Chapter 3 – Beginning Recovery
While I had stopped looking at pornography online when my wife and I moved back in together, I was white-knuckling it, and the real problem was as bad as ever. White-knuckling is a term used in recovery circles to describe someone who is resisting the temptation to physically act out with their addictive substance or behavior of choice, but who isn’t resolving the core issues that are driving their addictive behavior. White-knuckling doesn’t work for long. I knew that I had to stop using pornography if our marriage was going to make it, but I also knew it was only a matter of time before I would give in again. The fantasy life, lustful thoughts, and constant tormenting temptation continued to plague me.
When I contacted the leader of the Life Recovery group, I was ready and willing to do anything the group leader told me to do so that I could get free from my addiction to pornography. If he had told me to eat grass, I would have done it. As it turns out, that was exactly the state of mind I needed to have.
Joining that recovery group was to be my first step on my journey of recovery. It began the moment I stopped trying to beat the addiction myself or deny the seriousness of the situation, and instead chose to admit my need and reach out for help. I was not simply going to a group because I hoped to avoid ending my marriage – although that was an important part of my motivation. I was really and truly embracing the opportunity to let those who had the necessary experience help me get free from my addiction.
As a pornography addict, I lived a life controlled by shame. Shame is the result of a warped and erroneous perspective on your value and worth as an individual. Shame is a belief that, due to your failures or lack of accomplishment, you are not valuable as an individual or worthy of love. None of us lives up to our ideal of what a ‘good’ person should be all of the time. We are human. We make mistakes. When you determine in your mind that your ‘good’ qualities and accomplishments are outweighed by your ‘bad’ qualities and your failures, you will feel shame or low self-worth. We all need and desire to be loved and valued. When we don’t, we will often take extreme and unhealthy actions to obtain the love and value we so desperately crave. Addiction is often the result.
Because of the way my psyche developed as I grew up, I learned to be a people-pleaser – to show people a version of me that I thought they wanted to see so that they would be pleased with me. As a result, I had a tendency to hide my faults and true feelings. I was not allowing anyone to see the real me, unvarnished and imperfect as I was. I was constantly plagued by the idea that if I let anyone see the ‘real’ me, they would reject me because I was not perfect or did not meet their standards. It is important to understand that this was a subconscious process. I was not even aware I was doing it at the time. I only discovered it as I pursued recovery from addiction.
This pattern of behavior and the accompanying mindset that supported it created a problem. I wanted the ‘real’ me to be loved and valued, not the ‘fake’ me I was showing to others in order to gain their approval. My subconscious desire for the ‘real’ me to be valued and loved drove me to the world of pornography and sexual fantasy. In the fantasy world I created, the ‘real’ me was always valued, cherished, and loved – no matter how perverted my sexual desires were and no matter what my personal failures or shortcomings were. In my warped understanding of human value and worth, I had created a counterfeit version of unconditional love. But it wasn’t real, and there was a price to be paid.
Because I had repeatedly violated my beliefs and conscience about what was right by using pornography, I often felt shame concerning my behavior. The very thing I was doing in order to address the shame I felt about my shortcomings and failures didn’t solve the shame problem. Instead, it produced even more shame. Pornography addiction was the temporary anesthesia that enabled me to avoid dealing with my very real fear of rejection and feelings of shame. The paradox was that while I used pornography to temporarily escape the feelings of shame, in the aftermath of my actions I actually felt more shame as a result.
This process is what we, in recovery, call the shame cycle. I would act out by using pornography and sexual fantasy to create temporary feelings of acceptance and escape from feelings of shame, low self-worth, or difficult life circumstances. The result of acting out caused me to feel more shame after the fact, so I would eventually reach out to the addiction again. This cycle perpetuates the addiction. I lived this way for decades, and it almost destroyed me.
The group I was attempting to join was a closed group, meaning it was only after going through an interview process and being approved that I would be allowed to join. I was required to write down a complete sexual history that included everything I have written about in the previous chapters of this book, and then some. It was a process that pushed my shame button big-time, but by the grace of God, I did it. I had come to realize that if I did not find a way to get free from the addiction, I was going to die. Either the addiction had to go, or I had to go, there was no other alternative.
Although I did not know it at the time, I was already beginning to work the first of the twelve steps. Step number one states, “We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.” I was definitely at the point where I believed that. After the group leader reviewed my sexual history report and conducted an interview with me, I was approved to join the group. I had no idea what to expect, but I was so desperate to get free I was just glad to have the opportunity to attend in the hope that it might help.
As I began attending the men’s addiction group, an amazing thing began to happen. To this day I believe it was (and is) one of the most significant and powerful experiences that I have ever experienced in my life. This experience helped to propel me towards freedom from my addiction to pornography and continues to help me move forward in my recovery. For the first time in my life, I sat in the midst of a group of men and began to reveal who I really was – pornography addiction and all. These men didn’t reject me, call me a pervert, or otherwise disparage me for what I had been doing or the mistakes I had made. They showed me compassion, and they accepted me for who I was. In short, they loved me, despite knowing my faults and failures. That experience of unconditional love changed me and continues to change me.
I had been raised in a home by two parents who loved me and told me so often. They were good parents. But due to a variety of reasons, I learned to hide my true feelings, beliefs, and desires when I deemed it prudent in order to garner praise, reward, respect, and love from significant others (i.e. parents, sibling, friends, teachers, society, et cetera). Again, delving into how and why this occurs is beyond the scope of this book, suffice it to say that this is a very common occurrence in the childhood of many addicts. Learning to hide who I really was as a child may have been a necessary coping mechanism in my early childhood. However, as an adult, this approach to living became quite harmful.
Without knowing I was doing it, by the time I became an adult I was in the difficult and dangerous place where no one knew the real me. There was always some portion of who I was that I was hiding, depending upon the audience I was playing to at the time. I became a well-practiced chameleon, able to switch personas depending on what environment I was in at the time. Everything I allowed anyone to see was designed to produce the desired outcome. I had become a master manipulator. I wasn’t even conscious I was doing this most of the time. To say there weren’t times when I did it knowingly would be a lie, but I had been doing it so long, and it was so automatic, most of the time I didn’t even have to think about it. No one knew the real me, and that fact made me a ticking time-bomb and drove me to pornography as a temporary escape. In my fantasy world of pornography, I could be exactly who I was and be adored and valued without exception.
In that men’s recovery group, for the first time in my life, I finally made the decision to be real. It didn’t happen all at once, but I began to learn to take off the mask and be increasingly honest. The more I did, the more I began to heal and to receive love from those men, and the more I began to be able to receive the love of God and to love myself. The experience of unconditional love, in turn, began to weaken the stronghold of pornography addiction in my life and made it possible for me to begin to let go of my drug of choice. I had known in my heart that part of me didn’t want pornography, but I also knew that a part of me still had a strong felt need and desire for pornography. But as the love and acceptance I found in this men’s group began to change me, I realized I didn’t need pornography anymore. I had found a place in life where I was loved and accepted – addiction problems and all.