my experiences whilst sober have all been great. They haven’t, but not because I have missed acting out. The reason for not feeling great is more to do with having a massive gap in my coping mechanisms, because before I would always choose not to cope but to escape reality into the world of porn instead. Therefore, every day life can be a bit overwhelming at times and I feel a need to do something to ease, but since porn no longer holds a promise of relief for me, I just have to figure out something else to do. Quite often this means actually applying my brain to the stressful task at hand, no matter how painful it feels. Funnily enough, it always feels so much better afterwards when you force yourself to face your problems, I’ve noticed. Something positive to get hooked to there, wouldn’t you say.
Anyway, back to Saturday… After I returned back home, we went out to a bookstore with my wife and I bought a couple of books to keep me entertained what with me not watching TV and everything. I bought Tom Holt’s Little People, which I expect to be very funny, and Tom Sykes’ ‘What did I do last night?’. This last is a story of a real-life alcoholic, and since I think that porn addiction and alcoholism are rather similar, I figured that it would make an interesting read. A comment by someone on the cover even says that it is the first completely truthful book about addiction (the person had ever read).
So that was all fun and good. I’ve also noticed whilst in town that I can control my habit of ogling at women much better than I used to. In fact I feel that I am almost completely in control of the, which makes me very pleased. Now what I do when I’m outside is this: If I notice that there is an attractive, well she doesn’t actually have to be that attractive, woman walking in my field of vision, and I feel a temptation to look at her, I quickly ask myself ‘why do you want to look at her?’. This immediately gives me the strength to look elsewhere and the desire to ogle at that particular girl disappears. Quite often though, when I’m out there my eyes chance upon someone attractive and that’s when I employ the technique of bouncing the eyes onto something else, which I’ve read about somewhere on this support board. I find it very useful and if you do it quickly enough the sight of the attractive woman won’t even have time make you feel too uncomfortable. I would, however, caution anyone to try bouncing the eyes just for the hell of it, that it, seeking women to bounce your eyes off, which effectively gives a sneak peak at every woman you might desire to look at. Instead, and I know that I’m reiterating here, if you notice that there is a woman in you peripheral field of vision, don’t look at all. If however you accidentally land your eyes on someone attractive bounce them. Doing this soon becomes a habit. To have developed this habit has given me incredible sense of freedom, because I used to feel so enslaved by my habit of ogling.
The only really negative thing that happened on Saturday was that my wife got a bit upset about all this porn addiction business. You see she has recently read Out of the Shadows, which has left her with the impression that all people who regularly use internet porn end up escalating into all kinds of illegal (expletive). For this reason, she is now concerned that I too was involved in something immoral and illegal, which makes her quite angry. Couple this with her learning that all addicts ever do is lie and you’ll see how difficult it is for me to try to convince her that I was not involved in anything illicit at all. Sick, for sure, but not illegal. I try to tell her something to that effect, but I know that she’ll find it hard to believe, and so I tend to let it go, and tell her that I suppose that we just have to try to move on with our lives. I guess time will heal this problem too. After all, my being sober and open with her about my problems is still relatively new. I still find it almost ironic though that I suggested that she reads the same books on addiction that I read in the hope that this would make things easier for her, but instead, she ends up feeling worse. I can understand this, and perhaps I should have been a bit wiser in my book recommendations. However, I also feel that if she is feeling resentful towards me now, it is a bit more difficult to be completely honest with her about my past. Actually, I find this quite difficult anyway, especially if she wants to know some particulars, for example, what would my ritualisation consist of, I find it very embarrassing and potentially hurtful to her to start describing getting out the napkins and stuff. So I just end up not telling, but this doesn’t feel right either. Finding a person with whom you could be completely honest without the fear of hurting them is actually the only reason just now why I would considering seeking out a therapist. I’ll have to see how things go, and I have to say that they have been going pretty well overall. Besides, the rest of the Saturday evening went really well and my wife said that she was not feeling so upset anymore.
Today has been an excellent day. I slept extremely well, for about 9 hours, and having rested so well, I decided to hit the gym straight after breakfast. I had a really tough workout during which I attacked the weights with furious anger. Despite being quite tired afterwards, I felt energised. When I got home I continued reading Addiction is a Choice, and the more I read it the more I realise how much the free-will model makes sense, and how terribly destructive the disease model is. I mean, to say that addiction is a disease and people are powerless over it and cannot determine the course of their own lives, just strikes me as the craziest nonsense in the world. It is an apologist view and provides people with escapist tendencies the perfect excuse to continue indulging in whatever they wish. At least this is how I see it right now. No offence meant to anyone, but I think that I am ultimately responsible for my successes and failures. But I won’t dwell on this topic any longer this time, but I suspect that I will in the near future.
Continuing the list of things that I’ve learned during my sobriety:
5) I like the analogy put forward by someone on this site in which addiction was compared to a spoiled child who throws a tantrum when it wants something and screams ‘I wanna, I wanna, I wanna!’. That’s when you, the adult, or the voice of reason, must simply take that child away and wait until it stops screaming and then return to your shopping, or surfing, or what ever it was that you were doing. 6) I also like the way Curious Voyager spells the word rationalization: rationa lies sation. That effectively summarises the whole process; Telling lies to yourself.
