Archive for the ‘life’ Category:
Mind Body Spirit part 2
Body
The battle for the body deals with changing behavioral habits that have led to your addiction. This is often the first area that people start fighting so it shouldn’t be a total surprise to anyone. However, there is much more to this battle then just “not touching yourself”. It’s a start for sure but only a start. Behaviors can be unlearned with time. In my groups we use a rubber band to help train our minds to change behaviors. We wear this rubber band on our wrists, and every time we look at a woman in a way we know is wrong, we snap it. It trains your body that it will not get pleasure from looking at women any more. [Some studies suggest that the pleasure our brain feels from an orgasm is equal to ten hits of cocaine] It may seem silly but many people (myself included) have seen it work. Some say that it takes 30 days to make something a habit or to break a habit. Try it for 30 days and see how much you look lustfully at women after that. (Yes… at first you’ll be snapping it a lot, but snap and look away for 30 days). There are many other tools like this that can help. I’m not going to tell you which one to use because every person is different and some may work and some may not. (I encourage you to share your tools with others in your comments). Beyond behavioral changes there are some habits of being healthy that need to change. When I was dealing with my addiction I was overweight and out of shape. I had no physical outlet for my energy except to act out. It was totally by accident, but about the same time I started to deal with my addiction, I started to get my body in shape, too. I lost about 20 pounds and found a great way to get rid of stress. I work out on weights and do cardio regularly now. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated (sexually or otherwise) and after I worked out, I felt amazingly better. Just like the tools, I’m not going to tell you which one is best. You find something that you enjoy doing and do that. I like weight training and bicycling… what do you like?
Spirit
In my opinion this is the most overlooked part of recovery from addiction. It’s the one area that we don’t recognize as even being part of the battle. I’ve seen churches pray over addicts once, and then wonder why they continue to fail. Some addiction groups suggest finding a spiritual center but don’t help you to explore and grow spiritually. Let’s face it, for many of us the only reason we feel it’s wrong to look at pornography, masturbate, and have affairs, etc… is because somewhere inside us we believe it is wrong. For me, it is my belief in God and his views on sexuality. If I fight on the other fronts but forget to strengthen my belief in God and His commandments, then I will soon lose my desire to fight my addiction at all. With TV, magazines, radio and every other form of media out there saying that it’s OK to look at a woman’s body as an object, you will need to refocus on the reason you believed it was wrong. When I took a philosophy class in college, it challenged my faith in God. That was one class, two hours a week… how much more will thousands of ads every day challenge your beliefs that it’s wrong to act out? Just like before, the way you do it is up to you, but you need to stay connected to the source of your desire to stop your behavior. I choose to read the bible nightly and spend time in prayer to strengthen and grow in my relationship with God. If you don’t believe in God, I would ask you to stay connected to the reason you desire to change. The battle of the spirit is the battle for your desire to fight. Ever see a fight when one of the fighters just didn’t want to be there? I know this… I’ve never seen a fighter who didn’t want to be there win a fight.
Mind Body Spirit part 1
My fight with sexual addiction has made me realize that this battle is not fought on one battleground, but on three separate fronts. Like many others, I have stories of countless attempts to stop acting out that resulted in little or no lasting success. I started having victories only when I realized I was battling on just one of these fronts instead of all three. I fully believe that unless you take steps to engage your addiction in EVERY part of your life, you will never gain any lasting victory over it.
