I am struggling mightily with boredom at work. I simply don’t have much to do. What makes me even more frustrated is that the tasks that I must get done, I’m waiting on others to finish their tasks in order for me to finish mine. I really could work 2 hours today and get all my tasks done. The boredom leads me to a decision: to escape or not to escape. To live in reality, reality being God is present with me here, or to escape via distraction. What I really want to do is use paid time off and stay at home and work on CR stuff. But I’m trying to save my paid days off to potentially go on vacation with my wife for our five year anniversary. I know that I can be still and at peace in the present, even with boredom. I have peace in who God has made me. I have peace in what He has given me and put before me. My sex life is showing signs of life. My wife wanted sexual attention this weekend for the first time since her plasma hip injections 7 weeks ago. It was a very intimate experience, even though I didn’t receive any attention in return. It started to hurt her hips, so we promptly stopped. I think this is good to be building her comfort ability and trust with me in bed. But giving one way sex is not easy. I’m on week 7 of hard mode reboot which wasn’t exactly my idea. My addict brain has been obsessing over the intimate time, and my recovery brain has been trying to stay in the present and hand these thoughts over to God. I’ve been struggling with that Monday and Tuesday. I need the Prince of Peace to show me peace today. Lastly my ‘sponsor’ give his testimony at CR last night. He’s at 4 years no PMO, and had a 15 year streak before that. It is inspiring to know what God can do and the chains he can break. I am working on day 18 (I think) of no hunt-and-seek behavior. Coming here and venting my feelings to you guys and to God is my primary mode of defense. I need to express how I feel in healthy ways besides escape.
I need to stay in the present reality and tough out urges. God gave me great joy in doing this today. I was at the gym and the place was empty. I could have rifled through the magazine rack or channel surfed or whatever. But I texted my AP and told him how I felt. Still horny, I left the gym and just prayed ‘God I’ve done everything I know how to do. Please just help me. And He did. Once I got back to the office I felt free from urges for the rest of the day.
Yes! Sincere prayer from the heart, acknowledging our incapacity to fight sin and acknowledging God's incredible ability and willingness to fight for us. Sometimes it takes more prayer than a few moments but it always works.
Could you change jobs, to ditch the smartphone? Others have done it... On the other hand, if you can find freedom even with a smartphone, more [of God's] power to you. I have been there. This is really hard. I am surprised more people haven't replied to you about this. But it is not impossible. I think it happens in miniature when we snuggle or make out with our wives or whatever and get aroused but it doesn't go any further. But to sexually pleasure the other, and not receive release oneself...that can be really tough, even just physically. But again, not impossible. And I remember being grateful just for the intimacy and connection, even if my body was very frustrated. And take courage, if you can do this with God's help, it will show your wife you can genuinely put her first sacrificially and (re)build amazing trust and connection. I know that from experience. Remember Sheila Wray Gregoire says from her research that being prepared to halt sex at any point is one of the most powerful things for enabling a woman to feel free and thus to maximally enjoy sex. In my experience, the best thing for this situation after the event is exercise. Like a 10k run! There are I think not many experiences which are as effective at testing the depths of one's sexual surrender, barring going for a very long time with no physical intimacy. The tension may come out in a nocturnal event at some point, with or without a dream!
I was really struggling with resentment towards wife yesterday morning for the lack of sexual intimacy. I KNOW these resentments are rooted in lustful thoughts. When I fail to knock out a lustful thought in the first round and it makes it to round 2 or 3, then it does damage. A lustful thought that can hang around causes expectations which aren’t based in reality. This just makes me freaking miserable. I HAVE to do better at knocking out lustful thoughts in the first round this week. I admit I was frustrated with our sexual situation Friday and yesterday. I had this emotional sludge inside of me. I couldn’t figure out what emotions I was feeling or how to deal with them, so it drove me to wanting sex to escape. There was a lot of prayer involved and I didn’t have great days of mental health. During this mental wrestling match I went for a walk and was just trying to get my brain to understand - sex is not a need. I need to be content without sex for my life to be satisfying. Not trying to grasp ahold of it like a blood sucking leach. THis morning these verses are coming to mind: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a bond-servant and being born in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death: death on a cross.” Philippians 2:5-8 NASB2020 @Rebooter2022 It encourages me to think that being able to stop sex in the middle is something you’ve seen positive results from. Last week was one of the first/few times I’ve been able to peacefully do that. Hopefully it provides my wife with more freedom. The verses in Philippians go on to say Jesus was exalted by God for having relented his rights and offering himself as a servant. I hope that in the long-run God blesses my marriage. I have gone three weeks without hunt-and-seek behavior. I know that if I were to go back now it would be more painful than it’s ever been. The more I grow into my identity in Christ, the more painful relapsing into my old self is. I am very afraid of how painful scrolling/and relapsing would be. My rule that is providing me some structure now is this “Do not go anywhere alone where there is a possibility of seeing sexual imagery more enticing than that which is on the local news.. and Iowa news is not enticing.” This rule discouraged me from doing a few small actions this week, but did not entirely protect me from 3 small temptations that came to me. But the rule is providing a framework for avoiding unknowingly sliding into hunt-and-seek, by forcing me to think about where I’m going before I go. I’m traveling to PR this week for business, and this rule will keep me away from the beach and hotel pool.
