I struggled with fantasy a lot in the past. Two points I might add that I don't remember being reflected in your post: 1. As Christians, of course, we understand that sin is a matter of the heart. So imagining a porn scene or viewing a porn scene is virtually the same, from that perspective. 2. If I remember right from all my brain science reading, the brain doesn't distinguish between viewing porn and imagining porn. All the same brain wiring gets excited and firing in the same way. If you fantasize, it's just as harmful as viewing it on a screen. On the matter of fantasizing about marital sex, point #2 seems to suggest that this may be closer to the way porn affects our brains than that of actual, physical intimacy with our spouses. In other words, to imagine having sex with our wives is (brain-wise, perhaps) indistinguishable from watching porn, and turns a wife into an object to be used. In both cases, real physical and emotional intimacy is replaced with a virtual or imagined intimacy for the singular sake of pleasuring self--no real connection is achieved. I hope this helps, friend.
Whoops. Context: Highly pressured. Ill, exhausted, feeling pressured by it always being me having to get up with baby still. Not had sex in a while, last two times did not go well at all due to my wife's physical issues and my tiredness and some physiological problems--the most recent time I was not able to finish even after quite a long time; very frustrating. I just looked up some books on Amazon to buy on how to have good sex and keep sex alive in long-term relationships. I looked in an Amazon sample of one I knew would have illustrations, to check whether they were explicit photos or just drawn illustrations and if I could get the book (we have a couple of Christian sex books with drawn illustrations in already from when we were first married). I should not have done this. Foolish. There were some explicit photographs and I scrolled through them and back to them and my eye lingered for a bit. My accountability software will probably flag it. I wonder if this is a 'sobriety reset'. I am less interested in whether or not it is a reset at the moment than keeping things together and not falling apart, so I can keep looking after my family. I am also grateful that even though I felt the tug of temptation to masturbate, at the moment I seem to be able to pull back with God's help and I have gone straight into writing this. I don't think I got drunk on the images even though I took more than a first look at some of them. While they were appealing and attractive, there was no connection in them, and even while viewing them I was keenly aware that they were not my wife. I love my wife. Even if I never get to have free and enjoyable sex with her again, I still love my wife and I will put her first by pulling back and running away from these images. However, I must not be complacent and I know I could fall back into acting out at any time without God's help--this has reminded me of that yet again. I am sorry LORD, for looking them up. Please forgive me.
I also need to decide whether or not to tell my wife about this slip. I have told her I will tell her if I look at P, but I don't know whether this 'counts' or not. I am also meant to do it within a certain timeframe, but I can't remember what that timeframe was agreed as being most recently (whoops again). I think it might be a week. I will decide whether this is a sobriety reset or not and whether to tell my wife or not in conversation with God, my sponsor, and my therapist, but if anyone has any insight, experience, advice or wisdom about those things I am open to them.
Damn it, the above has triggered me. The images went in a bit. My body is wound up (including with anxiety about having slipped). I have been here before. Before with a slip like this, eventually the tension and the shame got to me and I did M. On the other hand, there have been other slips a bit like this (e.g. seeing something on a film) that didn't end up that way. I can't let that happen. I wasn't consciously specifically seeking out the images in order to lust or M, I was looking for resources and also checking if they were there out of curiosity--but I got burned. It was stupid and way too close to the boundary, over the boundary, and there may have been other lustful motivations at play that I wasn't conscious of or that I'm not fully admitting to myself. God help me.
You are human like all of us and like every saint who has walked this earth. Now is the time to be particularly vigilant for temptation may be more intense after a slip or a fall and your determination will be weakened. Return immediately to the good habits that brought you this far and most of all, pray. Pray as long as it takes for temptation to abate.
