Well I'm sober at the moment. I guess It's a little over a half day since I last acted out. This last time was over the line--at least one line--where I went to the porn sites of my choice and yanked on the crank until climax.
A lovely image, no? Me sitting on the toilet, all 340 pounds at 5'10, balancing the iPad in front of me with one of my favorite fetish videos and masturbating with the other hand. Strange how it takes me 30 seconds to masturbate to the 'right' images, but in the past, when I was acting out regularly, I'd take hours to climax with my partner, if I even could.
So that's one argument against masturbating for me, especially masturbating to pornography. My wife, or any wife, cannot compete with the exact images of my 'lust template', the 'zone' that I get my mind in when I touch myself (or grind myself or my pillow in an effort to be 'sober' because I didn't use my hand).
It's the cocaine or heroin addict's same ritual of thinking about 'scoring', searching for the 'score', and then using the drug to reach that ultimate high--the one we'll never be able to reach to the degree that makes us say "I'm done, I don't ever need to do that again".
I mourned the loss of porn several years ago when I'd given it up 'for good'.
And now it's creeped back into my life, first looking at 'legitimate' images on mainstream search engines, even with safe searches engaged.
Then I threw out the 'safe search', saying "Fuggit, I'm going to look at what's out there". At that time I'd been thinking I'd look at the images, 'store them' for later, when I'd surely have a fantasy/wet dream that would 'scratch the itch' that I had.
Next came the forays into videos that essentially were pornographic, but they were 'clean enough' for a site like You Tube to post without problems.
Finally there was the final "Fuggit, I'm gonna look at the 'good stuff' I've 'never had a chance to see' since I'd been sober for the last five years plus from surfing porn sites". Then I'd grinded my way to ejaculation, thinking this wasn't truly acting out.
Last, but certainly not least, I sat down on the toily when my wife was in the other room and said, "Fuggit, I grinded to a climax last night to feaux porn images, I might as well enjoy the real deal since either way I have to reset my sobriety".
And how could my wife, or anyone's partner compete with that? They can't beat this bottomless pit of false connections propped up by poor soul-less images, masked in youth, beauty, and that can be summoned to tweak our lust template just the way we want it.
I also know that when I was acting out on a regular basis, it was often at a time I wasn't getting along with my wives, past and present. This was confounded by the fact that I would create some of the conflicts in order to justify my going to act out. THAT particular trait has gratefully seemed absent up to now, but I'm definitely stressed out in the home environment.
My wife continues to be off limits sexually, she's--as usual--completely consumed, and rightfully so, with our beautiful 10 month old child, and she's 'hormonal', having to take medications to help maintain the nascent 'pregnancy' that started when our two 'snowflake' embryos were implanted over a week ago.
I continue to work hard at an extra job site that is notorious for eating up and spitting out professionals due to the complexity of the work and the nature of the clientele.
Compound that with the already slow nature of my completing my mandatory paperwork and billing, and my poor habits of staying up late on work nights (it's after 2am and I have to work in the morning) and you're in the midst of a vicious cycle that's creating the perfect environment for more acting out.
I've (re)established a boundary to prevent porn surfing on the iPad which included moving the one browser that I kept 'out' in the open 'for work'. It also conveniently happens to be the browser I know how to hide my tracks on and it's not tracked by Covenant Eyes.
I also decided to go back to the laptop that's completely secured (monitored) by CE so I'll always have the 'eye in the sky' watching me. Funny how an Orthodox Jew doesn't worry so much about the G-d I otherwise fear from seeing me act out, but I'm more concerned that my therapist who monitors my activity doesn't see me doing it.
For times that I will surf on the iPad, I'll use the CE Browser and keep those 'other browsers' for work in a folder that I have to go dig for a little, which hopefully be enough of a boundary to keep me from going there, in conjunction to other program work of course.
Regarding You Tube, I commit to watching it on the lap top or via the CE Browser. The YT iPad app is way too easy to act out on. It's too easy to erase the tracks and pretend it never happened.
From the 12-step angle, I've decided I must go back to meetings. It's probably been a year or more since I went to my last, and it's time to go and go regularly. It's like bathing. Unless I do it enough, I begin to stink again.
Reconnecting with my religious community has been a big obstacle for me. It used to be a degree of shame and also the discomfort of seeing the Ex and her husband hanging out with my twins, and then the twins preferentially staying around them instead of me.
Now it's kind of morphed into shame that I've disconnected from the community, shame that I've gained about sixty pounds since the birth of my child and since I've last attended synagogue regularly. And there's the shame/anger I have against the local rabbi who'd done his best in his own way to be supportive, but who I butted heads with and felt a lack of a connection to since I moved to this state in the first place. I also understand he's having some personal difficulties of a financial nature that may be weighing on him significantly.
The work at my job has kept me overly preoccupied and kept me home on Saturdays, a shame that I carry and hide from all but G-d Himself. I'd like to find a way to lose that 'workday' and make it a true day of rest. It's probably resulted in me being more loosie goosie on other matters in my religious observance, which from what I've seen with addiction, also leads to the ultimate compromises and bastardizations of life.
So I'm humbled by this disease, terrified that it can still flare up to the worst degrees I've ever hit and beyond, and yet I still have the smouldering lust that just had gasoline and a match thrown on it a number of times in the past few weeks. Once is too high of a number, or as my 12 step buddies say....
"One is too many and 100 is not enough".
Ain't it the truth?
Just had dinner that was left for me in the fridge my Motown Girl. She left a dirty diaper in a plastic bag on top of the food bag in there, which I at first thought was a joke. When I went back into the bedroom to thank her for the dinner and the diaper, I realized this wasn't a joke. She's been so overworked, over-hormoned, and emotionally overwhelmed, she likely just tossed all of the bags from her hands into the fridge, not realizing the diaper was in there too.
Well, after surfing porn in recent days and seeing how disgusting my fetishes are and what worse ones are out there, I thought it was appropo that there was a soiled diaper sitting on my dinner this evening :)
I'll keep trudging...just gotta stay sober for a few more minutes and then sleep will take over...may G-d help me...
0 comments:
Post a Comment