Today I wanted to talk about one thing which I think is absolutely critical to my recovery, and yet about which I have seen very little discussion about here. This is the topic of boundaries. A boundary is a line in the sand, it says cross this line at your peril. The further back from acting out the boundary is, the less chance you have of actually acting out. For example, one of my lines is to not watch porn. If I simply have that as my boundary, and ignore all the activities that take me towards porn, it is likely that I'm going to end up watching porn because by the time I get to that boundary I'm going to have so much momentum that an imaginary line isn't going to stop me. Tight boundaries then, recognise my triggers and escape behaviours and try to put the boundary rope as far back as possible. For example, instead of having my boundary as not watch porn, one of my boundaries is to not open any webpages when I'm opening the page for sexual excitement. This translates to not opening any webpages that I wouldn't be happy to open if my wife was sitting right beside me looking over my shoulder. And I've been doing this. My boundaries in this regard are as strong now, 84 days since I last acted out, as they were in my first week. Every other time I have made it some time clean from porn it has been the gradual relaxation of my boundaries that has, inexorably, drawn me back into watching porn. It might not be porn the first time I relax my boundaries, but that just encourages me to relax them even more the next time. Then, it is only a matter of time before it becomes a grey area as to whether I'm looking at porn or not - by which time the addict has already won and soon I'll be back fapping to porn again, no matter how strong my conviction that I was done for good this time. That, and not checking out women in public, are the two big boundaries that I have kept really tight for the past 84 days. If I'd started relaxing either of those boundaries, I don't believe I'd have made it this far without relapsing. A quick word about internet filters. Some people use internet filters to try and stop them from using porn - I know I have in the past. However, no internet filter is foolproof and I've often found myself pushing the boundaries of the filter and then justifying that whatever came up wasn't porn because the filter said it was OK. These days I still use a filter, but I have a completely different approach. Instead of trying to stop me from watching porn, my filter is to try and help me stay sober. It's a completely different mindset. I know the password to my filter and, any time I want, I can go and turn it off. Also, if a page comes up as blocked I can OK it if I want to. There have been a few times where my filter has blocked pages that I legitimately wanted to read (my filter doesn't distinguish between 'porn' and 'porn addiction') and I've added them to my safe list. There have been other times where my filter going off has served as a warning that I must be getting too close to my boundaries and I've turned away from what I was doing. The last type of boundaries I wanted to talk about aren't physical, they're mental and/or emotional. One of my biggest triggers is when I'm overtired. One of my boundaries, therefore, is to not use the internet when I'm overtired. Actually, the last time I accessed my filter was to reduce how late I could stay online (originally my filter would stop all access at 9pm, but I wound that back to 8:30pm), because I realised that I don't want to access the internet at that time of night. The last two of my personal boundaries that I still need to work on are getting things done before they cause me stress (i.e. not procrastinating) and to communicate my emotions rather than bottling them up (I still have a lot of work to do with this one). There's an excellent discussion about boundaries at a different forum here.
Good post. Boundaries are super important, not only for beating an addiction, but also for relating to other people. They ultimately determine who you are and what you'll put up with and most people aren't concious of their boundaries.
Thank you OG, this post was really helpful to me today. It's great that you're sharing all your wisdom, I appreciate it. Especially about transparency, for me, and accountability. If I'm closing a tab, or a book, or covering my e reader, then maybe I'm going somewhere I shouldn't be, even if I'm not doing anything "wrong" right now.
