Comet's Journal

[comet]

Today, i saw a good movie, Pay it forward. sometimes, we really need to pay it forward. why do i hooked on P? one reason is because of the emptiness in my heart. sometimes i just feel life is bored, i don't have any passion. Now i am twenty. when i was 17, i was a boy full of passion, i dreamed of making a difference like Trever in that movie, and sometimes i got really excited about those ideas, and i didn't feel life was boring, but now what am i?
Now i was hooked on P, i spent a lot of time on fulfill my own desire. i am still confused about my sexuality, some people said Sex is wonderful, but how about P? P is about sex, but P is addictive. i am confused about human beings' libido. libido is part of our sexuality, but because of libido, we get hooked on P. or maybe P itself stimulated a desire different from libido and because of that desire we are addicted to P. Is MB without P OK? i am going to read more posts here to figure them out.
There are many night clubs in the district where i live, people come in and out all through the night.people pay to watch exotic stuff. Hundreds and thousands years ago people also do this. because we just want to fulfill our desire. now we have all those hi-tech stuff and we are still live like breasts, living for our lust everyday. we didn't get evolved at all! A man can still live well by doing this, a man can still dress a brand new, smart suit, be polite to people while watching P everyday. i lived like this. but deep in my heart i know something is missing. compared with that Comet years before, i only grow more gross, ugly things in my mind, those delicacy, fineness, daintiness and elegance was losing. A man can live for lust, he can go to watch P, watch the exotic dancers every night. and cops will not go to catch him. but this way of living has no dignity. i try not to care whether my desire was fullfilled but to pay it forward, show new friends here i care about them and love them, show the world my love.

[truetome]

Hi Comet. What a great movie. Thank you for your honesty in your post. These are questions I am sure many of us addicts and non addicts alike ask. Humans are sexual beings. That is what my best friend who is also a professional therapist said to me after I told him I am a recovering SA. This happened on the golf course over the past summer. When I say best friend I mean we have known each other since we were 8 years old and to be clear he is not my therapist. He wanted to qualify my understanding of s*x addiction and how I think it applied to me. For me it was my compulsive use of P and mb to cope with my inadequecies. I developed this a little bit younger than you as a Freshman in HS and unfortunately carried this into my marriage. The struggle with sexuality I can definitely relate to. What is "normal"? Especially when lust is controlling our sexuality and our being in some cases. Over the past 20 months of sobriety I have to say I have learned more about myself than I ever have. I have always thought of myself as a good person wanting to help others and to be helpful anyway I can. And I was with one dirty little secret. I am powerless over lust and have it allowed it to lead me down a path of feeling worthless, shameful, hurtful and not worth being alive. It has severely hurt the one I love the most in my life more than anyone has ever hurt her ever. Why because I violated our trust. This is what the P and s*x industry creates. It creates lies and promises of fullfillment through fantasy to where I felt shameful and could not be myself (The friendly, loving, helpful good person I wanted to be) and caused me to isolate and retratct. The more difficult life got the lonelier i felt. I was afraid of being abandoned and was looking for a quick fix. With each use it lead farther from the love of my family, intimacy with my wife and grace with God.
With a renewed faith especially in myself, living with no secrets and free from P and mb I have become confident and able to handle the challenges of life. More importantly I am able to feel those challenges which in turn allows me to feel more compassionate and loving as a person than ever before. Trust me there was a ton of repressed pain and emotion along the way and peeling back the layers of my ego was no picnic. So before I ramble on too long I want to let you know I appreciate you being here especially at such a young age. I recently turned 43 and have lived with this addiction most of my life. I find it encouraging you have found at 20 that lust and P are not in the ingredients to having a fullfilling life. There are so many challenges for your generation to overcome with media streaming faster than ever and how communication through texting and social media is preferable to meeting face to face or talking live to each other.
I hope you find what you are looking for. - Matt

[comet]