Back in the PMO days, I never would have thought of sexual interaction with my wife that did not end in orgasm for me. These days, free of pornified thinking and using sex as more of a way to connect with my beloved wife -- who is a "touch" love language and has a higher libido than mine -- I will occasionally please her physically without any reciprocal stuff at all. And our sex life has never been better. She knows I am all in it for her, and that makes it better and more meaningful for me, too. But it took me nearly a decade in recovery and over 20 years of marriage for us to get to this point. Just sharing that growth is possible. We can do more than we ever imagined possible, going far beyond who we were when in the depths of addiction.
Team NOFAP, Interesting weekend. On Friday I met with my therapist. Amongst other things we started ‘exposure therapy’, which is designed to help me reinforce healthy thinking and tools when I do see sexually alluring images. He showed me a clip of a beautiful person that he had cut out from People magazine and told me to describe all of my thoughts. At first my thoughts were unhealthy and lustful. I became triggered in his office and he instructed me to put the picture down and turn it over. He then started talking me through humanizing the person in this image. Who she is. What her personality might be like. He encouraged me to dig into my healthy response mechanisms after I left the office. I journaled multiple times over the next 24 hours. I was triggered for probably 24 hours afterwards. One of the biggest things I noticed in my response is FEAR. I am scared of my arousal response. I am afraid that I will become triggered and what will happen after that. I am afraid that I will become aroused and then be vulnerable. I am not sure what to do with that fear. I had not noticed this particular fear before when triggered, but there I saw it, clear as day. Now that I know that fear is part of being triggered, I can better address it. I also met with APs on Saturday and explained the exposure therapy to them, as well as explained it to my wife. Talking about it really helped me calm down and become un-triggered. That is also a victory - having a strategy that can help me become un-triggered. My wife and I wanted to be sexually intimate this weekend. However she had a lot of hip pain, and we opted to cuddle instead. I was again struck with fear, fear of how I would be able to handle her disability over the next 10 years or so of our marriage, until she is old enough for hip replacement. She kept asking me if not having sex would make me sad, and I told her that I just wanted to know that she wanted me, that she wanted sex, and that she thinks I’m sexy. She reinforced these things. Honestly today, I feel pretty sexually satisfied from the experience. A big part of my sexual desire is just to be desired and have my sexual desire reciprocated from my wife, even if we don’t actually engage in sex. I again woke up today with fear. How can I go 10+ years with a disabled sex life? I NEED God to be my strength and rock. I cannot do this without him.
