Sex addict looking for advice

I think you need to find professional help brother and start a reboot asap. Find doctor Trish Lee on youtube. She sells a reboot program which seems to be pretty good for some extreme cases.

 

You need to:

• Delete Grindr immediately. Don't just delete the app from your phone--delete your actual account, and THEN delete the app from your phone.
• Activate content restrictions on your phone, and have a trusted friend control the passcode so you can't easily circumvent it.
• Find a local SAA meeting where you can start talking about this issue and find community.
• Find a licensed CSAT therapist and book an appointment.
• Understand that at some point, you need to tell your wife everything, even if it means you lose your marriage. Make no mistake--eventually, she will find out. And it's 10,000% better that she finds out by you coming clean and being honest, instead of her finding out because your behavior causes a crisis that you can't hide.

You need to treat this as if your doctor just diagnosed you with a potentially terminal illness. You would spare no expense, you'd take every precaution, you'd learn everything you can ... you would make your treatment and getting better your #1 priority. That's how you need to treat your recovery.

 

You sound like my exact story.
First...
I finally found a friend willing to help me. I had setup parental controls so I couldn't re-download the app.
I had him set content restrictions, and blacklist apps like. Kik, reddit, snapchat, Facebook, telegram, etc.
I installed covenant eyes and set him as my partner, and later I set my wife up as well.
Don't allow yourself any internet access unless its monitored.

You need to go to recovery group...
I have finished Blazing Grace 8 week course.
I'm going to Celebrate recovery group weekly.
I'm meeting a counselor bi-weekly to deal with root emotional issues.
And another man I'm doing telephone sessions with weekly for same thing.

Sexual acting out for me is not the problem, its merely a symptom.

The way is tough, but freedom is possible.

I'm 4 months in, not relapse free, but on a.level now 100 times better than where I have been.

 

People like us... we need open heart surgery, and we can't operate ourselves.

 

It seems impossible right now because your brain wants to hang onto all these coping mechanisms. But really, it's easy. Finding a local SAA meeting is as easy as going to https://saa-recovery.org/meetings/ and typing in your location. Deleting Grindr from your phone is as easy as long-pressing the app icon and selecting "delete." Etc etc.

You can do these things when you're ahead of the game, like you are now, or you can do them when you hit rock bottom and you've lost your marriage or worse. But you'll inevitably do them eventually.

 

Blocking adult material and having an accountability partner 100% But Surely he doesn’t need to tell his wife that he’s been sleeping with men! He wants to change and to fix his life. He doesn’t need the extra shame and stress of his wife thinking he’s gay. People that don’t understand sex addiction/compulsions probably won’t be able to get their head round it that he’s not! Maybe open up about porn overuse and trans material that you’re battling if you feel you want to share etc. But work very hard on fixing yourself she doesn’t need to know about grinder

 

There's some really good advise here, and I agree with everything except telling your wife right now. I've had similar struggles with gay porn, BD_SM, and even violent porn. I talk about it a lot on my journal.
https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-2#post-3727523

For me getting a sponsor or accountability partner for Covenant Eyes was key. This person knows what I'm looking at, what sites I've visited, gets screenshots, and knows if the app stops working or if I uninstall it. This has kept me porn free for about 6 months which paved the way to stop MO too. .

 

He needs to explain to his wife that he's been sexually unfaithful. She deserves to know that he's been having sex with multiple partners. She may have been exposed to all kinds of STIs.

Does he have to tell her right this second? I didn't say that. But at some point he does need to tell her. "Full disclosure" to a spouse is something every addiction professional requires when treating a married sex addict. Saving the marriage is impossible if there isn't trust, and trust that's only there because the addict is keeping secrets is worthless.

Frankly, the suggestion that she should be kept in the dark really pisses me off. But it doesn't matter. She's gonna find out sooner or later. It might be 10 years from now, but she's going to find out.

 

Well, and look, man ... I'm only telling you this from experience. When I was married, I felt the same way as you do now. I would have done anything and everything to avoid telling my wife the truth.

But when the truth eventually came out--as it always inevitably does--my wife made it very clear that the lying hurt her far worse than the infidelity. And that's not just the opinion of my wife--that's the opinion I've heard from literally every single spouse of an addict. Literally 100% of them, to a person.

She doesn't necessarily need to know explicit, intricate details--that's the kind of thing you typically work through with a therapist (always do disclosures with the help of a professional--doing it on your own is a recipe for disaster). But she will have the prerogative to ask difficult questions about the specifics of your behavior, and you should be prepared for how you'll answer those.

Re: your previously open marriage: only you know what your guys' ground rules were on that. Couples with open marriages sometimes have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and some open marriages demand full knowledge of extra-curricular fun. I'm not sure what type yours was. But regardless, if you continued acting out once you guys stopped being open, you're still on the hook for some type of confession.

The only other option is to keep the secret for the rest of your marriage ... and if this addiction has taught you anything, it's that these behaviors thrive in secrecy. To the extent you choose to keep it a secret, there's a very high likelihood that you'll do it again. For the sake of your marriage and your mental health, I hope that's not the case, but the data is stacked against you.

 

Why are you getting pissed off? My advise is also to NOT tell the wife. He just needs to cure himself, delete the grinder app, start the nofap reboot, and seek help for this sex addiction. The wife can support in these things. If he is cured and happy, then how is telling his wife that he has been unfaithful doing him any good except for causing a divorce which will damage him way more and put him down the rabbit hole even more?

