Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group
Part B – Chris walks through the second part of his testimony. We get to see what recovery tools became crucial to his healing.
We appreciate his honesty and openess, and our hope is that we can all identify with areas of his story in a way that leads us to a better self.
For more information, please contact us at
puritypodcast@castimonia.org
My wife gets angry. Very angry. At me. Which, when I stop and consider why, its not that surprising that she gets angry with me. As my therapist in our intensive said, her wound is no less real even though you can’t see it. Yeah. Its very real. I caused it. Or, I caused them. Her wounds. A lot of them.
So I shouldn’t be shocked or caught off guard or surprised when she gets angry. Somehow, though…I am. I am taken aback. Shocked. I immediately want to make it stop. To do whatever I need to do to end the conflict. Whether that is walking away, shutting down, trying to make her “feel better” by changing the subject or saying whatever I have to say to make it ok. Only, in listing my flaws for my 4th step, I came to a realization. Trying to avoid or assuage her anger is manipulation. I have a long history of manipulating my wife. I have done so over all of our marriage. To keep her attention elsewhere, to avoid conflict, to get what I want.
Early in my recovery, someone in one of the groups I attend said that recovery is not just about stopping acting out. Its about being healthy in how we deal with relationships and being fully alive in Christ. I am doing well in the first part. I am not acting out. However, as my sponsor recently told me, God reveals things to us when we are ready to deal with them. So evidently I am ready to deal with making my relationship healthy with my wife. That starts with how I deal with her anger.
I spoke with my counselor about this. He reminded me of the differences between guilt and shame. Guilt is I feel bad for what I have done. Shame is I am bad. So how am I responding in my wife’s anger? I have to not dive deep into shame, but to focus on guilt. I was at a friend’s house one night before we did our marriage intensive and disclosure. My wife was very overwhelmed by anger and wanted me out. My friend, no stranger to recovery, reminded me that I am not what I ought to be, but I am not what I used to be either. That helps now. I know that I am not perfect, nor will I ever be. I also know that I am not acting out anymore.
I have been so afraid of failing in anything. Dreading the response from my wife at one slip, one mistake, one goof up. Evidently its obvious because my counselor told me to give myself permission to fail in the small things. He reminded me I am not perfect and that my character flaws don’t magically disappear because I am in recovery. He’s right.
The other day I lied to my counselor. Then I lied to my wife about it. I had to apologize to them both. I was terrified at the response. I thought for sure my counselor would reset my sobriety date and that my wife would dive into a deep rage. Neither happened. She wasn’t angry. He didn’t scold me.
My wife later got mad. For no reason. Over a reminder, a memory, of something that brought back my acting out and former self. I wanted to hide. I didn’t. I remembered what my counselor said that God doesn’t make anything bad. Anger isn’t bad in and of itself as an emotion. She has the right to be angry at what I did. I need to let her work through that rather than trying to manipulate her out of it. I have guilt for what I did to her. I can’t change it though. I can only live today in a way that is different than how I did before. My accountability partner called it “living amends.” I like that. That’s how I approach her anger. She needs to have that emotion to deal with it. That doesn’t mean I did anything today to cause it. I can be supportive without being ashamed. And I can make living amends.
Part A — Chris walks us through his life and his growing addiction to pornography. He is rigorously honest about the struggles in his life and the character defects that magnified those.
He shares candidly patterns in his life that lead to broken thinking and false beliefs.
We thank him for his story of how he was in need of rescuing and restoration. This is part 1 of a 2-part testimony. Part 2 will highlight the restoration and what recovery tools worked best for him.
For more information, please contact us at
puritypodcast@castimonia.org.
I love this dialogue from “Airplane!”
(FYI, only the edited “PG” version of this movie should be watched as the rated “R” movie may be triggering.)
I read this story with sadness in my heart for this guy and his struggles. The worst part about this is that he still believes it is a matter of practicing self-control. Internet filters are extremely important and we must get to the point of healthiness where we don’t try to circumvent the filters, but instead are grateful for them. This guy has a lot to learn about gratefulness for his boundaries, none of which are in place. As my sponsor once told me, “It is wise to have external boundaries (filters, accountability, etc…) so when my internal boundaries fail, I have another set of boundaries protecting me.”