Well, I think that’s enough for today, since it’s already getting quite late and I still have my tomorrow’s work day to plan. I really like this new habit too, since it allows me to keep busy the whole day, and in addition, I can better identify things that need doing when I’m doing the planning from home. Most importantly, I’m planning, which I would often neglect to do in the past, from which would follow indecisiveness at work, which would lead to a desire to escape, which would lead to porn, just for few minutes honest, and then a whole day of acting out interspersed with preoccupation. But hey ho, times are changing and this dude is moving on.
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Post by arctic on Feb 27, 2007 7:04:56 GMT -5
OK this entry is going to contain a lot of negative stuff, but that’s how I’ve felt today. First of all, today I’ve had a tooth ache. I had a nice morning listening to music whilst making breakfast (I always make breakfast for me and my wife), and I was getting in the mood for having a great day at work. When I got to work, things were still looking bright, although I felt a bit exhausted, as I often do on Mondays. Then however the toothache started. It robbed me of my ability to think properly and made me very irritable at everyone and everything. The rest of the day at work was not that joyful for this reason. I also felt a little bit angry at this support board, because suddenly I feel that I am no longer fitting in, what with my ideas of having a free will and all. But I’m fighting my tendency to get so angry at things, and that’s why I wrote a couple of replies on the board today, which I thought were not angry at all. Whether they were of any help to anyone is another matter, but at least they were not harmful.
I also sense these little seeds of doubt entering my mind about my ability to stay sober. They are coming from reading this board, which I guess is kind of opposite to the effect it is supposed to have. I mean that I gather ideas from other people’s posts and the combination of these ideas makes me feel really lousy. These ideas subsume: 1) Recovery entails doing the 12 steps. 2) If you don’t agree with the 12 step ideology, you are resisting the best possible principles of recovery and don’t know what is good for you. In fact, you are in denial. 3) The addiction is such a sneaky disease that feeling that you have gotten better means that you’ve actually gotten worse.
I just feel such desperation reading through material containing these ideas. At first I’m full of optimism and fire and then I read someone say that unless you join this organisation or that and follow their credo to the point you are doomed to fail, and I’m left feeling alone and deluded. Perhaps I am deluded. Perhaps I am only kidding myself by thinking that I have the ultimate say in what I say or do. Perhaps I am just setting myself up for failure. Perhaps I’m going through the same path that millions have trodden before just prior to falling into the abyss. I don’t think that I am, but maybe this just means that I’m crazier than I ever thought possible. I just always thought that there was more than one way to skin a cat, as long as changing ones thinking was one of the ingredients of recovery. And I think that I am changing my thinking, or am I?
And now my wife is also feeling like crap because she is finding it difficult to find a job that she likes, and I don’t quite know how to support her. I feel like saying that she shouldn’t be giving up yet and instead keep looking until every possibility is exhausted. But I think that deep down she wants to feel like crap, almost to punish herself. I don’t know what to say to make her feel better, which makes me feel even worse. I don’t feel like acting out though, which I guess is a positive thing.
Hey ho, life goes on.
An addition made a little later… I feel much better now with me and my wife having talked about all sorts of fun stuff. I actually feel quite positive about things and not at all worried anymore. It’s good to notice that those moments of darkness always disappear after a while. I’m still feeling ill with the tooth problem and now there seems to be something wrong with my stomach too. I need to get on with my work though, although taking some rest might be a more sensible idea.
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Post by ferdberfil on Feb 27, 2007 13:11:02 GMT -5
Hi Arctic-
Lot of stuff there. I've been where you are, no question about it. And I guess the best advice I can give is that there's really no controversy about it to me - 12 step group membership is not required to recover. In fact, for some people recovery is hindered by 12 step membership. For others, it's completely life-saving.
There's no need to feel like you have to fight it. People will have their opinions about it. The important thing for you is to put one foot in front of the other, continue to get help wherever you can, and continue to put yourself out there. Don't hide yourself. Talk with other PAs whenever you can. Use other avenues for recovery. Therapy, meditation, exercise, sober activities, church, what have you. Whatever fits with your values.
If you find yourself associating with people giving you toxic messages (e.g., predicting your failure, telling you you're "in denial" when you know you're being completely honest), then ignore them or don't associate with them. Don't feel the need to fight. Have compassion for the fact they they have received help and feel the need to say the things they do in order to feel helped themselves. It's not personal. It's not about you. It's about them.
One of the most difficult things for us PAs (for us humans, even) is anger. I need to recognize this about myself so often. I'm angry so often. I hurt myself by getting caught up in the reactions of others and *my* reactions to others, and to things around me. The only thing I have control over is myself, everything else is completely out of my control. That includes 12-steppers. It doesn't help me to get angry at the disease model. It doesn't help me to get angry at people who feel they know me better than I do. It's better to just accept they these people need to feel this way and think this way, and that I need to continue to focus on remaining centered, calm, and compassionate towards others.
