First, please understand that I'm writing purely about myself and from my experience.
With that said, I've found, to my surprise, that many people have similar stories to mine. I'm a 40-something male sex addict (sometimes called a sexaholic), and I've acted out using pornography of all types, and compulsive and chronic masturbation for more than thirty years.
Dr. Patrick Carnes, in his book _Out of the Shadows_ writes about the "addict's moment." It's the moment where time stands still; where the sex addict knows he's been caught. It's when he sees a police car pull into his driveway, and he knows why it's there. It's when he receives a telephone call from the Department of Children's Services telling him that his child won't be coming home from school that day. Or in my case, it was the moment when I was mowing the lawn, and I heard my wife call me in a cracking voice that began as a whisper and ended as a sob and I saw that she was using the computer.
She had found child pornography. It was child porn that I had downloaded that morning, child porn that I learned how to find on my own and through Internet chat conversations with other porn users. Generally I would view it, and get rid of it right away, feeling horrible about myself for even seeking it. Yet I kept seeking it. And now, on this day when she asked me to let her use the computer and I didn't have time to erase it, she had found me out.
When I saw the dozen or so images that remained on the disk, I started to cry, "That's not me! That's not me!". And I meant it. It didn't feel like I had retrieved those images, even though I was well aware that I had. But I didn't pretend that I hadn't downloaded them, which is what I had done when she had previously found bestiality, group sex, BDSM, and other varieties of extreme porn I had been viewing. Those times she seemed to believe my denial, my fortress of lies, and she probably believed me because she wanted to think that I was the man she loved and whom she wanted to love her.
But this day, there were no lies I could tell any more. I knew that I had crossed a line and done what I had told myself, again and again, that I would never do again, but did anyway.
You see, not only did I feed my wife The Big Lie about my porn usage, over and over again. I fed it to myself, and worse, I believed it, living a double life and pretending that I was just an ordinary man with a strong desire to explore the Internet.
I spent that day avoiding my wife, and she me. The next day was a holiday. I went to work.
I went into my office and got on the Internet to research two things: breaking free of compulsive use of pornography, and painless suicide. I sought these because I knew that the life that I had led was over. What came next either had to be a life that was honest and porn-free, or biological death. On that day I felt that either would suffice; I had no preference either way.
I realize that I didn't start this way. It had begun more simply, as an only child in an alcoholic household, with lots of unsupervised time. I had the time to find my dad's stash of Playboy magazines as an 8 year old boy, having been encouraged by an older friend to seek for them as he had done in his house. It continued through high school, when my friends and I traded Penthouse and Club magazines, and snuck into porn movies underage, as a naughty prank. It grew in college, when I couldn't get started in the morning without masturbating, and after graduation when I began buying hardcore magazines and renting porn video tapes. It reached its fruition with the arrival of the Internet, first through pornographic newsgroups, later through websites, on a slow dial-up connection, and then using a high-speed cable modem. And on the net, there was always more to find -- and I always wanted to find more.
And what I found! Things that seemed unimaginable only a few years before were there for the asking, and at no cost besides the connection fee -- if you were smart enough to know how to find them. I got over my repulsion, and set aside my morals, stepping outside the bounds of right and wrong. I learned to hack into websites that others had to pay for. I discovered ways of finding images that no search-engine could reveal. I sought it, I traded it, I gave it away to others in chat rooms, where I found out from those men, who I discovered were much like me, how to get more.
Then, a few years before my moment arrived, I bought a laptop computer and began using a wireless modem. Within a year, I was spending at least an hour every day, away from my wife, downloading porn and masturbating. When she was away, I could spend an entire day looking at online porn, reading pornographic stories, and masturbating. Our frequency of sex diminished with my masturbation habit depleting my ability to perform with her -- and she knew why, or pretty much.
She wanted me to stop. She tried nagging me, but that only made me defensive and resistant. She tried to make herself more sexually responsive to me, but I considered this an unappealing phonyness in her -- as though I was leading a _genuine_ life! She told me that she wanted me to share my pornography with her, so that she could participate, but I knew that I could not do that. If I had, she would have been repulsed by what I was looking at, and rightfully so.
