I recently completed the work for step two of the program which reads:

“We came to believe a power greater than ourselves, could restore us to sanity”.

Woven into the 12 steps is the language of the spiritual concept of a higher power, the most widely perceived name for such an entity or being is God. Or as we read, the God of our understanding.

In the past, my understanding of God was a stepfather figure, all about rules, and Jesus represented some stepbrother, who tries to smooth things over with the old man. 

As flawed as that sounds, it is the theology of many believers, it gets caught and taught in churches worldwide without any real scrutiny or challenge. 

In the past, my desire for faith was proven incomplete and probably more rooted in theoretical thinking and less part of a spiritual awakening that can change life for the better. 

The potential that’s discovered by allowing the control-hungry addict to connect with a power greater than themself is not to be underestimated. Power to lean on and surrender to. Someone to call on in times of great trouble and need.

My higher power fits with my faith in Jesus, God, or Holy Spirit. Not to a theoretical version that gets preached about differently by everyone who professes to be a believer. But to my experiential understanding of God. Now, I don’t claim to know or be enlightened enough or be qualified to tell others about this subject, but I know now that when I pray these words, there is an existential gravitas to their meaning:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can and equip me with the knowledge to know the difference. 

I am reaching out to the one who claims to be the most high. So as far as higher powers go, I know I am pursuing one bigger than my ego and problems.

Now, such a being would practice what they preach, so I can’t imagine they have a problem with not taking credit, people misunderstanding or relating to them in less than conventional ways. I guess I’m saying to take the baggage out of the God bits. Sometimes we may need to accept that we may need to unlearn some information we have harboured in some form of resentment against a higher power we claim to not believe in.

How does my higher power, or the God of my understanding show up?

Quite simply the evidence will be the difference in my life, my more rounded identity, and the progress I make every day if I am willing to approach the program with an equal measure of both faith and a mind to be willing to work the steps.

One of my more recent steps forward in this area of living has come by truthfully learning the lessons of step one, I cannot do any of this alone. So in recovery, my higher power presents itself in those nearest and dearest to me, my brothers in fellowship, nature, music, meditation, and prayers. From the unconditional love of a sister or my partner or the teary-eyed empathy of the therapist, helping me to unpack my life’s most traumatic memories, the sponsor who picks up the call in the middle of the night, to offer some illumination in the witching hour and even my puppy who waits religiously for my return from work, just to spend a few moments going loopy with excitement.

Our addiction isolates and traps but recovery does the opposite. To sum it up in 3 words, it is a connection to others.

Our unique understanding and journey through life means we would each have our different experiences from which to envision or personify the God of our understanding, and as a non-religious fellowship, we need not get distracted from how we are bound to one another, mostly in our desire to be sexually sober. It’s what binds us that makes us strong.

I connect with my higher power a lot through nature and music, sometimes both. My pursuit of the vastness of nature and the way I find a home for the night on a hill or a mountainside can often be spiritual, there is no other word for it.

In the moments where guilt, regret, and terror can overcome me like a wave, I find comfort in knowing that as sure as the sun sets and rises, time keeps rolling on.

I believe that what you focus on your magnify, it’s why we start the days in recovery focusing on our gratitude. Similarly, if we embrace our resentments like some old friend, we generally find the other old familiars are not far behind. Just waiting to see if we can come out to play one more time.

Sometimes that higher power can come by simply making yourself accountable, no amount of prayer, music, reading, or even meetings would help me kick my slippery behaviours alone.

I decided that I couldn’t carry on with the tightrope approach I mentioned in my previous post, at least for now, I signed up for some screen-sharing accountability software. Which sends a daily report to my sponsor. In laying down control, I get back the healthy benefits of technology.

One of the readings that form a template for meetings is taking the time to read the section “How it works”. It says…

 “If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps.”

After taking some time away from writing about recovery I found myself settling into my new group. SAA offers sex addicts a program of recovery and a fellowship of encouragement and support to those who wish to live a life of recovery. I now have a sponsor who I converse with regularly and who is helping me to work on the first steps and set off on my journey of sobriety.

It’s one thing to know the steps and another to work the steps. This last week I went through my first step with my sponsor, this included a detailed summary of how my sex addiction made my life unmanageable and I took the view that rigorous honesty was going to hurt, but I needed to shed light on my deepest secrets so that the hold they have on me might be loosed.