To be fair, there is quite a lot of wisdom in 12-step philosophy. But you're also correct that there's a lot of aspects of 12-step philosophy that for many, can do more harm than good. One of the things about successful recovery is that people need to recover in line with their own values. It's not something a person can force themselves into. Don't force yourself. Don't go into recovery as a reaction against the problems with 12-step ideology, but don't force yourself into 12-step ideology either. But continue to abstain from porn, because it hurts you. It hurts me when I use it, so I don't.
I think you're doing really well Arctic. Take care, my friend.
-FB
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Post by arctic on Feb 27, 2007 14:00:36 GMT -5
FB, Thanks so much for your thoughfull reply and your words of wisdom. They really mean a world to me. I will take your advice and not try to fight things or to feel that I am being forced into something by an invisible hand. I know that this has been a ridiculous way to have thought about things, but it was nevertheless getting quite burdensome. Thanks for helping me out. Perhaps you can gather from the way that I write that I am not only a recovering PA but also a recovering hot head. I get especially rebellious if I think that the only way that I can beat my addiction is related to religion, because I am a radical atheist, a term Douglas Adams coined to differentiate himself from agnostics. I don't want to be angry and I don't want to withdraw from other people. It's just something that I've done too many times in my life, and thus fall pray to it quite easily. I'm trying to change this though since anger is rarely of any use, and I shall think about the things that you said and shall do some introspecting. I will also continue to read you Buddhism quotes! I guess in the end all I want is to recover and to help others do the same in the best way that I can. I'm feeling pretty ill physically right now (tag-teamed by toothache and a stomach bug ) but I'll write a journal entry from home on my laptop if I find the energy to do so. Take good care FB ...and peace, Arctic
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Post by MJ on Feb 27, 2007 18:37:26 GMT -5
I also sense these little seeds of doubt entering my mind about my ability to stay sober. They are coming from reading this board, which I guess is kind of opposite to the effect it is supposed to have. I mean that I gather ideas from other people’s posts and the combination of these ideas makes me feel really lousy. These ideas subsume: 1) Recovery entails doing the 12 steps. 2) If you don’t agree with the 12 step ideology, you are resisting the best possible principles of recovery and don’t know what is good for you. In fact, you are in denial. 3) The addiction is such a sneaky disease that feeling that you have gotten better means that you’ve actually gotten worse. I just feel such desperation reading through material containing these ideas. At first I’m full of optimism and fire and then I read someone say that unless you join this organisation or that and follow their credo to the point you are doomed to fail, and I’m left feeling alone and deluded. Perhaps I am deluded. Perhaps I am only kidding myself by thinking that I have the ultimate say in what I say or do. Perhaps I am just setting myself up for failure. Perhaps I’m going through the same path that millions have trodden before just prior to falling into the abyss. I don’t think that I am, but maybe this just means that I’m crazier than I ever thought possible. I just always thought that there was more than one way to skin a cat, as long as changing ones thinking was one of the ingredients of recovery. And I think that I am changing my thinking, or am I? Hey arctic, Just wanted to let you know that I can identify with what you're talking about here---wondering if this board is having an opposite effect of what it should be doing, feelings of desperation reading through all this addiction stuff, etc. I've found that recovery becomes hard to stomach when I'm bombarded by so many things like this. Anyways, keep sharing. Peace, MJ
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Post by arctic on Mar 1, 2007 14:02:18 GMT -5
(If you are reading this entry, you might want to skip straight to the last few paragraphs, in which I am being completely honest about the peeping tom episode that I’ve been bottling up for a long time. The location is marked with bold letters. Just a thought, so that you don’t get tired and give up before the really important stuff. The other stuff might be interesting too, but was written in a completely different state of mind.)
Today I have been sober for 49 days. No P and no MB. I am still feeling physically very ill, but at least I’m doing pretty ok in the mental health department. Yesterday’s reply from FB in particular has made me feel excellent; it’s almost like a heavy burden has been lifted from my shoulders through the knowledge that by being what I am, and doing what I do, I am not straying from the path to recovery, just taking a different one to it. I was also rather touched by MJ’s dropping in and letting me know that he too sometimes feels overwhelmed by the various approaches that people seem to adopt on this board. Thanks MJ! I will now focus on recovery best suited for me, and continue to read on the topic as much as I can.
I just nipped to work for a couple of hours since I was officially ill, but spent this time mainly on the board, as the physique was not quite conducive to proper work. I felt a little bit guilty for doing this, but I told myself that most people in my position would have elected to stay at home and not come to work in the first place. I also felt that it was important to my recovery to check the board and send a few posts to feel that I was still part of this great support board thing that we’re doing here. I felt excited and I wanted to reach out. I guess that’s more like the way things should work around here. Go out there, talk, connect, and share, instead of hiding in your own journal building up anger and getting more and more confused. I have also started to systematically look for individuals on this board whom I can relate to one way or another to be able to gain insights from them and perhaps to establish a useful dialogue. I will still continue to lament on my concerns about certain recovery strategies if I feel the need to, but I will restrict such laments to this journal. I shall also try to deliver any criticisms in a positive way, what ever that means.
