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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 16, 2005 17:05:06 GMT -5
Some background, then...
I don't define the beginning of my addiction as the point of exposure to it. That would be like assuming that the first time I ever drank beer or a glass of wine, I became an instant alcoholic. I didn't. And with porn, it was the same - at one point, it was just something I enjoyed. I don't try to claim that was a good thing - I never really understood the moral implications back then, and even before I was an addict, I don't doubt that my interest had a warping effect on my perceptions of the world. Even back then, I felt guilt and shame; part of me always knew there was something wrong in it.
Addiction began some years later. I'd started out with the same kind of general, spare-time interest I'd always had, but I'd begun turning to the porn to help with stress and pressure. Soon, I was hooked; and not long after, I knew it. Although part of me wanted to justify it as being morally neutral, underneath I knew it wasn't. I began trying to quit, all on my own, but I also didn't want to accept that I was an addict. I decided I had a Bad Habit, and tried to change it - without a real plan, and without any success, either. I struggled, slipped, failed, gave up, started again, struggled and slipped for almost a whole year. Sometimes, I wouldn't have access, and that would give me a reprieve.
But they never lasted. Soon enough, the addiction had kicked itself up again, and after one bout I ended up admitting that I "sometimes looked" to my wife. She wasn't at all happy about the fact, and so I said I would quit. For some reason, I hadn't really realized it would be such a problem - I figured, though, that now I had a real motive to quit. And that would be the last kick that I needed.
Wrong, again.
Later that year, an argument exploded; one that led to our marriage almost ending. She discovered I hadn't quit, though it had been 7 months. I'd tried, often - but had failed. And after then, I'd known that I would need to quit, properly. I promised I would. I committed to stay sober. And I did - for almost a whole month. Then I started to slip - small steps, at first, which I was able to justify to myself. But not long after that, I was all the way back into it again, slipping and sliding all over the place.
For a solid year, I struggled to try to quit, and kept failing. And every month, I dreaded the one-year anniversary of my promise to quit coming round; I was sure that my wife would mention it, and I knew I couldn't lie to her about it. In terms of days, I had probably stayed sober more than 11 months out of the 12, but that wasn't the measure at all - I was still hooked, still dependent, and I knew it well. I'd strung together some chunks of sobriety here and there, but in terms of emotional dependency, I hadn't budged an inch. I'd just white-knuckled through stretches.
I had a knot of guilt and dread in my stomach for that whole year; I was certain that when that day came around, my relationship was going to be gone; that I'd have thrown it away. I kept slipping and sliding, and when the day came around, I was terrified.
It never happened. The day passed without mention, and I survived, desperately relieved, but guilty and horribly upset. One day during the next five months, I had a horrible experience when I ended up lying in bed, full of guilt, mind racing, unable to sleep. I called her to confess, to beg for help - but couldn't do it. I blamed the fact that I couldn't sleep on too much coffee, and I lay on the phone with her, needing her company desperately, and unable to tell her what I wanted to.
I had thought that dreadful night would be enough to break my addiction, but it wasn't - it changed it, but didn't end it. The looking, chasing, seeking continued, in spite of it. Three months after that change, I confessed. It was a hard day for both of us, but I wanted and needed help desperately; and to do it, I finally accepted that I was really, truly addicted. It wasn't just a bad habit. I admitted to myself, at last, that I was an addict; and that the road to break free may well be hard.
After talking to my wife, I decided that I needed support outside of myself for it, and I wanted it to be someone I could trust - and that turned out to be one of my friends. I called him up to talk to him one day, and confessed my own struggles; I confessed to him what I was going through, what it was doing to my wife, and asked him to hold me accountable for my actions and my struggles. For the next five months, he sponsored me.
But it didn't work out. Those five months WERE the cleanest I'd ever had; but they weren't clean. I struggled here and there; I slipped once or twice. I never fell back into the binge patterns, which I was grateful for; but I still didn't seem to be able to stay really, truly clean. I felt the cleanest I had felt in years, and it was a delight. But two months later, everything had fallen apart again. I had a heated argument with my wife over something completely separate - and to soothe my feelings, I turned to the porn, having somehow convinced myself that the marriage was ruined anyway, so I had nothing to lose anymore.
A brief binge occurred, and then...the heat dissipated, the argument was resolved, and we were back on the right track. The day after that, I confessed the slip to her, and begged for help and one last shot at sobriety. She agreed to help me find a way to approach my addiction, and we decided we would talk more that weekend. I felt high, full of energy, hope and optimism.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 16, 2005 17:05:22 GMT -5
The morning after that, I slipped again. The slip lasted for roughly 10 seconds - I saw a picture of a woman on a non-porn site, checked the URL of it, and followed it back to where it came from (and that WAS a porn site).
The site opened in my browser - I saw the page swim, filling with other images of the same woman - then my heart raced, my head swam, and I closed it, guilty as hell, confused and feeling hopeless. That was the whole of the slip. I didn't know what to do now. I couldn't stay sober even for half a day, even with all the support and love in the world. I felt hopeless and lost, and couldn't see how recovery could ever be possible for me. I talked to my wife that day, confused and baffled. She supported me, but really didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to say either. What could you say, really, after a promise was broken so quickly and so easily?
The day after was a Saturday. That day, my wife and I talked at length. Neither of us wanted to give up the relationship. We both wanted me to be sober. I sure as hell didn't want to feel this crappy anymore. And somewhere during that conversation, I had an awakening...a kind of revelation that was hard to put my finger on. I rode high on that, and realized that I COULD break this addiction. I decided, then and there, that I would make all the changes, do all the work, give up anything I had to in order to make the sobriety stick. In the end, I knew it would be worth it.
At first, my wife was my support and sponsor - we never really planned for it to be permanent, but we thought it would be a way to start, until something better could be found. As it turned out, though, nothing better ever did - and through the recovery, we grew much closer, and much stronger as a couple. It was hard at times. It hurt sometimes. But in the end, today, it has been worth it all.
My recovery, in the end, proved to be a mix of many things - psychology lay at its root, and as I progressed through my recovery, I learned many things that ended up flowing through into other areas of my life, helping me to really start to recapture the energy and vibrancy that I had in my youth. As I recovered, I began to realize just how tightly chained I had been; just how heavy the price of my addiction had been, and just how lucky I was that I had found a way to break out before the price included my relationship.
