Sex Addiction Recovery Sabotage

The war against your obsession with pornography and sexual fantasies and your compulsion to masturbate is a war between logical thinking and feelings. If you have a sex problem it means that your emotions were already the victor at some point. There’s no shortage of stories of people doing foolish things for lust.

Feelings are fickle things. If you’ve determined to move beyond masturbation, pornography, and sexual fantasy, you’ve probably experienced the powerful high of feeling like your determination has already conquered the beast. You’ve probably also experienced every other possible emotion in the process: fear that you can’t do it, shame for what you’ve done in the past, anger that you have to do without, frustration, sorrow that you wasted a lot of energy, and jealousy of people who seem to be able to indulge without limits or consequences.

Feelings often translate into beliefs and those beliefs based on feelings are simply not reliable. Unfortunately, some of those feelings-based beliefs can make for very formidable roadblocks on the path to recovery. Consider:

“One of the downsides of the internet is that you can find people who support almost any perversion.”

Why Do Doctors Knock? (And Maybe You Should Observe Boundaries, Too)

Have you had a routine physical exam lately? I need one. They aren’t comfortable, to be sure. You know you aren’t just going to point to your neck, describe some pain, and walk out with a prescription. This is an all-in deal. I’m thinking about my last one. The crazy thing to me, though, was how they gave me privacy to exchange my clothing for a modesty gown. When the doctor knocked, it frankly seemed like a tease. What? He wants to make sure I’ve tucked and accounted to make sure no unnecessary flesh is showing? God forbid he discover what color my boxer shorts are. Oh, wait! He’s about to pull said boxer shorts down to my knees, look my penis over, handle my testicles, and then turn me around and feel inside my anus with his finger. And we both know it. So, why bother with the “Are you decent?” knock? Why bother with the privacy of someone who’s already surrendered it?  The answer is…boundaries, voluntarily-placed walls on what we do, look at, and think about at every moment in time.

Hold that thought a moment. Now consider: there was an episode of “The King of Queens” in which Doug is strong-armed into telling his wife, Carrie, the nature of his sexual fantasies. In an effort to divert attention from the fact that he imagines himself in liaisons with women other than her, he proudly reveals that these daydreams all assume that he’s a grieving widower. The funny thing, I guess, is that her hang-up then becomes that he routinely imagines her deceased. She then proceeds to fill a stack of note cards with her romance novel ideas of suitable topics for his fantasizing. As the show went into a dream sequence that started as Carrie’s suggested fantasy, but—since it was in Doug’s head—then imagined her demise in a car accident heard just off-screen, I found myself wondering how many men watching were squirming at the notion of their wife having the slightest idea what runs through their head in connection with sexual arousal, stimulation, and orgasm. If only our thoughts always met standards of TV network censors (as low as they’ve become).

I Couldn’t Believe My Own Eyes

I guess it’s no rare event when you see a movie or TV show and think, “Well that wouldn’t happen in real life.” I guess that’s often okay. But then again, and especially for kids, certain movies and TV shows become permanent fixtures in your head. Some of them inevitably become significant data in your gut feeling for what normal people do, think, or believe. Now that’s scary.

Okay, I just introduced a topic which could fill a book, but my focus today is to sound off on some short clips of three TV shows and a movie. In these clips, children about 10 to 12 years old are discussing or viewing  or acting out material that, for me, would have been very sexually charged. In all these cases, the material is used as a throwaway comedy bit. That is, the presence of these sexually-charged materials or behaviors has zero impact beyond the short scene that contains each of them. It’s that sort of denial of personhood in others that helped to empower my sexual fantasies and enjoyment of pornography. (There, I tied this into the overall theme of this blog site! Moving on…)

Save the Naked Girl!

The practical problems of obsessions with pornography and sexual fantasy are that they don’t respect boundaries. I can’t tell them to stick to a schedule or location. Unfortunately, this means that, despite my best intentions, I find myself in the “real world”, far away from my designated safe place to surf porn, daydream, and masturbate when the thoughts that serve me so well in fueling my masturbation fantasies arrive to pick on some REAL person I that I absolutely did not intend to interact, or worse, I fantasize about someone I know well and have to be around. Surely you know how weird and awful it can feel when you’ve seen someone and find yourself imagining them in some unspecified nudist situation, and then they make eye contact. Aren’t you certain at that point that your thoughts are transparent? Don’t you expect a dirty look?

Christian Pornography? Church Strip Clubs? Righteous Boner!