Since I’ve felt so mentally light today, as if there were troubles in this world, I noticed something interesting. When I’m feeling so good about stuff, images of P or girls I used to ogle would try to creep back into my mind. I wonder if this is something to do with there normally being a barrier of defiance and hatred in my mind, one that is specifically barricading access of P into my consciousness, but when I momentarily make my piece with the world, all of those hateful things also become forgiven and consequently are given free entry back into the cortex. I mean, normally I would be on my guard all the time, easily blocking away any P fantasies, but when I feel completely relaxed, I lower my guard. I guess this is what others mean by saying that PA is sneaky (expletive) of a condition and that one should never lower ones fist lest one gets punched in the nose repeatedly.
I think this has been the first time since the start of my sobriety that I’ve really lowered my guard a little bit, and knock, knock, who’s there?, pornographic fantasies! To be fair, I have to say that my indulgence in these totalled probably up to 10 seconds (I’m pretty good at kicking these things out of my mind when they do appear), but it’s still something to think about. In addition, I probably shouldn’t be using the word indulgence to describe what has been happening, because the appearance of such images has been quite uninvited. But the scary thing is how an accidental mental pop-up can kindle a self-fulfilling prophecy such that, as you are worried that more images might appear, and as if by magic, they do. There hasn’t been any desire to act out though because in my mind, P still stands for pain as well as porn, and these two are one and the same thing.
This business of mental pop-ups reminds of a concept that encountered on this board a couple of weeks ago. I believe it was called ‘exposure therapy’ and consisted of allowing oneself to fantasise about ones favourite P and all that, whilst just sitting there with no access to the net or anything, and also, importantly, refraining from MB. This was somehow supposed to help deal with the fantasies in the future and to teach the subject that he needn’t masturbate if fantasies do appear. Or perhaps I got the whole thing wrong. Anyway, the thought of having to do this on myself absolutely horrifies me and I think it would make me very upset indeed. For me it would be playing with fire, and so far, I’ve achieved the best state of mind by keeping all P out, whether coming from within or without. I just hope that constantly blocking certain thoughts doesn’t cause them to brew into something totally insane and uncontrollable until one day they will break their way into the forefront of my mind like a bunch of Goblins into the tomb of Balin. That would really suck. I don’t see why they should though, and I’m sure that as time goes by, my ability to cope with PA will grows stronger as I grow wiser. I wonder if there are mental pop-up blockers.
Oh yes, I finally got myself an avatar that I really like. I think the picture beautifully captures the journey that I have to make, up these massive steps to a place where the sunrise is so beautiful. For me the steps symbolise personal growth and the sunrise is the new, better life that I am headed towards. I also changed my personal statement or whatever it is that appears below the avatar to me being headed for a better life, instead of not having to scratch even if it itches. I kind of liked the scratchy message though, because it is so true, that one doesn’t have to give in to temptation no matter how strong it is. This is especially important to me personally, because back in the days during my half-hearted quitting attempts I would always give in to temptation, because on some level I believed that the presence of a temptation meant that sobriety was not the right thing for me. Surely my body knew what it needed. Bollocks! I thought that I should have changed my thinking first, and from this sobriety should have followed automatically without me having to go through the inconveniencies of abstinence. Speaking of half-hearted attempts, in the past, never was I able to really want to give up viewing porn, because it seemed like an old friend. But now it just seems so easy to visualise a life without P because I’ve seen its true colours. Some friend! (expletive)ing back-stabber more like! Of course it’s not P that is doing any stabbing in the back, but me stabbing my own back, no matter how hard this might be to achieve physically. Yesterday, I contributed to the thread ‘how to treat women’ on the general discussion board. I expanded on the point I believe had already been made such that women are actually hurt by the way we men look at and treat them, by using my wife’s personal experiences as examples. I then got reply from an SO saying that ‘I, arctic, could clearly see the issue’. Although my instant feeling in response to this was pride, to have an SO say something positive to me, I’m not sure if I should have gotten any credit for being so observant. After all I used to be such an ogler and objectifier of women myself. I must point out that I have never said anything inappropriate to a woman, I would just stare holes in them. Although I’d like to think that this never did any harm to anyone, I’m sure that some of my staring was quite obvious and has made many women feel uncomfortable. But that’s not the way I used to see it when I was at the staring end. In fact, I don’t think that I considered women to have any emotions at all, or simply didn’t spare the subject any thought, behaviour that I suppose is part of the definition of objectification. It is especially interesting to note that despite my wife having had such bad experiences with being treated as an object, it never occurred to me that I was doing the same to other women all the time. If I heard, however, that someone had objectified my wife, I would be furious. Such double-standards! The world would be a much better place if we could just follow the ‘golden rule plus’: do unto others what you would like done unto you and your loved ones.
