CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

Intimacy

By

Dependency

“Codependent” is a word that comes up frequently… Being dependent in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s a component of healthy relationships. Some people fear dependency, interpreting it as a sign of weakness or helplessness, or out of a fear of intimacy. In healthy relationships, this is not the case. It is altogether possible to be an autonomous person and yet be able to be dependent on another. If you exhibit healthy dependency you are willing to admit the need for others in your life, and to let them need you. After all, we all start out life as completely dependent on our caretakers. If we grew up in a family that encouraged a sense of autonomy and independent growth, with parents who praised our achievements and showed us love, we will reach adulthood with a sense of security about ourselves and our internal worth and our ability to move through the world as successful people, in whatever way we define that for ourselves. Setting emotional boundaries, giving someone space (and taking it for ourselves) is acceptable. We can allow people to be who they are, not who we want them to be. We understand that we can’t change other people, and balance feelings of closeness with feelings of separateness. Yet we also know how to care for others and let them care for us – we’re able to ask for help when we need it. In other words, it’s ok to need and be needed, because we know and feel good about who we are independently of another person if that person happens not to be around. We are able to form healthily interdependent relationships without losing our sense of self. Sometimes things don’t go the way described above, and what’s experienced growing up is criticism, rejection, conditional love (often based on achievement that validates the parents’, not the child’s, sense of self-worth), over-dependence promoted as valuable, making it impossible to feel adequate without another person around to shore up self-worth. In this scenario you are unable to take responsibility for your own sense of adequacy. You expect your good feelings about yourself to be validated from outside yourself – usually from another person. You feel weak and vulnerable. You depend on someone else to feel secure, comforted, nurtured, supported, lovable, or worthy. You can’t make a decision without the approval of the other person. Your relationships tend to be enmeshed rather than engaged, and the other person in your relationship probably complains about feeling suffocated. More than likely you’ve been called “clingy.” Since it’s hard to set your own agenda, you’re often at a loss, looking to the other person to fill in what’s missing for you. From an on-line article by Katherine Rabinowitz, LP, M.A., NCPsyA
http://www.therapycanwork.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=49&Itemid=99

“If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.” – Fritz Perls

By

Castimonia Tuesday Night Meeting Topic: When does “looking” become “lusting”?

Originally posted at:
http://sexual-sanity.com/2012/08/when-does-looking-become-lusting/

When does a look become lust? Where is line that separates normal, healthy, God-given sexual response from sinful, destructive lust?

Christians generally focus on Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:27-28 as the standard for moral purity: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” So if this is our goal, we need to be clear about what it actually means to “look at a person lustfully.”

Let’s say you go to a restaurant. You look over to your left, and notice someone at the next table who is very attractive. Maybe they are dressed provocatively. You look at them, and their attractiveness registers in your mind. You might even notice something about their body that is attractive or alluring.

Is that lust? When does awareness and/or sexual attraction cross the line into lust?

Christians have been wrestling with this question for generations. Many wise people have written and taught about this. Let me suggest three words that are helpful in drawing the line between looking and lusting:

1. Looking becomes lusting when we stare

Intuitively we all know that there is some difference between looking at someone and staring at them. It’s one thing look at, or notice someone, it’s another to intensely watch them, to “visually feast on them.”

This is where the much maligned and often misunderstood “two-second rule” applies. The two-second rule suggests that looking at someone for a short amount of time is normal and socially acceptable. But looking at someone for more than two seconds constitutes staring and generally signifies crossing the line into lust.

While trying to legalistically apply this “rule” doesn’t work very well, understanding the principle behind it can be helpful.

Neuroscientists tell us that if we look at something intently for an extended period of time, that image gets burned into our brain, and we can recall the image later. We encounter millions of images and sensory impressions as we go through each day. Most of these we either ignore or pay such scant attention to that we can’t recall them later. They move in and out of our consciousness and aren’t retained.

But some of these images and sensory impressions make a deeper impression. They are retained if we pay focused attention to them … if we “take a mental picture.” That’s what happens if we stare at someone.

Let’s go back to the restaurant example. So you see someone who is attractive and/or dressed in such a way that catches your attention and possibly even creates a minor sexual response. But then, instead of fixating on that, you turn your attention elsewhere. You get involved in a conversation with your companion(s), and other thoughts, sights, and sounds take up our attention. It doesn’t take long for that earlier stimulus to fade, as your consciousness is filled with other thoughts and other stimuli.

But if you were staring, you were burning that image into your memory. Later that day, if you sat down and closed your eyes, you could probably call to mind that person, or that image.

2. Looking becomes lusting when we fantasize

Sometimes we do this while we stare: we build a fantasy in our minds about the person we are starting at. We imagine talking to this person, starting a relationship with this person, or doing something sexual with this person. In the later instance, way we are literally “committing adultery in our minds” as Jesus talks about in Matthew 5:28.

