“Surrender all that no longer serves you. Let all that remains buried in your heart come to the surface and be healed. Let there be space for new energies to enter. A new beginning transforms darkness to light.”

Anon

I have always had a problem with the word surrender, I paid lip service to all the spiritual concepts and sung about them for year’s, but it was only when I realised the hell I had fashioned for myself in my addiction that I began to connect with my faith in a truly existential way.

My partner witnessed the desperate condition I found myself in and could see how stripped of hope I had become, it was in these moments of being spent and broken that she realised how important this part of me was.

Despite not sharing my belief in God, she was sorry if she ever shut it down or stood in the way of me connecting with my faith. I cannot tell you the gratitude I feel for being encouraged to explore and reconnect with this part of me.

I heard today from a fellow that it’s said that the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous was written through but not necessarily by Bill W. I always felt it was as though God was saying you guys can have this one and claims anonymity like some sort of Banksy in the sky.

We travel in the language of a Higher power or the God of our understanding, This might not rest well with many outlets of organised religion but it needn’t be a sticking point. It’s how we don’t get drawn into controversy or arguments and keep our focus on our responsibility to tackle this day and this day only.

The themes of forgiveness, redemption, the death of the former nature and rebirth of the new are all pivotal to being able to forge a life free from that which so easily ensnares us, in short Regardless of someone’s religious affiliation we have all fallen short of the standard of living we know to be best for us.

There is the suggestion that we get on our knees and pray for a sober day, even as someone aligned with the Christian faith I have rarely practiced this outward enactment of the spiritual act of surrender.

I realise now that I have been living life just wanting to land on my feet but it’s only in recovery that I finally landed on my knees.

What does surrender look like for me?

Well, I acknowledge that alone I am powerless over my sexual addiction and without practicing the basics and living a life of surrender to God and service to others I am doomed to repeat the rituals that landed me in the pit.

My addiction was basically my own life choice to practice idolatry and worship my false god, an ever-changing engraven image, worship of the created and not the creator.

Now my days are tasked with simply choosing grace over shame.

Remember that we deal with sex addiction, cunning, baffling, powerful!

Taken from “how it works“

To this day I struggle to explain how I got to where I did with pornography. The time, the deception, the boundaries crossed and the contradictions I lived with.

Patrick Carnes explains often how pursuit of novelty leads to a hijacking of the reward system. This is often manifested in youth and when it hits the sexual awakening of adolescence it can lead to potent compulsive behaviour, this gateway is evident in many shares in the rooms of recovery. Whether someone acts out in fantasy, voyeurism, exposure, with pornography, with prostitutes or extra marital affairs the one thing that we all relate to is the unmanageability of our illness.

I often used to tell myself nobody in their right mind would do what I would do, to sit in front of a screen from bedtime to dawn downloading as much pornography as I could find, then delete it all in a purge of shame and guilt, I would see so much I wouldn’t even masturbate or even be able to get an erection, It was a night shift with no real outcome other than exhaustion, shame, irritability and depression.

My browsing habits had strayed outside of my sexual template a long time ago, I would see the shocking as normal and the normal as boring, I was for want of a better word insane.

The science at play in my descent into oblivion was the Coolidge effect, the genetic wiring that fires at the suggestion of sexual novelty, like the meme it’s the head turning mechanism that all males feel in defiance of all other rationale or commitment, this video explains it better than I could.

In human beings, the Coolidge effect can help explain the tendency to seek out new or varied sexual experiences, which can become problematic when it leads to compulsive or addictive behaviors, such as excessive pornography consumption, promiscuity, or infidelity.

In my years as an evolving sex and porn addict I wore out my brains sense of novelty, the chemicals released in moments of arousal through porn, light up the brain in the same way that a heroin addicts brain appears in a scan. I said once I felt like Porn was a drug to me and I had happened upon a crack den before I truly learnt I needed help.

The brains ability to ply the breaks and say enough in such intense brain chemical states becomes more difficult, dopamine release solidifies and reinforces a behaviour, pretty soon the mechanism of reward wears off and to get a comparable dopaminergic response the stimulus or dose has to be increased, this tolerance applies to porn in the same way a dose of a drug does.