As I’ve written earlier, I am stamping on the ogling habit big time now and it is really working. The pull of the habit is still there but I am able to override it through volitional control of my actions. I am also trying to place myself in women’s shoes, metaphorically speaking, and envisage how they might perceive me if I was to ogle at them. Before I might have said that women would see me as confident and flirtatious, but now I would be more inclined to use terms like sleazy, frightening, lecherous and creepy. In fact, my wife used to tell me back in the days that I should really change the way that I look at people because it looked like I was up to something and that I looked somewhat dodgy. She didn’t know then that I was objectifying and pornifying women, but she nevertheless rapidly noticed that something was wrong with the way I behaved. I wonder how many women I have frightened in my life time through ogling. I will never do that again to another woman. I will also bear in mind Helstone’s daughter who felt so uncomfortable with the lascivious stares of grown men on the streets that she ended up wearing baggy sweaters in hot summer weather just to escape the unwanted attention. Remembering these kinds of real life examples helps maintain the right perspective on my own actions. I should also remember that the subject and the object are likely to have very different perceptions of the same situation.
Now that I’m here, I might as well deal with the whole peeping tom business, which I’ve briefly mentioned above, and also touched in a thread called ‘being cured vs. remaining in control’. This happened when I was about 15 and living in a small town, with mainly detached houses. I and my best friend lived in houses whose backyards opposed each other and we would routinely cut across the back yard to visit each other. This friend also happened to have a sister three years older than us, and although she wasn’t necessarily a beauty queen, she nevertheless held substantial attraction to a little hormone-stuffed boy like me. I also have this recollection that she would sometimes tease me with her sexuality, wearing a bit too little clothing or bending provocatively here and there and lying in a funny angle and all that. On a couple of occasions she even staged an underwearless upskirt, I’m sure about it, at least one of them of was clearly intentional. She also had porn mags in her bed room, go figure. Anyways, I would habitually hang out at my friend’s house in the evenings and she would be home too. I quickly realised that she would always follow the same showering routine, in which she would have to walk near the place where we sat on her way to the shower, and then walk back near us again to return to her room. And it just so happened that her room was on the ground floor and facing the back yard, which was pitch black, plus she never drew the curtains. I don’t know why, but it occurred to me on one faithful night when she once again went to shower that I could just excuse myself and pretend to go home, but instead I could go and peep through her window. And so I did, and it worked. The kicks that I got out of this were so unbelievably strong that I can still remember them very vividly, and I was immediately hooked on peeping tomming. I figured that all I would have to do was to make sure that I was always at my friend’s house at a certain time of the evening, and that I excused myself when the sister’s shower time was nearing. So I kept doing this night after night, basically every time I got a chance. Sometimes my friend was not at home in the evening and at those times I would just skulk around the backyard waiting for the right moment. From where I lived I could also see the light in her bedroom window, and every time that light went on in the evening, I would quickly put on some clothes and race outside to the backyard. Sometimes I waited for hours outside in the dark, thirsty and hungry, but unable to leave my spot.
Then the winter came, and where I grew up we used to get quite a lot of snow. And with snow came the inevitable tracks in the snow, but this didn’t lessen my need to peep at my friend’s sister. So I continued my nightly activities, prowling outside her window, but I soon realised that for some reason she had started to draw her curtains. A light was also quickly installed to provide lighting to the back yard. Of course I knew that all of these things were happening because of the tracks in the snow, but I somehow managed to convince myself that it was probably nothing. Surely tracks could just as easily appear by boys like us playing in the snow. I even remember encouraging my friend to do stuff in the snow in the backyard in order to stage some legitimate tracks, so that my peeping tom tracks would not stand out. Another crazy thing I did was that when I was in the house when she was taking her shower, and after she had already drawn her curtains, I would quickly sneak into her room and open the curtains ever so slightly so that I could see inside later. So this is the kind of (expletive) I would get up to instead of just admitting that it was time to stop.
One night I was doing my usual thing again, waiting out at the back, when I saw some movement in a window of a room where there were no lights on. (expletive). Had they spotted me? I quickly run back to my house, and it almost seems funny in retrospect, I put on some of the brightest clothing that I possessed, changed my shoes to something with a completely different sole pattern from the ones used whilst peeping, and headed back outside. The reason for putting on bright clothing was that I would always wear black when out peeping and I thought that a peeping tom wearing bright clothes would be inconceivable. So wearing this outfit I then went back to my friend’s house, this time through the front and rang the door bell. You see my friend had not been at home that evening, but I pretended not to know that and I somehow thought that my appearing immediately after the potential sighting of the peeping tom at the back of the house through the front door wearing bright clothing would somehow prove that I couldn't possibly be the peeping tom. So the door was opened, by the mother, I think, and she seemed very displeased to see me and answered my enquiries as to my friend’s whereabouts rather curtly. The sister wouldn’t even come to the door, which she normally would have. Something was wrong and I knew what it was. They knew.
