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.”

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.