What has been your biggest challenges to your sobriety?

[OpenEyes]

This is a great thing and what the heck, I will try to revive it.

This is for the PA's but I hope SO's read it as well, to get some insight.

What has been your biggest challenges to your sobriety? IF you wish to list a particular trigger, please keep it "clean" or if it is a situation or mental state, please relate that. Also list why that has been such a challenge.

I am starting this one off, but I will not be posting my own reply till 20 Jun, 2010.

I look forward to seeing some posts!

[65Ford]

No doubt about it, being alone. It's not that I'm bored, I have plenty to do, and plenty of other activities to spend my time on. Maybe it's from having lived alone for several years and I just never quite got used to cohabitation, I don't know. But when the house goes empty and quiet, the seduction is there. I'm still trying to figure out how to overcome that, but in the meantime I'm just making every effort to not be left alone. At this stage, it's also a trust issue. On the one hand I would like to find a way to re-earn my wife's trust that I can be left alone, as well as re-establishing trust in myself that I can be left alone. I posted in a another thread that she offered to go out to pick up some groceries if I didn't want to go, but I couldn't trust myself to stay home alone, so I went with her. It's tough. Really, really tough.

[OpenEyes]

To this point, I think my biggest problem has been not just taking responsibility for my actions, but understanding what is responsibility, how it applies to my SO, my PA, and how to change my perception of responsibility, and take the new way of seeing it to heart.

[FoolishMind]

Good Question OE, and in all honesty its hard to single out exactly what the biggest challenge is. As the after first understanding were a PA, the Challenge of turning it around is probably the hardest thing to deal with.

For me right now, apart from all the usual triggers, I think I find the hardest challenge is trusting myself. I know despite years of sorting myself and my family out, I can still screw up, and its quite a challenge in my own personal confidence dealing with that on a daily basis.

FM

[yorkie_owner_85]

I guess for me it would have to be having money and being in the bookstore. Online P also poses another risk for me.

[Frustrated]

The key might be conditioning...some call it habits but I believe that it's something far deeper. For example, at Christmas many people feel sad; depressed. There is no other reason at the time to feel that way except that it's the Christmas season and they are 'conditioned' to be sad or depressed. 'It has always been that way....I've always felt that way'.

With a PA the same thing can happen. You become conditioned to browsing the smut section of your local magazine rack scanning the covers, or each time that you're in front of the computer you're conditioned to begin the methodical hunt for fresh images or video footage. Most times we're not even aware that we're doing it and even worse, we don't even have a sexual itch to scratch. Awareness and a shift in thinking can help a great deal in beating your PA. Changing your daily routine can also help break conditioning.

[Daniel]

For me as you can read in my recent journal posts, it was figuring out the "gray area" of P/non-P/suggestive etc. material.

I fell into the trap (on purpose) of wandering too far into this rationalization of looking at gray area material and saying it wasn't P so it's OK. Not!

So the day-to-day PA-activity is keeping thoughts pure, as that's where the war starts; keeping a black-and-white view of suggestive material period; being careful with my eyes when out and about.

The good news is the challenges indeed subside. What is challenging now would been off the bottom of the list from two years ago.

Daniel

[MyNameIsMatt]

No doubt about it, being alone. It's not that I'm bored, I have plenty to do, and plenty of other activities to spend my time on. Maybe it's from having lived alone for several years and I just never quite got used to cohabitation, I don't know. But when the house goes empty and quiet, the seduction is there. I'm still trying to figure out how to overcome that, but in the meantime I'm just making every effort to not be left alone. At this stage, it's also a trust issue. On the one hand I would like to find a way to re-earn my wife's trust that I can be left alone, as well as re-establishing trust in myself that I can be left alone. I posted in a another thread that she offered to go out to pick up some groceries if I didn't want to go, but I couldn't trust myself to stay home alone, so I went with her. It's tough. Really, really tough.

Oh wow. If i didn't know any better, I'd say I wrote this myself.

Being alone, and having the opportunity there is difficult. I've placed a few pictures of her and us on the wall behind my monitor, but it's so habitual, it's hard to break the patter.

A few days after I resolved to get better, she took the dog for a walk. I declined to go with due to having to other things I wanted to do. She left, and I kept busy, but pretty much the whole time I thought about using.

When she came back, I felt guilty for thinking about it, and she saw the guilt on my face.

She still thinks I used that day.

The lack of trust hurts. It's all my fault, but that doesn't make it hurt less.

[Thoughtless]

The goal of avoiding gray areas has been one of the best things I have gained from this site.....Thank you Daniel

[TYC113]

Yeah, I would definitely have to say being alone is a trigger. I often have those thoughts come in to play whenever I am alone. And I have a hard time telling myself no when I am alone. It's a little troubling when I have a computer in my room and I can easily look it up there. That's why I have tried to put up blockers on my computer browsers so that I cannot even look up P. It's tough.

Also, going to sleep, the thoughts are there and they are some pretty strong thoughts. Hard to contain when I am asleep.