Mind
I always thought that in order to stop acting out you just had to stop. I used to think, “If I just kept my hands off myself I will eventually win”. I learned later that this kind of sobriety is called “white knuckling”, where a person stops acting out physically only through sheer will-power, but never actually changes his desire to act out. However, if you can get control of your thoughts, you will not have to white knuckle it (at least as often… sometimes you will just have to will-power your way through bad days). So what does the battle of your mind look like? It wasn’t until I started looking at my thought life that I realized how messed up it really was. I spent large amounts of time thinking about sex, women or a multitude of other things that would eventually get me sexually excited to the point where I wanted to act out. I didn’t realize I was doing this; it was just a mental habit that often happened automatically. If I talked or looked at a pretty woman, my mind would wander off to fantasy land where I could have what I wanted now. And better than that, I didn’t have to do any work to get it (life takes work… my fantasies were easy). I soon realized that it wasn’t always sexual thoughts that triggered me. I could have been dreaming about a new car, a new job or anything that would make my life seem better. But when I snapped back to reality and realized I didn’t have these things, I would become unhappy with my real life to the point that I didn’t want to live in that life anymore. So I’d dive into my fantasy land and get some satisfaction there. I honestly believe that I spent more time in my fantasy life than in real life during my addiction (how I survived driving, school and jobs is a mystery). It’s this running from reality that is the mind battle. Keeping those fantasy thoughts out and dealing with the life you have is what helps keep you grounded and sober. How do you expect to stop looking at women if you’re thinking about their bodies all day long? If you have a fantasy of how your wife is supposed to be, how are you going to be happy with the reality of who she is (guess what… woman are not perfect and we all have some baggage and issues that will require work)? I remember being in love with women until I got to know them. They seemed perfect from afar but I got closer and found them to be human, with flaws and imperfections just like everyone. I challenge you to take time this week to keep track of your thought life. If it’s filled with sex, you shouldn’t be surprised if you feel sexual all the time. If it’s filled with fantasies of a perfect life, you shouldn’t be surprised if you feel disappointed with reality. [Let me take a moment to say that I’m not saying you shouldn’t have dreams or desires. But your dreams and desires should be supportive of your reality, not a substitute for it]. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul tells the Corinthians to keep every thought captive. He understood how much the mind affects the body and that were your mind goes, your body will follow.
Confession of a sex addict
My addiction to sex started long before I had ever seen pornography or even knew about sex. It started when I learned to avoid pain. Instead of dealing with pain in my life, I learned to hide from it, to pretend it didn’t exist, to push it so far down that I wouldn’t ever have to deal with it.As a child I learned from my parents and friends that pain is best not dealt with and ignoring it was the best way to handle it. By the age of 15 I was an expert at life avoidance. I could click out of life faster than reality could happen. If something happened I didn’t like, I could be in a fantasy world where things did go my way. I could ignore it and be as cool as ice. Nothing got to me. I was so calm that my friends used to call me the “rock”. Not because I had great wrestling moves but because nothing could make me blink. No matter the trauma, I would remain the same. It was meant as a complement and that’s how I took it but only later did I realize that it was a sign of how disconnected I had become.
When I discovered pornography, it only furthered my fall into a fantasy world. With porn came masturbation and the biggest escape of all. The release of masturbation gave me a total escape from my feelings and life. I actually remember thinking that if I started to masturbate I should remember the date so I would know how many years I was addicted to it. Even then I knew I was on a downward spiral… but that didn’t stop me.
Unfortunately the escape was only momentary and required me to build a habit to sustain my “rock” like exterior. I eventually end up masturbating 2 to 3 times a week and had binges where I would masturbate every day or multiple times a day. With so much time spent in a fantasy world, I started to disconnect with reality. I became a hermit in my body and in mind.
I grew up a believer in God and that faith kept me going, but it also grieved me endlessly. Even though I knew God didn’t like my actions, I kept doing them. I felt worthless, loveless and useless to God or anyone. My self esteem took a nose dive and the only way I could escape those feelings was to masturbate more. I didn’t dare tell anyone because I thought I was the only one to deal with this. After all sex was never talked about in my family, and my friends only talked about it from what they saw in porn. So I felt alone and perverted with no way out… I was helpless to my addiction. And I stayed there, in secrecy for 18 years.
It wasn’t until I was 34 that I finally come to terms with who I was and started my recovery, not only with my sex addiction, but with my addiction to avoiding life and pain. The change of heart started 5 years before I actually stopped masturbating. It was in that time that I started to attend a new church and felt that God was showing me who I was made to be. It started when I asked God to give me patience and humility. I had visited a new church with a friend and decided to continue going there. I remember feeling that I would do anything to work there. Something in me told me I had to be a part of it, that I would be able to finally get connected. A desire I had wanted fulfilled for so long. As it happened, there was a job opening a few months after I started to attend.
