PA do you ever really forget?

Yes, I agree with this @kropo82 ! Thanks for your point of view, it helps us all learn and grow more.

 

Just resurrecting an old thread.

I've just been listening to a debate on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze. It starts at 24:52 into this (not sure if that'll play outside the UK). The debate is about how we treat the past, i.e. should we tear down statues of historic figures who we now disagree with (e.g. Cecil Rhodes in the UK or Robert E. Lee in the USA) and was between Shiv Malik and Tiffany Jenkins. It struck me as a similar unease I have at the call to erase our memories. I know those memories are the result of doing something wrong, but erasing them? Here are some choice quotes from the debate:

They are debating cultural history, and our own personal histories are clearly different from that. But that sense that it is more important to acknowledge our history (in order to understand who we are now) than attempt to erase it is what I feel about pornography.

 

Forgive me for not listening to the link (was available for download here in Central Jersey). But this is a fight that I've had with my drug addict clients, many of whom want to avoid the shame that the past behavior includes (and for many of them, the behavior is as shameful as the behavior that brings people to this site, or moreso).

Historian George Santayana famously wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" (which gets mangled and misquoted all over the place, a boon to us pedants who love to feel superior to hoi polloi). We need to remember the past enough to avoid it; we need to get honest about the damage it has caused. Not to do so means risking relapse. Even minimizing the extent of our use or the damage it caused is risky; I'll save the whole tirade on forms of denial (which is only of interest to a specialist), but trust me, there's a common (if complicated) route from minimizing the past, to minimizing it's effects in the present, to "just a little bit"...

That said, some folks get into a shame spiral when they look at the past. Some of the posters over at the Relapse & Recovery Reports forum (I hang out there a lot) get caught up in it, and sometimes get to feeling so bad that the guilt causes more relapses. So it's clear that too much gazing at the past is also not useful.

As with so many things in recovery, it's a balance. Addicts aren't great at balance, so this is hard for many of us. Just as modern life pretty much requires use of screens, so that we addicts have to learn to moderate our use to avoid PMO, so it is that living with our past requires some awareness of our history and its effects, but we can't let it swamp us. When I was a regular attendee of 12-step, I remember hearing, "Look back; don't stare back".

And do the next right thing.

 

Wow, what a thread this is. Fascinating.

Surely the past is not an absolute value - we are constantly interrogating it by the light of our present experience and emotions.

As such we should neither deny it or let it define us in the current moment. My view is that we should use it as tool for our continued learning and maturation - especially on an emotional level - and this requires both the memories and freedom from those memories.

An example - for the longest time PMO was part of me, my identity. Within my celibate marriage I took misplaced pride in my virility via PMO. Regrettable though this is, it is a fact and cannot be changed. It is also an important part of my story and I unable to make sense of NoFap without it.

Inevitably within that remembering - and with effort - I can recall PMO-related moments and experiences. But they have no hold on me. It really is a curious feeling, like seeing the shadow of a shadow.

In summary, my personal view (and I hope nobody minds me saying this) is that SO of PA shouldn't seek to police the past. Nobody (including SO themselves) could ever live up to such scrutiny. The past happened and at the moment it happened it already had a past of its own. It really is too complicated to unravel.

The real question is whether PA have relinquished the hold the past has on them. Some will define this relinquishment in religious terms and others secular. Both (IMO) are legitimate since only the end result matters.