And beyond...
Today...I've left behind many of my old beliefs, and I've recaptured new ones. My hopes and dreams are starting to live again, and I've found the energy and confidence to pursue them.
As a young man, I had chased success with all the energy of my being, but after the disastrous impact on my life of my addiction I had grown used to the possibility of failure, and grown afraid of it; instead of hunting for success, I had started to put barriers up to keep my fears at bay. I had stopped doing, and had started reacting. My life had changed, not through any great change in my own situation, but instead, through a drastic shift in the way I viewed the world.
During my recovery, somewhere along the way, I saw it. I realized, then, how much of my life was shaped not by my situation, but how I looked at it; how much of my potential was crippled by the simple, but powerful belief that I somehow wasn't up to the task. I had changed my potential, simply by losing faith in it.
So, then, I started to make changes. I started to make myself look, once more, at the things I COULD do, the potential I DID have, and the hopes and dreams of my life that I had somehow let fall. I chose to pick them up and start chasing success again, instead of running from my fears, and hiding from the possibility of failure.
In the end, after all, failure is a gift to us. It teaches us what we did wrong, and if we are open to the experience of learning from our failures, it teaches us how to succeed. Nobody succeeds all the time. I hadn't as a child. But I had always believed in my ability to succeed, and it had carried me through.
Today, I believe again. And that's where this journal really begins.
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Post by sofedup on Mar 16, 2005 17:54:02 GMT -5
Blackspiral,
Thank you for putting your Story here . I have always had admiration for you. Now that I know your story, it helps me to see that Yes, there is Light at the end of the tunnel, thru this Addiction.
it gives me Hope. And right now, Hope is All I have. So, I grab onto it like a lifeline.
you said..
Great insight .... and again I admire you for this. I am Positive, Your wife can see what a wonderful Man you have become and is thankful for your Dedication to your Recovery.
Yes, I understand this. And its Where I am at also. Beleiving in myself. Believing in Who I have become and am today.
god bless you, as your continue on your path to Recovery...
sofedup
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 18, 2005 1:25:23 GMT -5
An overview of my recovery, Part 1
Although the passages I posted above give a reasonable, if undetailed overview of what I went through on the way to recovery, it really doesn't touch on what I did to actually recover. So before I begin with journal proper, I'm going to post a fairly brief summary of what I did, and what I learned that really helped me on the way. I don't expect it to be complete; I'm sure that there will be a lot of elements missing, as it'd take me a long time to recall everything that happened in the last year and more. But to keep it a little easier, I'm going to break it down into what I think is a reasonable order - that is to say, the order in which they either happened, or I became aware of them.
Step 1 - Sobriety First things first, and the foundation of everything - I got sober. Sounds simple enough, but as people here are more than well aware, really it's not. Building my sobriety was a challenge in and of itself. As I mentioned in the post above, I had slipped and fallen numerous times before - but my mindset was different this time.
It's not completely simple to describe, but the feeling was not just one of determination - that I'd had before. But this time, instead of a dread of failing and a degree of panic, I felt hopeful...and more than that. Underneath it all, I felt a certainty that I hadn't felt before; a knowledge that I could do it, and a belief that I would.
The two most basic elements for sobriety, to my mind, are these - the willingness to put your sobriety first, ahead of the other things in your life, and the willingness to make changes and sacrifices to support and protect it. More than once, I've likened sobriety to a child; at first, it can't stand on its own, and it needs all the help it can get both to be supported, and to be protected. Left to fend for itself, it simply won't make it. Sobriety becomes a way of life; but at first, it is anything but.
One more important element, though, is this - taking responsibility for your actions. You can't just point fingers and blame the world, or the past, or the pornstars, or anyone else for your addiction. The addiction is in the present, in the here and now, and is a part of you - and to be able to deal with it, you first have to accept that you are responsible for it. The other factors may well be responsible for helping to bring the addiction into existence - but YOU are responsible for bringing it to a close.
Anyway, as I mentioned - it's important to be willing to make changes and sacrifices to protect your sobriety, especially early on. The changes I made include, but weren't limited to :
Destroying and throwing out DVDs. Not porn DVDs, but the regular old Hollywood kind. Any film that I had ever used as porn in any way, went. Any film that I had considered using as porn, went. And later, if I realised a film contained something I hadn't noticed, it went out, too. Each DVD was cut in two, then thrown in the trash.
Throwing out a great many magazines. I also quit buying magazines for the most part - the magazine section of most shops, even when the shops aren't stocking what is officially called "porn", is touch-and-go at the very best. Car magazines, bike magazines, fitness magazines, beauty magazines, sports magazines and many others use images on their covers that, within the last 20 years, you might well have expected to SEE on the cover of porn.
Changing my routines. I changed routes to and from work to avoid certain shops which I knew displayed porn magazines out front. I stopped going to those shops which stocked the same kind of things, too, and for some things, I stopped shopping altogether - DVDs, for example, were too suspect to buy in the stores, so I would only purchase them online, from Amazon. I also avoided areas that were associated with other areas of my sexual addiction, such as places I had gone to ogle women. The biggest problem with this was not so much making the changes, but being willing to see the old behaviours, accept them and change them, without chaining myself down with guilt and shame for them. Sometimes, that was very hard.
Writing out a book of Reminders and Affirmations. A small, blue-denim covered pocket book, around 3 inches high and 2 inches wide, bound by a piece of blue elastic - I carried it everywhere I went, and had it sitting beside my desk at work. In it, I had written reminders to myself - short, succinct, direct reminders about what I wanted for my recovery, what I would be giving up if I chose to quit, what I was going to lose, what I had already lost, and the pain I had already gone through sometimes. The first page said, in blunt English, to focus on each page and think about each point for at least five seconds. Reading through the book helped me break out of addictive craving on many occasions; it acted as a reminder, a form of meditation, and a very effective pattern-breaker. The book never left my side for over six months.
