Struggling again. I appreciate others who share their successes, but I seem to only become lucid after my failures, which I had yesterday.

Which leads me to the real reason for this blog. I was checking around on different sites about overcoming porn addiction this morning to see what I could do differently. I came across an interesting site at www.sexualcontrol.com. He takes a different approach than the 12 step or religious approach. I identified with many of his insights about how he thinks it works (and did work for him and how he counsels others to make it work). He points out that sexual addiction is similar to food and money addictions in that they are all born out of natural drives, whereas drugs and alcohol are different in that we can reasonably strive to give up drugs and alcohol, but we have to learn to manage our drives for food, sex and responsible money management. That is then part of his argument for not using a 12 step approach for porn or sex addiction.

Furthermore, he states that there is a problem with repressing our desires for our addictive agent (in my case porn) rather than being honest about it all, talking ourselves through when we feel a desire for something, facing our feelings and then honestly assessing whether we want to pay the price for it. He puts it much better than I have here, so I would endorse going to the site and reading the material. I thought many of the insights were good, but I have yet to process them or try to apply them in my life.

One thing that resonated with me, though, was the fact of how "normal" or natural I feel after having acted out in looking at porn. It seems like the normal thing to do. This is my emotions/heart speaking, I know, because my mind can think of all sorts of reasons that this is the wrong thing to do. But somehow it "feels right". That is the scary thing. So I want to get to the point where it "feels wrong". Somehow I have to convince my heart of that.

I am not ready to give up on the 12 step or religious approach. In fact, many of the blogs here I have read talk about the difficulty of dealing with the real underlying emotions. So there is much overlap. And the religious and 12 step approach is so much a part of my life. But I do want to be real and find what works for my life and perhaps I need to adjust things somewhat, or perhaps a lot.

I know that there are several other people on this site that suffer from similar addictions, so any feedback is welcome.

Thanks for "listening"....

Tags: Disappointed