One of the most interesting and most misunderstood aspects of sexual addiction is that its addictive qualities come partly from a chemical reaction in your brain. This might not be a news flash to many reading this post because we all know how much we crave that feeling we get from an orgasm. What might come as a surprise though is just how strong the chemical signal really is. Some studies suggest that an orgasm has the equivalent reaction on the brain as ten hits of cocaine. Unfortunately these studies were conducted only on men because men were easier to monitor BUT it would be safe to say that it is at least plausible that women have a similarly strong reaction.

How does this help in the battle for purity? It helps the addict know what he/she is fighting against. For the most part, many people fighting sexual addiction are told to just stop masturbating or having sex. Abstinence alone does little to fight off the withdrawal symptoms that most addicts face at the beginning. Many of the addiction groups out there (AA, NA, SA, etc) understand that support is needed to fight the cravings that come soon after stopping. AA is well known for its 90 meetings in 90 days theme. They understand that the first three months will be the hardest withdrawal period and having a group to go to helps tremendously.

It should be interesting to note that drugs only alter the brains natural chemistry by increasing or decreasing certain chemicals. Most drugs affect the big three, serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine (this is a VERY simplistic example… the brain is extremely complex and the effects of drugs on it is equally complex). So don’t be surprised to learn that an orgasm uses those same brain chemicals… if not more efficiently than some drugs. If you learn one thing from this blog I hope it is this. That your recovery is more than just a change in behavior it is also a change in brain chemistry which takes different measures some times. We don’t expect an alcoholic or drug addict to get better alone, so don’t expect the same from yourself. Most people agree that after the first 90 days the power of the cravings go down. They do not disappear but they do lessen in strength. So be on guard at the beginning and be ready to fight.

It’s been a while since I have posted and I apologize, going back to school has been kicking my butt. Coming up on five years of sobriety has taught me even more about what it takes to remain sober. The beginning of the battle for purity usually consists of targeting those behaviors we want to stop and the good ones we want to start. However, one of the things every person should understand when starting their fight for purity is that it will look like an uphill battle at first, but as time goes on the battlefield changes.

This is an important little saying that has so much to tell. First, your battle for purity will not be over anytime soon. The battlefield will change, but you will always be fighting it. Many people ask “how long before I’m fixed” or “When will I be able to stop going to groups”. To say that someone can’t be permanently changed in a day would be false, but I haven’t met anyone who had an instant or quick healing yet. I do believe God can take things out of our life but have found, at least in my life, that the battle for purity is more often than not used to helped us become a better person. For me, the battle has helped me to become stronger in many areas of my life. Some of the areas would have never been addressed had I not been forced to stand and fight.

The second part of that saying should be an encouragement. It explains that the battle will not always be as hard as it was in the beginning. When I first started, all I could do was use behavioral techniques (the rubber band technique, calling a sponsor, going to groups, etc…) in an attempt to stop acting out. Those techniques worked but as time went on emotions that I usually avoided started to come to the surface. They could not be pushed aside anymore and I had to learn how to deal with them. Because I had starved myself of my normal coping mechanism (masturbation) the battle then became how to deal with these emotions. New coping skills such as talking about my feelings with friends and in my groups helped me to understand them better. Seeking shelter in my relationship with God and in prayer helped me to endure when the pain of them seemed overwhelming. Once I stopped running from them, I found that my emotions were not as hard to feel as I once believed. Emotions like rejection once felt like the hand of death; but now it is only a passing cold chill. Feeling not good enough used to keep me isolated and alone; but now it stirs me to step out and appreciate myself. Feelings of being a failure kept me from trying; now they remind me that I was brave enough to have tried.

If I have learned one thing in my battle for purity it is this. The battle was always there, what changed was that I begin to fight instead of hiding in a fantasy land of porn and masturbation. As I grew stronger I found new ways of fighting and even new enemies that had to be faced. I have had my share of injuries and will no doubt continue to stumble and fall. My fight has become a training ground that gives me strength to never give up, never stay down, and the will to continue to push forward to newer battlegrounds.

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.

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.

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.

I am a Christian and I believe that my addiction is wrong for me. My beliefs are based on the morals, standards and examples covered within the bible. My fight for sexual sobriety (not masturbating or viewing porn) was a miserable failure for 18 years, because I was always trying to stop the guilt that came after acting out. I never really wanted to stop acting out, I just didn’t want to feel bad afterward. It wasn’t until I actually desired to be pro active that I started to see success. For me, the biblical morals and standards were always just words I spoke, but in reality I didn’t accept. When I accepted them and made them my own, that’s when I started to hate my addiction instead of hating the pain that resulted from it.

It doesn’t matter if you are a Christian, Buddhist, Islamic or Atheist. What matters is that you want to change because you are done being the person that lets pornography and sexual addiction rule your life. A sure sign of this real desire is the willingness to do whatever it takes to defeat your addiction. If need be, will you get rid of your TV? Will you stop driving by the adult book stores (even if it adds 10 min to your daily drive)? Will you tell your spouse the truth? Will you go to an addictions group once a week? Twice a week or more? I have seen addicts go to extreme lengths just to get a fix. From surfing the net for hours just to see a naked picture, to planning a month in advance how they were going to act out. So there is no excuse about not having the ability to put a recovery plan in action. Addicts are masters at planing and are dogged in their pursuit of their objectives. Once you decide your objective is sobriety and not pain avoidance, it can be achieved.

So the first question I ask everyone who comes to a group is “Do you Really want it?”… Do you?