In my case I would over dose so much my addiction wasn’t taking place between my legs but between my ears.

Here’s Harvard explaining how addiction works.

In other posts I discuss how some of the professional field treats sex addiction with much stigma and taboo. It is often said that sex addiction is an excuse of morally flawed people when they get caught. The medical field differ in opinions over whether it’s a disorder, a legit addiction or a disease.

In my experience sex addiction is the easiest to hide of all addictions, costs nothing monetary wise if porn is your gateway but can and will cost you your family, friends, livelihood and even life if left to run your life.

The very nature of sex addiction will always be steeped in shame, the boundaries that some sex addicts cross can do great harm to others, can break the law and lead to legal consequences, social alienation, extreme remorse and self hatred.

When I first heard the saying “the opposite of addiction is connection” I couldn’t help but scoff a little but in actual fact it is the most true thing I have learnt. Years of secrecy, shame and isolation disconnected me from friends, family my partner and most tragically myself.

Social media became a place to broadcast a me I wanted to be, my authentic self but it merely solidified the fact I was living a double life and I needed to stop.

I thank God for the love and support I have. Despite my early cynical thoughts that I didn’t need others or some program, the twelve steps have been a safe community based on a collective desire to change, providing tools for change, a brotherhood and a place to belong and find purpose in serving others.

Alone though I feel the progress may have been slower and it’s been my investment in myself by pursuing therapy, in truth my therapist encouraged me towards the twelve steps initially. In my opinion the best therapists dealing with addiction will always encourage an addict to a place to connect with others in recovery.

I know my story, how this all started as a child, I know the pain that has been present most of my life and that my stunted sexual identity found comfort in the counterfeit. I know too what I need to do, recovery isn’t celibacy but rather experiencing physical intimacy in a more deep and meaningful way than I had ever experienced before. It will take time, patience and commitment. The one thing is that despite the science and information at hand to help understand things I don’t think I ever will get why I explored the avenues I did.

So if you’re struggling to get your head around how someone could do certain things you are not alone, I like to think I get it a lot more but in truth it will always be cunning, baffling and powerful.

Some useful articles:

• https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/brain-activity-in-sex-addiction-mirrors-that-of-drug-addiction
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600144/
• https://www.addictioncenter.com/community/is-porn-addiction-real/

We live in a world now where mobile computers have changed everything, I often think back to the 90s when lads mags, Oasis and video games filled the time that I wasn’t kicking a football around in the park.

I was about 12 years old when I first came into conscious contact with pornography, my parents in some way must have thought it healthier to have a stash under the bed than the torn-out pages from papers or smuggling the catalogue with the lingerie section into my room.

When I think back the very first time I came across a magazine it was my birth father’s stash and I would have been about 6, my uncle some 3 years older and his friends were talking about nude mags and I said I could get one. I had no idea of what it meant back then but only a few years later it would become my easy way out. My escape.

Pat Carnes is the sex addicts version of Dr Bob, he was one of the first who wrote about sex addiction back in 1983 in the book Out of the Shadows, and many others since, he explained in recent times on the beyond theory podcast that a common path for males is formative years involve a hijacking of the reward system with video games which hits a whole other level when coming of age with pornography and the internet.

This has more recently been built upon with data from fight the new drug – https://fightthenewdrug.org/whats-the-research-video-game-addiction-linked-compulsive-porn-2/

I have observed this in my story and many shares of fellow recovering sex addicts and also observe it in friends and colleagues, the cultural normalising of video games and porn that led to a lot of my distorted thinking being propped up, thinking everyone is probably doing what im doing just nobody talks about it.

Here in 2023 and I am in the age demographic who’s pornography addiction dates back to a time before all this internet, I can remember a time before you could type in anything you can think of and a screen will show you what it can find. In my day it was magazine and video, as technology evolved so did my addiction.

I meet guys now who have never known anything but limitless novelty at a time where people are becoming less and less connected. For those who are old enough to remember viagra or to use it’s generic name sildenafil was a hit with older men who could no longer function fully due to age-related factors, now we have impotence drugs marketed towards guys in their 20s and they even allude to Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction being one of the contributing factors in this demographic.