When I started working at the church I felt God was opening the door for me to finally involve myself, to be more then a wallflower. Looking back I see that it was God opening doors so I would finally understand who I was. The more I involved myself in the church the more of myself came out. I began to have opinions about things and thoughts about God… thoughts that where my own not a regurgitation of my parents beliefs. I think they were always in me but I never let them out or explored them before. My fantasy life never let me find out who I was. My beliefs where challenged; some where changed others where strengthened. For a few years everything was going well for me. I was financially comfortable and was content. My relationship with God was at an all time high. I was reading my bible and talking to him quite often. I was happy and I remember thinking that I had a good relationship with God and that I was doing great… then the thought came to me that I was doing good with God only because things were going well in my life.
I then asked God to help me be happy with him in the tough times of life as well as the good times. I knew what I was thinking… I just wanted to be genuine with God and not just a fair weather believer.
I think it was shortly after that, maybe a 6 months to a year, that I was forced to address the secret sin in my life. A member of my church, who I didn’t know at the time, came up to me and said he wanted to speak to me in private. He told me that he felt he had a word from God for me and wanted to pray over me. This was the first time anyone wanted to pray over me and I was excited to hear any kind of word from God about my life. Then he said that before he prayed he had to ask me a question. Thinking no harm could come from it, I said go ahead. What he asked floored me. He asked if I had ever brought pornography into the church… Right then and there I was faced with the image of when I indeed did bring pornography into the church. It only happened one time when I went to a porn site on my computer. It lasted only a few minutes and I remember telling myself this is God’s house and I should stop. It was a time when I was alone and nobody was there. Nobody ever knew about it… Or so I thought.
I remember having this overpowering fear of telling the truth, after all nobody knew. The thought went through my mind, “Just say no and move on”. But I also had this voice in my head that said “You have to tell the truth, don’t run… tell the truth”. I don’t know why, but it felt like how I answered was going to be a pivotal point in my life. I chose to be honest. I chose to admit my sexual addiction. That choice to be open and honest literally opened my eyes to who I was, who I was supposed to be and who I have always wanted to be. He told me God said because I was honest; he was able to pray over me.
I remember feeling excited about the whole incident. I thought it was all behind me. I confessed my sin to another and the secret was finally out. But what I didn’t know was that God had just started to work. In truth, had it just stopped there nothing would have changed for me. It was by God’s grace that what had happened became known to the elders of the church. I had no place to hide my dirty laundry any more. The deepest darkest part of me that I hated the most was out there for the whole world to see. I was faced with yet another choice that I felt would define who I was. To hide in the shadows or come clean about who I was…again. It was probably the hardest thing I had ever done up to that point in my life, but I went before the elders and was honest.
I thought at that time, that the whole incident was for me to finally get help with my sexual addiction. And I believe it was part of it, but looking back now I believe it was God pushing me into a corner and asking me “Who are you?” What I found out was that I was scared of the man I was created to be. I was created to be an honest man, a man of integrity, a man of conviction. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, a man who had Gods laws written in his heart. Once I accepted that small part of who I was, it made it easy for me to make some changes in my life. I started going to a sexual addiction group and began to fight to be the man I now believed I was. I wish I could say that my whole life went from good to great. God kept putting me in situations that made me answer the question “Who are you”. What it did, was give me the courage to start answering the question. The more I was put in the corner the more I came out with a new understanding and belief of who I was and who God designed me to be. What I gained from it was a heart to not only be that man, but to help others be who they were created to be.
Many things have changed since then. I quit my job and went back to school to get a M.A. in counseling so I could help other men. I currently lead two men’s groups dealing with sexual addiction and sexual temptation. I have found who I am and I have decided to be that man and use the gifts God has given me. The fight goes on in my life and I believe it will be there until I die. But I am finally wining battles and have over three years of sobriety from looking at pornography and masturbation. I’m not afraid to ask for help and do what needs to be done to keep winning. Looking back, it was the biggest blessing in my life when I was forced to deal with my sin and I can honestly say that my worst day with sobriety has been far better than my best day with my addiction.