Rockinastorm's journal

[Rockinastorm]

So I am here on the beginning of my 9th day without P or MB. 9 days doesnt sound so long, but the reason that I am actually here starting my journal right now is because I am this very second trying to fight for this day. I have been on ttf for almost a week now.

I dont want to be fighting right now. I want to give in. I continue to forget how deep this addiction is until I am right here trying to fight for my dignity with everything I have.




so 2 hours later and this is all I have for the start of a journal. But, I survived without giving in. its a start at least... The feeling is gone now but how long till they return.. when do they go away for good??

[IN NEED OF HELP]

I am sorry to hear that you are having a rough morning. the thing is, you came here, instead of going anywhere else. The urges are going to come and go at times, but it is how you deal with them that matters the most. you should already have a plan for yourself, in what to do when the urges come. The more that you just sit there and dwell on them, the more likely you are going to give in to them.

Learn a way to change your thoughts right away, start thinking of some very nice things, and if you do this, the urges will soon lighten up.

And please don't worry about 2 hours later, and this is all that you wrote. you had a choice to make, and that was, Do I spend two hours looking at P, or do I spend two hours on TTF. clearly my friend, you made the right choice

Always remember, that at anytime, these urges can come right to us, so please learn a way to just fight them off, and change your thoughts

Good luck to you. I wish you the best

[waterlily327]

I wasn't planning on responding to your journal, because I wanted to give you some space but I really want to say this here:
I used to view addiction (in general) as a sign of weakness. If you let it overcome you after seeing all the negative consequences and still refuse to change, maybe it is a sign of weakness...
But now, I see it like this: if you are willing to fight your addiction, you are strong. You are SO strong. You (and all the other PAs here) have realized that your PA has those negative impacts on your life and you are here trying to change. Slips don't make you weak-fighting makes you strong. Remember that. (hugs)

[HopeandDespair]

I can relate with what your going through. I'm currently on day 6 and I'm really having a tough time. I am desperately trying to stay away from P and MB and it is really hard. I feel like I have a ton of built up pressure within that isn't getting released and I feel extremely anxious.

Keep posting, I look forward to following your journey.

[Rockinastorm]

I made it to nine days, then I fell apart this morning. Bad dreams and a lot of anxiety over school work gave me urges I couldnt control.

I didnt come here when I felt them. I didnt think Waterlily would be on skype today. I wanted it so badly that I was willing to just go straight to the internet to search for P. Thank god I have K9 now and thank God for Waterlily for calling in response to the s.o.s. text i sent her minutes before giving in. Her call was what finally stopped my frivolous search. In the end I only saw a couple of pictures. i hated what I saw. it made me sick. I have found that when I search for P... when I find it.. I dont actually want to see it. It is such a sick feeling. If I hadn't already been convinced I was an addict I would be now.

I have realized that I have continued my habit of running away. I ran away from TTF after I started and I have not made good habits of posting here. That needs to change. Today was a gorgeous day and I wasted most of it. Today would have been day 10, and I blew it. I need to shape up. That's why I am here in the first place.

Thank you to all of you who have posted here and shown me that I am not alone. I promise I will be stronger about facing this addiction head-on.

[HopeandDespair]

Sorry to hear that you relapsed. I have been feeling the same way. I'm currently entering my final month of the semester and I am extremely stressed. . . I have been fighting P cravings all day. Thoughts that I've been overreacting have been creeping in. Today makes it 1 week for me. The first abstinent week in over 8 years. I feel like I'm going crazy.

Glad to hear you are back. . . keep posting!

[rosie]

As much as you want to beat yourself up right now - I think you did the right things in some cases here. You contacted your partner, you stopped the cycle, and you came here and fessed up. Credit where credit is due...

I also see this as a learning experience for you - its not all bad. You realised a few things about yourself and if you can apply those things to your life, this experience will actually act as a positive rather than a negative.

[chasman62]

Absolutely!

Worthless self-criticism is one of the hallmarks of people who end up in cycles of compulsive/addictive behaviors.