Thank you. I am so grateful that I have been able to talk about the above with my wife. She intuited something was up from me from my grumpiness and off-ness on the same day and asked me outright 'Are you struggling with man things?' I could not lie to her. I told her about the above. She was calm and forgiving and said she loved me, which led to tears from me. I am extremely grateful for this, more than I can express with words. Thank you God. If anyone prayed for me, thank you. I have talked to my sponsor about it too. He said it is up to me to decide whether this is a sobriety reset or not. I am still going to wait a few days to decide (and I still need to talk to my therapist), but I am leaning towards not resetting my sobriety for this. I did not deliberately go and seek out porn. I did not get the rush of expectation from being about to do that or think I was doing that. I had actually had a quiet time and done my daily sobriety renewal just before the incident, and one of the things I had written in my daily planner during my prayer time was 'investigate some sex books [to learn more about how to be better at sex]'. It was early in the morning and my mind was perhaps not entirely clear. However, I should have weighed and tested this more. It was a stupid thing to do, going to a book that I knew had pictures to see if they were safe to view. And I got burned. I can adjust my boundary a little now: do not look up this book or books like it. So I think I will probably file this under a setback under 'progressive victory over lust' and a slip with murky 'hunting and seeking behaviour' but not a fully fledged P relapse. They say 'to thine own self be true' in SA. But if anyone reading this wants to call me out on being too lenient on myself here, or thinks I am deceiving myself, please say so and I will consider it. Anyway, big nocturnal emission last night... I think from this, but also possibly from the time when I last had sex and was not able to finish due to physiological issues, and most recently from fooling around a bit with my wife last night but being unable to do anything else because she is on her period (and she didn't want to do anything else for me). Sometimes it feels like the tension just gets too much, and then there is a nocturnal release. However, I should keep working at mastering the tension and keeping it in check with self-control all the same, only with the help of God and others of course. Thank you for reading.
I met with my therapist too. He seemed fine with my and my sponsor's decision that this was not a sobriety reset. I did not get drunk on the images I foolishly stumbled across over a week ago, but I did let in a bit of lust. They have been kicking around my head for this past week, and I am in a state of more heightened than normal obsession and temptation. This is a setback on the recovery road. Jesus is the solution, and others, and real life. Connection connection connection, with reality. First-person, the images were pleasurable and enticing. That is just biology. That tells me my biology is working correctly. They will always be so, so long as I have a penis. But that does not mean I have to look at them, be enslaved to them or masturbate. Psychological research shows that the way you evaluate and interpret an experience actually changes the subjective experience itself. If I zoom out to third-person, while the images were pleasurable and enticing for me, the activity of looking at them by myself is sad, pathetic and unhelpful, and devoid of any real connection with another human being, except myself and my own lust. I don't want to have sex with myself. Still, shameful as the behaviour is, the way away from it does not come from shaming myself. Self-compassion and compassion from God will lead me away from this shameful behaviour. The kindness of God leads us to repentance. God is good.
Try and stay with this one all the way through, folks, because you might just find some helpful golden nuggets... I had a brief period recently of having very little temptation around at all. Then yesterday was my Grandfather's funeral. I hate death, and it made me sad. I had no temptation during the day yesterday, but last night I had a very vivid dream where I was watching topless women. It still amazes me how even when I am not putting new porn images into my system my brain can effectively create them (or recreate them) in my dreams so that they are so 'real' I can see them clearly in my sleep. The circuitry is deeply wired-in and the addiction is profound. In addiction terms I have a breasts fixation and a breasts obsession. Nude breasts are like kryptonite for me and I am completely powerless over them by myself. It's probably something to do with the fact that my mother walked out on me, my Dad and my siblings when I was little, but knowing that doesn't really help me much. Anyway, today I wake up and I'm like 'I wish I wasn't a Christian and committed to 12-step and didn't have all these moral standards, because then I could spend some of today masturbating to pornography.' But then I remember/realise something, something I've realised before but I think it's worth documenting as it might resonate with and help others: It's not just 'God' and my moral standards and my upbringing that I come up against when temptation invites me to contemplate indulging my addiction: It's myself! Yes, a part of me, the addiction part of me, is powerless over breasts and porn and masturbation. I must admit and accept this. But another part of me hates those things, wants to be faithful to my wife, and would much rather spend time preoccupied with other, far more valuable and worthwhile things. I am not just my addiction! I am more than my addiction! And the part of me that is anti-addiction is also part of me! That's one of the reasons why after acting out the addiction, it feels so awful. Because if it wasn't, I would be truly screwed and doomed. Even if, in addiction terms, I don't actually have the free will not to give in to the temptation by myself because I am powerless over it, I need at the least enough free will to be able to turn to God and others in my powerlessness and ask for help to get the power to overcome temptation, and that has to be something that I want and that I choose to do. 