Some people might have decided at this point to give up the whole peeping tom business, but not me. What I did instead was to start looking for other opportunities to peep, and I would really scan the area for potential targets: detached houses with big and dark backyards. So I would leave the house in the evening, cycle somewhere, hop off my bike and run into the black woods that surrounded the residential areas and enveloped quite a few of the houses. But for some reason finding such places was not quite as easy as I had hoped for. There was, however, this one really attractive girl who lived quite near our house, and I decided to find a way to peep her. I would often see her jogging past in her tight jogging gear, and because I had already had such successes with my friend’s sister, I remember thinking that I had discovered this power to see anyone naked, whether they knew about it or not. To be more precise, I remember thinking that they no longer had the power to deprive me from seeing them naked and I felt quite triumphant about this. Now that’s a pretty dangerous kind of way to think about things, but that’s the way (expletive) was. So I identified the window of their family bathroom, which was a small one and pretty high up too, so one would have to climb onto a stool to see inside. What I would do was to ride my bike to a play ground that was just next to their house and then sneak behind their house and try to peek inside. Once again it was winter and I was leaving tracks in the snow, and I still cannot understand today how the hell I could have been so dangerously careless and stupid. I guess that says something about the strength of the pull that an addiction can exert on you. Anyway, I would do this every once in a while when I saw from the park that the light at the critical window was on, but I never saw anything at all, with the potential exception of the dad’s shoulder. One night, however, when I had once again ridden to the park and was just going to peak in, I felt this very thin string against my right thigh. It had never been there before and it yielded ever so slightly as I pressed against it. Nothing happened thought, but I sensed that something was up. I quickly retreated behind a nearby fence and seconds later that back door opened and the father, a big muscular guy, came out holding a flash light and started to scan the back yard with its beam. I held my breath. The snow was creaking under his shoes as he started to approach the spot where I was hiding and just before he got there I pounced, startled him and run for my life. I negotiated a seven foot fence in two seconds and run towards the woods the man hollering for me to stop and come back. I didn’t think this was a good idea. So I spent a little time in the woods cooling down and then returned back home and once again, believe it or not, changed into my bright clothes, changed my shoes and went back outside. I had to do this because my bike was still lying in the nearby play ground and I had to recover it. But as I approached the park I saw these two men, the dad and a guy from next door carry my bike towards me. They knew that it had been me who triggered the alarm! They then took me back to my house and made me tell the whole story to my parents and I felt so embarrassed about the whole affair. Apparently the police had also been involved in the investigation and my foot prints had been photographed and everything. They had also come up with the idea of the trap wire. What I thought was a rather harmless activity aimed at only pleasing me had clearly caused a lot of terror in this family of three people, something that had never even occurred to me. So that’s my peeping tom story from those younger years. It was my first experience of sexual addiction and one that got me hooked on voyeurism in the years to come. I’m glad I told you this story. Thanks for listening those who did. I think I’ll stop for tonight since it’s getting a bit late and frankly, I feel psychologically exhausted.
Arctic, over and out.
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Post by ferdberfil on Mar 2, 2007 1:15:28 GMT -5
Hi arctic-
Your post was really moving. You're setting a really good example for me in terms of the kind of honesty and fearless self-examination I think I need to go for. -FB
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Post by MalachiC on Mar 2, 2007 2:11:40 GMT -5
Arctic, two things:
1. "I was immediately hooked on peeping tomming" made me laugh out loud because sometimes words just don't want to cooperate and you have to bend the rules. I like it.
2. Your story is the most important thing I've read since coming to this board. You really capture the feelings COMPLETELY. For some reason, we don't step back and say "what the eff?" We just rationalize more and more implausible scenarios. For a year after college, I lived with roomates and I would come home from work and lock my bedroom door and mb. It became such a part of my routine that I figured "oh they think i come home, i'm so tired, I nap." But that obviously makes no sense to a sane person. Similarly, my other addiction reared its ugly yet delicious head one time when I consumed, over the course of a week, forty of my mom's vicodin. Each time I took a pill, I would say "oh she will think she lost one." then "oh she will think maybe my dad took this one." then "oh she will think she spilled some." until the whole bottle is gone, and suddenly my excuses that worked for EACH INDIVIDUAL MISTAKE meant nothing in the face of this herculean monument to idiocy I had created.
I think about that a lot, because 1) I got caught, and 2) It's a much more literal, concrete, and tangible example of addiction than our p/mb. I'm convinced the feelings and emotions and shame are the same for both, and so even though I'm in the death throes of p withdrawl (17 days? I lost count), I can be pretty sure that I'll look back on this with the same clarity I see my pill-stealing.
And you with yours.
Cheers brother, let's rock this out.
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Post by arctic on Mar 3, 2007 14:06:29 GMT -5
I believe today is day 50 of my newly found sobriety and I am feeling, exactly like yesterday. But this is a good thing, because yesterday, I felt good.
Thanks a lot for those who took the trouble of reading through my previous post. FB and Malachi, you said that I was describing the way that I felt honestly and completely. That was because when I wrote the story, I was back there, reliving every moment. It was just one of those moments when I felt the doors to my heart open and I had to seize the moment to write down what I saw. I was feeling quite intense and I had to be a little bit careful not to get turned on by the memories.
If there is one thing that I’ve learned from this site, which there is since I’ve already listed at least 5 in my earlier posts, it is that the only thing that works on this board is honesty. I mean, it is cool to make jokes occasionally, and to me, those can be a really nice way of feeling that hey, this guy is probably my friend, but ultimately the only thing that benefits me is honesty.