Hi, Matt, i also appreciate your honesty. you shared your experience with me. right now, i have been sober since i joint this site, less than a month. i found i have little idea about the way ahead. because of your story, i can see the road clearly. Thank you.
i just feel to keep sober requires effort. before i feel it is impossible for me to quit, now i find it is not so difficult. i feel the peace in my mind i have never felt before. i began my addiction at 17, before i didn't have a computer, i mb, but without p. i was hooked very very quickly at that age, Within a year i got deeply hooked, watched the trash till midnight every school day, in weekends i used all the afternoon or morning on p. i damaged the relationship with my parents. when i look back, i sigh, but i can't help, i just wasted a lot of my youth. even i was young, i had died. like an very old tree, always dies inside out. a serious PA dies inside out.
Down in my heart i know i have no dignity. this kind of living has no dignity. now i am planning my winter break, i want to travel, do something else. life is exciting, we don't need p to kill the bored.

[Disillusioned]

Comet, it takes great dignity to be so honest, to look into yourself and say, "This is not who I am, but it is controlling me," to seek answers and share with others the pain of an uncontrollable addiction. You are a person with dignity that has been harmed. It is still within you, but has been hurt and not allowed to grow because of the P. We all have lust, and P has fed that and made it too big in your young life. YOU are taking steps to rid yourself of it, and allow yourself dignity and to be the person you were intended to be, with all your gifts and all your love.
Keep reading the journals, Comet. There are men here that are over 70 and have fought this for a long, long time. If you give a bit in your resolve, it comes right back, ready to harm again. P is not who you are, but it has infected you. You are on your way to wholeness. Recognize the strength of the beast, the infection that P is, and keep pushing its ugly claws out of your sweet, young life. We all want all the good things in life for you.
Hang in there, Comet.
disillusioned

[comet]

There are men here that are over 70 and have fought this for a long, long time. If you give a bit in your resolve, it comes right back, ready to harm again. P is not who you are, but it has infected you.
disillusioned

I think you are absolutely right! we are always vulnerable.
yesterday, i broke my promise and acted out. it all began when i was using a computer in a library to finish a powerpoint on a difficult subject, i had did it for hours and it became tough. i felt tired. i don't know what was i thinking, i just opened some sites, not p sites, but had some photos of opposite sex. then i just had a sudden urge to use p, it was very strong, i told myself to calm down. to think about the results, but my brain just recalled all the p images and the temporary high of p. i lost the control and gave up. of course i couldn't watch p in a library, i also can't go to the dorm, i don't want my dormmate to find out. So i ran to a cybercafe to act out. it was very cold with snow and wind, and i wore a little. I was totally crazy at that moment, running in the wind just for a high...
After that i felt ashamed. i broke the promise for me and for all the friends here. i felt ashamed to talk about it to let my friends down. that afternoon after my acting out i did nothing. Just surfed the net for no purpose. i had a bad mood for a whole afternoon.
i downloaded the book called The Porn Trap by Wendy and Larry Maltz. This morning i woke up, lay on bed, suddenly remember the old story of Sisyphus. He rolls a large stone to the top of the hill with all his strength, then the stone just rolls down, he can do nothing but to watch the rolling stone down the hill. He and i are alike in some ways, i tried to keep sober but then i acted out, throw p away and promised not to do that any more, then i started it over. i repeated the circle for years. i got up until nine o'clock in the morning with decadence. I don't know what to do.

[comet]

Day 1
This evening, i was thinking about all the things that happened yesterday. what should i do? after all, i have to do something. so i decided 1. Go on visiting TTF, reply friends' posts. try to help others if i can.
2. read the book The Porn Trap, one hour per day.
3. read other members' journal, learn from others.
4. if i acted out again in the future, i would be proactive. do something instead of lying on the bed like this morning.
i thought even though i failed, at least i learned something, i changed my thinking about p a little bit, in the past i acted out on average once every two days. this time i kept sober for more than a week. i can start over again.