'Without God, I can't. Without me, God won't.' And that means that I'm not just denying myself when I resist temptation by turning to God, I'm denying myself in order to be true to myself. I control myself with God's help in order to experience true freedom. And me, in terms of my best me, my true me, plus God and others are bigger than this addiction. I guess Freud talked about this in terms of Id, Ego and Superego (though I'm still thinking through exactly how this maps onto that): All of them are part of me. But I've discovered time and again that by ourselves my ego and my superego aren't enough to control my id--it bursts out and runs rampage. However, God + others + my superego + my ego (which are parts of me) can rein in and reign over my id (which is part of me, as I am still being sanctified). Another one is the two wolves. I love the two wolves parable that does the rounds: There are two wolves in us, at war. So which one is going to win? The one you feed. Another thing I've realised though, and I may have shared this before, is that they aren't actually two wolves. One is a wolf, and one is a lion. Or perhaps, one is a pauper and one is a prince. Who's going to win today? Not just the one I feed, but the one I ask my saviour to feed as I turn to him. To get current, after the incident a month ago I am perhaps aware of some heightened P temptations. Maybe these dreams were related to that. I still don't think it was a sobriety reset, but when I take in some of lust like that it sets me back. I have been doing generally better, I think, with not going into P fantasy or fantasising about my wife (which I have also discovered is not helpful for me) just before falling asleep or getting up, except for some slips when I have been very tired, but this morning after the dream I fell into the latter for a little while. It is not helpful. So I will continue to press on towards Christ and create healing chronological distance with him from my latest larger setback in progressive victory over lust. Thanks for reading.
I have the same fixation but I believe it is simply because P and the media have trained me to focus this way. I have a few practical thoughts to do battle with this temptation when it arises: * breasts simply aren't that special, every other human on the planet has two of them * a large precentage of the starlets and other media personalities today have simply purchased their glorified chests to gain attention, fame and fortune from the vulnerable. They aren't natural and in the grand scheme of things they aren't even that expensive. They can be purchased and installed for the price of used car. * Clothing designers, camera men, makeup artists, film, TV and advertising directors all draw focus on breasts as a cheap and superficial means to sell their products. In the best case scenario they don't recognize the sinful nature of what they are doing. Nevertheless, I don't want to be such an easy mark to these mindless schemers. * God's purpose for breasts is the wholesome, beautiful and natural purpose of nursing infants and not the base and vulgar connotations given to them by humans * All mammals have them. It seems to be only man who has conjured up a corrupted fixation with them beyond their purpose. * The human body was made in God's image, so we cannot deny it can be beautiful but God has warned us not to become fixated on His creations but rather to fix our gaze upon Him. Of course these dissuading thoughts are not enough on their own. Sincere, regular, and if needs be constant, prayer for help with this temptation is the only truly effective weapon that I have found.
I totally get where you are coming from, @CPilot , however I also think that breasts are naturally beautiful, attractive and arousing, as you say in your last point. I don't think their purpose is only to nurse infants but that they are also a source of sexual pleasure and enjoyment, in the context of marriage. However I completely agree that to fixate on and idolise them, to 'exchange the glory of creation for the glory of the creator' and to seek sexual pleasure from breasts other than those of one's wife, is sinful and shows a misrelation and a lack of self control and faithfulness, which we need to be rescued from.
I can’t be bothered. I feel restless, tired, irritable at the moment. I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m really horny—that is, I want to have sex with my wife. The frequency has dropped a little just lately due to my wife’s health issues and anxiety. I know my wife does not want to have sex at the moment. My mind keeps coming back to masturbation as a way of relieving the tension and irritation. So annoying. So boring. So repetitive. Always the same thing. But I can’t seem to stop. At the moment I’m not addicted to doing M but I am addicted to contemplating doing M. I wish I was like regular guys who did not have a moral problem or conscience about it and could just do it without thinking anything more of it. Then I would not be trapped in this prison of sexual tension and constantly contemplating doing M but not being wholehearted enough to actually do it. But, I do have a hangup about it and I am stuck in this mental cycle. How else do I get out of this mental cycle? I guess I need to focus on something else. That takes energy, and I’m tired, and I don’t have huge amounts of energy at the moment. And what to focus on? I can’t be bothered with anything else right now. God help me. I guess I need to pray. You other guys who don't M, how do you deal with the hornyness and sexual frustration when it comes? I feel so distracted by it right now and like I can't focus on anything else. Time to go for a run.
