This Jouney

[BeingThere]

Yes, I misspelled my journal name. On purpose. In honor of my true journey.

This has been a path that has taken me near the precipice of death many times. Much of that time, I only hoped that I would emerge triumphant but harbored in my heart the fear that I never would.

But what is triumph? In a battle the only winners are those who make peace.

I have gone off in horrific rants, innumerable pity parties, and thoughtless stupors. I have researched, re-researched, examined myself ad nauseum, prayed, and thrown fits. There were times when I think I truly was insane for a time. Functional but insane.

I place that here at the beginning to remind myself how far I have come. I am grateful for every step and regret not a one. It is how it should be.

This is a wonderful existence. Joy and discontent co-exist to give light and contrast to each other. I will witness the majesty of life.

-Mike

[2frustrated]

Welcome. I look forward to reading your journal. I can already tell by the way you write that you will be presenting themes, that we all know well, in a new and insightful way.

[BeingThere]

Thanks 2frustrated. I appreciate the encouragement.

I have two online journals now. I almost feel like a traitor. But diversity of thought is always something I've needed.

I cannot remember how long it's been since I've even seen porn. It use to come at me fast and furious. It was everywhere. Pop-ups, advertisements, email. All that stopped. Other than an occasional porn friend request on facebook (which I became wise to right away), I don't think I've seen a naked body other than my own until today.

I watched a video on facebook. It was a Lenny Kravitz video. I won't describe it but there was some mild nudity. I barely noticed it. Of course, when I finally recognized it, I realized I had no reaction to it. It was as meaningless as anything else. Like the song. Not sure why they had to put that in there.

Three years ago I would have been horribly triggered. No ... even two and a half years ago. I would not have been able to stop myself from acting out. It would have been impossible for me to imagine I could ever deactivate those triggers, but they're gone.

I examine my feelings. Did I find the women attractive? Of course, at some level, I recognize that. And that was one of my early downfalls. I interpreted that as something that was evil, wrong or messed up when it was simply a natural reaction to an attractive member of the opposite sex. Without that attraction, there would be no couples and there would be no humans. It was thinking that I had to dwell on it, magnify it, and act on it that caused the problems.

Finding normal sexuality is a challenge because of so much misinformation on both sides. But I'm the only one that can sort it out for me. I guess I shouldn't use the word 'normal' because normal seems to be drifting more and more towards things that don't make me comfortable.

For the first six months of sobriety (sobriety vs. recovery) I treated anything sexual as the enemy. This served me well but barred me from any real recovery work. Then the pain started. The confusion. The emptiness. Howling at the moon. And I had to face my demons without my drug. I had no coping skills but being a victim and wrestling with insanity. That's right, no coping skills. Over 50 years old and no adult emotional coping skills.

Eventually, I have had to face the fact that I am a sexual being and come to terms with it ... and what that meant. I realized it was no more healthy to be sexually anorexic than it was to be a full-blown sex addict.

And crisis of faith. That was the big one. For 35 years I was a devout Christian. Extremely devout. But it didn't match with reality and I couldn't deal with that maturely. Spent time inventing excuses for my religion and blaming God for my woes. But eventually excuses and untruths had to go. Dishonesty had to crumble away in every area of my life.

That was truly a horrendous crisis for me ... worse than breaking away from porn. It was so bad that, try as I liked, I couldn't bring myself to give up the old belief system. And that was the very thing dragging me down.

Finally, light. I had worked through some very emotionally (and financially) difficult times in the second stage of sobriety (where recovery actually starts). Then like a miracle, everything started to fall together. The puzzle just had to be dumped on the floor. All the pieces that were jammed together trying to make the damn puzzle work needed to come apart so I could have a fresh look at it all. And quite serendipitously, a couple of piecse were handed to me and the puzzle starte to come together for real.

I could try to say that this journey was about overcoming pornography addiction, but it wasn't. That's like saying the road to Paris starts in Louisiana. Well it does, if you're in Louisiana. No, this journey has always been about feeling and experiencing things that would allow me to see the universe in a very different perspective. Not in a cold, textbook theorm sort of way, but in a living, breathing sort of way. Been there and truly done that. It's warm. It's fresh. It's real. I lived it.

This is so NOT where I would find myself. I had my vision. My little dream of the perfect Christian household, marriage, community, etc. Yet here I am very much happy, at peace, and hopeful without any of that. And this was the path I HAD to take because I would not have made the journey here willingly.

And that makes me wonder where I need to go from here ... and if I'll have to be dragged, kicking and screaming like this last time. Maybe if there's a lesson for me, I will not kicks and scream as much ... maybe just enjoy the ride.