Alternative behaviours. I planned ahead, buying up crossword books, new books to read by authors I liked, and taking a notebook so I could scribble sketches and write when I wanted. I planned places I could go to get out of the office and get a breath of fresh air, away from the internet-enabled computer where I did my daily work. I planned simple excursions to a nearby store, which would cost me around $3 to buy a snack and a low-value drink, but which would break me away from the computer for around 15 minutes, enough to break the cycle of an addictive haze. I also learned a little about meditation, and practiced applying it to calm my racing thoughts. I also wrote down people I could call for support. Every single idea I had was prepared for, and every single one was written into the back of my pocketbook, one line each. On the front page of the book, I wrote a simple reminder to myself - that the back of the book contained alternatives for me, if I needed to use them.
Breaking my beliefs. I wrote, often, about my addiction; about what it was doing to me, and had done. When I didn't understand it, I would sit and write about it, trying to see what was going on. I wrote about the beliefs that strengthened my addiction; the beliefs in the fact that porn was harmless, that it was only natural, that all men were this way, that it was healthy; and I broke them down, each in turn, by smashing away the unsteady legs that they had been built on. This really took full flight in later recovery, but in the first couple of months, it had its maiden voyage, helping me to start to explore and understand the real depth of my addiction (though I was nowhere near ready to truly address it in those first weeks).
Planning. As with all the things above, I planned. I spent time, thinking about all the things that had caused me to fall before. All the situations that had led me to fall before. All the chains of thought that had led me down unhealthy roads, and brought me to failure. Every time I found a new one, I thought about how to break it; how I could prevent it from occurring, or how I could deal with it in a way that wouldn't leave me turning to addiction.
Talking, and support. One of the single greatest weapons I had in my sobriety was the support of my wife; not simply because she was my wife, but because she had a lot of experience of addictions. She was able to help me understand many of the mechanisms of addiction, which were helpful, but the single most helpful thing in all of it was this one thing; when the days were hard, when it all felt dreadful and I didn't feel like it was worth it, or like I could hold on, or had begun to feel like an emotional wreck, she was able to comfort me, to understand how I felt, and to promise that if I held on, it would pass, and it would get easier. That one thing, repeated to me often enough, was what gave me the strength to hold on more than once - simply faith in the fact that it wouldn't last forever, and I could beat it, I could ride it out.
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In the end, some of these changes wound up being permanent for me, while others became more relaxed later on, such as no longer needing to carry the little book everywhere I went. But they were only ever relaxed when I was certain that I could deal with things healthily - I never tried to "test my sobriety". I only ever removed the supports of my sobriety when I was certain that it would stand on its own without them, and then only with careful planning and consideration in advance, to make sure I was doing it in the right way, and for the right motives. I think it's very important.
There is one note here that's very important. Porn is only part of the problem, in so far as you look at what society has deemed to be considered p*graphic. If you use lingerie catalogues the same way - if you look at the women in them for sexual arousal, then jerk off to it, for example - then it makes no difference whether it is "officially" porn, or not. The addiction doesn't distinguish between the two; and you need to be careful that you don't, either.
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For now, I'll leave this here. I'll follow it up later with some comments about my recovery as it progressed after the first few months of my sobriety.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 18, 2005 3:26:33 GMT -5
In addition to the post above, I forgot to mention a couple of other pieces - and the message has reached its size limit, so they won't fit anymore.
The first of those is another side to talking with my wife. A major benefit of this activity was simply reinforcement. For years, I'd reinforced the addiction and its thinking - pretty much every single day, in one way or another, I'd been thinking or doing something that supported and reinforced my old patterns of thinking, my old patterns of belief.
When I entered into recovery this time, every day, I spent some time working on my recovery; and most of that was spent talking to my wife, discussing and working through the questions I had and the things I was thinking. On one hand, this allowed me to improve my understanding; but perhaps more importantly, it meant that every day, I put energy into focusing on my recovery and developing a NEW set of behaviours, beliefs and patterns of thought.
The other thing I wasn't able to fit in was simply a simple note - one thing that I accepted from the very beginning was that, at some point after day one, though I didn't know when it would be, I stood the chance of being hit by a haze of addictive craving and thinking that I struggled to see through, and struggled to even think during. So I prepared - even down to what seem to be almost stupid little notes, like the note in my book telling me that there are alternatives in the back. I tried to be as thorough as I could be, to take nothing for granted - even down to my own ability to think clearly and act accordingly.
Planning ahead takes a little time, but it's worth it, in my view. If you plan ahead for a situation that doesn't arise, then you may have just wasted a half an hour planning, but it's no real loss. On the other hand, if you DON'T plan for a situation, then it DOES arise, there's a chance that it may cost you your sobriety, especially in the first few months where your sobriety is only just being established.
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Post by choselife on Mar 18, 2005 7:07:26 GMT -5
Thanks, BlackSpiral.
Your posts are always a treasure to me. I could flatter you to the nth degree, but I know thats not what you are about. Your posts are so incredibly informative and also so personable and caring, as as your replies to others.
Besides all the details in your posts which are so helpful, I could sum up what I get from your posts in just a few thoughts.
Being sober and working on recovery takes an incredible amount of committment, bravery to analyze and truly explore the inner core stuff which I try to escape from via porn; attention to detail,etc. It is very hard work.
Sobriety may be the first step, but recovery is necessary to stay sober. Can't whiteknuckle it forever.
When approaching SA as you have, you will learn a tremendous amount about yourself which will help you in many ways that you might not ever have imagined.
All the hard efforts are so worth it.
You are truly an inspiration to me. Reading your posts should be required reading for both new and old posters. As they say, take what you will and leave the rest, but I am confident everybody will have a lot to take from your posts, and very little to leave.
My best CL
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 18, 2005 18:34:08 GMT -5
An overview of my recovery, part 2 - beyond sobriety By around 2 months in, I had started to feel comfortable with the idea of sobriety, and by 3 months, it was starting to stick. The tools I had been using were serving their purpose, and I'd spent a wonderful Christmas, feeling cleaner than I had felt in a long time.
This time, though, also coincided with one of the things I had been faced with overcoming - the feeling that, somehow, I was losing out, mixed up with the old beliefs that had allowed my addiction to exist in the first place.