But since I am on the topic of honesty, when I was writing my peeping tom experiences, I had also written down another pretty honest account of some of my more recent activities, which were not exactly peeping, but voyeurism nonetheless. I then deleted all that I had written because I get paranoid that my wife might one day decide to come to this site, which she knows about, and track down every single post that I’ve ever written. She doesn’t know my username or anything, but it would probably take her about 15 minutes to figure out who I was, if she really wanted to. I don’t think that she would really do that, but it was with this fear in mind that I ended up censoring my own post. I mean there’s so much talk around this board and elsewhere that one should aim to be completely honest with ones partner about the past sexual addiction if you wish to leave the baggage behind and move on, but I simply don’t believe in blurting out everything to just come clean ,so to speak, if doing so would hurt her without necessarily helping with anything. Hang on, isn’t that exactly what one of the 12 steps also say, that you should aim to seek the atonement of those whom you have wronged by confessing your wrong doings, provided that this doesn’t harm the confessees. I guess that’s what I am trying to do here, but to be completely honest with you, I am also (expletive) scared of the consequences. So, on one hand I don’t want to confess to my wife all of my escalated behaviour simply because I don’t want her to hurt, but also because I am afraid of doing it. She even told me after having read the book by that Carnes fellow that she’d rather not know what I had been up to, which is something that I mumbled about in one of my earlier posts. OK, decision made, I shall not volunteer her anything. It can only do harm. If I do start to feel that something is bottling up inside I will come on blurt it out here or to a therapist or the directory enquiries. Gee, that’d make their day. ‘So the number is blah, blah, blah…anything else I can help you with? ‘Yes there is this one thing…’ I think that I will continue writing my stories here though, because I guess it will ultimately be much better to get them out in the open.
I mentioned elsewhere that I no longer have a broadband connection at home. As a matter of fact I haven’t had one since 2004, for two reasons. One reason was to minimise the time I spend viewing porn on the internet by restricting it only to working hours. But there is also another reason, which was that by refusing high speed internet I would convey to my wife the appearance of someone serious about staying away from internet porn. If I had said yes, let’s have a broadband connection, she would have immediately thought, that’s him hoping to get back to his internet porning habit. This stems from our past when we did have a high speed internet at home, which enabled me to barricade myself into my room for several hours each evening under the pretence of ‘studying’. I know some people like Malachi pretended to be napping, but my thing was ‘studying’. After all I was a post-graduate student.
Our routine would be this. We come home from work, my wife and me, make dinner, watch some TV and talk a little, not too much mind you because things were not going so well most of the times thanks to me, and then I would tell my wife that it was time for me to get back to studying. She too was a student at the time and could understand the constant need of poring over research papers. I don’t think I have ever done so much studying in my life, day in day out, all day long, at work and then at home, and learned so little. I guess some people might say that they have never slept so much and gotten so little rest.
We lived in a relatively small two bedroom flat, and I studied in one of the bed rooms. She would study in the other one the only difference was that she was actually studying. Both rooms had doors that could be closed if you wanted to. I certainly did. The rooms were at a right angle relative to each other and so there was no direct view from one into the other, but it was still important to have the doors, at least hers, closed so that I would have enough time to close the porn sites if my wife decided to come out of her room. Just listening for the sounds emanating from pushing the chair away from the desk when getting up was not good enough, nor were the footsteps, because once I was in the trance of porn surfing there was no way I could rely on my ability to pay attention to such sounds. But if sounds were combined with the rattling of the door handle and the dragging open of the door, then I would have just about enough time close down and get back to my supposed learning activities. I would even leave papers open on the desk with some of them practically lying across the keyboard, and also have an online paper open on one the windows on the screen, so that if she were to walk in, all she would see was me bent over these papers, and bending over suited me fine to cover the erection, and a respectable publication decorating the computer screen. What a model husband. Any girls dream no doubt.
But although I was desperate to have my door closed, I was also feeling paranoid that my wife would suspect something if I just went into my room and closed the door behind me. After all there was no good reason for doing so since there were no noises coming in from the hallway or anything. So I would always go into the room and leave the door open, initially. She would then go into hers and variably either close the door or leave it open. There was no good way of predicting what she was going to do and I remember clearly how tensely I would wait to see whether her door would be closed or left open. If it got closed, triumph. I would quickly enter my study room and close the door behind me. That was ok to do, wasn’t it, since people in this house clearly were in the habit of closing doors behind them anyway. She did it. There was nothing suspicious about me doing the same thing. If, however, she decided to leave her door open I would have to think of ways of shutting it without appearing to have any ulterior motive. The usual tactic that I employed was first to start working on my computer to create a studious appearance and then wonder into her study supposedly looking for this book or that or asking whether she wanted a cup of tea since I was making myself one anyway, and when leaving her room, I would either ask whether she wanted me to close the door or leave it open. There was a pretty good chance that she would ask me to close it, since by this time she was already starting to feel absorbed in her studies and not wanting to be distracted. Sometimes I didn’t even bother to ask, but closed the door anyway on my way out, either deliberately, thus pretending to be the good boy who only wanted her to have her quite study time, or I would accidentally kick the wedge from under the door so that it would shut itself. It now occurs to me that one strategy that I could have employed was to start washing the dishes in the kitchen in order create some noise and get her to close the door of her own volition. It’s a little bit strange to have such thoughts enter my head now that I am no longer involved in such activity. I guess the sneaky ways of thinking still linger in my head.