Yesterday, after 66 days sober of compulsive porn and masturbation, I relapsed. This post is to allow me to get into writing what happened, why it happened, and what I can do to prevent a future re-occurrence.
What happened?
Either the day of the relapse or before, when browsing the ‘controversial’ filter of my reddit homepage, a pic of a model appeared. The pic itself wasn’t nude, but the comments section contained plenty of links to nude images (and I knew they would). I was in a state of mind where, with 66 days of sobriety behind me, I was feeling pretty confident about my ability to handle triggering images, but later on I came back to the post and clicked one of the links. It was a bit of excitement, just to see the forbidden fruit and ‘test’ myself. At the time, I remember feeling that it didn’t actually do anything for me – I didn’t really get turned on, in fact I remember feeling the opposite – I felt “this is behind me now, this is an artificial representation of female sexuality and I don’t need it anymore”.
However, clearly there was more going on in my head asI came back to the links a second time later on, and looked at a few more. Then, my wife went to bed and I was up on my own. I clicked another link, which went to a non-porn video website that had associated videos which were softcore porn. I put my phone down to resist, knowing full well the territory I was now entering. But a few minutes later I came back and watched a few of them. Then I put my phone down again. By this point the prospect of watching porn was getting pretty real in my head but I was still resisting. Then something gave way, I opened up my laptop and watched porn – “edging” (where you watch and masturbate to porn but don’t orgasm) for about 45 minutes. Then by chance my wife called me to bed and I closed my laptop and went upstairs.
I was battling in my head about whether what I had done counted as a relapse, as I hadn’t climaxed. Deep down, I knew it did, and that my counter of 66 days needed to be reset, but I was trying to think of a rational way of not resetting my counter and not counting it as a relapse. I knew that I would have felt very differently (both physically and emotionally) had I actually climaxed, but I also knew that whenever I discuss this topic with other addicts, my opinion is consistent: edging is relapsing.
My wife then got up to breastfeed our newborn daughter, and I suggested I go to the spare room to get some sleep (we each take turns to do this so we aren’t both tired at the same time). Probably about 10% of me knew I was suggesting this as way of putting myself back in a position where I could look at porn again, and perhaps finish off what I had started. This is known as a cognitive distortion – justifying putting yourself in a situation where you know you may watch porn.
I went to the spare room and almost instantly started watching porn on my phone again. I quickly decided that I had clearly relapsed and that I needed to get it over and done with. In my experience, edging then stopping leaves me in a weird state of emotions for days (usually leading to more edging and an eventual climax), and I usually only get back on track once I have actually climaxed as there is just too much going on in my head. In the past, I have often just decided to climax once I’ve found myself edging, just to get it out of the way and back to recovery (this has been a valid technique in my experience, not an excuse).
So I watched porn. For hours. Climaxing three times, getting about 2 hours sleep. This is known as binging. The preferable method of relapsing, if there is one, is to watch porn briefly only once then get back to staying sober, but so often when I’ve watched porn once, and I know I’ve failed for that day, I tell myself I may as well watch more until the night is over as it won’t make that day any more ‘failed’ than it already is. Again, a cognitive distortion.
In the morning, I told my wife. I have never lied to her since I started my recovery in earnest, and so I explained briefly why I think I did it (see below) and what I need to do differently. She was very upset, not just because I had relapsed but because she is suffering from extreme tiredness and felt hurt I had been given the gift of a solid 6 hours sleep in the spare room (something she’s not had since the birth) and I just used it to watch porn. She also was hoping since the birth that the addiction was in the past. She had a cry, we talked a bit more, had a hug, and we’re ok now – we’re in this together.
Why did it happen?
I think this one is quite easy to answer. About 1.5 weeks ago I became a dad. Since then, sleep has been a thing of magical fantasy, as has ‘me time’. I’ve been constantly on duty for 10 days – changing nappies, cuddling the baby while my wife sleeps, supporting my wife, cooking etc.