When I was home for Christmas, I spent a lot of my time with my family, and sometimes sat down to watch TV with them for a while. The shows that were on were pretty straight, and didn't include any of the programs you might think of as being overtly sexualized. But here and there, many of them made passing reference to the culture of porn and sexual use; and small step by small step, I began to question if I hadn't pushed myself out too far; and if maybe, I should start to relax my boundaries.
This thinking stayed with me for a couple of weeks, and on one long, entirely boring and drawn-out journey, it culminated in threatening to derail my sobriety. I'd set off traveling, and I hadn't prepared. So when I was sitting there, my thoughts had started to wander - and for most of the journey, that had been fine. But near the end, they'd started touching on the old cycle of searching for porn - and though I fought against it, it was half-hearted, and I ended up with many images swimming through my head.
I talked to my wife immediately after the journey, and got my head together again - and in my head, I knew the truth of it all. I knew what the porn offered to me was fake, and that it would hurt me. But I knew, now, that it hadn't stuck deep - mentally, logically, I knew these things, true. But deeper inside, there were still many beliefs that persisted that challenged it - beliefs that the porn was acceptable somehow, that it was somehow morally neutral. That it brought me pleasure, and that that should be fine. And of course, the fact that it was somehow normal, natural and fairly instinctive male behavior.
In many ways, I had broken the first pattern of the addiction - faced with stress, porn didn't even cross my mind anymore, and for the longest time during that journey, even boredom hadn't brought it to mind. That pattern, the instinctive neural chain, was faded to little more than a shadow by this point.
It hadn't been the emotional trigger that had brought about the images. The boredom had triggered me to sit and think - but it was one of those thoughts, one wrong thought, that had sent me off down the wrong road. The wrong thinking, supported by old and wrong beliefs that still existed. Realizing that, I knew a few things needed to be done to break it.
1. Stop the wrong thought patterns! I'd used a pattern breaking technique called the stop-thought process during my sobriety (something I forgot to mention above). It's a fairly well-known technique, and many people have their own variations on it - for me, I visualized a bright pink word (STOP!) in my mind, and used that to interrupt the memories and cravings sometimes. It proved to be surprisingly effective for me, in fact. My recovery, though, had been threatened here not just by the fact that I hadn't stopped the thinking effectively - I had tried, but I had been sunk by two other things that I had to address too.
2. Protect and nurture my new beliefs. I'd done the foolish thing of letting myself watch TV, and then start to think about how TV was telling me what everyone else did, that I wasn't able to do. I'd started to see myself as missing out, and I'd started to ask myself damaging questions about that. My new beliefs, about the nobility and value of what I was trying to achieve, slipped away under the curtain of the perception that I was losing out by my decisions, and it grew weaker. I did all too little to nourish those once-proud beliefs during those weeks, and when the journey came, they were near breaking point.
From this point on, I allowed myself to focus not on what I was losing out on, but what I was gaining as a result of it. The TV had shifted my perception to one of loss; but I nurtured a belief that I later grew to discover was truer than I had even realised. Every thing I was giving up was shallow and superficial, even damaging and dangerous. And in return, I was being rewarded with deep changes, emotional growth and spiritual peace. I wasn't giving things up - I was trading them in, and I was getting by far the best end of the deal.
This still wasn't all of it, though. There was one more hurdle that I realized still needed to be crossed.
3. Break my OLD beliefs. One thing that I learned from Tony Robbins was the concept of limiting beliefs - beliefs that chain me down, or somehow restrict my efforts to make changes or succeed in the things I attempt. To take writing, for example, I had a belief that although I had gifts, I was somehow too young and too inexperienced to really be a writer - it's one of the beliefs I broke in order to break free and pursue the dream of my writing. Robbins taught the idea of breaking the supports of a belief through writing exercises, in order to break it down thoroughly.
Now, I had many old beliefs that had driven my addiction, and had allowed me to rationalise it. They were things like these :
- Porn's harmless, really. - Every man does porn. It's just normal male behavior. - Porn's just an expression of healthy sexuality. - I'm attracted to women, so being attracted to porn is natural too. - It's okay to ogle women; I'm supposed to find them attractive.
There were many more, too. Now, on the surface, I'd already thought about them and decided they were mostly wrong - but underneath, deep inside, they were still there. What I might have known logically, I still didn't feel deep down, and there were beliefs beneath each of those, each one supporting the old belief.
For example - take the belief that porn is harmless. It's a simple enough belief, but it breaks down into the various beliefs that are necessary to support it :
- Porn doesn't harm me. - Porn doesn't harm my partner. - Porn doesn't harm our relationship. - Porn doesn't hurt other people in any way. - The people in porn aren't hurt by their participation in it. - Nobody is hurt by virtue of their exposure to porn.
Each of these beliefs was very simple for me to break, as I had seen and read enough to know that none of these things held true. But even more than that, it breaks down further - into the people who you learned these beliefs from, and the examples you had in your life to support them. Careful examination of those revealed most of them to be suspect or make-believe, and the final belief - that porn is harmless - found itself on such shaky ground that it couldn't stand.
And in place of it, using what I had done, I established a new belief - that porn was harmful, warped perceptions, broke relationships, hurt my partner, wasted my life. Porn was anything but harmless. This wasn't just just considered and thought through - this was written down, pen to paper, every single word. It's too easy to think of six things, then forget one - if you write it down, you ensure that you are thorough. It takes longer, but it's worth the work.
I did this exercise, for every single belief I could find that supported my old way of life, for every belief I had that challenged my sobriety. I broke each one down, carefully and thoroughly, then pushed a new belief into the gap that was left each time. And by the time I was done, I had no doubt that my path was the right one, and that it was both worthwhile for me, and the path I wanted to pursue.
This was where I was, at three months into my recovery; and this was the path I would walk, for the next few months.
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Next, I'll follow up with the impact that losing my emotional support had begun to have on my life at around the same time.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 18, 2005 22:30:51 GMT -5
An overview of recovery, part 3 - emotions At around 2-3 months, as well as what I wrote above, I started to find that the addiction had been so tightly bound to my emotions that I hadn't actually had to deal with them! The situations that would normally have caused stress, or anger, or frustration, simply bypassed all the steps between and had been going straight to the point of craving. I wanted the addictive substance, and the reason why was buried so deeply that I wasn't even aware it existed.
At 2-3 months, that relationship was largely broken though. And as a result, the emotions that I hadn't had to deal with in all this time were showing up like a hurricane.