As I sat there reading through my list of how my addiction would manifest in my day-to-day, I shared rituals such as screen grabbing hundreds of pictures of girls on social media like Instagram, building spank bank folders hidden deep in my phone, if that sounds a little off normal, I then went on to discuss how I would collect pictures of ex-girlfriends and find pornographic images that would be look-alikes of them, if the relationship ended particularly bad the types of images I would associate would be quite extreme and I am ashamed to say by extreme, I mean disgusting.

One way that my addiction would compel me was in the different ways I could find myself masturbating, at times porn just wasn’t interesting, this was before all the high-speed sites we have now.

My step one also helped me see the sex in the sex addict until now I had thought it was mostly porn but as I took my first bit of inventory, I shared how I would lie to new girlfriends about my sexual experience to get them to do certain things as manufactured “first times” it was just to get what I wanted, I would also take viagra regularly to allow me to have as much sex as I could, (at 25 my ED was likely due to high porn dependency)

The porn trip had taken me so far out of the sexual template that I find living with the knowledge of my previous viewing and downloading habits almost unbearable at times. Long story short, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am a sex addict and my life had become unmanageable.

So after this meeting with my sponsor, I felt led to share some of this with the group later that day. Having completed step one I felt encouraged and that I had unloaded some of my heaviest secrets.

When I got home however my happiness was short-lived, I immediately found myself triggered as soon as I settled down. It was as though my addiction was sitting in the passenger seat and was saying “so you are brave now, wait till I get you on your own”.

It was almost like my father when I was very little, I could remember the times he would grit his teeth and you knew it meant that when we got home he would fly off the handle.

Suddenly, my guard was down, I felt crap and Instagram gave me the gateway drug of endless young attractive girls with pages of pictures, it may not be porn but the setting would almost always end in the rabbit hole of hardcore internet porn. 

Instagram, which is heavily algorithm-driven will only show you more and more of what you become slippery with, it’s a terrible thing to have in your “middle circle” if like me you are a scroller and a clicker.

While my first step work was triggering it has forced me to up my game with my recovery.

To give you some insight into the first step have a look at the link below. https://saa-recovery.org/literature/first-step-to-recovery-a-guide-to-working-the-first-step/

This program is one of intense personal analysis and a deep commitment to working on your character is required. It isn’t about perfection and beating yourself up, but it is evidenced by the progress you make. Mistakes need a debrief, what was the trigger? what could I have done? What should I have done? What measures could I put in place as a future contingency?

Ultimately my biggest takeaway so far is you have to truly admit you cannot do it alone, it’s not something you can grizz out with sheer bloody-mindedness.

So here is a bit of help in the form of a digital tool. I have a 12-step journal but don’t connect with writing things by hand. That may not always be the case. I foresee Step 4 will be a mile-long scroll for me and I believe our way is to do that by hand.

I use this app which is designed for those in 12-step programs.

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Google App: https://bit.ly/2QDgiiM

Apple App: https://apple.co/2rMlgRM

The app is great for self-reflection, I use it as part of my end-of-day routine. There is a free version and a paid version that allows you to connect with online sponsors but this I would say is secondary to getting involved with a group, you can use it to connect with your sponsor if they are interested in integrating an app into the way the program is applied.

The cost for the full app is £11.99 every 3 months, if I were to sponsor someone one day, when ready, I would have the cost of my use and that of my sponsee. So that would be £23.98 a quarter, without sounding like I am on a commission that equates to a few coffees these days, but each according to their means would be a great way to go about this, or pay for the first year and have a reduced renewal fee.

Whatever you do, don’t go it alone, start with what you are thankful for. Take a few minutes to clear your mind and admit or remind yourself of your powerlessness.

Get to a meeting, pick up the book, make some calls and take it all one step at a time.

https://saauk.info/en/meetings

This weekend was about two things, firstly starting back at work with a new job on Monday and the second was coming to the decision that twelve-step recovery is the way for me to go.

On Friday I had a therapy session and I felt like it was a good day, I had reached two milestones of acceptance in my recovery journey, firstly I finally felt that my pain and my past sufferings are not things I can erase or run from but are truly a part of me, the good, the bad the ugly, all part of the same me and there is no burying the pain in a box in an attic anymore, not an option! Secondly, I accepted the reality that this struggle against pornography is going to be one I face for the rest of my days. Everyone has their battles and this one is mine. As much as I feel like Frodo about my quest, I accept my fate.