Anyway, this is the routine that we went through on most nights for about one year, from the time I got a broadband connection at home, which I justified to her as being highly useful for us both, because we could now easily access online papers and to check our email anytime we wanted to, until the time that I got caught having viewed lots of porn at home on my laptop for not remembering to delete the temporary internet files. History I would never forget to delete, but the files would sometimes escape my attention when I switched off the internet feeling exhausted and disgusted with myself. Funnily enough, after my evening session was over, I would normally re-open my door, perhaps to feel a little bit better about myself, and also, provided that my wife had not come out of her room whilst I was behind closed doors, to make her think that I had never had my door closed in the first place. You see, I was always extra careful to close it very quietly so as to make it possible to reopen it without her knowing that it had ever been closed. I think she was not aware just how much porn I was viewing but I’m sure she was suspecting something was going on. First, we were rarely having sex those days. Second, the emotional connection was a bit shaky at best. Perhaps it was for these reasons that she would occasionally ask me after one of my study sessions, what exactly did you study today and what did you learn? I would therefore always have to be mentally prepared to give a convincing answer to questions like these, which was easily done by skimming through a paper or two and memorising a couple of salient details. Quite often I would also just pretend that I had read a particular paper for the first time, although I knew it from before and recite its findings instead. After all she didn’t know which papers I had read and which ones I hadn’t. The only way I could prevent my evenings deteriorating into a porn viewing frenzy, was to leave my laptop at work.
Perhaps some one might be able to relate to a story like this. Going to extra lengths just trying to ensure that I got what I wanted. I would also always be very excited if my wife told me that she would be nipping out for the evening because that meant that I didn’t have to go through with all this business of keeping the doors closed. If she had announced that in two days she would be going somewhere, I would really look forward to this. If she was trying to make up her mind as to whether she should go out or stay in, I would always come up with a whole lot of good reason why going out would be in her best interest. On a lot of the weekends, I deliberately left a lot of my work material such as books and printed research papers at work, so that I would have the perfect excuse to go to the office and surf porn there. Yet again I could have juggled the doors if I needed to, but there was always more danger of getting caught at home than there was at work, especially because I had a lock on the door there. I would always feel very anxious before I told my wife that I would be just popping into the office for a while to get some work done. I would prance around like a caged lion trying to calculate whether she would suspect something if I told her that I’d be going to work, or whether it would she would trust me. My hands were cold and sweaty, my stomach in a knot when I would finally ask her, honey I was thinking of nipping to work for a couple of hours, is that ok? Occasionally, I would be tactical and ask her to come with me hoping to god that she would say no and that she’d rather stay home. That way I could almost feel guilt-free about going.
When I came back from work, at some point I noticed that my wife had started to look at my crotch as the first thing when I returned. What was she after? Had I sometimes had stains on my trousers? I bet I had, and in fact I know that I sometimes did. Or I would notice afterwards, that (expletive), there’s this translucent patch on my inner left thigh. That didn’t put me off continuing to surf porn though. Why should it? She was just checking whether I now had stains, just like I used to when I was still careless. Now that the stains were no longer to be seen, surely she should have known her heart that I’m was not up to anything at all.
Anyways, I am doing fine now. I’ve doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing on the topic. I’ve also tried to become a little bit more active on the board, and overall I’m feeling very positive about my recovery. There are some little difficulties with coping with every day situations, but these always pass and I think that I am growing as a person. It’s been a while since that has been happening since my stagnation about 6 years ago. And importantly, I still believe my having freewill to decide what I do with my life, and I have now used it to decide that I will remain sober and pursue happiness.
Note added afterwards: When I finished writing my about my past sneaky behaviour I wanted to get it posted to my journal (I'm writing these entries from home without an internet connection.). So I went to my wife and told her that I would be nipping to work to get some stuff done. I felt horrible! It was like I was right back there doing the old sneaking around again and I felt my stomach turn into a knot. I was also worried that I was becoming addicted to this site now, because I really was looking forward to coming here and posting. Maybe that's normal, but I'd better just watch out.
I also told my wife that I had been writing about the way I used to sneak around. The replied that she had always known what was going on and that it really used to annoy her because she felt that I must have thought that she was an idiot to have expected her to believe all my BS excuses and lies. She said that it still angers her to think back to those days, and that she still carries this subconscious belief that I think that she is in fact an idiot. That's why she for example quite often snaps at me if I ask certain kinds of questions, for she thinks that I am ridiculing her. I felt like (expletive) when she told me this. Almost as guilty as having viewed porn. I'm glad that she did though. I feel much better now after having been to town with her to have a nice browse in a book store and a cup of coffee.
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Post by arctic on Mar 4, 2007 7:57:01 GMT -5
I spend a lot of time thinking about this board. Preoccupation.
I look forward to coming to this board and enjoy getting on the computer just to come here. Ritualisation.
I spend more time on this board than I intended to and sometimes get less work done because I am here. Compulsive online behaviour.
I often feel lousy after logging off because I had promised myself to do work instead of visiting this board. Desperation.
Welcome new addiction.
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