Escaping the Darkness

[Jon]

OK, This is my first Journal post, on the first day of my Porn Free Life!

I have been trapped in a cycle of P use for 13 years. I go constantly round the cycle of downloading - Guilt - Destroying the P collection - Promising Never Again - Downloading again. At first, all those years ago, it would take me months to go round the cycle. Now, its less than a week!

As time has gone on I have resorted to more and more extreme forms of P. I hate myself for having looked at this stuff, it haunts my dreams and thoughts, some of it I cant get out of my head, it affects the way I look at women, even women who I pass in the street or women I see at work.

This addiction causes me massive stress - which is sort of funny because it is often when I am stressed that I turn to P to de-stress! Yet the secrecy needed by the cloak-and-dagger effort I have taken to keep this away from my wife has been enourmously stressful. My wife dosnt know that I use P, but I think she has suspected once or twice but has chosen not to confront me on the issue.

One reason I want to deal with this now in particular is that my oldest son is coming up to 13. How can I tell him that it is wrong to look at this stuff when I do it myself? And yet I wouldnt want him to be damaged by it in the way I have.

So, I need to get started. I'm going to begin by hunting for all the stashed away P and eliminating it. That's not as simple as it sounds! I am meticulously efficient in keeping multiple copies of computer data in different locations - in fact I have even deliberately tried to defeat my periods of guilt by placing stashes in places I cant easily reach when I feel guilty and want to delete them!

I also need to have a cull of the DVD collection.

By my recent precedent the most immediate risk will be getting past day 5. I usually give in again after about 5 days. So that's my initial target, get to day five without giving in. Then after that the next five. Then the next.

Wish me luck!

Jon

[bluegoldfinch]

Wish me luck!

Jon

Good luck!

Finch :)

[likeafish34]

Jon,
My situation is so similar to your's. I've being doing porn for about 10 or 12 years. I've given up loads of times and keep coming back. I've become quite an expert at relapsing. I can now do it so quickly and easily. My cycles have got shorter and each time I come back I become more extreme.
One of the things that has made me think seriously again about giving up, is that my 13 year old son mentioned a porn site. I suppose that you could say that its good that he feels that he can be open with me, but it scares me to think that he could get dragged in to this addiction. When I talked to him about it later, he told me that he doesn't look at porn (and I believe him), but I'm sure that its only a matter of time before he and his friends let their curiosity take hold.
I can't really give any advice yet, because its only about 24 hours since I gave it up, but I sincerely wish you all the best in your battle.
Simon

[Jon]

I've become quite an expert at relapsing. I can now do it so quickly and easily.

I know exactly what you mean! I too have become something of an expert in finding P on the internet, knowing exactly where to go to get what I want quickly and efficiently. As a consequence I have sometime downloaded the same video up to five times. This makes it almost irrelevant whether I keep P on my computer or not. Even if I delete it all, I can be rebuilding my collection in minutes.

[Letting Go]

Jon,

I understand where you are coming from. I was there myself 5 years ago. What you need is knowledge, help and honesty in your relationship and they all need to come quickly. I must confess, I do not know exactly in what order you need to do this but you need:

- Knowledge on how to defeat P & MB. I started with Patrick Carnes’ books, and am now working on Mark Laasers’ books on recovery. I am also working on spirituality as well. All of this is knowledge, but that won’t do you any good unless you get help.

- Help from professionals and your peers. Find a counselor or therapist who has experience with sex addiction. Find a group (preferably face-to-face), find a mentor and a sponsor. Support from your peers is very important in your recovery.

- Honest with your spouse. This will probably be the most difficult and painful step that you will ever take, but I think it is necessary for your recovery. If you cannot take this step you probably will not have hit rock bottom. I have to admit that I never took this step and my wife found me out (I hit rock bottom shortly thereafter …). I also have to admit that I probably would still be caught in my addictive cycle if it wasn’t for my wife’s knowledge, understanding, and support in my recovery process. But now because of this, our marriage is better than ever. My spouse and I make a point to work on our marriage every day and the closeness that this has produced has given me the incentive I need to continue my recovery.

You are going to be going through a difficult time if you persist in your recovery. The pain and suffering that you and your spouse will go through will be hard. It may seem so much easier to avoid these difficult steps and to simply ignore the problem (and have yet another relapse). But if you do, then your marriage will die by a thousand slow cuts. If you persist and succeed, then you will be rewarded by having a much deeper and satisfying relationship, not only with your spouse, but your son as well.

I wish you all the luck in the world.


Letting Go

[Jon]

Well today was my third day P free.

Made one change today which is, I think, essential.

