CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

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Toss Your Textbooks: Docs Redefine Sexual Behavior Addictions

Toss Your Textbooks: Docs Redefine Sexual Behavior Addictions

American Society of Addiction Medicine agrees to disagree with DSM
Published on September 15, 2011 by Gary Wilson in Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow
A major event has occurred in the realm of addiction science and treatment. America’s top addiction experts at The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) have just released their sweeping new definition of addiction. This new definition ends the debate over whether sex and porn addictions are “real addictions.”  They are.

The new definition resulted from an intensive, four‐year process with more than 80 experts actively working on it, including top addiction authorities, addiction medicine clinicians and leading neuroscience researchers from across the country. … Two decades of advancements in neurosciences convinced ASAM that addiction needed to be redefined by what’s going on in the brain.

The new definition leaves no doubt that all addictions—whether to alcohol, heroin or sex, say—are fundamentally the same. Dr. Raju Haleja, former president of the Canadian Society for Addiction Medicine and the chair of the ASAM committee that crafted the new definition, told The Fix, “We are looking at addiction as one disease, as opposed to those who see them as separate diseases. Addiction is addiction. It doesn’t matter what cranks your brain in that direction, once it has changed direction, you’re vulnerable to all addiction.” …Sex or gambling or food addiction [are] every bit as medically valid as addiction to alcohol or heroin or crystal meth.

Click the link below for the full article as well as other great posts on sexual addiction issues.

Psychology Today Sex Addiction Article

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Colombian Prostitutes!

“The scandal was made public Saturday. As many as 11 agents and 10 military  servicemembers allegedly brought prostitutes back to their hotel in Cartagena,  Colombia, while doing advance work before the president’s arrival for a trade  summit.”

Seriously? Another scandal dealing with Sexual Purity issues and public employees?  Why does this not surprise me?  I didn’t even bother to watch or read a single news story on the subject of the Secret Service agents and Marines who used the services of 20+ Colombian prostitutes the week before the president made his trip to the South American country.  I understood what was going on, just from the headlines.  I actually had to search for the story in order to read more about it!

The sad reality is, in today’s mainstream society, it is almost acceptable for a man, especially overseas, to partake in this type sexual immorality.  The news stories keep referencing a “secret culture” in the Secret Service that seems to have been in place for a while.  However, as “mainstream” as it is for men to visit prostitutes or act out sexually in affairs, self gratification, or pornography, this should never be acceptable.  Accepting that a co-worker engage in such activity is just as bad as you supporting them in that activity!  The “secret culture” they speak of is a culture of immorality and looking the other way, accepting this type of behavior as normal behavior, both by the Secret Service and Military members.  I believe that the problem is that of “group think” where many men have done this for so long and passed it on to others, that when someone new asks the question “why?” the other men accuse him of not being a “team player” but in reality don’t even know where, when, or how this “secret culture” became acceptable, they just accept and partake!

Their actions will have major ramifications not only for themselves and their loved ones, but for the entire agency.  The head of the Secret Service agency is now under scrutiny.  Why didn’t he stop this “secret culture” when he took the job?  Perhaps he was part of that culture and either engaged in the immoral behavior or simply looked the other way.  From my knowledge of members of the Secret Service, this type of activity is nothing new.  Many participate and those that do not, simply look the other way!

At what point do your friends or co-workers confront you on your sexually immoral behaviors?  Is it after you’ve been caught or while you are acting out?  A man who struggles with sexual immorality as much as these guys do are perhaps in a deep denial that they have a problem.  Furthermore, their “friends” don’t do anything to help the man and just enable his actions, some by joining the “fun” and other by looking the other way.  In my case, I wish I “real” friends would have said something to me about my problem with sexual impurity before I went as far as I did.

Have you ever been in a position where you saw a coworker acting in an immoral manner and failed to say or do something about it?  Were you just a team player and even joined in on the fun?  How about at your church?  Do you know the men at your church intimately enough to know they might struggle with sexual purity?  Perhaps you have been in a support or recovery group long enough where you can take the initiative and be courageous enough to step forward and do what is right and help out a fellow man.  Sometimes, these men need to be brought into the light by brothers who struggle with the same issues.

Sexual impurity, however, is a very secretive issue.  So how can a man in recovery help bring out those that need help?  It’s easy (sort of).  You can help others simply by being open and honest with your own struggles, not caring what the other men or women think about you or your past activities.  You never know who might be listening, perhaps someone who is so far “down the scale” that they desperately need to hear about hope in getting out of the pit of sexual immorality.  Perhaps one of these Secret Service agents could have had the support to say “No” to sexual immorality had someone at their church given their testimony on how they were a slave to sexual immorality or addiction!

We don’t really know how God will use us or our testimony, just at the right time, for the right person, for the right reason, to advance His kingdom and help a lost man living in the dark, come to the light and enter a spiritual program of recovery.

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Men’s Sexual Purity Recovery, Is it for you? 80/20 Principle – Part 3

In Men’s Sexual Purity Recovery, Is it for you? 80/20 Principle – Part 1 I openly discussed the issue with excessive lustful thoughts and self-gratification (masturbation).  In Men’s Sexual Purity Recovery, Is it for you? 80/20 Principle – Part 2 I go one level deeper into the viewing of pornography and its effects on the brain and how an addiction can quickly form.  In Part 3, I go further “down the scale” of sexual purity and look at situations where a man has crossed the “flesh line” so to speak.