When we start to obsess about the person, when we spin stories or scenarios in our minds about them, then we have crossed the line into lust.

3. Looking becomes lusting when we objectify

To objectify someone is to cease to view them as a person, and instead view them as an object. We do this when we focus on a person’s body – or body parts – instead of focusing on them as a person. Then we move from relating to them as a human being to thinking about them, looking at them, maybe even evaluating them in the same detached, objectifying way we might look at a pornographic picture.

Habitual pornography users can struggle to build healthy relationships with members of the opposite sex because of this tendency. Viewing pornography trains you to objectify people, focusing on their body and sexuality. Sexual thoughts can intrude in your consciousness as you are trying to relate on a social level with someone.

You can probably see that these three words — staring, fantasizing, and objectifying — are related, and they often go together in practice. If you’re staring at someone, you might also be fantasizing about them. If you are fantasizing about someone, you might also be undressing them in your mind … objectifying them.

Obviously things like pornography, sexual chat, and erotic stories all fit into this category of lusting. They don’t satisfy our sexual desire, they feed it and create desire for more. They don’t build intimacy. They don’t bring people together. They alienate people, because they train people to objectify and fantasize, rather than to love, serve, and relate.

Our goal is to treat other people with love and with dignity as persons. When we view people primarily as objects for our viewing and critique, or view them primarily from the standpoint of potential sexual partners, we are severely limiting the ways in which we can connect on a human, non-sexual level.

 

 

By

EPA: Prolific Porn Watcher Still on Payroll

From Greenwire
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
http://www.eenews.net/

Robin Bravender, E&E reporter

Months after getting caught in the act of watching pornography at the office, a highly paid U.S. EPA employee has been banned from the building, but he’s still on the payroll.

The offending staffer’s habits came to light during a spectacle of a House hearing in May. Aghast lawmakers took turns jabbing EPA for failing to fire the staffer, who confessed to having watched pornography on his work computer for between two and six hours per day since 2010.

“How much pornography would it take for an EPA employee to lose their job?” asked incredulous Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

“Fire him. Fire him,” demanded Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

The fact that EPA’s prolific porn watcher is still employed more than four months later has prompted even more outrage from Capitol Hill.

“If this is not a case for the EPA to take someone off the payroll, which the agency’s Inspector General uncovered months ago, then what is?” Issa said today in a statement. “It is simply unacceptable that this individual would continue to receive compensation courtesy of the American taxpayer. The EPA clearly needs to get its house in order, and it is astonishing that such egregious abuses remain unresolved.”

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) promised congressional action.

“Paying to keep a confirmed porn watcher at government expense demonstrates the need for dramatic reform and the need to suspend federal employee compensation after they have been caught in the act,” Mica said today in a statement. “It may be too late in this Congress to further pursue this reform but I will make every effort to see how we can address this matter.”

The staffer is on administrative leave but still receiving his salary, according to EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia. “This employee continues to be investigated by the [Office of the Inspector General] and U.S. Attorney’s Office, and we are working with these offices to obtain information necessary to move forward with administrative action,” she said.

EPA would not offer more updates about the employee’s status, and Jeff Lagda, a spokesman for the EPA inspector general’s office, said he couldn’t share any more specifics while the investigation is ongoing. The employee’s name has been withheld by EPA and investigators.

Investigators confirmed the staffer’s porn viewing when an OIG special agent arrived at his workspace to conduct an interview. The agent “witnessed the employee actively viewing pornography on his government-issued computer,” Allan Williams, deputy assistant EPA inspector general, told lawmakers at the May hearing (Greenwire, May 7).

The employee confessed to spending hours each day watching porn at work, and the OIG found that he had downloaded and viewed more than 7,000 pornographic files while on the job, Williams said, noting then that the Justice Department had accepted the case for prosecution.

Issa shared some additional details about the staffer’s habits, including the fact that he had spent four consecutive hours on a site called “Sadism is Beautiful.” Committee staff also noted that the employee was a highly paid GS-14 staffer who had received performance awards during the time period he had been watching pornography at work.

Employees working in Washington, D.C., at the General Schedule 14 pay scale earn between $106,000 and $139,000 per year in fiscal 2014, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

‘It’s not easy to fire somebody’

When lawmakers grilled EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on the porn watcher at a separate hearing in June, she said she shared their frustrations that problem employees couldn’t be fired more quickly. “Any way that we can make these processes move more quickly, I’m all for it,” she said (E&ENews PM, June 25).

“I actually have to work through the administrative process, as you know, and there is still an ongoing OIG criminal investigation, is my understanding,” she told lawmakers. “We have actually banned him from the building. He no longer has access to any EPA equipment” and was already on administrative leave at the time, she said.