Yes, I'm talking to you ... self. All three of us. Body, soul, and mind. We've found friendship in this existence. Let's not forget how wonderful that is and start fighting again. Apart, we are nothing. Together, we are unstoppable.

-Mike

[2frustrated]

Wow, Mike. I like your strategy with attractive women: acknowledge the beauty and move on.

I'm having a bit of a crisis myself with religion. Nothing to do with guilt or being mad at God or anything like that. Just reorienting some religious views.

I can't wait to hear more of your journey.

[BeingThere]

2frustrated, I sympathize with you. Hopefully, you won't have to go through the total reorientation I did, but no matter how small, there certainly is some crisis to that change.

...

More thoughts today. I've known this but I'm expressing it today. This seems to be a day of recap for me.

I am a very different person now than I was even a year ago. We all change, and I have done at least some changing all my life. But this shift is very dramatic. Most of my life, I hated myself. I wanted me to never have existed. I despised myself to the core. This way pre-dated porn, but the porn addiction didn't help this.

Oddly, I have been relatively successful in many ways a good share of my life. Driven. Driven by pain I suppose. Poor little victim. Overcompensating for pain suffered. Blaming. Excusing. Yet still performing. Very functional in the real world in so many ways. Most people (except those very close to me) would never guess how much I hated myself.

I can now say - out loud - Mike, I love you. I mean it. I feel it. It's real. For the first time in my life. I'm not perfect. Far from it. This love has nothing to do with my performance in life (or lack thereof). It is a realization that I'm the same as everyone else that has ever existed. No better; no worse.

Some would believe this has come as a result of dumping porn from my life. It hasn't. It came as a result of the process I had to go through to dump porn. Yes, it could have been anything. Cancer. Traffic accident. Crack addiction. Porn addiction. They're all the same. It is apparently what I needed to work through. It was my path here.

I had this concept that being free from porn would finally solve all my life's problems. LOL @ myself. Not even. if anything, it exposed them. It was like pulling back the bandage, and instead of seeing a healed wound, seeing a gangrenous, festering gash. And I had no medication for it. The porn was just the dressing.

So after finding sobriety for the first time in 12 years, I found I had absolutely no coping mechanisms for dealing with my issues. I had been using the drug for so long that I didn't have a clue how to handle it.

I threw myself horrid pity parties. Contemplated suicide daily. Really contemplated. Had detailed plans on how to make it look like an accident. I lived in a cave. I literally would spend days on end in a 10 x 12 room writing software, sleeping under my desk, and only emerging briefly to get food. The only contact I had with humans was on line. What had once been a productive and fairly successful business person now was becoming a dismal financial wreck. All in the name of sobriety. All under the guise of recovery.

I would say here that I lost a 29 year marriage. I didn't really lose it. It was over a long time ago. It just hadn't been burried. Take away the porn and it still would have ended. The porn was just one more painful complication.

Ah, but I still love her. I always will. There's no reason for me to change that. But we can't be together. After nearly 5 years, I'm missing her again. But it's OK. I miss our family. I miss the dream of what I wanted. But we never had that dream. The pain was too deep and we were too far apart in what we believed and wanted in life for a marriage to continue. But it doesn't mean I can't love her. And that doesn't mean I can't love someone else. I have already shown that I can.

This is beginning to sound like a whining session. It isn't. It's a celebration. It's the celibration of a story that's just getting better. It's the expression of gratitude for all the difficulty and struggle. I am so grateful for all of it, I wouldn't change a thing. No, not even the porn.

When the pain became so deep, I chose to feel it rather than to stuff it in the attic. This, because I didn't want to go through the rest of my life without the beautiful memories. I chose to take them with me and enjoy them. Fond memories of children, home, community, church, and even wife. Why should I toss those memories in the garbage just because they were interwoven with pain? And now, rather than turn from the memories and thoughts, I will experience them. I will let them come and I will make friends with them. And they will be my happy companions.

Not sure why I need to write this, especially in a new journal. But it's here.

Beautiful thing to remember today: I got here not by freeing myself from porn, but by the process it took to free myself from porn.

-Mike

[grasshopper]

Great to see you on TTF Mike. I loved reading your journal on NPS and look forward to sitting down later and having a good read again.

Can I throw you a challenge and ask what you think people close to a recovering addict notice about their recovery. I mean those friends and family who didn't notice us PMBing. What changes do they see over a one, two, three year period?

hopper

[BeingThere]

I grasshopper. That is a difficult question. I'm not sure I would know. Maybe very little, if anything. They might see someone with more confidence, someone more outgoing. But I don't think this would be the result of stopping the porn or masturbation. The change would be the result of the process the addict goes through to stop.

My ex-wife kept telling me she didn't see any change and she thought I was still acting out. For a good part of my recovery, I was very reclusive, somber, depressed, sad, stressed out. If people saw that, would they think I was in recovery? Probably not. They would think something really bad was going on in my life.