It's difficult to describe what it felt like. Since my older teens, I'd had something of a reputation for being fairly stable, thick-skinned, capable, able to cope with stress and emotional pain. But all of a sudden, I was an emotional mess - I had feelings that I didn't know how to deal with. My temper shortened, my stress levels jumped. I was more easily frustrated, I was more often depressed. I was happier, though, as well - it was like being trapped on some kind of emotional ferris wheel, one minute up, one minute down, and all the while feeling like it was at the whim of whoever ran the wheel. At the time, it certainly didn't feel like I was the guy in control.
It hit my relationship hard, too. I wasn't able to cope or handle things very well, and my partner had relied on me for years to be her rock of support; all of a sudden, though, I could barely support myself, and I felt drained, incapable of really supporting her as well. Her need for emotional support had not decreased, and my ability to act in the role had largely collapsed; worse yet, my own situation was actually increasing the stress on her. It was a hard time for both of us.
The whirlwind lasted for a few weeks in total, during which, things seemed to be a struggle for us. But after it passed and the storm calmed again, I started to really see what had been underneath my addiction all the time, and by virtue of that, I began to understand what I would need to do to deal with it. Sometimes, minor stresses and frustrations were the driving force, simply things that hadn't gone my way during the day. Other times, there were other things at work - such as frustrations with my current lifestyle and situation, or money, or many other more persistent problems. I realised, as I began to see, that I needed to learn how to deal with these things properly, and healthily.
Coping with feelings, and longer-term thinking The feelings, I realised, were probably the primary root of my addiction. The bulk of my acting out, and certainly the key reason why I had failed to quit in the past, had been down to the fact that I had allowed the porn to evolve into an extremely unhealthy need. It had become my primary emotional support, my means of survival, my key coping mechanism to get through life. I also realised, at the same time, that this pattern was repeated in other areas of my life - and most of all, with food.
I had been a stress eater, and it struck me then that food, too, was something I had used to medicate and cope with my emotions. If I wanted to really develop a healthy way of dealing with my feelings, inside, I needed to make sure that I addressed ALL the unhealthy things I did. I didn't want to just dump porn and gain a hundred pounds - by this point, I'd already gained more weight than I cared to anyway. I didn't want to become a computer game addict either, or a smoker, or a drinker. I wanted to develop a healthy, internal way of dealing with my feelings, and make a complete break with addiction.
From this point on, I started to be very careful, considering exactly WHY I wanted to do something before I ever did it. If I wanted to get food because I felt stressed, or tired, or bored, then it was no-go. If I wanted to play games because I felt worried about something, I had to put it on hold. I didn't have to give these things up, though - I enjoy food, I quite like to cook, and I do enjoy playing computer games sometimes. But motive was fundamentally important.
The second element, which mixes into this, is learning to think in the long term.
The fundamental attractions of porn, food and computer games, or even books, music and films, are all the same thing - right here, right now, they can give you pleasure. And there's nothing wrong in that - the things we enjoy are almost universally things that give us pleasure in the present.
The trouble is, especially in the addict, that examination goes no further than the current moment, the current act - it does not consider either the long term impact on your life, or even the immediate consequences of your actions, beyond the pleasure that you want - this includes morals, as breaches of your own morals have definite long-term emotional impact. As addicts, this short-term tunnel-vision can blind us to the truth of what we are fighting against.
If you were able to know in the moment that using porn could cost you your job, your dreams, your emotional or even physical health, your happiness, your security, your family - and in exchange, you'd get a rush and a high - and if you were able to then balance those two options in a healthy way to make your decision, it would be a no-brainer. Quick high and mangled life versus no high and happy life is not a difficult choice.
But in the addiction, we just don't see the long term. Make no mistake, though - I don't mean we aren't aware of it. I always knew about the long term; logically, I understood it. I knew what I stood to lose. I knew what was out there, what it could cost me. Not completely; but at the very least, I knew my relationship was riding on it. But in the moment of considering the action, none of that really existed to me. All I saw was the high, and the positives. I knew about the long term, but I didn't see it.
Learning to see both of these elements - motive, and consequences - allowed me to choose my actions cleanly. The consequences of my actions allowed me to make sure I made decisions that were right for my life in the whole, not just in the here and now - and by checking my motives, I was able to make sure I never fell back into the pattern of compulsion. Motive, though, is a little more complex, and runs on into the need for emotional handling.
Emotional handling With motive, the main key is simply learning to handle your emotions. If you know you want to eat because you're stressed, then the key isn't to resist the urge to eat. The key is to deal with the stress. As I said, my feelings were at the core of my addiction. Because of that, I knew that if I could learn to seek out healthy ways of dealing with my emotions, I would destroy the single strongest root that the addiction had. It wouldn't solve the problem, but it would be a great step in the right direction.
Easier said than done. For many years, I realised, I had habitually run to other things - food, computer games, porn, films, TV, sometimes alcohol - to escape from and bury my feelings, rather than address them. And although I wasn't caught up in the cycle of compulsion anymore, when I was going through the emotional hurricane, it sometimes seemed that it just wasn't worth it - that the trade-off was just too heavy. Even my wife once commented that it was almost better before, when I was still using the porn. And even after I got through that, the urge to run to other things was still very strong.
The method for dealing with the feelings was easy enough, really. Identify the feeling, identify its source, and then consider the healthy course of action. If it's stress from work, then often, the healthy course of action was simply to let it go, and relax (sounds weird, but sometimes, just realising that was enough to make it happen). If it was money, then spending a little time working through a budget sheet would help deal with it, and writing out plans to work towards a solution could help too. If it was something I didn't want to do, but needed to, then the solution was simply to do it, if possible, or arrange to do it at the next opportunity.
At one time, this would have been a nightmarish task, but sobriety had already laid the groundwork for it - so breaking the pattern was not as hard as it would once have been. The strongest of the compulsions had been the porn, and with that one broken, I had two advantages - firstly, I was able to see the emotions I was needing to deal with, so the problem was more apparent. But secondly, and very importantly, I had already proven I could break a strong compulsion, and had no doubts about my ability to break these weaker ones.
