Journal entry for the Morning of 6-14-07

Wow, I worked for 12 hours yesterday, skipped going and working out afterwards. Its probably a good thing as I hade to get up about 0900 as my wife had somewhere to go and someone needed to watch the kids. Just sitting here and drinking coffee, the kids are behaving well, just heard the trashman outside and remembered the cart needed to be at the curb and I forgot to do that last night when I came home in the pouring down rain. It wasn't a particularly hard day, I guess their is part of me that finds strength in physical touch. I don't think its lust but their is something about human connection that is comforting. I read something one time ( I will have to look it up) about the reason that some kids have sex at a young age is due to the fact that we no longer have the family bed, they each have their own room and minimal to no physical contact. Their is part of me that would like to have relations with my wife but it is not the driving force, at times their are passing moments that feel more animalistic but I "pray them away" with a prayer for God's will for my wife. Part of me just feels a want for closeness or oneness with her. I do't know if the desire for oneness could be a type of lust in disquise.

Under the Mercy

Serenity

Serenity. In searching for blogs that are out their with people in recovery I found this prayer again that I say so often.
This is a slightly different version than I know by heart, so I will post it here.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful worldas it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next.
Amen.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

Under the Mercy

An Era of Prohibition in my Marriage

"...this meant no sex with themselves or other, invluding not getting into
relationships. For others it also meant "drying out" and not having
sex with the spouse for a time to recover from lust."

--From "The Solution, Page 204 of SA's White Book

This was a really hard thing for me to deal with when it came up almost 2 months back. My wife and I are basically in a co-dependent relationship. She would be in a place in which she wasn't sure if she could trust me but she would give herself to me physically and all would be right for 10 minutes but then she would feel worse about us, herself and the situation.

When I had failed to do the things financially that I was supposed to do (not moving money to savings when it should have been and moving money out for things and not letting my wife know beforehand that savings is how we were affording these activities) I went to be that night in the front room. A few months prior when my "acting out"/fantasy/inappropriate banter had shown up (really it was lust pent up in me) we had been apart for a short period of time but our "need" for each other ended that quickly one night when I was invited back into the conjugal bed.

Now, even though we are at times sleeping in the same bed (more often than not) it has been right about two months. Though I yearn for my wife it is different now than it was before. Before I could have lust filled sex with my wife. Literally lusting after her and wanting sex to go certain ways because that made for the better high. I wanted the high to be with her but the high was for me. She was at best an object of my desire for my benefit.

Now I know something else and I am learning what it is to have physical attraction for my wife and to desire her but to want to do so intimately. I want to give myself to my wife. Words like tender have replaced words like animal. Now, physical intimacy is a fruit that will come from the other types of intimacy. As we plan for school next year, talk about our children's future and our future children, my wife has read this blog and she is free to continue doing so. I just want her to know and I will continue to tell her that she is beautiful and I desire to hold her again and to be able to tell her again, "I don't know where you begin and I end."

Under the Mercy

The problem with our culture isn't that it overvalues sex. The problem
with our culture is that it doesn't have a clue of the value of sex.

--adapted from Christopher West

Step One: My life is unmanageable due to what?

We admitted that we were powerless over lust -- that our lives had become
unmanageable.

This step has two parts that are very distinct in it. When we begin this process it is out of an admission that our lives are unmanageable, but first our lives have to beome unmanageable due to lust. How does that happen?

In my journey of recovery I have met several people that exemplify several different types of unmanageability in life. I have met a few people that had abused children and had dealt with criminal consequences. Some were trying to heal marriages damaged by affairs or strings of affairs. Still others were driven by religious conversions of themselves or spouses.

My recovery was very motivated by my wife's conversion and in some ways what I would call my reversion to the faith. I had lived a wide and varied past and experienced things not uncommon to many teens and twenty-somethings today. I was caught in relationships of fantasy, use of pornography, erotic literature, strip clubs, using my wife as an outlet and masturbation.

These things were my "problem" to be fixed. Behaviors that needed stopping before they escalated further. Behaviors that harmed my relationships with others at the different stages of my life. My wife began to think ill of them, the ones she knew about and as she found out about others. For a time we explored some of the fantasies, for a time that is all they were but after attempting one of the more harmless ones things began to change.

Part of my insides saw a door opening and it yearned for fantasy to become real. Fortunately, the door was closing my wife made a definitive turn down the path of conversion and for that I thank give thanks to God to this day. Pressure from her was a large motivating factor for me to begin my journey to recovery. It is just now, years later that I am realizing that I was only really focusing on behaviors, not acting out, instead of what the addiction truly is, on what had made me a love cripple. That is lust. That is what has made my life unmanageable.

I have to admit this and it is not easy to admit but I am learning day by day to express myself intimately and not lustfully. To give without expectation of return instead of taking with the expectation of getting more.

Under the Mercy,
MS

My fear about ridding myself of lust.

One thing that I want in my life is the removal of lust from my being. I struggle to surrender that to God and work to lessen its control over me every day. Lust is my vice that I struggle with. My fear is that in trying to remove the impulse of that vice I am afraid of what may happen.

Most people as a knee jerk answer will say that purity is the coresponding virtue that I need to develop to fight lust and its ill effects. Purity just seems to have such negative connotations for me or from how I hear it described. Purity seems so very dispassionate in my heart. My mind knows better but my heart doesn't.

An important item of note is that my wife and I are practicing continence (no sex) right now, by choice as we are healing the damage in our relationship. The physical expression of my desire for her is muted, and while I do not wish to lust after her at times I want nothing more than lust filled sex with her. Don't get me wrong, at times I have very pure motives of desire, self-donation and the want of union with the other half of me. The times that I most lust after my wife is when things are tense or stressful and these also happen to be during times that if we were being sexually active currently, it would be logistically impossible.

The problem that this lust for my wife creates a time where I am vulnerable or feel very weak in my ability to deal with lust if it should present itself at the store, on the way to work or wherever I may be. However, with God's mercy these times pass.

Returning back to my fear that with the removal of lust via suppression of sexual desire by promoting 'purity' I will end up with no desire for my wife. I feel that purity is a quality of my actions but not a way of life. I have started to think that the best way for me to fight and conquer lust is to promote a virtue that will combat all of my being a 'love-cripple'. I believe that the answer is practicing intimacy as a virtue.

Intimacy is the appropriate sharing of my being with others in all aspects of my life and in a special way with my wife. It is a gift of me to another person that they can receive or reject as they will. Lust is me taking from something for my own personal gratification. Intimacy is receiving another as gift but more importantly giving myself without demanding or expecting anything in return. Today I pray to God for the gift to worthily and freely offer myself to my wife.

Under the Mercy