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Edited on Wed Mar-28-07 09:51 PM by varkam
I did some writing tonight and I thought I would share here with my fellows in recovery. I hope you might find something useful in my ramblings :D
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We admitted to ourselves that we were powerless over our compulsive sexual behaviours - that our lives had become unmanageable.
I’ve never been one to admit that I’ve been powerless over anything. I suppose not many of us have. I’ve always prided myself on being able to do anything that I wanted to, so long as I worked hard and applied myself. I figured I could do most anything. Thinking back, I realize that’s an arrogant stance to take; to assume that there is nothing that I cannot do – a product, I suppose, of culture and early adversity.
I applied the same standard to my use of pornography as well as having multiple relationships. I always tried to make myself believe that I could stop if I wanted to, regardless of what the evidence said. The fact that I would swear it off on night, but be filling my hard drive up the next should of illuminated for me the fact that I had a problem, but I would rationalize it away: I didn’t really want to stop. In a way, that might have been true as, if I had really wanted to stop, I would have been prepared to do anything to stop it. I was not prepared to do that.
Even in admitting that you have a problem, it’s implied that you – at the least – lack a certain amount of control. When one says that help is needed, it’s made clear that one cannot do anything that one wishes on their own. That is counter-intuitive to what I believed, and so it was easier to remain in my addiction.
Moreover, admitting a problem is terrifying, especially when it comes to sexual matters, and especially when the punishment can be quite severe. I was addicted to pornography – is that something people really can come forward with on their own? I suppose it is, but those people are what I would call courageous. It’s clear to me, now, that I never knew the first thing about courage. I allowed myself to be ruled by my fears, and the result isn’t too surprising. It came out, but not through any virtue of my own.
So I’ve been talking about powerlessness, but was I really powerless? Did I really have no control? I grant that my time in recovery has been limited, but I feel enough time has passed that I now have the sufficient perspective to be able to give an unequivocal yes as an answer to that question.
I had tried many times to stop when the guilt overtook me. I had my moments of clarity. Times when I saw, in a real way, the people portrayed in the pictures as just that – people. They had hopes and dreams, people that loved them and visa versa, fears and loss, beautiful and imperfect – just like me. So I’d get rid of all of it, swear to myself that I wouldn’t go back, and go on into the brave new world. It never stuck. I’d always come back, convinced that they weren’t being hurt, that they were freely choosing to do this, and that it didn’t hurt anyone. All that despite the pain that the secret knowledge that I was a slave caused me.
I collected. Picture after picture. Movie after movie. Person after person. Storing them, cataloging them, owning them. I could view them at my leisure, delete the ones that fell out of my favor, convinced of my own control over them. I had it backwards, I gave my control up in that lonely, dark world of mine.
At first, certain things I would shy away from because I still saw them as people. After a while, your moral boundaries fade and everything seems acceptable and, indeed, even desired. The more extreme, the more degrading and debasing, the more inhumane, the better.
When would it of been enough? Would there ever of been a point when I could sit back and breathe that sigh of relief – that my collection is complete and now I can move on to more productive and healthy endeavors? No. It was never enough. Had I not had the occasional attack of conscience, I would imagine that my collection would of numbered in the tens of millions of individual pictures and movies.
Given all of that, it’s clear to me that I had no real control over it. It controlled me. I do want to make it clear, however, that I’m not saying I have no responsibility. I do. It may be true that I’m an addict, and addiction undercuts autonomy – but the onus was always mind to recognize that the addiction was there and, more important, to do something about it. To get help. I did not, and consequently, shirked my personal responsibility.
I am powerless. I just can’t mess with pornography or cybersex. The saying one is not enough and a thousand is too many applies just as well in the world of sex addiction. If I see one picture, it sparks a craving to see another. Before I know it, hours of my life are gone and I’ve nothing to show for it except for being a little deeper, a little farther away from the things that matter to me. I realize all that, and yet I still can’t stop myself if I make it to that point.
The unmanageability of my life is actually what brought me into recovery – as I imagine it does for most addicts. I was arrested in October, and as I lay in the detention center that evening, I realized that I could not keep living as I had been. That was just one aspect of how my life had become unmanageable and, indeed, the most obvious.
It was unmanageable for years, just in smaller, subtle ways. For instance, my phone would often ring when I was with Sarah and I would be terrified of answering it because it might be someone I was having an affair with. I would lie so much about my whereabouts, important details of my life, my feelings, and my activities on the computer – all to cover for my double-life. I would then have to constantly monitor the things that I have said, for fear that I would say something that might give away a previous lie.
And I had been caught in lies many, many times. I lied to the people I loved, to the people that loved me (or the me that they thought they knew). Once I had been involved in an affair with a woman in California, and we wrote letters back and forth. My current girlfriend found one such letter and threatened to break up with me. I told her I would end it, and I did – for about a week. Like the siren’s call, my addiction beckoned me back into the fold, eager to lose the things that I’d worked so hard to mend.
All the lies, the constant covering, the pervasive fear of being “outed” takes a toll. For me, it was bouts of depression, endemic self-hatred, guilt, shame, and fear. Once I remember preparing a presentation for a class in psychopharmachology and, as I was loading it into the computer, I was struck with the fear (albeit irrational) that I’d mistakenly placed pornographic images into the presentation. Living like that every day is not how one should live.
I was going to start working with sexually, emotionally, and physically vulnerable adults and children via graduate school. The chasm between how I led my life during the day, and how I led it behind closed doors as not lost on me. I was to be placed in a position of power, trust, and authority over vulnerable individuals, and yet I was engaged in exploitation in a sense myself. That is hypocrisy at best, and dangerous at worst.
I’d almost been caught, many, many times. Sarah had found my pornography, or at least some of it. She found what could be considered “G” rated relative to the rest of the things on my computer. That didn’t get me to delete it. There were times when I was looking at it and Sarah surprised me, almost seeing what was on the screen. That didn’t get me to delete it. There was even a time when I think the FBI tried to access my computer. That didn’t get me to delete it. In retrospect, I think I wanted to be caught at some level. I left it relatively unhidden, and took basically no special security measures.
Looking over what I’ve written, it becomes clear to me that I am powerless and, as a result, my life has become completely and utterly unmanageable. I have, however, taken the first step in acknowledging my addiction by admitting to my powerlessness. It is also painfully clear to me how I was killing myself slowly, how I was living two lives, and how I was doing harm to others by living as I have. Given that all I’ve wanted to do was to help others, that lifestyle is completely at odds with my life’s goals. I could not of lived like that forever, nor should I want to. It was going to take from me until there was nothing left to take. I am thankful that I am here.
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