Life becomes unbearable and the guilt eats me up - T's story

Submitted by a reader on Tue, 03/11/2009 - 17:56

a reader's picture

I first viewed porn in gradeschool and the guilt has not stopped for 25 years.

I am now 33 years old, I have a beautiful loving wife and children. My wife and I are very close and we talk about my problem when it happens, rather I should say that I do good for months at a time and then I slip up and am bad for a couple of weeks. Life becomes unbearable and the guilt eats me up.

I go from a loving father to a tyrant and eventually tell my wife. She lovingly tells me she suspected as much by the way I have been acting, we cry together. I promise to do better, we make love and then a month, or 6 months, or a day later the cycle repeats itself and I feel powerless.

I try to get lost in other things, government, sports, whatever I can to obsess about and keep my mind wandering but so far it has always come back to pornography. It is keeping me from my potential, mainly through all of the guilt and shame that I feel. I don't know how much longer I can hold it all together. The family, the career, and the social life. Help.

Thank you T for sharing your honest insights. I think many guys will relate to this scenario; you are not acting out your habit on a daily or even monthly basis, but it always feels as if the old routine is beckoning, just around the corner. You allow yourself to taste the freedom, but still feel trapped by some deeper longing to watch porn. Something keeps you in this painful loop.

When you do bounce back into porn, I wonder what you are learning from each experience? Do you notice any trends or pattern? Is there a specific trigger scenario or feeling, such as when you are feeling bored, worried, angry, disconnected or especially down on yourself? Notice your self-talk as the porn craving builds; what kind of dialogue are you having with yourself?

Many of us turn to porn for escapism; to procrastinate or avoid facing up to things. You mention that you try to get lost in other things, which may be indicative of your own desire for escapism. Focussing on other interests is helpful in breaking the habit, but many of us find that it's not so easy. Compared to the illicit thrill of porn, old interests or hobbies just don't seem to cut it. It's almost as if we are hooked on the emotional trip that our porn habit consistently delivers. Feeling obsessed, guilty and wretched is a strong form of escapism, after all.

So my advice would be to invest a little more time into monitoring your emotions and self-talk, maybe through a simple journal or diary. My porn addiction recovery guide expands on this technique. You are very fortunate to have an understanding and loving partner, and it may be helpful for you to treat this as a joint project. Your wife may notice trigger signals before you do.

Once you have a clear picture of your habit pattern, you'll be better equipped to revamp your lifestyle and get your needs genuinely met. And it's important to remember that this is a longer-term process with inevitable setbacks along the way. Whenever you slip back into porn, your habit isn't actually dragging you down further. Quite the reverse in fact; every time is an opportunity to break down the habit some more. There's always something to learn from a relapse, and this attitude will help you to keep moving forward.

Hello T,

YES! I can strongly relate to a good deal of what you talked about in your posting. Its also very brave to come here and share it with us. The size & nature of your problem (struggle) is that what we are talking about here is an "unconscious pattern of behaviour", meaning a pattern of behaviour driven by emotions or perhaps specific feelings.

The problem with a porn habit is I would suggest, is that its about blocking out something that's very hard to face upto (it may even be something very deep down that you are NOT yet fully aware of, or have no insight into yet?) the reason you end up back seeking porn once again is that something builds up inside you (us) and then when it reaches a critical point it's enough to trigger the porn habit once again.

**I know this might sound like cold comfort but your porn habit (obsession or compulsion) isn't driving you every single day of the week and thats not to be dismissed.

**You also have a loving wife who sounds very forgiving & seems to have some understanding of the struggle. Wow, T atleast you can talk about the problem opennly with her by what you have said. Thats a vital factor in trying to get free of the pattern.

**A porn habit is never just about the porn its always about other problems or deep emotional issues. Porn is only a means to an end, just like drink or drugs are also a means to an end. When all is said and done we are always back left with our own self again even after being indulgent with porn.

**I think a good strong dose of self forgiveness should be applied here, you should STOP Beating yourself up. Just because you have slipped or viewed porn doesn't make you a bad person. Like the person NOT the porn habit?

Best Regards to you T go well.

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I'd like to vouch for two very important points made here by Alex:

1) Consider the number of days when you aren't controlled by the habit, compared to the days when you feel as if you are. I have learned that I tend to overlook my successes. It's easy to convince myself that there's no hope when in fact there is plenty.

2) Self-forgiveness is everything. Try to think of your addiction or habit as an external thing that sometimes influences your actions rather than a 'bad' part of you. This makes it all easier to manage.