Don't dwell on what you did that was negative but what you did that was positive. Draw on the strength that comes from that....feel how much better it is to have faced up to that difficult choice and to have made the right call. That is progress...serious progress.

You are going about this the right way, you have put the mechanisms in place to help you break the cycle down and you are working on genuine honesty and engaging people to help you deal with lifes stresses instead of relying on a pointless and destructive compulsion.

Good work my friend.

Chas

[Rockinastorm]

I have realized that spending time here on TTF won't do me any good if I can't get everything out. Part of commiting to fight is coming clean and exposing everything to the light. I am so embarrassed to put this out there. I am afraid. But at the same time I know that this is a supportive community and we are all here together. So here is the incredibly delayed, enormous background story of my life before TTF.

I first experienced P in 5th grade when we were doing a project on Greek or Roman art or history or something along those lines. So the encyclopedia had an image that went along with the article of an eroded nude statue. Some girl in the class yelled out “OMG my first P!” So upon going home I had to define the word P having no idea what it meant or how it was related to a statue or Greece/Rome. I was interested. The girl sounded excited about it. So I went home and turned on my computer to our own encyclopedia-dictionary program.
That was all it took.
I was caught by my folks soon after when I started using the internet to look after school. They did a fairly ok job of blocking some of it but I became craftier and more creative, as well as learning how to delete the internet history. I was already hooked on it. Then after being caught 1-2 more times I was able to escape from it for a couple of years.. but went back to it around 7th-8th grade.
Around this time I was molested by my cousin. This completely shattered me. I had almost no self esteem to begin with, and this made me feel so much more ****ed up. I am still dealing with it today.
I actually just told my girlfriend about it this summer.. along with a lot of other lies I had been piling up… aside from her only my roommate knows. I told him because I needed to tell someone, and hes been the closest one too me other than her. And we don’t even get along that well. But hes a psych major, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt.
Thank god. Its coming out now. And the tears are coming too. That’s a good sign. It means im not bullshiting myself here anymore. I am here for real. Honestly, this is the first post here that is actually getting to me. I am glad I am finally getting somewhere. I hope this isn’t just the wine.
It happened multiple times.. when ever I would get out to the west coast… it happened a couple of times.. and when it didn’t, I drove myself crazy worrying about when it would. I don’t know right now how many times.
The hardest moment of my life was coming clean to my girlfriend about every single thing I had ever done, including P, MB, all my hookups and “gf’s” and compiling that into a timeline for her. That was my promise to her, on new years eve of 2010, so that we could go into 2011 together, with the past behind us. So I told her. I searched through all the horrifying, degrading, embarrassing thoughts and moments, to tell her everything. But I don’t need to post that for this journal. Its enough to say what I have said and move on. Theres still a lot to go.
I was alone growing up. I didn’t have any friends for some reason, and my family was disfuctional would be saying it nicely… I used aim chats to find friends and “love” from strangers on the internet.

I think I should stop here. Reading this makes me feel like im making excuses. But this IS what lead me down this path to begin with.
I had/have a broken view of women and girls. I don’t know whether that’s just my fault or the fact that I was passed over numerous times in highschool when I wouldn’t just hookup with a girl. Then, when I did, I was quickly abandoned, and/or felt as though I had abandoned myself. My first 2 times having S were in highschool. I hated both. I gave it away because I was loney, and because several thousand other things…. Like I don’t know… going to an all-male highschool where everything was a damn *****-measuring competition.. (figuratively speaking).. I had illusions that the relationships I had were actually what I wanted them to be.. and that I was in love… and that I wasn’t being cheated on although I knew that was the case.

So then after threatening to fail out of ------------ “prestigious prep school” I was able to convince my parents that I belonged in a normal school. That’s where I met my current girlfriend, who is here under the name Waterlily327. (She’s done a much better job of facing this than I have andyou have probably already seen her posts around the site.)