There is a small, passionate movement afoot to justify ogling nude dancers and drooling over lewd images of sexual intercourse. This movement suggests that the Bible does not forbid looking at nudity and it’s only lust if you acknowledge to yourself a literal desire to engage in sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse. Oh, and some would say that ideal Christian pornography would show kind, caring lovemaking between real husband and wife. I’m not yet clear on what makes for a Christian strip club, but there is a notion that if the customers were all Christians, it wouldn’t be a den of sin. After all, if it’s just looking and your interest is in the “appreciation and admiration” of God’s handiwork, it must be Godly.

Undressing Nudity, Part Four of Four

This is the fourth and final part of an essay on nudity. I’m trying to de-mystify it, un-power it, and un-couple it from associations that aren’t healthy.

I’ve always been fascinated by nudist camps, closed-access communities where people give each other complete visual access to their bodies. The idea of privates is meaningless. Back when, as a kid, I feared going to the doctor largely because he might have to see under my clothes, the idea of a nudist camp blew my mind. Even as an adult, when the idea of being a visitor kind of excites me, I imagine that I’d spend the whole time comparing forbidden body parts, hoping that a cross-section of society would be present and I could learn all sorts of things about body types and puberty and aging and so on and so forth. Well, I recently read a serious study about behavior and attitudes of nudists. Basically it was asking if all that exposure to nudity created a sexually-charged environment. Well, the conclusion was that a nudist camp and an orgy are nearly opposite environments. It made the nudist camp sound like prudes at a church supper. They didn’t discuss the human body or sex and they primarily did not look below the neck. They had virtual boundaries for themselves.

Undressing Nudity, Part Three

In the first two parts of this essay, I explored how seeing nudity and being seen nude are sometimes quite appropriate. Yet, I’ve hung onto my childish thinking that to be seen naked is like being cut open and eyes upon you are the blood draining from your body. It’s that life-changing and earth-shattering. In this essay, I’m trying to unpack my thinking and rewire my brain to make the mere state of nudity less of a hot button. That should help me put pornography and sexual fantasy in their proper perspectives.

As an adolescent, I was the boy least likely to have sexual intercourse. If I’d learned nothing else from Sunday School, I was pretty sure I was not allowed to go all the way with a girl. So, one of my fantasies to masturbate to was that I was stripped and forced into a small room with a girl whom my classmates used as the butt of ugly jokes. Of course, she was naked, too. In my thinking, male and female naked in a room together necessarily meant there would be sexual intercourse. It was a given and I’d have no choice about it. I didn’t have to imagine threats from my captors or weapons aimed at my head. Boys weren’t supposed to see vaginas. Girls weren’t supposed to see penises. If such a thing happens (a boner is a given), we have liftoff.

Undressing Nudity, Part Two

Continuing from Part One…

In the years before my 11th birthday, I was very comfortable with my understanding of nudity: it’s a bad thing to be and a bad thing to see. When I was nine-turning-ten, my family drove to Mexico City for a convention. We we were with a large group of RVers and had a government guide. In the little villages along the way, I saw poverty conditions I hadn’t witnessed before or since. I saw half-naked kids (the lower half!). I know I saw at least one squatting in the street to take a dump. You don’t forget that. When I entered seventh grade, nudity became a part of my life, but only because donning jockstraps for PE and showering afterward in a square, partionless room was forced upon me. I coped with it as well as anyone else seemed to, but I almost daily got a boner thinking about how embarrassing it was going to be. A year later, I saw Superman: The Movie and witnessed the unconscionable: voluntary nudity. Now I read that Superman was about some visitor from a distant planet capable of saving Earth from disaster and such, but at the time it was the “movie with the naked boy in it.” I grant you he was only four (or nearly four), but the young Superman standing in the crater that his escape pod had made was wearing only a smile. That floored me. Screenwriter, parents, director, producer, theater owner, and I don’t know who else all decided that it was okay to put a penis on the movie screen. I saw no justification for it.

Undressing Nudity, Part One

I have a real hang-up with nudity. When I was a kid, it was a scary, unnatural, disgusting thing. Then when puberty hit, it was still scary, but I strongly associated it with sexuality. As I’ve matured, I find it easier to be casually naked. Better yet, I’m not bothered that my kid is comfortable seeing and being seen naked. Still, I recognize that I have deeply-entrenched associations with nudity. They are not healthy and I want to address them. In fact, I believe my obsession with it is core to my problem with sexual fantasy and pornography.