I decided that I will own this! I will carry the knowledge of the depths to which my addiction took me, for the rest of my days, but I will no longer be consumed by it.

As the evening rolled on, my time was spent researching accountability apps, web filters, and apps for counting sobriety days.

It turns out that my post about the bubble wrap or the tightrope is a fairly accurate appraisal of the situation. The marketplace offers solutions that either lock down everything, blocking even helpful videos on porn addiction, these were filtered out just for containing the P-word in the title, and on the other end of the spectrum, it would be just too easy to get around the parameters if someone wanted to.

My thoughts turned to the day counting of one’s sobriety streak which seems to be the primary focus of NoFappers. As I set up my meagre 2-day streak on an app, I felt almost miserable that the 40-odd days following the revelation of my dark secret so quickly turned to court the galleries of “glamour” which soon jumped to hard-core videos. Sure this was more “normal” porn but I know better now, porn for me is no longer an option in any form.

I decided to turn in and went to sleep, unfortunately for me, I woke up midway through the night, and there it was, the monster under the bed.

The day, I reached out to a could-be sponsor saying I am ready to commit to the program, I had ordered my recovery bible, the big green book, and my voices of recovery readings. Had a great session and felt some real miles on the road to recovery, And later that very same night, here I was! Bump, a pothole, and then click click followed by despair, shame, and pain. I didn’t get back to sleep and the following day was one of deep misery.

In another episode of Elementary and the recovering Sherlock was about to earn his one-year chip and well, just take a look yourself.

The tears rolled down my face watching the TV show again, I have always been a Sherlock Holmes fanboy, beholding a hero so vulnerable and flawed yet so brilliant.

Then it hit me. Step One!

We admitted we were powerless over addictive sexual behaviour – that our lives had become unmanageable.

This journey of recovery isn’t linear, it isn’t a movie nor does it have a soundtrack. Being angry and feeling sorry for myself is not going to help anyone.

My higher power is going to be a little more tangible to me as I believe in God. Not in the way that I may have before but in a more meaningful existential way.

I thought of Jesus and his temptation, it came after his baptism, 40 days in the desert, no food and absolutely threaders, and here was me folding like a cheap suit. Two lessons I take from this are, firstly I am not Jesus, obviously, and secondly, neither is any other human on this planet.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

1. We admitted we were powerless over addictive sexual behaviour – that our lives had become unmanageable
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when doing so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. 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.
12. 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.

You have to be OK with the idea that you will never watch porn ever again in your life. If this idea gives you anxiety or makes you cringe, then you don’t have the ‘Porn is NOT an Option’ mindset yet

Gary Wilson

As addicts we need to educate ourselves on the science of addiction to make progress as individuals, the shame and self-loathing that comes with porn and sex addiction can leave your entire identity in pieces on the floor. I can’t even look at pictures of myself now without thinking is that even me?

I am angry with the double life I was leading, don’t misunderstand me here, I would function well with my 9 to 5 life, I would make sure I catch up with a small group of friends, I pursued fitness goals and devoted a lot of time to understand the plight of oppressed minority struggles but lacked the ability to pause and look in the mirror and start with improving the guy staring back at me.

My trigger would often come when I was alone and overtired, for years healthy sleep had eluded me, I have never quite kicked the night owl routine of my youth, and here lies the problem, whenever I had a compulsive binge, I would edge and not even finish sometimes as I wouldn’t even be aroused, I was chasing the rabbit through wonderland but deriving no pleasure from it, completely numb to what I was seeing.

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As time went on I would feel more release in deleting the porn I would collect like I was closing the lid on the laptop under the delusion that I had the high ground and was walking away, in control.

I would wonder why I would get cramps and feel I had a bad stomach, I have since discovered this was likely to be caused by the edging sessions placing a strain on my prostate.

When it came to real opportunities with my loving partner, I would often suffer from Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction (PIED) and Premature Ejaculation (PE) and this would just fuel the anxiety over real sex, I knew I wanted it, but the fear of the pain of not being able to perform made things worse.

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The brain is like a chemical factory and the ever-increasing pursuit of novelty with internet porn can rewire the way our brain works. From my early exposure to pre-internet porn, I can now share with you that my curiosity soon overwrote my normal interests, I mean, what 15-year-old lad in the 90s would have got hold of pregnant porn, fisting, and double penetration videos? I was already a veteran of hardcore and getting porn in the 90s was so much more difficult.