The slow pace of dealing with the employee isn’t too far out of the ordinary, said Earl Devaney, the now-retired economic stimulus watchdog who spent decades in top government oversight posts.

If DOJ has accepted the case for prosecution, he said, “EPA is totally handcuffed” from taking administrative actions in the meantime, as prosecutors are likely involved in negotiations with the suspect to plead to a crime or are pursuing an indictment. “If they are going to prosecute, they don’t want that administrative action having been taken because let’s say they go to a jury and the jury hears that he’s already lost his job, they start feeling sorry for him,” Devaney added.

“The fact that they’ve accepted it as a crime suggests to me that it’s something more than just watching, let’s call it regular porn,” he said, suggesting that something more serious might be involved. Devaney noted that he wasn’t familiar with the specific circumstances of this case.

However, because the employee had confessed to watching an average of several hours of pornography at work per day, “that could be enough to say, ‘Let’s send a signal here, and on a technicality we’ll charge him with a crime.’ Theft of government services comes to mind, because he’s abusing taxpayers’ monies; obviously, they didn’t pay him to watch porn,” Devaney added.

Not many people get fired from EPA in any given year based on performance issues. In the agency of roughly 16,000 staffers, only five have been terminated due to discipline or performance issues so far in fiscal 2014, according to a database kept by OPM. Ten were fired for performance or discipline in fiscal 2013; 24 were terminated the previous year.

Those numbers appear “about normal if you go across government,” Devaney said. “There are so many hoops that you have to jump through, so many appeal rights that a suspect has that they can literally tie up a general counsel’s office for weeks and months.

“It’s not easy to fire somebody.”

By

Pornography use is a relationship issue

“As sex and relationship therapists, we know that pornography use is a relationship issue.  Porn affects the user’s inner life (the relationship he has with himself), as well as the interactions he has with his partner and other family members.  Regular porn use often interferes with a person’s ability to maintain good self-esteem and experience manually fulfilling sexual intimacy with a partner.  Dealing with pornography is not solely about stopping a behavior or overcoming an addiction.  It also involves reclaiming a sense of personal integrity and manifesting attitudes and behaviors that promote healthy sexual intimacy.  Nothing we found in our research discussed pornography use and its repercussions with this type of emphasis.” – Wendy Maltz, LCSW, DST and Larry Maltz, LCSW in The Porn Trap

Sexual addiction is an intimacy disorder, not about sex but about an emotional issue.  Regular porn use lowers the ability to feel good about themselves and their intimate relationships, so they withdraw which increases the emotional disconnect.

By

‘The old man’s still got it’: Senior Constable secretly filmed his sex sessions with 33 women

Marc Osborn recorded footage using pinhole camera hidden inside alarm clock

Kathy Marks
Wednesday 14 August 2013
web-mar-osborn-getty

With two children and a job in a busy Sydney police station, Senior Constable Marc Osborn had plenty on his plate.

Yet he found time not only to date no fewer than 33 women, but also to make tapes of himself having sex with them, which he then showed off to colleagues.

It was the tapes that landed him in court this week, where he was convicted of three counts of “filming a private act for sexual  gratification”. Osborn, 42, who will be sentenced next month, claimed he filmed the encounters – with a pinhole camera hidden inside an alarm clock – only to prove to younger officers that “the old man’s still got it”.

Police investigators found details of 33 women on his mobile phone. Sydney’s Downing Street Local Court heard that he would meet four of them on any given day, sometimes travelling between Sydney and Newcastle, 75 miles to the north. He also sent group texts to some of them.

Osborn, who faces immediate dismissal from the New South Wales force, told the women – many of whom he met on internet dating sites – that they could trust him, because he was a police officer. One of them testified that she felt “very betrayed” and “completely bewildered”.

The court heard that on one occasion Osborn winked at the camera while having sex with one of his conquests.

At one of the stations where he worked – Gladesville, in north-west  Sydney – a frequent topic of conversation was: “Have you seen Osborn‘s latest video?” And eventually it was his colleagues who reported him to senior officers. The force now faces a possible damages claim from some of his victims.

One 31-year-old woman, identified only as “Miss BB”, said she had sex with Osborn in a fully marked Nissan patrol police vehicle, and that  he visited her so frequently that “even the neighbours were commenting… that it appeared I had personal security”.

She was shocked to discover he had filmed them together, telling  investigators that the only mementos Osborn was entitled to have of  her were topless photographs, which she had had taken “professionally”.

During his at times tearful testimony, Osborn – who wore a large pair of dark sunglasses while entering and leaving court – said he was the second oldest on his team. “I guess I was just trying to compete with my peers … trying to join in the conversation.”