Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles and you have to change.
Jamie Lee Curtis
After my first session with my therapist, I had to consider my future relationship with the theatre of my downfall, technology.
It is obvious that the routes to porn are everywhere and as a society, you only need to turn on the tv or go on a night out to see we are a hyper-sexualised society with casual attitudes towards sex.
Bubble Wrap
One way to approach avoiding porn is to minimise the use of technology in your life. This could be by ensuring you have no access to a computer or getting a dumb phone with very few features to avoid the internet like the plague, some tips below could work for you, I will explain some of my methods and choices, I am sure these will not necessarily be fixed but will serve as a starting point.
- Make yourself accountable to others such as friends or get a sponsor in a 12-step group such as sex addicts anonymous
- Buy a dumb phone to avoid internet access
- Come off social media to avoid content triggers
- Install a blocker or an accountability app like Covenant Eyes if you have to maintain access to the internet
- Make your email and phone accessible to a partner
There is a growing list of apps to make your browsing behaviours accountable, sadly many of these are paid and I am sorry to say many can be got around easily.
I believe that behaviour and attitude are everything when it comes to recovery.
Answer the following honestly, as the answers will inform the steps you need to take.
What online behaviours have been unhealthy and damaging?
For me personally, this was the following:
- Seeking out anything that I could think of no matter how messed up.
- Adding girls I don’t even know on socials especially ones with only fans to download as much of their stuff as I could.
- Clicking through Twitter profiles for amateur porn.
- Site hopping the streaming sites and watching increasingly extreme pornography.
- Downloading and hoarding a porn stash filed and hidden on either a computer or mobile.
- Bookmarking loads of porn sites.
If you recognise some of these behaviours, we have some real issues we will need to work through, rather than condemn yourself in shame ask yourself the next question?
What can I do to resolve this?
The first thing I did was cull my social media followings on Facebook, and Instagram, and I ditched Twitter, this reduced the triggering content flowing through my timelines that could set off a porn binge. This was the first part, you need to remember Instagram is an algorithm-led platform and your search feed will funnel more and more content based on your previous behaviour. You can go through each suggestion picture and select “not interested” and it will start to get the message across to the Instagram mechanisms.
It took me a few days of doing this to reduce the unending pics of insta chicks, young girls, and countless only fans accounts attempting to pick up paying subscribers. Instagram is a real problem as it is saturated with borderline porn, and accounts of minors whose accounts say “parent-managed account” but with again highly sexualised content, based on the hundreds of thousands of followers these accounts have, I can only assume they have become monetised, so you can see how things are really problematic here.
I am happy to report my Instagram is all healthy hobby-centric stuff like mountains and fitness pics now.
I then sat down with my partner and reviewed my socials and gave her access to all my online activities, for me, I had been so secretive for years I was relieved to have that wall broken down and not be alone shadow-boxing my demons.
I no longer download anything, I have no porn bookmarks, and all safe search browsing is turned on.
I set my home page to fight the new drug.
The Tightrope
To me, sobriety has to be viewed as a way to live a full life, free from the fake exterior of social media me, the one that was projected to hide the fragile and wounded part of me.
My addiction doesn’t define me but I need to develop the ability to master technology as a tool and learn consistent responsible use, I have had a few momentary relapses in these early stages where I hit up some soft (solo girl nude galleries)
I cannot kid myself that I can manage my way out of this alone with lesser types of content, this will so easily lead to video and then extreme categories and this is disruptive to the reboot process. Addicts will always default to boundary-pushing if we do not hold our ground.
Remember that we are repairing our brains by living free of pornography. So, any porn use, pornified sex, fantasising, and edging just keeps those damaging pathways open.
Here is Paula Hall explaining how this works.
Relapses will happen, the strength comes in getting back up, understanding what went wrong, how we tripped and then we take steps to save the same thing happening again. I found that remaining accountable and saying I tripped up last night keeps me humble. I do this as secrecy has been the fuel of this fire for 25 years.
I am going to try to write a letter to myself that acts as a break open in an emergency kind of thing. I think I will also “keep coming back” to my local Sex Addicts Anonymous group to get a sponsor.
The program works and I feel it important to support 12 step recovery, I need to find the right setting for me as some define sobriety in a heavily religious ways.
I attended a session and shared with an SAA (Sex Addicts Anonymous) group and what I found was everyone was lovely, realising you are not alone is an important step to learning your true value. Check out the link below to find a group for you.
https://saauk.info/en/meetings
To explain the 12 steps here is Russell Brand in his own unique way.
- We admitted we were powerless over addictive sexual behaviour – that our lives had become unmanageable
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when doing so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other sex addicts and practice these principles in our lives.
Don’t be put off by the God parts of the steps, I was the only person there that identified as a Christian, the point is we find a driving mechanism that isn’t self, find a higher power, the universe, the force, something bigger than you, the point of these steps is what is important.
I will keep you posted on my experience with this program as I work through it but I am starting to see the value of others to maintain one’s sobriety, I felt at first that I never had anyone who knew about this, the last thing I want are mates with the same affliction but that is not what it is at all.
It’s the shared struggles, success, emotions and solidarity of striving to live right. When one shares, it can unlock something for someone else.
I like the idea of finding a sponsor and one day when I have put in the work and am ready, I would like to work with someone as a sponsor.
It’s nice to live life with hopes centered on being useful to others rather than being self serving.
Basecamp Recovery 