The Opposite of Addiction is Connection (840 days of freedom)

When I say PMO, I mean that as its linear process (Porn, Masturbation then Orgasm). I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding this, but basically short answer is no, not completely O free. (Although there are a lot less O's without PM!)

I think that this openness to uncertainty I'm trying to describe is definitely the best way to approach social situations, and I'm only finding more and more success with this. Quitting porn I think we get a taste of how much we don't know about ourselves, because of how much incomprehensibly better our lives get every time we do it. So I think it makes perfect sense to extend this to everyone else; if we can be by all appearances limitless in this amazing way without porn, then everyone else must have some deep abyss of personality that they are either better or worse at tapping into. Regardless of their ability to tap into it though, we can tap into it for them! I'm starting to believe in the power of actually making a person more of themselves in community with them. If this is a possibility, then how important it becomes to always be attentive to others and always try your best to actively listen and respond truthfully! And all along the way I've learned about how much more there is to people. I have grown up grossly underestimating every human being on earth.

A big part of this inspiration came from some acting classes I took on Stanislavsky's method. There are tons of intricacies to it, but at the end of the day it rests on a definition of acting that goes like this: "Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances." So I took classes in college and did plays, and then did a play this summer, and for whatever reason practicing emotional presence and a heightened awareness of the things around me and being conscious only to them and not myself started to bleed into my social situations after the play this summer. My social life has been forever changed by jumping into social situations with my whole heart this way.

I am so grateful for so many of you to have been inspired by my story, and to see other people trying to do the same thing I am. I sometimes get discouraged trying to find others that care about all this as much as I do, this is really inspiring and the feedback I have gotten has really helped me!

I'm really sorry I have not responded sooner! I thought I would be getting email notifications for this post, but didn't and so it isn't until now that I am looking back at it!

Here's to freedom!!!

 

Like I said in the response above this one, I feel that for me personally my acting experience kind of lined up with my socialization.

I don't feel like I've ever been a terribly awkward person, but everyone has got some sort of social anxiety and some better or worse way of dealing with it, and I've definitely been called awkward on multiple occasions in my life. And for whatever reason, I often found myself quiet with others and always in my own head, thinking too much about what everyone else is saying and in some way for some reason too worried to contribute anything to the conversation. I was hearing what they were saying, but I couldn't respond or actively participate. The first time I remember having this awareness was in 8th grade.

I grew up always the smart person, I got good grades and had my smaller group of friends who all had their reasons for not hanging out with more popular people (Insecurity breeds so many lies in our head!). I wasn't terribly nerdy or anything, but me and my smaller group of friends preferred things like video games, energy drinks and porn to getting out there and getting to know people. We dealt with our insecurities by acting goofy constantly and just exhibiting generally out there behavior. It was a lot of fun, and I don't think it was inherently a bad thing at all, but we never stopped to deal with what was going on with ourselves and our self-image. I think we all hated ourselves and that every one of our social interactions really boiled down to who can prove they hate themselves the most by impressing someone with doing something ridiculous.

Its crazy how an ounce of self-esteem has started to infect my outlook on community. I have gone from always seeking distraction by either being goofy or finding something to hate on or make fun of, and with some of that self-esteem and self-trust have started getting into the driver seat of my personality a little bit, so that I am actually a person who is proud of who they are no matter what. With this, I can talk about who I am to others now, and believe in a unique way of understanding anyone else, so that I become more confident that my questions to them will be interesting and lead to good conversation. It also comes with some self-forgiveness, so that when I don't hit it off with someone I am able to take a look at myself and realize that there are an infinite number of reasons for which I will at any time not be able to connect with someone, and that its probably not relevant to anything that would effect how I should esteem myself. Not that you're not ever wrong, now that I pay more attention to situations I often see how I may have screwed them up in some way or another, but that being wrong is not so wrong after all (at least when it comes to socializing). All you have to do is try again and try to be successful, and that even after many failed attempts at maybe making a friend or sparking a girl's interest, you actually can reverse the whole situation with one successful interaction. So even if what you do wrong should bear weight on how you esteem yourself (God forbid to my high school self!), it's actually OK to be rejected when the way you value yourself is somehow without porn able to become disconnected from the actions of others, and holds truer to who you actually are no matter what happens outside of you.

For me I've had to temper this growth as well though, because it inflates my head sometimes. When my head's inflated, I start losing touch with reality, which is the source of my happiness in the first place (my whole point with connection being the opposite of addiction; It's connecting to reality that is the supreme source of my happiness). I'm always looking to stay humble so that I can learn and experience this amazing life that others have to offer me, (take the inverse of what I said above, other people can make you more of who you are) and in order to do this I pretty much have to always get out of my comfort zone. Whenever I have anxiety about doing something right, I try to take it as a sign that I will do it right thinking of all this anxiety as merely a sign that I care, and that if I just trust that feeling and forgive myself for being afraid, that I actually will do well.

So I think building self-esteem is the real factor that changes how I read people. It's like once I can build an awareness of myself and the powers of my personality, and some serenity with what and who that is, then my self-esteem disconnects a little bit from being based on the reactions of others. Once I'm not so deathly afraid of the reactions of others anymore, I can look at them with much less shame, and without the self-shame occupying most of my mind whether I choose to acknowledge it or not, I have a lot more head space to actually perceive another person. And this just takes practice, its like jumping off a cliff every time, still is. So I think the more painful it is the more work your doing in the right direction. I think one of the biggest episodes of progress in terms of being able to look at people this way and being willing to practice it more and more was this past June, after I did the play, which happens to be 2 years into my recovery. But I think jumping into this pain of social anxiety more readily could easily speed up the process.