And now that I've past the funk, what people see is someone who is brash, says what he thinks, doesn't give a flying f**k what other people think of him, has gone off the deep end in terms of religion and spiritual beliefs, has forsaken the "ways of the Lord" and denied his faith. I already know what they would think. They would assume that my messed up state of affairs is the result of many years of porn addiction and that I have lost the spirit.

Interestingly, I have a whole new set of friends. I have an entirely new routine. I live in a different place. I'm alone, but not lonely. I am excited about life when I get up. I have lost 40 lbs and kept it off for nearly 3 years. I have goals I believe in. And most importantly, I love myself and trust myself. That is the biggest difference.

But ... I would pretty much be the same even if I were still acting out. It was these changes in life that let me stop the porn addiction, not the other way around. Don't get me wrong, I still believe in sobriety first. I do believe that most porn addicts are caught in this thing by shame and guilt and that they can't break that cycle until they feel like they have some "clean time".

I cared for some time what others thought about me. I hoped that someone could see the differences that I thought would come about by not having this degrading filth in my life anymore. A fundamental shift came for me when my spiritual life came together. When the world made sense again and I could see that, no matter what I had done or been in the past, I was no worse than the best of humans and no better than the worst. When you truly comprehend this, it is so freeing that you just have to do a little dance. :)

I don't know if anyone sees in me what they would term a positive change. But I have seen in others what I think are very positive changes. The first thing I see is a little self-confidence creeping back in their life. Then I see them being less dependent on others for their feeling of self-worth. Then I see them becoming more social. I think this is a result of where they are flowing their energy. They still have the same amount of energy, they just aren't flowing it into debasing fantasy. It naturally starts to spill over into other areas of their life.

But that is a negative model. It requires the word "stop". Stop flowing your energy into porn. A positive approach would be to flow your energy into the other things and there would be little left for porn. In other words, start living life rather than hiding from it. Feel it. Yes, it's very painful sometimes. But you can't feel the joy without feeling the pain. They give contrast to each other. And I have found many times that, when truly felt, the pain changes it's features and becomes my friend. Then its twin sisters, Joy and Hope, appear.

This sounds like a formula for recovery. I don't really have one of those other than to believe and keep trying. This was my journey. Many PA's come to me and seek the cure. They want it in steps, in writing. And when I set mine out, it is so unorthadox that most reject it. It's incomprehensible. So that's why I say that it was my path.

I'm not a guru. I've only been sober since May 2008. And I've only been in recovery since about November of 2008. There are many things I have yet to experience. Many mysteries that I don't understand. I'm like a 5-year-old trying to understand particle physics. I can only grasp a very rudimentary representation of truth through symbols that aren't accurate but give me some idea of truth. But somewhere deep inside, we all know the truth. All of it. We're just here to experience what we are experiencing. Like a witness. Like the eyes and ears of God.

So ... very good question. Makes me think of things I'm not always consciously aware of. A worthwhile question, not from the standpoint of impressing others with our change, but from the standpoint of witnessing the change inside ourselves.

-Mike

[2frustrated]

I think more people hate themselves than we know. For some reason it's instilled in us at an early age--shame, self-loathing, guilt. It takes a lot of work to learn how to overcome that. I'm still working on it.

Once again, it's almost magical to read your journal. Thanks for sharing.

[chasman62]

@being there

Beautiful thing to remember today: I got here not by freeing myself from porn, but by the process it took to free myself from porn.

Excellent mantra and one many can learn from. It is not the quitting of behavior, it's not counting days or months...it's about changing your entire mindset so that you don't want it any more. It really is about becoming a new you. A lot of guys on here talk about going back to 'before ' they became a PA ...to me that is a crazy idea because that person was the one who became the addict. Ditch that guy and become a new one!

There is a lot of sound advice in what you write and I look forward to reading more. It is absolutely critical that you become genuine in all aspects of your life and if that means discarding beliefs or opinions that you thought you 'should have' but never really did have then that has to be part of it.

[grasshopper]

Thanks for these responses. One of the best things about getting older is that I care less and less about what people think of me. But when it comes to my wife, kids, colleagues etc., I do care about how my behaviour touches them. I would like them to feel safe and happy in dealing with me.

For instance, porn has definitely affected my relationship with my kids. I'm talking about the shame, withdrawal, self-hatred side of things. I get snappy, morose, defensive, horrible.

I would like to think that as I make changes in my life that render porn redundant, these changes are noticeable to those who never knew I used porn, and particularly to those I love. Really what I want is to stop being such a pig to the people I love.

Not really asking for answers. Just turning things over. The focus is more about recognising my values and developing ways of living in them.

thanks guys
hopper