The problem was, enough never seemed to be enough. For every image I saw, I always wanted another one, and that one needed to be more hardcore, more extreme, and eventually, illegal. No longer were pretty girls in bikinis even interesting to me. I needed a bigger rush, a shock to the system, and what I can only describe as the trance-state that I got when I slid into the images and masturbated slowly for hours at a time.
In more lucid moments, I did wonder what was happening to me. I couldn't understand why porn and masturbation had such a hold on me. After all, I reasoned, in fifteen years of marriage I had never so much as kissed another woman. Even in chat rooms, I preferred to chat with other men who wanted to discuss porn and trade it, or to chat about sexual fantasies and experiences. I rarely chatted with women, and I didn't want to. After all, that would be cheating on my wife!
So on that holiday that I sat at my desk at work, I read an article about whether pornography addiction was real. I also read about a process for stopping pornography use. Then I found two more resources, both 12-step groups: Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, at
http://www.slaafws.org/ , and Sexaholics Anonymous, at
http://www.sa.org/ .
I attended my first Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting the following night, and I went to a second the next night. The following weekend, I began my association with Sexaholics Anonymous at a Saturday morning meeting that I have not missed since I began going, and with whom I've since attended an incredibly uplifting retreat. Through these programs I met men who had done what I've done; and men and women who have had affairs, and affairs on their affairs, and who had affairs on the fiances whom their spouses never knew about. Among us, we've spent thousands of dollars on prostitutes, strip clubs, adult bookshops; we've prostituted ourselves, we've given ourselves away. We did all of these things, and every time we did them, we said it would be the last time. It was -- until the next time.
None of us were satisfied with any of these things, yet we felt we just couldn't stop. We have only been able to stop once we realized that we were true addicts, and committed ourselves to our programs of recovery, wholly and completely, because "half measures availed us nothing."
Also on that holiday, I began looking for a therapist. I found one later that week, and I've been seeing him once a week for six months. He's helped me look beyond myself, and into myself, to understand both how my behaviors affect others around me, and also to learn how those behaviors came about.
I've begun to remember myself as a boy, and as a teenager, and to think about what I would say were I today to meet myself as a child. I think it would be something like, "Come on, let's go for a hike, let's go for a bike ride, let's go for a swim!". It would be something that would pull that young man out of the shell he was in, and to pull down the wall he was building around himself, the wall that he needed to insulate himself from a family whose attention was sometimes neglectful, sometimes loving, sometimes physically abusive, and always chaotic and inconsistent.
What's most amazing to me is that I am still married. Without begging, pleading or cajoling, and with the expectation that she would leave me, my wife decided to stay -- thank God! She has been attending her own 12-step group, S-Anon (
http://www.sanon.org/), where she has learned that she is neither responsible for, nor able to change my sexually addictive behaviors, and where she is encouraged to maintain her integrity as a person, rather than to feel she must lower her standards of decency to maintain a relationship with an addict.
She has been as supportive as she could be for me -- she has gone beyond the cause of duty by any reasonable standard -- and although we have had some very difficult times these past months, our relationship is much better than it was then, and better than it has been for years. Today, there is growing honesty and openness in our relationship, even though we know we have a long way to go. But never before have I been so hopeful.
You might wonder why she didn't turn me over to the police, once she found those images. She certainly had the right to do that, but she chose not to, instead waiting to see whether I would begin to change at last. I'm glad she didn't, of course, but whether she did or not, when my "addict's moment" came, I was thoroughly prepared for whatever would happen. I was prepared to die, remember, and I knew just how I was going to make that happen.
I don't like to give advice, because I have enough to work on without telling someone else how to live his or her life. I think, instead, that if you are someone who is going through a crisis, either because of your own sexual compulsions, or because you're in a relationship with someone whom you believe might suffer a sexual addiction, you should find other people who've been through this process and who have survived. They are out there. For addicts, try SLAA or SA, or Sex Addicts Anonymous (
http://www.saa-recovery.org/). For partners, try S-Anon. You might also find this article, " Helping wives deal with a husband who's into pornography" (
http://www.sarr.org/coaddicts/dealin..._a_husband.htm) helpful.
The one piece of advice that I will give you is this: don't NOT do something. If you or your partner has issues of sexual compulsion, they will not improve without working on them. The good news is, they will get better, if you are willing to work at making them better, in the fellowship of others who deal with the same problem and who seek the same hope every day. You can join with them, in their journey and yours. Whether you do is up to you.
In the same boat
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