I had started to feel a bit claustrophobic and constricted – ‘cabin fever’. I hadn’t seen any of my friends (the few that I have), but had played host while my wife had plenty of her friends round, and I hadn’t really left the house. I needed to vent; an outlet just to give myself some time to myself. Nothing serious, I don’t want to escape from my responsibilities or anything like that, but I started to feel like I just needed to give myself some time to explore my own mind a bit and relax. My wife recognised this days ago and encouraged me to do so, but I didn’t do it. I think the addict in me knew that if I didn’t give myself some time, I would continue to get more worked up and increase the chances of watching porn, so I resisted doing something ‘wholesome’ for myself (e.g. read a book, go for a cycle, play guitar etc).
In addition to not devoting time to myself, since the birth I had stopped doing all the recovery activities that I had put in place. This included:
These are all activities that I have added to my life in order to counteract specific aspects of my addiction. Since the birth, I’ve completely stopped doing all of them. Why? Well, a mixture of being too tired and distracted by new routines, and also a bit of hope that I’m over porn and I don’t need to anymore. Clearly that isn’t true.
So, the combination of not having enough sleep, feeling mentally constricted by not giving myself any space, and not performing any of my recovery activities, led to an unmanageable build up of stress and anxiety, leading me to watch porn to self-soothe. I did it as I needed an escape, and porn is the most efficient escape I know. Funnily enough, I wasn’t really feeling ‘triggered’ in the usual sense – I wasn’t full of urges to watch porn. I just wanted to have some time to myself. This is something I have identified a while back as part of my addiction, hence the need to introduce healthy activities to replace porn, but as these were not being done, porn became the go-to solution.
What does this mean?
I asked myself how significant this relapse was. There are those on the internet that think that a sober ‘streak’ is all that matters, and totally berate themselves for slipping up. I am not in that camp. Statistically speaking, my measure of success has so far been monthly trends of % clean. I started at 68% sober in July 2014, slowly rising until I got to 100% in January and February 2015.
It is really easy to lose faith and motivation from a relapse, but it is very important to avoid this. There is an inner voice of desperation that I hear when I relapse, which tells me to give up and stop trying to quit because I never will be able to. I have to silence this voice with determination and positivity. Therefore, my stance on this relapse is that I did amazingly well to get to day 67 and have made so much progress not only in abstinence but in understanding who I am and how to reconnect with my life. Having assessed why I slipped up, I feel I can accept this relapse on the basis that a) it is understandable given the change my life is going through becoming a dad and b) I am going to learn from it and commit to putting in place steps to try and avoid a recurrence in similar situations.
If anyone reading this is now thinking that I’m giving myself an easy ride, you may be falling into the shame trap. Addictions are fuelled by shame, self-doubt and negativity. Dwelling on a relapse, kicking myself, telling myself how much I’ve failed, are all logical reactions but entirely counter-productive to recovery, so I will not be doing any of these things. But, make no mistake, inside I am saddened by my relapse and it is not easy to re-motivate. But I will.
What will I do differently / what can I learn from this?
So, now what? Based on the reasons for my relapse, what I will do now is:
What am I not going to do differently?
Whenever abstinence from porn is discussed, the topic of content restrictions and blocks must always be considered, but it is something I’m not yet prepared to go back to. My wife and I tried it for one month last year and it was the worst month of my entire recovery – trying to break the blocks became more of a game than actually watching porn, and I felt that I was training my brain to rely on blocks rather than self-control. So for now I’m going to continue to use reddit etc, as I believe the risk of stumbling across NSFW content is worth it compared to the myriad of troubles (and lack of success) I experienced with a content blocking approach.
Fin
So there we go. There’s my account of my relapse, what it means to me and what I’m going to do to try and avoid a further relapse under similar situations next time. Maybe this will be interesting to others, but it at least serves as a reminder and documentation to myself.
As they say in the 12 step program, “we seek progress not perfection“.
This site is intended for individuals who struggle with maintaining sexual purity. This information is posted for individuals at various stages in their recovery, year 1 to year 30+; what applies to some, may not apply others. Spouses are encouraged to read this blog with the caveat that they may not agree with, understand, or know the reason for some items posted. As always, take what you like and leave the rest.