Also, one of the biggest general things I see in almost everyone is that THEY HAVE THAT SHAME TOO, and that if they're being mean to you its actually probably because they're just not ready to let go of it and actually probably has very little to do with who you are or even anything you actually did, since that shame can distort a truthful perspective so much. So there's no reason not to look at anyone as proud of yourself as you can be because 1, now you know you're fighting for a good cause by trying to connect with them at all, and don't have to worry about the shame in an ulterior motive such as maybe taking advantage of a girl or getting something you need from someone (unless you are, in which case you need to drop those and any other expectations you have in any social situation in order to be able to connect with them well and smoothly) and 2, that shame is only a weakness getting in the way of your (and their) happiness. If you're just a little more proud of who you are than they are, and can get over trying to feel better than anyone else for that reason, than you can use that to actually bring themselves out and become more proud of who they are in that moment, and that's how I believe communication can and was meant to literally regenerate people.

My addiction at its height was probably daily use between 16 and 19 yo. By the time I was 19 I found Mark Queppet on YouTube, then branded as the Sacred Sexuality Project but now Universal Man, and my journey in actually thinking about stopping began.

 

I've been thinking about this question a lot, and how to respond to it well.

I think that staying in the present is the secret to my happiness. This is easier said than done, because I find myself a lot of the time feeling I simply can't enjoy the present as much as I want to. There's guilt and shame, resentments, expectations, greed and a million other things that bear me down a lot of the time and so what I try to do during the week in preparation for more socialization in the upcoming weekend is whatever I can to quell everything and anything drawing any energy from me, in order to make myself as absolutely naturally present as possible for any given social event.

Doing this requires doing things I don't necessarily feel like doing. This is confusing because my purpose for doing these things is to make myself more readily able to respond and act truthfully according to my feelings. It doesn't really make sense logically that in order to be able to do this I have to do disciplined actions which conflict with them 80% of the time, if not more than that. Things like quitting porn, boosting your self-esteem with regular exercise, doing the same by keeping a clean room and house, even eating less than you want sometimes helps me have a clearer mind and makes me more confident in myself. Not to mention what has recently seemed to become most essential to me: making sure I'm giving my job my all. If I half-ass work, I half-ass my weekend, and get half-assed happiness.

Fighting PMO I find myself attempting to draw security from the good on the other side of the struggle, basically focusing on the carrot at the end of the stick that doesn't even seem real from my porn addicted perspective. Because of this I have to work really hard to fantasize it into my reality. This way of thinking was and is immensely crucial and helpful for me because I am able to remind myself what's worth the struggle.

The fantasy of who I can be (and by the way, some of which I have become) and undertaking the actions to become that person feel very different from each other. It's easier to believe that I can be that person when the fantasy is already in my head. But a lot of the time it's gone, like any time I experience all the fear/pain/discipline involved in the actions I undertake. So what do I do when the fantasy just won't come to me? My helpful fantasizing gets distorted. There seems to be a fine line between fantasizing to encourage throwing myself through fear and pain into discipline, and doing so simply to avoid feeling these things. The fantasizing is not exclusive to potential reality, so my brain moves easily from "here's what I can be, and this pain is helping me get there," to "this pain is not comfortable, so lets convince our self that we are already who we want to become." Basically, spending a lot of time in the pink cloud just turns into pride and convincing myself that I'm better than everyone else, which easily snaps back into insecurity and using unhealthy social habits to simply make myself feel better throughout a whole social event rather than forgetting about my damned comfort and putting myself into reality and out there for anyone to see, because in doing this I can be enabled to see them better.

The fantasizing can get out of whack, but that shouldn't take any credence from that reality worth fantasizing about.

I think the most important thing for us to remember is not to be surprised by a feeling of doubt or apathy; the potential is as present as that fantasy in your head at its strongest impression, despite its concurrent deceptive tendencies.

 

Realizing that you can be incapable of being as honest as you want to be (or even think you’re being) is such a huge part to beating addiction I feel. No ones better at deceiving me than myself. When I think I’m being purely and selflessly honest, 9 times out of 10 I’m spinning a story about myself in a certain light useful towards getting what I want out of an immediate situation, and at the same time convincing myself that I’m simply pouring out the contents of my heart in their purest most truthful form. Honesty is a skill that takes a lot of practice, and seems to be the necessary initial push towards becoming equipped to deal with addiction.

 

I definitely know what you mean. I have felt that way before, and nothing anyone says about why life is good or fun or why anything is interesting makes sense at all. It takes a lot of help to get out of it too.

I definitely think sharing your feelings as often as you can, with others and with yourself by journaling, are two huge things that help. When you feel the way it sounds like your feeling, everything is very overwhelming. When you journal about your feelings, and with a log of some consistent journaling for a few days go back and read it, it really puts what might be bothering you into a perspective that for me always made everything feel more manageable. I have looked back on my journal a lot of times and realized that what's bothering me isn't this overwhelming uncertain thing that I can define, it becomes this one quantifiable issue, and even if it can't be dealt with right away, knowing what it is released a lot of that anxiety.