[IN NEED OF HELP]

hello comet

Sorry to see you had it rough the other day, and ending up acting out. I don't like that it happened, but it can/will happen to many of us. the thing is, what are we going to do about it after we done it? well we certainly cant just lay around feeling sorry for ourselves, because all that will do, is depress us more, and when us addicts and depressed, well we all know what we do.

But I must say I like what you decided to do the next day...... come here, Read from a book, Read journals here. and so forth. I like this, because it just shows us that you not just going to feel sorry for you, but instead, what you are doing is getting right back into your recovery. that is very encouraging to me.

Do what you can to never allow this again. I see that you had great shame in what you done, and you felt real bad afterwards. I know you didn't like that feeling you had, so use those feelings that you had, as a motivation to never do it again. next time you have this heavy urge to do this, instead of driving somewhere so you can look at P, just stay where you are, and come to TTF instead. I promise, that if you come to this site first, the chances of going to the P sits, will be slim to none in going to them.

Stop feeding this monster, the minute you started to just look at pics of women, you were just giving this beast a snack, and then, he found a way to get a full course mean and then some.

But I am very happy that you came back here, and I need to say, that I am very impressed in how honest you was to all of us, and letting us know, what had happened. I feel you will in time, have a very successful recovery.

Hope to see you back again my friend

Your fellow addict
Gerald

[2frustrated]

The difference between you and Sisyphys is that you created the hill yourself. Even though you relapsed, I believe those days of sobriety and planning for recovery made the hill smaller. You lost a battle, but you're winning the war.

I loved your comments in the first post about how primitive we are. The clothes, technology, fancy cities, are all an illusion if we still behave like beasts.

[Disillusioned]

Hi Comet,
Just checking in and I see you are having problems with relapse. If you have noticed, some of our long-time members who have been sober for a greater length of time, still relapse. You even noticed the start of it in the library, just looking at female images. That primed that circuit in your brain and started the chemicals being released and your body, your brain, every cell in your being was tuned in, attentive, waiting for the familiar surge of the full wave of those chemicals that say..'.Awe...I feel good', even though they are followed by the misery of 'I failed.'
In the Skinner book about PA, he talks about this, how the chemical reaction is triggered. How the chemicals start to be released. It is why you went through snow, wind, cold...to get the rest of the good chemicals. It is why P is addictive. The chemical reaction in our brain is good, but it is the primer and source that are bad and devastating to you, Comet. That's why the images just looking at women took you to the point of no return. What would you have done if you were in the front seat in a computer classroom with and hour and a half of lecture left, or a lab with 3 hours of class time left. You must learn to stop and delay, tell yourself, I can last...and you can. You lasted till you got to where you could use. How I wish you had run into a friendly classmate who said, Come, get a cup of coffee with me, and we'll catch up on how things are going. You can tell yourself, I will hold off for an hour. I can take this. I can hold off for 2 hours. I can do this. And you can. Believe in yourself, Comet. Then, follow through. The difference this time is that you didn't give up. Sobriety feels so good, you want it for yourself. You want it, everyone here is pulling for you to have it and be the best man Comet can be, and that is in a life without p.
Hang in there, Friend.
disillusioned.

[Disillusioned]

Just checking in again, Comet, and wondering how you are doing. Don't let one relapse cause you to give up. Like the rock that was let go down the hill, it is really hard to stop the cascade of chemicals once they are released. The trick seems to be to identify the trigger that started the cascade. If it can be avoided, do so. If not, have something strong and firm in your quiver to knock it out and down before it has a chance to take that chemical reaction in your brain from going any further. In every sense you are re-booting your brain, and I pray you can recover from this and be the good man that nature intended for you to be. P is no substitute for loving someone, Comet. What p tells is lies. It is better to have someone who is truly yours and gives you of herself, freely, not sharing with anyone else when she can have you.
Good luck and I hope to read you are well on your way and feeling stronger.

disillusioned