A quick note

I am still here and very much alive, overtime is making things rough to get done but I am getting a routine down so that I can keep up posting. My biggest fear right now is getting tired and worn out. I am fortunate that I have my wife, she is a gift from God that helps me keep my mind straight. I have chores to do and must get to them but I thought I would drop a note in and pass along this news item that I found.

Under the Mercy,

MS

sexaholic sexaholism pornography sex+addiction lust news Catholic+bishop

Step Four

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Now we get to some hard work. In some ways this could easily become a list of faults and failings and nothing more. I think that would be a mistake, a missed opportunity for growth. I am not saying that it is unimportant to know where you have failed but I think we need to dig deeper.

In step one we recount places that we have failed to show how our life has become unmanageable due to lust. Here we can take that and see where our insides our and see what our true moral standards are, we can learn our true current standards by how we act and not what we profess. This shows us where we truly are on the journey.

For me I professed that masturbation was inherently wrong. However, in reality I didn't have a problem with it and in reality my behavior made it look like a good thing. It wasn't just masturbation but objectifying women and thinking of them doing things to me, lusting and wanting to be lusted after.

This point of my inventory wasn't to show me that, "Oh well, I guess masturbation is okay and this isn't a problem." The point was to show me that I had work to do, I may fail but I need to work myself back to my standard. The other thing it showed me was how lust allowed me (lust didn't do this but I did) to take steps away from Truth.

This shows me that when I began to lust and masturbate I lowered my standard. This allowed me to take further steps from pornography to fantasy. I began to lead a double life, a life of secrecy, and secrecy is a hallmark of lustful actions. Now the question laying in front of me and seperately in front of my wife was: How far away will you go?

Would I go to an affair when fantasy didn't bring the high and an opportunity presented itself? What was I capable of? This helps to build resolve in my being, to make me stronger to not go further than I am now.

However, I have to take that resolve and stand up with it and work to reclaim what I profess in the actions of secrecy, they must, one at a time, begin to match what I profess.

I must not see a beautiful woman and wonder what she wants to do to me sexually but instead thank God for her beauty, have awe for His creation. I have to attatch feelings of respect and remember that she is someone's daughter and was lovingly held by a father who, not unlike me, loves his daughter completely.

I don't want my daughters to be hurt the way I have hurt my wife and in some ways I have to surrender the ultimate fact that this is partly out of my control. On the other hand I have to have the courage to be a man of integrity so that my daughters will see that, respect it and come to be attracted to or have that as their standard.

That is what is important about this step today, to keep going on the journey back to morality. To striving day by day to be the man I profess, it will be the journey of my life but it is the journey I am choosing. I choose the narrow way, the road less traveled.

Under the mercy,

M S

step+four 12steps 12+step lust sexaholic sexaholism sex+addiction step+4 masturbation

Lust Versus Intimacy

One of the biggest things addiction to lust, more commonly know as Sex Addicts or Sexaholics, does to a person is it makes them incapable of sharing with anyone else who they really are. It could be due to embarrassment, shame, guilt or a variety of other reasons but the sex addict disconnects and begins to connect to the unreal to make him or herself feel real or whole.

Don’t get me wrong, at times the Sexaholic can connect with other people very well. I have personally experienced many times that I connected to those around me; the problem was a small period of time that came afterward when I would have self-doubt. That self-doubt is about the other person not connecting with the real me, with what I really wanted, the pleasure, the lust, the acting out. In reality the other person had connected with the real me, the cripple, the part of me that I allowed to define me that was not the real me.

I was ashamed of the things I had done in secret, those were the things that I kept to myself and never shared with anyone else. If I had ever shared them I would have risked my status as a person, the funny thing is that it increased the addiction, allowed it to have more control over me and made the risk greater, I just thought I was controlling it.

The answer to the problem is sharing oneself, your true self. I had to learn to share all of me, who I am and the addict. The true me was on the inside, I was scared of the acting out and the addiction, the things that I had done in my life or fantasized about. I was beginning to let the addiction define me; I was losing my life and my identity.

The sharing of ME is where intimacy comes into play. Lust, the addiction, was where I took from others what I wanted of them as an object and took from them what I wanted for me. My conscience was withered inside me but it made me feel bad in what small ways it could, because I never felt quite right about having used someone, be it internet pornography or any other way of acting out.

I had to learn to integrate myself and be honest with those closest to me. I had to learn how to share myself, this is intimacy, the SPICES of life (Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Sexual). This began in the group. This began by sharing all of who I was in the group. I came to learn to share myself, my sins and my successes, I learned it didn’t kill me for others to know how bad I was. I have learned to replace old patterns with new ones. Instead of internet pornography, I share some of myself here. Instead of using the internet in secret I am here with my daughter across from me working on her schoolwork and my wife a little further beyond her.

Instead of lusting after women, I attach feelings to them. They are someone’s little girl and I know how I would feel about someone who treated my little girls the way I have treated others, even though the little girl in question is a “consenting adult”. I am surrendering myself and amazingly it has been given back to me.

Under the Mercy.

Lust	Intimacy
Avoid Consequences	Accepting Consequences
Protect Self	Make Self Vulnerable
Opaque	Transparent
Share Part of Self	Share Whole Self
Take	Give
Conquer	Surrender
Self-Centered	Other-Centered
Reacting to Feelings	Attaching Feelings
Secrecy	Honesty

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Journal 20070620

Today my life is a just a little bit harder in some ways than it was yesterday, but it is easier or more normal in other ways. It is time for me to integrate living in a more normal life and keeping up sobriety. This is one of those ways, replacing the old habits, the bad ones, with new ones. Honesty is replaced by deception, reality by a counterfeit. I wish some of my coworkers would learn this lesson as well, I don't want them to learn it as painfully as I did but I wish they would learn it.

Two related articles on addiction, though it just calls it "pornography" addiction and a silent killer, remember that the real problem is lust.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/living/17394054.htm

and

http://mondaymorninginsight.com/index.php/site/comments/the_silent_killer_in_our_churches/

and

http://stevengibbs.typepad.com/steven_gibbs/2007/06/the_porn_talk.html

Under the Mercy.




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