Wishing you well T.

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Before you can be free of a porn obsession (porn compulsion) the first thing we need to do is recognize that what is required is a process of healing. And that secondly you cannot do this healing totally alone or on your own. I found that in order to discover or uncover some of what was driving me to use pornography, I had to realize that the root cuases were buried deeper down in my psyche than I had initially realized. Thats said I found counseling & therapy immensly valuable in reaching the causes of my problematic behaviours. I was very very fortunate to uncover some of those root cuases through a process of insight, these insights had a very profound & long lasting effect on me. This allowed me to a) reach forgiveness of myself and b) to realize that I was not to blame for the circumstances of what happened to me earlier in my growing up. These insights in turn naturally lead me away from using porn.

**I also discovered OpenDNS which I put in place to help me. OpenDNS offers a free filtering service and this provides a safety net and keeps me away from & off porn. See: http://www.opendns.com

Best Regards Alex

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good site here and i like the direct/god-free style.

Alex - i'm interested to know whether someone like the guy T could ever figure these things out for himself? or do you say he absolutely needs counselling?

once a guy finds out the root causes of his addiction, how does he go about converting this into new behaviours?

thanx

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Hello pj,

YES! Good questions.

No.1 OK! The plain answer is absolutely NOP!! you almost certainly cannot do this on your own. (self help definitely has severe limitations unfortunately) Why? because the very nature of an unconscious pattern of behaviour is it lives outside of your daily conscious awareness. If you are driven to use porn by something that is outside of your daily awareness you therefore cannot control it. The pattern "has you" you are not totally in control the pattern is, therefore there is often a sense of being out of control when it comes to having a porn habit.

No.2 YES! in an ideal situation counseling on a one to one, face to face basis is most desirable. The job of any counselor or therapist is to aim at bringing the unconscious hidden issues to the surface of your psyche and from unconsciousness >>>into conscious awareness. You can only take back power & control of something that is within your daily awareness.

No.3 No! once a person has gained actual insight into the root causes of their behaviour I would strongly suggest that the psyche is incredibly good at healing us and rebalancing us. That means a porn habit would just tend to drop away because the feelings that once drove it have now been released abit like puss from an infected wound. The wound just heals by itself if given a chance. Once I saw and really felt the grief associated with my own pattern of use i.e. realized what the root causes were I lost almost all interest in porn following on from that. I have now let go my porn habit almost entirely.

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hey Alex thanx so much. i was looking at counselling options but kind of telling myself at the same time 'man you don't need it, you're special, you can beat this thing on your own'. now i'm going to look into it a lot more seriously.

thanx again, pj

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Hi Again PJ,

YES! trying to face up to having a porn habit (struggle with porn) is extremely difficult and so its important to recognize what your up against & that it cannot be dealt with alone.
It takes courage to go into counseling, it takes a willing-ness to look inside yourself and to face the feelings and to face the real deep down issues which the porn covers up or tries to block out. We all tend to want to run away from our hurt, our wounds, our wounded-ness but using porn is like putting a stopper into the top of the bottle it keeps the genie stuck inside.

PJ everyone of us "IS" special and unique but that said Porn has spread its tentacles around the world now with some truely horrible consiquences. Here in the west (in the UK) we don't see the most extreme consiquences of what porn can do too people, in Africa and other countries sexual violence is fuelled by porn in the most unlikely remote locations.

**Look for a counselor or therapist who has experience of working with issues around porn, look for an experienced person to work with were ever possible. Jason has been a big help to me and he might know of someone or could point you in the right direction.

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The difference between looking at pornography & fantasizing and looking at your partner in a state of sexual arousal is that with porn the person in that image becomes reduced down to purely a sex object. Actually with a real walking talking person they cannot become only a sex object.

Its a question of the nature of the relationship between you & the other person, in life the person is real and is not just an object (yes! you may still dream about that person or even have sexual fantasies about that person but its not the same with porn).

A real person is not going to allow you to see them as only a sexual object, a real woman defies objectification because she IS actual flesh & blood, she or he is real is based in actual reality. Talks, says things you don't expect, burps or farts etc in other words defies your expectations & fantasies, defies attempts at being only an object. A sexual object is by its nature devoid of personality or feelings which means they or it would have to be less than fully human. In other words they would have to become debased or dehumanized or humiliated in the process to come close to being any kind of object?

Human beings a flawed and full of faults and full of short comings, but the models in porn are always perfect and thus meet our fantasy requirements because we can make them into what we want and they don't answer back or say crass things at the wrong time,etc.

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