True enough, the pattern broke - but it wasn't flawless. I was still fighting against the porn at the same time, and although I had sobriety, it was still quite young. Added to that, I was really only starting to discover the emotions again, and discovering how to deal with them - though easy enough to describe above - didn't come all at once, or nearly as plainly at times. But I never gave up, I kept on trying, and importantly I never let it slip from my mind - I talked about it every day with my wife, and I kept thinking about how I could deal with my feelings, and how I could learn to respond healthily. Over the next few months, it all started to take root, and by around the 5th month, it seemed like it was really becoming a reality; recovery was actually starting to happen for me.
===
Next, I'll follow up with some of the things I learned while reading in this time, and the changes that occurred between my 5th and 7th months of sobriety.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 21, 2005 19:18:28 GMT -5
An overview of my recovery, part 4 - books, and complacencyBefore I get into this, I want to refer to a thread I replied to recently. It's to do with porn being a key problem in life, and the way that your perception can warp as you start working through sobriety. Rather than retype it all here, I'm going to link back to that thread. Porn is the central problem (in thread "I so wish porn was most of problem") lightwave.proboards48.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1111358225&start=0I'll probably end up linking to some other threads in the future too, but for now, I'm just going to get back to writing out this journal. BooksAlthough I bypassed the classic and popular Carnes books, I did do quite a lot of reading of my own in other areas. I read about Buddhism (I started by trying to find out about meditation, as I thought it could be a useful tool in my sobriety), and I read online, both about other people's struggles and approaches to recovery, and about the damage that it had done to the lives of other families. All of it chipped in for me - even those parts I disagreed with served to strengthen my own beliefs. But two books stood out amongst them. 1. The Centerfold Syndrome, by Gary R. BrooksI was introduced to this book by my wife, when I was around 6 months into my sobriety - it had been recommended a lot on another forum, and I had picked it up for her, then ended up reading it myself. The book doesn't offer much by way of solutions to problems - so if you're looking for something to read to help you get sober or build up recovery, this isn't the one. What it DOES deal with, though, is the society that raises us to be vulnerable to this addiction, and the impact that male social groups have on the persistence of it. It helped me to think and learn about the things that create the problem for us in the first place. The book focuses on the problems and progress of a support group comprising all men, each with their own sexual addiction, life situation and attitudes. They vary wildly, and offer a great perspective on the way men tend to think, and the way they can progress as they learn more about themselves and life. It's a great book, written in a style that is fairly easy to read. What it gives, most of all, is a much better understanding of why and how we were prepared and geared up to become the kind of addicts we became, with the attitudes that came with it - and to a certain extent, also, evidence of hope that we can recover from it. I'd recommend it as reading to both addicts and their partners - to those who're still caught in the haze of believing it to be healthy or normal behaviour, it'd definitely prove to be an eye-opener. 2. Awaken the Giant Within, by Tony RobbinsThis book, I encountered much earlier, though I was still already a few months into my sobriety - neither of these books is really aimed at getting sober. Far more, they're concerned with recovery. Robbins book isn't related to sexual addiction at all, and in fact, doesn't really focus on addiction as a centrepoint - it is given reference, it is explained and techniques for dealing with it are addressed, but in fact, Robbins' book is more a kind of guide on how to change the way you think, and the way you believe, in order to influence the way that you act. Many of the techniques here are ones I applied myself - such as the breaking down of limiting beliefs that I mentioned earlier - and I found the book to be very uplifting, very positive, and it gave me a real boost and sense of direction in my recovery. The use of language is one of the important points stressed in his book - the use of empowering language, and empowering questions, are two things I adopted into my life as a whole (to quote one of his chapter headings, "questions are the answer" - and I found it to be very true). The words you use to describe something can have a massive impact on life, and the questions you ask yourself can greatly change the results you'll get. For language - consider the following. If you describe a problem as "horrendous", it seems more difficult and daunting than one you describe as "tricky". Better yet, if you describe it as "interesting", then it may actually seem to be appealing. The thing is, the problem doesn't change at all. All that changes is the language you use, and by virtue of that, the perception you have. This example only grazes the surface, though, and I'd really recommend that people pick the book up to get more detail. With questions, it's similar. The mind is great at answering questions, even if you don't have answers. Let's say, you've been slipping and sliding in your sobriety and recovery. If you ask yourself, "Why can't I succeed?", then the brain will supply answers - it'll tell you all the reasons why it's impossible for you to succeed. On the flip side, if you ask yourself "How can I succeed?", then the brain will try to find the answers to that question instead, seeking out ways that you could succeed in overcoming. The key thing here is the supplied premise. The brain is partially a tool, which does your bidding - if you ask it a question, it'll answer, and when you ask a question, there's an implicit premise underneath it that drives the kind of answers you get. In these two cases, the first question's premise is that you can't succeed - in the second question, the premise is that you can. The situation doesn't change in either case - in both situations, you've slipped and fallen. But the answers you get will change your beliefs, and the beliefs you hold will shape your potential. If you believe it's impossible to succeed, you may attempt the task half-heartedly, or even not attempt it at all. If you believe it's possible, though - if you believe you CAN succeed - then you will approach the task with more energy. In particular, when the going gets rough, this changes things drastically. If you believe you can't succeed anyway, your willingness to endure the pain of the struggle will obviously be severely limited, as it will seem somewhat futile. That's quite different to someone who believes that they can succeed. That said, back onto my own path through recovery. ComplacencySuffice to say, complacency is a pretty deadly thing when it comes to sobriety and recovery, and at around 5 months, my own started to come into play. It wasn't as flat-out awful as deciding I'd won the game and putting down my tools, but I certainly began to become a little more lax here and there. The porn issue had faded well into the background now, but the other issues I was dealing with - mostly superficiality, objectification and sexualisation of other people - were still in the forefront, and rather than apply my time to tackling them head-on, I decided to let myself relax a little. At five and a half months, I felt I'd made a lot of progress, and at six, I reported to the board that I had made it there, and felt great. At six and a half months, though, I noticed something. I already knew I wasn't at my destination yet - I knew where I wanted to be, and I knew I still had issues left over from the porn addiction that needed to be addressed. But somehow, in spite of knowing that, I'd allowed myself to fall back into the habit of wanting to be