I feel for lads now who have never known a world without high-speed 4k porn on tap. We have never had so much extreme material just a few search words away right in our pockets, so it is no wonder that we just do not have the data on this issue for the much-needed recognition to be given. It is sadly still some way off with the American Psychological Association (APA) and in the UK there seems to be more growth of understanding, but this is not something that the NHS can assist in and I saw private therapy with a specialist as the only way to go.

This is an interesting video to give some insight into what goes on with our brains while we are hooked on porn.

There is also an extra part with some tips on how to overcome your porn addiction, which may help in creating new healthy lifestyle behaviours.

I find that hiking, running, climbing mountains and camping can all get me out in nature and give me some much-needed time away from the constant connection to technology, in starting this blog I saw an opportunity to put tech in its rightful place, as a tool rather than a master. 

To build on the information in the videos above, there are also a couple of books pictured below that I can recommend to arm yourself with the knowledge and understanding to finally live a better life.

I wish that of all the things I have googled and searched for online, that I had searched – help me, I am a porn addict, but then hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I think childhood trauma or emotional loss is the universal template for addiction

Gabor Maté

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I am a Sex Addict and this is my first blog post. Recovery feels like a mountain but I can’t go back.

I want to take the time to explain that my addiction has always worked in a cycle, deeply buried and hidden from the world, I conflated deceptive secrecy with personal privacy and I lived a double life hidden from loved ones and family.

It was as though my brain was a partitioned hard drive, on one side lived the version of me that has always been outgoing and seemingly confident, a version of me that would often be projected through the medium of social media and interaction. The colleague, the friend, the partner, and the uncle.

On the other side of the partition was the closed curtain, late-night porn-binging obsessive-compulsive.

An addict with conflicting operating systems is destined to crash and need a complete reboot. To understand such personal destructive behaviour, you have to trace the cord back to the wall.

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Paula Hall is a leading therapist in this field and explains the OAT model

Opportunity

My problem with pornography has been with me for as long as I can remember. I am of an age where my first encounter was through magazines and VHS tapes.

At the age of 12, a scrunched-up nude picture under the bed was swapped out by my parents for a black bag full of top-shelf magazines. I always thought I must have had cool parents, but I see now this was not helpful to healthy development and my needs for healthy boundaries and safeguarding were not met. I might have run with this and taken it to places I never meant to but this was my origin.

Attachment

I never felt an attachment to a father, my biological father was someone my mother had to escape early on in my life, he was a physically abusive man, and my earliest memories were of fear and domestic abuse.

Later in childhood, my stepfather was more inward and quiet. I would spend so much of my childhood trying to figure out why he was in such a mood. Communication and acceptance were always something I strived for and only now do I understand that my identity had been sculpted on the pursuit of this unrealised status of legitimacy through a longing for some sense of adoption.

Trauma

One of the exercises through my private therapy was to establish a timeline of trauma in my life, this might be broken down into two types, “big T” Trauma and “little t” trauma. Only when I went through this exercise did I see just how much I had experienced and the common thing I did, was to box it up and say to myself no time for indulging in self-pity, and have to get on with things.

Alongside this timeline of trauma I also established a timeline of my porn & sexual behaviours, the porn & sex journey had peaked at similar times to these traumas, and I often previously felt that masturbation and pornography were like some sort of self-medication.

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Understanding your path is vital to the acceptance stage of this, what this looks like for you will be unique to you.

As Paula Hall says in her video, Opportunity is just growing exponentially with technology, and in my personal experience, my habits evolved and escalated as technology advanced. I often feel like I wish I had existed in a time when such novelty didn’t exist. Watching TV the other day I felt this clip resonated with such feelings.

So today take the time to deep dive into your own attic, what have you boxed and boarded up?

Have you been self-medicating the whole time?

In a world that says “It’s just porn” I will use Basecamp Recovery to share my experiences and lessons, I intend to show that pornography is not only a cause of erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation, but the ever-increasing need for dopamine can ruin your life unless you arrest your fall.

A hijacked reward system can turn your whole life upside down.

For me to get through life intact I now have to devote my every day to the idea of no longer being a blind consumer of pornography. I hope others will join me.