I once had CBT for OCD with a particular therapist. My OCD (internal variety, confusingly [for here] known as 'pure O') mainly focuses on a compulsion to mentally review whether or not I should confess past mental or physical events to my wife. However, I mentioned sometimes struggling with P memories to him. He suggested 'exposure therapy' of deliberately holding in mind a pornographic image in order to normalise this. I told him I felt uncomfortable with this and that it conflicted with my morality and told him so. He told me I could contact a mentor in my faith tradition to ask them if it was OK for me to do. I contacted one of my mentors who is a Pentecostal minister and also an Anglican priest. He said it was stupid and dangerous to deliberately hold porn in mind, and not to do it. We did not proceed with this line of therapy, though I stuck with the therapist and he was very good for the other OCD stuff. (The biggest lessons I got from that therapy were that 'Internal or automatic behaviour is still a kind of behaviour e.g. lying in bed and letting my mind wander is still a kind of activity' and to change my verb in my mantra for dealing with intrusive thoughts from 'Acknowledge and refocus' to 'ALLOW and refocus'. These are both very helpful principles for fighting PMO temptation too e.g. when a P thought comes in, don't pull it close and engage, but don't try to push it away and 'fight' it either--both will make it grow. Instead, allow it to be there, and get on with focusing on something else, even while it is there. Paradoxically, this de-fangs it.) I will tell you that anecdotally I have come across many people and accounts of people in Sexaholics Anonymous who say that their therapist gave them bogus advice, and did not understand lust addiction e.g. 'just use a little bit of porn', or 'just masturbate a bit as an outlet, it's normal'. They do not understand that if someone has an addiction/allergy/sensitivity to lust then if you let in a bit / do a bit of a lustful activity it triggers a chain reaction, can snowball into insatiable repetition, and smashes the conscience. I imagine this image/images from People magazine was of a clothed person, which is different to an image of a naked person. We need to learn to look at clothed women and not lust. However. A reproduced image of a woman on paper or on a screen is different from meeting a woman in real life. There is no personality, spirit or interactivity there. So it is a lot easier to lust, because it is just a reproduced fascimile. These things did not even exist before the late nineteenth century. Do we really need to train ourselves to look at them? Wouldn't better exposure therapy be relating to attractive women in public in appropriate and safe scenarios without freaking out? Even my current therapist who is an extremely qualified clinical psychologist tried to take me down the line of 'it's OK to M, everyone does it'. I tried it, and it still almost always triggered shame, depression, anxiety and increased P cravings. It took him a while to see that it is a behavioural addiction for me and violates my particular moral standards, which are very hard to change! So, to say, make sure you have a decent therapist and that you have done your homework checking out their qualifications. There are lots of different styles and therapies available out there--you want something with a strong evidence base for efficacy. I really understand the fear. 10+ years...this is where the 'one day at a time' adage is really very helpful. You can't do 10+ years. So don't. You CAN do today, with God's help. So just do today, one day at a time. Are you committed to stay faithful to your wife, with God's help, just for today, and find no lust / O / sexual stimulation outside of her? Your marriage vows, what did you say? Are you committed to upholding those, just for today, with God's help? Reaffirm it every day and just do it for today. One or both of you might die tomorrow. A lot of different things can happen in 10+ years. She might be miraculously healed, or you might get accidentally castrated. I am learning that occasional but regular conversations about sex held outside the bedroom at a safe time with one's marriage partner are helpful. It seems to me that regular sexual intimacy of some kind should be normal and expected in a marriage (1 Corinthians 7) except in exceptional circumstances but not that it should ever be demanded, coerced, expected as an entitlement (Ephesians 5; we have responsibilities, not rights, the ESV actually mistranslates part of 1 Cor 7 here). Given your wife has hip problems, could there be scope for the 'intercourse' part of your sexual intimacy looking like you manually or orally stimulating your wife to climax, and then her doing the same for you, if she wants to? There is a saying in Sexaholics Anonymous that 'sex is optional'. This is hard to learn, but I am finding it more and more to be true. It's not a need. We don't need it. If you never had sex in the next 10 years, you would not die. And you might not even be miserable either! It's all about attention, as far as I can see. If we constantly think about the sex that we could be and are not having, we will be miserable, yes. But if we retrain our attention to allow natural arousal to be there when it surfaces and then refocus elsewhere in life, we find we can live comfortably without sex. And don't forget about the wonder of nocturnal emissions... If it really was a 'need' then the body can get the Os in its sleep. But I am suspicious that this is not actually an outworking of a need, but rather an outworking of the biological desire-system releasing semen when the desire system (a 'want') has been triggered or strained in some particular way. I am preaching this to myself too, because I can be prone to share your fear.
Isn't exposure therapy predicated on the assumption that one can retrain the brain to not react to certain stimuli and thus rely on ourselves to resist temptation? Where in this theoretical treatment is the understanding that we will never be completely reliable beings but that we can succeed if we trust in God to fight temptation for us? I don't mean to offend. I am sure there are some good psychologists out there who can be very helpful when one is need of help. However, psychologists are also humans and those without faith are missing the paramount means of assistance - God.