comfortable and have a fairly easy day - I didn't want to work recovery every single night, and so some days, I gave it a miss. I'd started allowing the momentum of my sobriety to carry me through my recovery. But my momentum had already run out. I realised, all of a sudden, that at six and a half months in I was struggling more with objectification and sexualisation than I had when I was back down at five. Porn was still a long pole's length away from me; but I knew, if I kept sliding back, it was waiting for me there at the bottom. For five months and a bit, I had been climbing up the mountain; sometimes struggling a little, even feeling like I was sliding a little at times, but always going up, and never falling. But for the last month, I realised, I'd not been going up the mountain at all - I'd been going back down. I'd stopped watching my feet, and somehow, I'd lost the path I was pursuing, and had started following the easy one back down again. I could use many unpleasant words to describe my opinion of THAT path, but suffice to say, that realisation was enough for me to change my attitude and turn it around. I knew that the bottom of the mountain was damned, and I wasn't going back that way. So I dug my heels in again, took a better grip of all my tools, and started working my sobriety and recovery again. There are two types of recovery - one is passive. That's the one where you rely entirely on old momentum, mostly letting sobriety and recovery run their own course. You wait for problems to come, and you hope to survive each one. The other is active. You plan. You work. You prepare and you stock up. You watch for problems coming, try to see them before they get here, and try to avoid them - or if not, you do your best to make sure you're steady, so they will pass you by without dislodging your grip on the mountain. And the more you work it, the better you get at seeing problems before they come. Soon, you're almost never encountering the problems at all, because you've learned to avoid them - or sometimes, because you've changed yourself, and things that used to be problems aren't anymore. At 5 months, I had started to coast - but by 7 months, I had realised just where that path would take me. At 7 months, I took my own good advice, and started back on what I had always believed to be the right path, but had lost sight of - the path of active recovery. === Next, I'll focus on what I dealt with beyond this point - superficiality, sexualisation, objectification, fear, and focus.
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Post by 1975 on Mar 23, 2005 2:29:06 GMT -5
BlackSpiral, Thanks so much for sharing all of this. I am learning alot from what you shared, and am definitely going to look up the Tony Robbins book and try the stop-thought process exercises. I may look up the other book as well. I look forward to reading the "next installment." Sincerely, '75
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 25, 2005 0:44:13 GMT -5
An overview of my recovery, part 5 - progress beyond 7 months Beyond this 7 month point, there are really two distinct parts that I want to go into. The first is one that ties in closely to this journal; the issues of fear, and focus, both of which tie back into the beliefs that I mentioned earlier. And after that, the issues of objectification, sexualisation and superficiality.
Fear, and focus Fear and focus are two things that go hand in hand, and are key to achieving almost anything. It's said that, in order to conquer a fear, you have to go at it head on. But that's only half the battle. The focus should, ideally, be away from the fear itself too, and towards the potential for overcoming it. Again, this is something I learned initially by working through Robbins' book.
When you are afraid of failure, then the tendency is for you to focus on it. We do it instinctively with the things we fear; if there is a hungry lion ten feet away on the corner, the last thing you want to do is take your eyes off it. But with fears, that's exactly what you have to do. The reason is quite simple - your focus determines where you will go. If you focus on what you are afraid of, you will move steadily towards the thing you fear. In order to succeed, you have to focus on success.
This is one of the most common mistakes made, to my mind, during the recovery cycle. Addicts try to flee from the thing they fear, or push it from them. They try desperately to not think about what they don't want to think. But that doesn't work. The best and simplest way to avoid thinking about it, is to make yourself think about something you do want to think about. Otherwise, it'd be like trying not to think of the colour blue - the first thing your brain does is try to work out "What exactly IS this colour blue we're trying not to think of?"...and then, all of a sudden, you're thinking about it.
Focus on failure, and you take yourself there. It's hard - we fear failure, so we feel compelled to consider it, to focus on it to a certain extent. In our minds, it even seems like if we focus on failure, and try to keep it at bay, we'll somehow achieve success. But in fact, that's rather like trying to avoid falling by watching the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. You have to watch the path, not the rocks.
This comes down to two key situations. The first is your response to a situation. If something comes up, and you then think "Oh no, I can't cope with this, it might drive me back to the porn, I don't want to go back there" then guess what - you're off back to the porn. You have to think "Porn isn't an option for me. So what will I do to deal with this?" By doing this, you empower yourself to survive the situation, to deal with it, and to move past it without resorting to your addiction. Rather than panicking about the fact that you might fail, you focus on the fact that you WILL succeed.
The second is our limitations, in things we are attempting, and things we have yet to attempt - in my case, writing was a prime example of this. I left my writing alone for 2 years, because I was so concerned that I might fail in achieving what I wanted. Later, I realised that the only way I could guarantee failure was to never try; and instead, I started focusing on learning HOW to succeed, and on moving forward. I acknowledged that there were things that could cause me to fail; but rather than viewing them as insurmountable obstacles, I learned to view them as challenges to be tackled and overcome. My writing, since then, stuttered to a start amongst my life's other goals, and is now moving forward apace.
If you focus on worrying about whether you will fail in something, you weaken your own potential. Focusing instead on the possibility of success, and on the way in which you CAN succeed, empowers you to both attempt, and persist in attempting to achieve the goals you want to aim for.
Focus on where you want to be, on what you want to do, on how you wish to behave, on how you want to think. Focus forward, look forward, push forward. Focusing behind you only ever sends you stumbling back. By all means, consider the things that may bring you down - but in this, too, focus on the positives. Don't focus on why they may be difficult to deal with, or why they may make you fall. Focus on what you will do to make sure you don't fall when they occur, and on how you will make sure your sobriety is sustained and your recovery moves forward.
Objectification, Sexualisation and Superficiality Beyond sobriety, beyond learning to handle emotions, and beyond the addiction itself, there are the scars that it leaves behind. Every addiction has them, of course. Some are simply physical; most leave mental scars. In my case, this addiction had a drastic impact on the way that I viewed the world, the way that I lived, the way that I thought. In a way, they are more deep wounds than scars; but rather than being addictive habits, they were actual changes - changes to beliefs, changes to attitudes, changes to understanding. They weren't facets of the addiction as I entered into it, but were all reflections of what I had learned from my time caught up in it. The whole subject is too complex for me to go into in any length here, but I wanted to at least go over it in brief.