My wife works part-time and for some months on those days she goes to work I have dropped my children off to school and then rather than go straight to work, I instead come back home and spend 2 hours downloading/consuming P.

Today I avoided that by not letting myself go back into the house and leaving for work straight away. I cant afford to let myself be alone. In the past I have gone back into the house "just to pick up something" and then given in to the temptation to go look at some P. I think I need to avoid being by myself for a good long while!

---

I have been reading the stuff in the resources section and following the links I found there to other anti-porn sites. I'm trying to rediscover the sense of horror I originally had about P but which long exposure has dulled my reaction to. Some of the stories of the women involved in the making of P are truly horrific. When you watch P you try and pretend that the women you see in the videos are enjoying what is happening to them, the reality is that these women have been brutalised, exploited & abused. It makes me sick to feel that by my consumption of this material I have had some part in the exploitation of these women. I don't want to be that person. I'm really not the kind of evil toad who wants to treat women this way.

[IN NEED OF HELP]

Today I avoided that by not letting myself go back into the house and leaving for work straight away. I cant afford to let myself be alone. In the past I have gone back into the house "just to pick up something" and then given in to the temptation to go look at some P. I think I need to avoid being by myself for a good long while!.

It is good that you see that being alone, will allow you to just look. Being alone, is the easiest time to look at porn, but the most dangerest for us. So now if we are to get rid of this addiction, we can not find ourselves in any situation, that will allow for us to slip. I know that this has always been a danger for me, when I am alone. I had a job that I got one hour for lunch. I lived only 7 minutes from work, so I would go home, and that gave me a good 30 mins to look and download this crap.

I can not believe that I allowed myself to become this person that I am. I destroyed everything that means the most to me. My lady, The love of my life, is so distant from me now. I just ripped her Heart in to a million pieces. The damage and the pain I cause, can not be repaired. I am 54 years old, and I have well over 30 years plus of porn using. It has been a tough road, but I am about 78 days free of this crap. I do not know, If my relationship is going to last, but the one thing that I know will last, Is me being free from this for good. All of us who are addicted, really need to make the changes that we need to, so we can be much better people on this earth

I wish you the best in your recovery. We can all do this together

[likeafish34]

It's amazing how many similarities there are in the PAs stories. I've also found ways of being alone in the house. Leaving a bit late to go to work, fooling myself that I was just leaving latter to avoid the London traffic. In fact it was really just to give myself some time to do P.

I must take a look around and get links to sites that show how much harm this stuff does to the women involved. Most of the stuff that you see on the TV about women in P, shows them as women who are in control and just making money out of us poor fools. I'm sure that the reality is very different. I remember seeing one woman who was saying how much she was in control, but her arms were covered in self harm scars. As somebody who has been close to a self harmer, o know how lacking in control they really felt.
Anyway, it's good to see that you're sticking at it.
Simon

[Jon]

Its day four and I'm still here! Feeling a bit down today though and its often times like this that I reach for the P. There's not a great deal of sense in that is the? Viewing P because you feel depressed which just leaves you feeling more depressed!

On the plus side, I have been sleeping better the past few nights, maybe its not having to deal with the guilty conscience.

I was noticing allot today the number of pictures of women in the adverts on the tube, in the newspapers etc. All scantily clad. I guess that when I was immersing myself in P daily these pics looked fairly trivial in character. Now, however, I'm trying to be more aware, so I turn over the page quickly, turn my back on that poster. I dont want to take away the memory of what I see and then think on it to the point of giving in to temptation to go look at more pics.

I sometimes went through long periods where I would download soft-core pics thinking "Well those are not so bad. If I just look at those then I'm not really doing anything so wrong." The funny thing is I would download huge collections of that sort of stuff - then still have to go and find some HC! That sort of logic just never works.

On the subject of collections, I used to find that I would download vast numbers of photos (up to 100000 sometimes) and huge amounts of video (I never counted but I probably had more than 20 hours of video on lots of occasions) and I would never actually get around to looking at more than a small percentage of the stuff I downloaded. Yet still I felt driven to download more. Has anyone else had this experience?

[likeafish34]

I never really got into downloading as much porn as you. Having said that, I did collect a lot. I even filed it very carefully in different folders, so that I could access it easily. If only I was that organised with my home or work filing, life would be so much easier LOL.

It's interesting that you mention scantily clad females in posters and stuff. I'm finding that there's a lot of sexuality presented on the tele and I'm definitely looking at women in the street in a sexual way. When this happens, I criticise myself. I think that over the years of my porn addiction, I've tended to look at women more and more as sexual objects. Having said that, sexual attraction is natural. Oh, I don't know.

Anyway, keep it going. Even though you might be having a tough day, the end results of kicking the habit must be worth it.

Simon