I’m at 60 days here without hunt-and-seek and want to remind myself of the pain of hunting, and the joy of sobriety. The Pain of Hunting: The guilt of having hunted feels like someone is pressing my facing against a wall. It feels low. It fills me with fear that my addiction is taking my life, fear that my marriage is going to end, fear that I will never be well. Hunting crushes my wife. It makes her feel all the fear that I feel. It is worse than physical harm to her. And she does find out and I might as well detail what I hunted for and why she wasn’t enough. She would find out, because I have shown her my blue chip, 30 day sobriety chip, and 60 day sobriety chip now. So if I feel, she would definitely ask questions and I would need to tell her what happened. Hunting would derail the progress we are making in our marriage. It would destroy what we are building. Hunting makes me too ashamed and guilty to approach the throne of God with the boldness that should come with being covered in Jesus’ blood. It severs my ability to communicate and commune with the Holy SPirit. To Be Continued
I have the gift sent from Jesus of the Holy Spirit living within me. I can feel him there, growing like a small tree in the pit of my stomach. I can sense Him when I am quiet. This is new for me. I think I have been a ‘Christian’ forever but I’m going to a church which is encouraging me and reminding me to seek the presence of God. Maybe Jesus Himself is reminding me that He sent the Holy Spirit. That He is real. That is peace and He is my compass. Hunting behavior replaces my dependence on Him with a dependence on chaos. The chaos becomes my ‘peace’, if you can believe that. I think it has something to do with my high risk tolerance, where I love taking risks. I love the thrill of that little rebellion. But in truth the rebellion isn’t against my parents or wife.. it’s against God. So no wonder His feelings are hurt when I disobey Him and He distances Himself from me.. He is hurt by my betrayal. Today I will stay in a safe place as I work online. I will not visit websites, no matter how innocuous,, that could contain provocative imagery. Not because I couldn’t handle them through my resources, but because I don’t want to see imagery.
73 days without the frenzy of the scrolling, seeking, fearful behavior. Today I entered into that frenzy and went to a work related news website I knew might contain enticing ads. I went there not to stare, but for the rush of dopamine that comes from scrolling. So I’m resetting back to zero. I am encouraged by this streak and also feel the Holy Spirit’s guidance in this. Today I prayed, I texted my APs, i had three journal entries, I went for a walk after initial temptation, I listened to a recovery podcast at lunch while at the gym. It could have been a more serious fall had I not leaned on my resources. It is painful resetting my counter and embarrassing. The more I grow close to the Holy Spirit the more any slip is painful. If my wife asks I will have to tell her the truth. That is the hardest and most important part.
It sounds like you're making progress in spite of that slip-up. It's good that you didn't go any further, immediately recognized the behavior, and tapped into good resources to remind yourself why this journey is important. It's good that you're transparent with your wife as well. Keep that up and find ways to continue to appreciate, encourage, and love one another even if that doesn't involve sex. Even the "smaller" slip-ups can be as painful as the "bigger" ones used to be, and I think that's part of sanctification and is a kind of growing pain. Remember not to be too hard on yourself and meditate on Scripture and pray. I've found it's good to comfort yourself with this after receiving correction from the Holy Spirit. It's restorative. Praying for you and for your marriage as you continue on your journey.
Struggling with a growth edge here. The Holy Spirit is growing in my life and working through my church family. I am working through humanizing enticing images with therapist. But I am also struggling with scrolling through risky parts of the internet - App Store, album covers, movie trailers. Resetting my counter to show that. At 9 months without MO. Praise God for working through my struggle to show me the new transformation that I am in Him. My battle plan today: - FREE lustful thoughts, turning them all over to the Holy Spirit and identifying them as evil. - If I see an enticing image, I will humanize the person in it and only look at their eyes. If their eyes are not there, then there is nothing to see. I will then get up and take a break from tech. I will NOT search out more imagery.
Bravo. I would be more interested in celebrating the no MO if I were you. I am coming up for 11 months no MO so not far ahead of you. Thankfully scrolling not so much of a problem for me...most of the time. Only occasionally. And I don't have a smartphone. I saw an image of a woman with big boobs today online at work and lingered a bit. I need to work on that with God. But I am so glad that by his power I am not looking at P or doing M these days. The scrolling / lingering comes in the 'progressive victory over lust' category. I applaud you, as ever, for tracking yourself with this and for aiming for Jesus' standard. I would also add to this; don't beat yourself up. Women are beautiful and we are wired to find them attractive. We can't help that. But we can stop scrolling and lingering, when we become aware of it, with God's help. Keep working on that with God, but don't shame yourself.
Thank you guys for the encouragement, it makes my night. My wife started working over night as a nurse, and logging in here home alone tonight made me feel not alone. Thank you!