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Post by BlackSpiral on Mar 25, 2005 0:44:28 GMT -5
My own experience of sexualisation and objectification was disturbing to me. I began to realise that I had looked at the world through very sexualised eyes - women, regardless of who they were, would be seen and assessed as possible sexual partners. Men, on the other hand, would tend to be viewed as sexual competitors. It stunned me to realise just how much of my perception that had become at times, and how widespread the problem in my life appeared to really be.
I've heard it said that it's "just a man thing", or "normal male behaviour" to look at the world this way, to see women as objects, as a collection of potential sexual partners. I don't buy it at all. I can recall a time before the addiction, when I was an older teenager, and when my behaviours weren't so out of control, and when my beliefs and perceptions weren't so warped. I can trace a path backwards to see where many of these changes occurred, and how, and why. There are elements of male behaviour within them, but they've become warped, under the influence of the porn - itself, essentially a corruption too.
At first, when I approached these, I did buy into some of those things. I wondered if I would be able to change them - I wondered, too, if it would be even normal or healthy to TRY to change them. I asked the wrong questions, and focused on the wrong parts. With things like ogling, I considered that to be natural attraction - wasn't it therefore normal to find women attractive, after all? Isn't that just normal, healthy male behaviour?
Well, maybe attraction is. But ogling isn't attraction - it's an unhealthy response to a sexualised interpretation of attraction. Most women will tell you that being ogled by men isn't a pleasant experience. A handful may enjoy it - the vast majority, however, do not. Equally, once upon a time, I regarded it as a rude, offensive way to treat a woman. I had respect for other people. As time went by, though, and I lived in my addiction for a while, my beliefs shifted until it seemed like "just a natural thing".
Well, okay, maybe it is natural. But so's cancer - neither of them is healthy, and neither I wanted in my life.
This whole subject, of course, is controversial. Some people think it's normal to ogle women. I'd have to agree, it's normal - in so far as normal means "of the norm". But just because most men are down there doesn't mean I have to be, nor should I accept it as a status quo. I won't simply decide it's okay to ogle other women so that I fit neatly within someone else's comfortable beliefs, either. If it's comfortable for you, fine - ogle and be happy. Me, I don't want to act that way. It feels wrong; it violates my morals. And as I've said more than once, the big key to being happy is managing to live comfortably within your own morals.
Related loosely to that, there was another question that threw me for a loop. If I did manage to break away from this response to other women, would I suddenly find myself unattracted to my own partner? Talk about shallow and narrow-minded. The whole question reeks of a world and perception so rooted in sexualisation and superficiality that it doesn't understand that the OTHER parts of life play a role in the question. How I feel, act and respond is NOT a simple, basic product of superficial attractiveness. There are a wealth of other motives - mostly far deeper ones - that influence how I feel about someone, about a situation, and how I choose to respond to it.
The question seemed so sensible when I asked it of myself, though. I guess that's one of the things about growth - being able to look back, and wonder how you could ever have been so blind to things that seem so obvious to you now.
The path forward from here wasn't quite so black and white, though. Issues of motive, experience, health, nature and learning all came into play, and although some clear influences were easily addressed, some things were far trickier customers - some continue to be today. I'm not recovered yet. What I am, though, is confident in the fact that I WILL be recovered. Every now and then, I notice another small change - another little step forward - that helps tell me that I've moved a notch further along my path of recovery. A situation that was uncomfortable once, suddenly isn't. A problem that I'd used to have, suddenly just isn't there anymore. Every time I notice another one, it's wonderful.
There's work to be done, there are changes to be made, and there is damage to be healed. But I am doing the work, making the changes, and healing the damage, and I have faith in the fact that it will all work out. It really seems like things do, in the end.
===
Finally, to finish off the introduction to my journal - I'm going to focus on what recovery has given to me, in my life. It's been a rough road, and I imagine it still will be, from time to time. But it's been worthwhile, and I'm going to go over some of the most significant things that recovery has given to me.
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Post by choselife on Mar 25, 2005 7:27:44 GMT -5
Hello, BlackSpiral. Your journal is like a good book that I can't put down (this analogy was subliminally prompted by knowing you are a writer, but totally sincere. Can't wait to read the next chapter about what your recovery has given to you. This sums up a lot thats meaningful to me. Intellectually, I have known it for a while. Now I need to take the steps, walk the walk. In my current career, I know that I have tremendous potential, and I know that if I take the steps I need to in order to truly explore exactly what my potential is, that I will need to tolerate "feeling stupid" a lot of times, as I so obsessively judge myself. But I also know, that if I tolerate those feelings and march on anyhow, that I will be taking major strides towards being the best that I can be. As I write this, perhaps this is an oversimplification, but I believe that there are three categories of people; those who are struggling and are clueless as to why because they don't even attempt to look at themselves; others who know a whole bunch about themselves, read all the helpful books (Carnes, Robbins, etc), but don't take the next step to translate their knowledge into actions; and the last category I hope to join, which is those that attempt to take those first wobbly steps by taking actions which are so difficult to take, and then grow in confidence along the way as they learn that they will fall, but are able to get back up again, and I expect after a while, they fall less often and stay down for shorter periods of time. Also, those in that last category end up of course learning those important things about themselves which can only be learned through failures. From what I know intellectually (but not experiencially), that is the critical type of learning that enables people to truly be successful in reaching their goals, whether it be financial or even relations. I had no intent to hijack your thread, its just that your words are very thought-provoking, and just want to get the thoughts out. No need to respond within this thread. I have complimented you enough, don't want your head to burst , so I will just say one more simple "thank you". CL
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Post by Stillhopeful on Mar 25, 2005 7:59:24 GMT -5
This is very useful to everyone, SAs and SOs alike, Black Spiral. Thanks for sharing the details and taking the time to organise them logically. At a future time, you may want to consider a career in motivational speaking - a la Robbins. You have a real gift. Still
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Post by gerry on Mar 25, 2005 22:30:44 GMT -5
I like a lot your posts... but there are too long for me, hahahah, I am not so good with english, it takes me a lot of time to read you... But it s very intersting be well gerry
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