The “flesh line” is best defined as the line that is crossed where a person knowingly has “impure” sexual intercourse with another person.   By “impure” I refer to sexual intercourse with anonymous sex partners, affair partners, prostitutes, or other “high-risk” persons that fulfill the fantasy or high.  Once this occurs, pornography and masturbation by themselves may never be “enough” to achieve the same sexual high achieved once the line has been crossed.  The battle becomes a lot more difficult and the consequences a lot higher once this occurs.  Crossing the flesh line now gives the person a taste of how much better the sexual gratification could be with the intense adrenaline rush from doing something “wrong” and also from the Neurochemicals pumping through the brain.  The intensity can be as much if not more than while viewing pornography.  Now the person can try to reenact the pornography they viewed with another person.  Sometimes with the other person’s consent, sometimes without.  A lot of times, they dehumanize the person and treat them like an object only for use for their sexual satisfaction, desperately trying to get the same level of high they had in previous acting out experiences.

The diagram to the left shows a progression of the disease beginning with the roots of unmet emotional needs (click on the diagram for a full-sized image).  Background information on this diagram and the progression will be discussed in another post.  However, this diagram clearly defines where the “flesh-line” (or Flesh Barrier as it is showing the diagram) lies and the resulting behaviors and consequences.  There are those of us in Castimonia who have passed the flesh line and have faced severe consequences such as diseases, loss of our jobs, loss of our marriage, violence toward us, prison, and even death!  What a man who struggles with sexual purity must understand is that if they do not take hold of the problem early on, they will end up suffering these consequences.  No matter how deceptive the man might be in fooling their loved ones, employers, etc… they are only fooling themselves.  One day, the truth will come out, and even though the damage has already been done with the sexual acting out, the consequences will come forward and might be more severe than when they were just struggling with lustful thoughts, masturbation, or viewing pornography.

My hope for every man who reads this blog is that it opens their eyes to a problem they might be denying.  That it helps them understand the problem and helps them understand that there are others who struggle with this issue and if not confronted, will escalate to the point where the consequences are severe!

In Part 4, I will answer the initial question asked in the topic title, “Men’s Sexual Purity Recovery, Is it for you?”

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This question has been asked by many men who come to my group.  To be honest, I can’t read their minds, nor do I know their backgrounds or sexual history until they give their First Step.  There are also men who come to my group that are not sex addicts but only struggle with sexual purity issues.  How does a man who attends Castimonia determine if they might be a sex addict?

Below is a link to the Sex Addiction Screening Test used by many therapist in the field of Sex Addiction.  It is hosted on sexhelp.com and is an initial test that may answer the question, “Am I a Sex Addict?”

The SAST is an initial assessment test for people with potentially addictive behaviors. It provides a profile of responses that help distinguish between addictive and non-addictive behaviors. It was developed in cooperation with hospitals, treatment programs, private therapists and community groups.

Take a few moments to complete this cost-free, no-obligation questionnaire.

Please be an open and honest as possible when taking this test.  The more open and honest you are about your sexual behaviors, the more accurate the results will be.

Sex Addiction Screening Test

For other information on finding a therapist or general information, please visit:

SexHelp.com – Get Help For Sex Addiction

If you scored in the “Addict” level on this test, I would recommend seeing a professional sex addiction specialist therapist.

https://castimonia.org/2012/04/16/am-i-a-sex-addict/

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Online Porn Is Huge. Like Really, Really Huge. Who Knew?

For the sake of our Castimonia members, I have deleted links and actual site names from this BusinessWeek article.  I do not want to trigger them.  These stats reinforce a statement in my Men’s Sexual Purity Recovery, Is it for you? 80/20 Principle – Part 2 post on 30% of all internet traffic is porn-related.

By  Ashlee Vanceon April 05, 2012

The good folks at ExtremeTech took it upon themselves this week to get at one of the Internet’s crucial questions—just how big are porn sites these days? The answer? ***** big. To study porn sites, ExtremeTech turned to the DoubleClick Ad Planner tool from Google (GOOG). It’s a useful website where you can peek at information gathered by ad-serving cookies about how much traffic a website gets, the age and income of visitors, and the amount of time people spend on a site.

According to this tool, the online porn kingpin X****** feeds up 4.4 billion page views per month. That’s about 10 times as many as the New York Times and three times as many as CNN.com. Y******—another site packed full of stimulating content—notches 2.1 billion page views per month. And while people spend a few minutes per day on news sites, they tend to spend 15 minutes or more on porn sites, which would seem to say something rather definitive about, er, male stamina.

“But it’s not just men on the sites,” you shout. True, although the top porn sites count men as about 75 percent of their visitors. Breaking the stats down further, about half of the visitors make between $25,000 and $50,000 per year, while only 2 percent earn more than $150,000 per year. According to Google, the other interests of X****** visitors include Latin American music and gangs and organized crime, while Y****** visitors like networking equipment and family films, so it’s an eclectic bunch.

While anyone can dig through these numbers, ExtremeTech did a nice job of adding some context to the incredible amount of data served up by porn sites. According to the Google estimates, X****** would record “29 petabytes of data transferred every month, or 50 gigabytes per second. That’s about 25,000 times more than your home Internet connection is probably capable of, which is a couple of megabytes per second.” Sliced another way, X****** will “serve up 50 gigabytes per second, or 400Gbps,” ExtremeTech writes. “Bear in mind this is an average data rate, too: At peak time, X****** might burst to 1,000Gbps (1Tbps) or more. To put this into perspective, there’s only about 15Tbps of connectivity between London and New York.”

Someone at Y****** chatted with ExtremeTech and said the Google estimates are way below actual totals. Y****** stores more than 100TB of porn and feeds up about 28 petabytes per month.

These types of figures put the top porn sites in a class that only Microsoft (MSFT), Google, and Facebook really surpass. My takeaway from this is that companies such as Dell (DELL) and Cisco Systems (CSCO) make a ton of money selling gear to the top porn sites and that these companies must have some very savvy engineers.