Welp, perhaps unsurprisingly, last night I lost 428 days of sobriety and masturbated (to sensation, nothing else). I’m not entirely sure how it happened. I went to sleep around 2240, woke up or got woken up by something at 2300 and just felt ‘I need to masturbate’. So I just went to the bathroom and did it. I was half-asleep, sort of in a dream state. Kind of shocked that I did it though it wasn’t out of nowhere (see below). It relieved the sexual tension. It was also gross. My main feelings about it are that it is gross, and that I am fed up with obsessing about it and worrying about it. However, although it relieved the sexual tension, if I am addicted to it then soon I will want to do it again and I will progressively do it more and more unless defences are put in place—so I need to watch out for that. But my main feeling is that I do not want to waste my life obsessing about having done this and whether or not to do it again, but just to move on with my life and stop thinking about it. I do not even know for sure (and I guess can’t) if it is a ‘sin’ or not. So: Lord God Father. I am sorry if masturbating was a sin and I should not have. I do not know what to think about that and I am really confused about it. But if it was a sin, I am sorry and I ask for your forgiveness. Please help me not to obsess about having done it or whether I will do it again and just to move on with my life, and to concentrate on being useful in service to you and others and healthy rest.
One day at a time. Don't get too busted up about it. Just keep moving forward. You have made huge strides. Don't let this become the beginning of a new period of unhealthy fixation. Thanks for your relentless honesty with yourself and your support team. That is essential to moving forward.
Thanks a lot @Tao Jones , I appreciate it. What are some of the markers of addiction? An inability to control a behaviour, and an obsessive preoccupation with it. I feel like I was not in control with this episode. The behaviour sort of took me over in the middle of the night. Also the preoccupation is there, though it is better than it was. At least this was just masturbation by itself and it can be an isolated incident. God has brought me far. I have some ways to go though to true recovery from obsession. And I must watch that I do not slip into further M, or P, as a result of this, with God's help. You're right. One day at a time.
Hello. I have set up an SA meeting online, but linked to my home city by name because I haven't been able to find a physical venue. If someone comes along who is able to secure a phsyical venue, we may switch to a physical venue, but not yet. (@XandeXIV you are welcome to come along if you are ever interested.) It's just myself and one other gentleman so far, who I was put in touch with because he contacted SA and lives in the same cityas me. This man is about a decade older than me and has had terrible trouble with P and M. He can't make it tonight, the night of the meeting, and the meeting hasn't been properly advertised nationally yet, so I have joined an American meeting remotely. However I struggle to have the confidence to share in this meeting for some reason, so I am sharing here. When I lost my sobriety in December to M my sponsor dropped me because of it. I found a new sponsor but he was super intense. He wanted me to send him a written step 10 review at the end of every day, and text him step 10 spot checks throughout the day. It did not feel right and I was not able to do this, so I stopped with him. I need to find a new sponsor but don't have any free times at the moment to attend other meetings in my country where I might find a new one! I can redouble my efforts but I begin to wonder if I need a sponsor or not. I am sober from M for 74 days and sober from P for much longer. This last week I have had some temptations. I can still run into trouble when it has been a while since my wife and I have been together. I can let in some fantasy about her in the mornings, and I can get tempted to contemplate looking up P when I am working at my laptop alone (though ad hoc Cold Turkey internet blocks really help with this). I am not sure whether I have still to be 'relieved of the obsession' of lust by a 'spiritual experience' or whether these are just normal temptations for a recovering lustaholic. What I do know is that I am externally sober since December and that I feel I am continuing to make progress over lust internally by looking out for these things and asking for God's help. Thanks for reading and for any advice.
Sorry to hear that. As far as I am concerned that should not have happened. Have you worked all the way through the steps? I would say to keep looking for a new sponsor. Hopefully you can find one that suits both of you. My experience is we do better in recovery with a sponsor.
My initial sponsor was extremely helpful. I have not found one as good since. After my 2023 relapse, I did not seek out a new one. I maintain a wide and deep network of APs, incl. in-person ones, and that, combined with the steps I know I need to take each day, has seemed sufficient to help me get back on track and stay on track (I'm nearing two months of no P again). Consult the Spirit in prayer; he will not lead you astray. God bless you!
Thanks for your experience @Tao Jones and @born3 I have worked through the steps 1-8 and 10-11. I got a bit stuck with step 9 and then my sponsor dropped me. I do 10 and 11 daily in my own way, and I am kind of doing 12 by starting a new SA group. I think I should probably continue with a sponsor. I will keep trying to find a new one who suits me.