The most amazing blessing is that She was not like any of the other girls I had ever met or talked to. She was not promiscuous in any sense. She was far more innocent than anyone I knew or had ever known. And I asked her to date me, a monster. Of course I was pretending to be the guy I wanted to be, the guy I always thought I had been.. cleverly omitting my usage of P, aim chats, my cousin, and the fact that I had had S. Of course I stopped using P and I had not been using aim for a long long time.
I never told her about having S before. I didn’t tell her till 8 months later about the first time, and I waited another 8 to tell her about the second. Keeping those secrets destroyed my heart, and her trust, and led me to dark places. She was so pure. And I didn’t want to hurt her. I worried so much that I would, that I ended up doing so.
Not even 6 months into our relationship I felt I had the need to “test” myself by intentionally placing myself in a possibly adulterous scenario with both an ex-gf and an overly promiscuous female friend at the very same time.
I lied to her the other 3 times I “tested” myself.
I am a monster.
The more space that I put between us, the more P came back into the picture.
Then, last year, I ended up cheating on her. I made phone calls with said friend from above which were completely inappropriate and adulterous fantasies.

I told her about all this over our summer break in 2010. It had to come out in bits and pieces. The worst stuff came out first.
I nearly lost her.
I wondered then if it would be better for her if she did.
But she then showed me what it really means to love someone.
She stayed with me through months and months of secrets coming out. Months and months of pain. She didn’t trust me at all. I don’t know how much she trusts me now, 9 months later.. but all I care about right now is the fact that she is still here.
With all the shit I put us through, coupled with an already longdistance relationship and my transfer to a new large university with a female majority, it is nothing short of the work of GOD that we are still together.

I have been trying to turn myself around – trying to become the man I was pretending to be when I met her. I have been trying since this summer. I have made lots of progress In almost every area.
I still have problems with P/MB. She recognized it this summer, but didn’t want to push me into admitting that I have a problem…. I didn’t realize until recently.
I have been trying to stop, and I can do about a week, then it takes practically nothing and I am in the gutter of the internet.. and I would string relapses together.. going a couple days in a row before I could stop for another week or two.

I might be wrong but I think that gets me up to now. I admitted to myself I had a problem just a couple weeks ago. I joined on the 27th of March.

I am trying to turn my life around.
I want to show my girlfriend that I am worth being with. That I am worth keeping.
I want to show her that she was right to stay with me, that I am not a hopeless case.
I want to show her that I love her enough to beat this addiction.
Actually, I want to show that to both of us, because sometimes I don’t believe in myself at all.
I want to marry her, but if I cannot change, if I cannot beat this, how can I ever give her what she needs?

My roommate just came in and now that I have had a break I don’t know what else to say. I guess I will post this up now.
I am officially here.
Scratch that.
My heart is officially here; and invested in this. I want to accept responcibility. I want to feel the pain. I want to endure, and come out stronger.

[Rockinastorm]

I have found that diagnosing the way that I am feeling is better broken down into different categories. I have found that using different body parts helps personify my feelings. For instance, my heart knows what I should be doing all the time, but its not often audible because I have ignored it so much.
My mind will do whatever it takes to make the best of a situation. that more often than not means tricking me into thinking I am in the right, or that there will be no consiquences, or that just because time has passed makes everything ok, or that I am feeling ok after getting it something off my chest, so Waterlily should be just fine hearing about it. Lastly, there is my D who is exactly that: a D who only cares about himself no matter who he hurts or what he has to go through to be satisfied...

maybe this is a childish response. I dont know. but its hard for me to let my heart take control. its still hard to put it out there.

the only thing I have to my credit is the fact that since last summer I have been honest. I have delayed speaking about something for up to a day since that point, but everything I have painfully remembered or thought of or looked at (with unnecessary detail excluded), I have brought up with Waterlily.
That is all I have right now.
I want it to be more, but I am for now, right here.
But honestly, no pun intended, I have never been this honest or straightforward before. And this is a very good thing that I am at this point.

I hope that by finally getting all this stuff out here, to you as a community, I will feel able to help you during your struggles; without feeling hollow or hypocritical.

Peace be with all of you.