James' story

James very kindly submitted his story to this site, and I read through with a growing feeling of privilege. He writes about his personal experiences of addiction with such insight and clarity, it makes for a touching and genuinely moving read. What follows is simply an extract, and I'm going to feature further extracts in forthcoming blog posts. For practicality, I have to break it down into sections, but I'm aware that this doesn't do justice to the profound impact of his story.

i was staying with my new partner and she had a friend visit. i thought the friend a nutter and didn't know why my partner was her friend. she suggested i go upstairs and use the internet while they had tea and a chat...i said 'yeah - i'll go check out fractals, i wonder if i can get a mandlebrot set animated online!' (i hadn't ever used the internet before), but glowing in neon letters a hundred feet tall in my head was the word PORN.

i felt ashamed and literally terrified. as soon as it had occurred to me my stomach was churning and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. i felt dizzy and almost sick and was shaking as i went up to the loft. i was in a very special relationship, i had never had such intimacy and beauty with another person and i KNEW i was going to kick open a door in that and let something terrible in. i played around looking at fractals for a while...then googled 'porn'. this was on a laptop with a dial up connection and no pop-up blocker...i was completely naive about the internet. i hit a site and the machine almost instantly locked up with pop-up after pop-up i couldn't get rid of fast enough before two more would take it's place. it was like opening pandora's box. it was like that first ever time i did solvents - torn between that primal lusting trance over the images and terror of being caught.

after struggling and failing to get rid of the porn i just switched the machine off. i re-booted and checked the internet was still working and everything seemed to be back to normal...i didn't even know about browser history back then!

over the next few weeks i continued to obsess over the porn i knew i could now get on the internet. my partner became ill. we started having fights. there was a part of me now i was ashamed of, that i tried to cover up. on one occasion my partner was very ill and i got her into bed. she wanted me to stay with her but i made some excuse and went back to the computer and had a 'session' - i thought she was too out of it to realise but in retrospect i believe she was somatising what i had brought into the relationship already. my porn addiction was making her ill.

a few days later she used the computer and suddenly got alot of porn pop-ups. she was surprised because that had never happened. she checked browser history and saw hundreds of sites that i'd hamfistedly scanned through. it was a terrible shock for her..she was already ill and actually passed out when i told her what i'd been doing. she was incoherant and i put her to bed. i slept on the couch and the next day she came down and had literally gone grey over night. i know that sounds extreme and hard to believe...it sounds like a line from some penny-dreadful...but she had aged 10 years overnight.

she raged at me and cried and we had a huge 'fight'. she told me to leave and i packed my bag(i was still living in london three days a week then). she thrust a drawing i had given her as a gift back at me and told me to use it to entrap some other stupid woman. i took it and burned it in the wood-burner when she wasn't looking. i left and started to walk down the hill to the train station.

halfway down i moved over to let a car i could hear coming up behind me past but it stopped behind me. i turned and saw it was her. i said hi through the window thinking i had forgotten something perhaps...not really daring to hope she had changed her mind...i can't express how much i loved her, how desparately sorry and guilty and ashamed i was...but also i was afraid of how extreme her reaction had been, how much it had hurt her, how she had changed overnight, how broken she now seemed.

we went back to the house and we talked about it for hours. i would have said anything to stay together...and did. something died in me that day, some part of the love i had, perfect was over and now it was make do, if that makes sense.

we stayed together and it was very difficult. we talked about it alot - her trying to understand and get over the feelings of betrayal and abuse, me trying to explain something i really didn't understand myself, something i just wanted to go away. me not dealing with her anger at all, just withdrawing, turning inwards...more and more trying to say the 'right thing'...being less and less real.

i had no perspective on this - no relationships in the past, no track-record of doing anything more than scratching the corner and scraping through, and i reverted to that.

there were moments of real joy between us sometimes... when she would laugh unguardedly again and then i would see her rememember it again, see the fear and mistrust in her eyes, and i would die a little more inside knowing what i had killed between us.

There's little I can add to this piercingly honest account of internet porn awakening and the devastating eventual impact on James' relationship. He describes the emotional disarray and confusion that confronts addicts even as they attempt to assure and recover their partner's faith in them. For me, this story highlights the deepest motivations for working to rebuild such a damaged relationship, and reminds us of the undeniable challenge of doing so. Thank you James.