In recovery I have seen just how much tech is designed to hijack our reward system, apps rely on algorithm and the doom scroll is a part of normal everyday life.

Internet Gaming Disorder has a greater backing from the DSM-5 than Sex Addiction which is frustrating, I have previously said whatever it is referred to as in a text book means little to me as my priority is that I am well and living as my authentic self.

A big purpose I feel in recovery is to take all I have learnt from my mess and poor life choices to help others find freedom and healing in their own journeys, there are innumerable folks entering rooms around the world, some have the self-awareness to seek help while others find their way into the rooms through hitting rock bottom and others being stopped by the law.

When I describe how bad things were for me to newcomers to the program I am reminded just how insane and unwell I was in “the bubble” as I describe my acting out behaviours would feel like someone else was taking the wheel and as a passenger I knew I was going to feel like shit and I still found myself along for the ride anyway.

My challenge with living in this game of phones era is to embrace help and accountability with tech, tools like Covenant Eyes and Screentime tools mean I can say to someone this stuff is just too difficult for me alone and I am willing to lay down my “right to privacy” knowing that secrecy is more the apt word for the things I have struggled with. I am glad that most late nights on my phone or computer now involve blog posting, podcasts or YouTube.

Tech is a great tool but a terrible master.

“He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly
fiction.”

Kris Kristofferson

Kris Kristofferson is said to have written the song the pilgrim in part about Johnny Cash and his behaviours, he was often described as the walking contradiction. As I look at my life I can relate with these words.

We addicts find ourselves caught in a relentless struggle, as our actions often betray the values we hold dear. I may cherish honesty, yet deceit became my modus operandi. I might value connection, yet isolation becomes my sanctuary.

The chasm between intentions and actions became a source of immense anguish, intensifying the contradictions I faced and lived with as a silent hypocrite.

One example of contradiction was I knew a girl who was what now may be described as a content creator, but we used the phrase glamour model back in the day. I stumbled upon her accidentally online and once I knew her alternative name I knew I could find these galleries of images, images which she doesn’t own and can never remove from the internet, the pain and regret of that period of her life I knew to be a source of great discomfort to her but so many times I would revisit these images to view them despite knowing better.

The self loathing involved with this act of self defiance was one of many examples of toxic shame at play in my life. I shudder to think the hours wasted merely in trying to find everything I could, the obsession and lunacy of addiction truly is cunning, baffling and powerful as the big book describes.

The contradiction I live with daily is that I despise everything that is pornography, I see no positives from it personally, I believe it is the worst educator, that producing and selling content is not empowering and being a blind consumer of it is buying into a lie that it is a substitute or an aid for real intimacy and connection. The reality, however, is if I was given unfettered access to the internet I would be walking the tightrope where if I were to fall off I would lose myself in a hole for days binging everything I could. I need accountability and I need support to function with modern living.

As soon as I see contradictions and paradoxes at play in my life I know I need to do some work on self care and service to others. My course needs correcting immediately as a degree or two off-course can be remedied quickly but to carry on in the wrong direction I can go severely off course very quickly.

One of the most profound contradictions I have to be alert to is the illusion of control. I may desperately desire to reign over my life but in truth I am a terrible God, without the program and others I will find myself utterly powerless in the face of compulsion. There is no self help for an addict.

So what do I mean by opposites? this is where the idealist and the romantic in me steps in, recovery gives flawed folks such as myself a chance to own my actions and more importantly learn from and learn how not to make the same mistakes and terrible decisions over and over again.

When I look at some of my worst and most shameful deeds on my inventory I see the opportunity to find the opposites or work towards the symmetry of redemption, from shame to grace, from defects to assets, from resentments to gratitude.

This website serves as an opposite that I needed to realise in my new life, in the past I would search out directories that would take me to places no person should go to online but to me they served as a phone list of dealers, I was the depraved junkie and my eyes where the veins waiting for its hit.

To live, I need to take the worst of me and work towards a directory of hope and help to make amends to myself and others for colouring so far out of my values.