Also your claim that the wife will always find out is false. Me and my friends have cheated in the past and our wifes did not find out and they will not find out. Never. Do we feel guilty? No, because we are very good men and would die for our wifes so sometimes on holidays we like to have some fun.

 

I heard a leading expert on sexual compulsions say. That if it would do more harm to tell your partner and that you were making changes to stop being unfaithful that could be a better option to not disclose! Sex addiction also thrives in Shame. He doesn’t really need all his family and friends thinking he’s a homosexual cuck. He needs to forgive himself. Work at loving and bettering himself so he doesn’t feel the need to keep self harming.

 

Amen

 

There is no intimacy in a relationship with secrecy and lies. Period.

 

The majority find out eventually. Some it’s 40 years married, some it’s right away and some it after death. In 5 years of working my own recovery from my husbands porn addiction I’ve been blown away by the number of partners who find out after their spouse dies. I’m sorry, you are not acting like good men if you think cheating, and lying to the one you vowed to love is “ just having fun”. Good men are faithful, don’t lie and don’t think it’s ok to screw their loved ones over. He’s pissed off because he knows the devastating harm you’ve done to both yourself and your partner with your actions. God forbid he become an honorable man of character who gives his wife the opportunity to decide what she wants in her life, be it staying and supporting an unfaithful addict or leaving.

 

For @Qzmp1, I appreciate the tough spot you are in. Addiction is a place where we do a lot of justification, and end up doing things we previously would have called evil, while telling ourselves it's not that bad. Then we escalate, and see it's not that much worse than the thing we already justified, and before we know it, we've crossed some hard boundaries and we know nobody will understand. Then we encounter some kind of breaking point, and are confronted with how much we could lose, and it's terrifying. Our compulsion to justify doesn't stop. We search for reasons, trying to convince ourselves we don't have to do the thing we know is right.

Consider; if she were doing what you have done, you would deserve to know. You said you had an open marriage previously, but not any more. You had rules that you agreed upon, then you agreed upon a different set of rules. You broke those rules. She deserves to know.
Also consider, she probably already knows something is wrong. I have been on this forum for years, I've seen hundreds of guys come through here, and I can personally attest, it is extremely rare for men to have a porn addiction and for their SO not to know something about it. Sometimes they know everything already. Sometimes they know he looks at a lot of porn, and she doesn't know what kind, neither does she want to know. Sometimes she knows he looks at porn, just not how much. Nearly every time, at bare minimum she knows something is very wrong with the relationship and she does not know what it is, but would like to help fix it. In some cases, she decides to end the relationship. In most, she at least tries to stay. It is extremely rare for an SO to have no clue, and be totally blindsided by an addict's disclosure. I would argue if she was, they didn't have a healthy relationship anyway. If she can't see the distress he's in, she's not paying attention.
Also consider, telling her what you have done is not what damages a relationship. Looking at porn and hooking up, that is what damages the relationship. You are just now recognizing that fact, late. I am sorry, that is an extraordinarily uncomfortable place to be, but you can't undo what you have done. If your water pipes froze and burst, not telling anyone about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. You are going to have to admit you made a mistake and aggressively fix that problem, and get help to fix that problem, or you're going to have to deal with that problem AND more secondary problems in the future.

The question is not, in my opinion, if you should disclose, but how you should disclose and how much to tell her at a time. One of the things porn does to us that experts do not recognize, but the vast majority of recovered addicts and SOs acknowledge, is that it makes us insensitive, selfish, and bad at communication. This is not a good position to come from when handling such an important relationship problem, but at the same time, it needs to happen. It's like someone needs life saving surgery right now, but the surgeon is drunk. Doing the surgery, or disclosing to your partner right now, is probably going to cause some damage. At the same time, waiting until you sober up is not a great option either. I recommend trying to ease into the conversation, instead of dumping your sins on her like at a confessional. "Can we talk?" always signals a serious conversation, so she will know something big is coming and can choose to delay it if she is not in a good position. "I have been having a hard time with anxiety and some other problems" is a good step, but you have to follow that with "I have been trying to fix that on my own, but not in a healthy way, and I got in pretty deep." All of these give her the option to shut it down if she doesn't want to know details, or for her to ask for them as is her right. Then she is given her choice to decide what she wants to do.

 

This is delusional. I apologize, I know being confrontational is generally not a good way to help the person you are talking to receive the message, but to admit you have violated and imply you will violate the terms of your marriage, that you feel no regret over it, and that you are simultaneously "a very good man" is logically inconsistent. Unless you also claim your wife can violate the terms of marriage and be a very good person. I'm not going to come right out and say you are a bad person, but that is bad behavior by any moral standard.

The thing is, despite what modern mainstream wants to believe and wants you to believe, sex has consequences. It's not just fun. Both men and women bond with the people they have sex with. Sex can transmit disease. At maximum, you can create a brand new human being with that person, a human being who needs to be cared for, or killed in the womb, one option being extremely expensive in terms of time, money, and emotion, the other being traumatic and incredibly callous. That's why sex is a big deal, even when we have more reliable contraception than we used to. And even if it wasn't a big deal, lying about something you agreed not to lie about is not very good behavior.

If it's not okay for your wife to hook up with someone else on holiday, it's not okay for you to do the same.