My Journey, My Success

I just want to start off with a disclaimer: you'll never meet a bigger asshole than I.

The Absconding
My mother is a serial monogamist. This isn't a compliment. When I was less than a year old, my mother took me and my older sister and skipped states with her lover. Her lover was her husband's best friend. I didn't meet my father again until I was myself a father.

Late Nights
My mother's relationship with her new man didn't last long. He cheated on her. You know the old saying? "If he'll cheat with you, he'll cheat on you." I guess my mother missed the memo, because she was livid. I remember her calling the cops on my putative father. From there, my mother moved to another man, and that's when things really got bad. For the first few years, my stepfather was nice, but as time went on, he stopped working and just sat around watching TV and sleeping. My mother had to take a second job (she was a nurse), and one of her jobs had her working third shift at the hospital. My stepfather would wait until my mother had gone, and then he'd call me and my sister downstairs and beat us, smashing our fingers with a paddle on the coffee table, and make us clean the house all night. I was about 10.

Deep Throat
Not long after the beatings started, my stepfather made us kids sit down in the living room one sunny, Saturday afternoon (I can see that day in my mind even now) and made us watch the porn classic, Deep Throat, with him. I couldn't believe what I was seeing -- I loved it and was hooked. From there, I started masturbating and watching all the porn I could.

Fuckfest
The near-nightly beatings and chores continued unabated, but our stepfather added a new cruelty to his tortures. He started abusing us sexually. He called me down to the basement one night after my mother had gone to work and made me suck his cock. He raped my sister when she was only 12, and when my mother found out, guess what she did? She hushed it all up! The gates of perversion were thrown up. I fucked my real sister and my stepsisters. I even fucked my stepbrother in the ass, even though I'm not gay. He just wanted me to.

Escape
My mother finally left him, not because he was abusing us, but because she couldn't get him to work. He was a deadbeat, and it was costing her too much time and money. Her reasons for leaving all revolved around her, never a thought for us. We moved to a small town one state south, and there my life normalized. I started high school, got good grades, and went all-State in track and field. I had regular girlfriends, though I didn't try to fuck them. I wasn't like other boys my age, foaming at the mouth for sex. But I still watched porn and masturbated daily, sometimes twice or three times a day. On the outside, my life was normal; on the inside, the demons were still there raging around, devouring me.

Kedvesem
I went to university and was a good, serious student. No one knew the secrets of my past, and since I'd gone to school out of state, there was no one around me who knew, either. There, in my third year, I met a girl who blew me away -- beautiful, exotic, intelligent, world-traveled, a great actress, a sexy reciter of my poetry at the coffee house. My demons slept, and I won her heart. I married her a week after graduating university, and we moved to Japan. This was my last escape. I had my girl, a new life, and I was putting 10,000 miles between me and my past. But, of course, I was still masturbating and watching porn whenever I could. My past boarded that plane with me.

Japan
If things weren't bad enough in my life, this is where things got worse. The demons came back with a vengeance. I was married seven years before my past came back to overthrow me. At the age of 29, I couldn't hide from myself anymore. (I learned from my counselor that most people who are abused as children must confront their past between the ages of 28 and 32.) Using social media, I started flirting with women online. I won't go into much detail here, since my wife will be reading this, but for the next eight years, I fucked anything that moved. I was the biggest man-whore cheating dirtbag to ever walk the face of the earth. I even cheated while my wife was pregnant! And then I'd come home and sleep with my wife, risking disease not only to her but to our children! When she was in the hospital convalescing after one of our children's birth, I was out fucking some whore. And here's the kicker: my wife knew all along! We'd have fights about it, and though she desperately wanted to leave -- even to die! -- she endured. Her love for me (not for the children) gave her the strength to go on, day after day, seeing me cheat. And when she had no more strength, she cried to Heaven for help. She knew that if she left me, I'd be damned. So she prayed for me daily, she loved me, and she never gave me grief...always dealing with me patiently and kindly. It was only in the moments that I was caught red-handed that we'd have a fight. I still masturbated and watched porn all the time, even though I was getting sex from my wife and from any number of random women. I was the biggest addict ever.

The Church
We as a family became Catholic in 2005, right at the beginning of my cheating campaign. I just went along with it because my wife wanted to do it. I thought, eh, whatever. Now where's the pussy?! But when I attended my first Mass, I felt Jesus' real presence there, and I cried. It didn't take long, however, for my dark past to squash that, and I forgot all about Jesus. My wife, bolstered by the Eucharist and her daily prayers, however, loved the Church, and its graces gave her the strength to endure.

Waking Up
In late 2011, my wife and I published our first novel together, and something moved inside my heart. I didn't pay any attention to it, though, still loving my philandering, masturbating ways. We published eight more titles with our publisher over the next year and a half, during which time, I had a breakthrough. In the summer of 2012, after eight years of perseverance and prayer, my wife's love broke through. One day, all of a sudden, we just saw eye to eye, and I got the first inkling of what I'd been doing to her. We stayed up all night talking, actually pacing as we did so, trying to work this out. I had tried to prove to my wife that love did not exist (after all, I'd seen none from anyone until I met her), but she showed me that ignoring or trying to kill love cannot succeed. Love is stronger than infidelity, stronger than death. I stopped cheating all at once, and I haven't gone back. I still watched porn and masturbated for a month or so after that, but my healing had already begun. It didn't take long for the masturbation to stop. If it were merely wrong, I may not have ever stopped, but once I realized how much it hurt my wife, I dropped that habit immediately and never looked back.

Substitution
"God cannot be mocked; a man reaps what he sows." This is so true, and if my wife had not substituted herself for me, to be the victim for all my crimes, then I would, no doubt, be paying for my misdeeds. But my wife prayed that all my punishment be on her, and God took her seriously. He heaped it all on her, and she bore it, with her own willpower and His strength and grace. I'm two years clean now, and I have neither urge to masturbate nor to cheat, and my life is a blissful garden of love. A garden my wife tended for us both as I tried to burn it down.

The point of all this
This is not the story of a recovered addict. This is a story about love. Glorious, all-conquering love. There is only one way to defeat this pornography-masturbation addiction: love must break through into your life. There must be forgiveness and hope. I fall to my knees each morning, kiss the earth, and thank God for my wife, my life, and for Love.

Conclusion
My wife and I are STD-free (miraculously!), we're seventeen years married, we have six daughters, and we're expecting our seventh, a boy, at Christmas time. We are united, and our family reaps the benefits of our love. I try to be a devout Catholic every day. I try to be the best husband, the best father, and the best worker I can be. This is not to praise me but to stand as witness to the power of Love, the graces of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the incredible gift of a good woman standing by my side through it all.

Message
Gentlemen,
We're all called to be men. We have a grand destiny, but first we must learn to be the beautiful beings we were designed to be. Come, men, and be powerful with me! Be strong! And remember, even when you don't love yourself, God loves you. Hell, even I love you! You are, therefore, lovable.

Gentlemen,
Don't isolate yourselves. Be active, be proactive. Find what you love to do and pursue it. Don't just sit behind your computers. You need to get out more! Get your head out of your hole.

I leave you for now with this song. Listen to it carefully and often whenever you feel down.
The Uncluded - Teleprompters

Best regards,
Mark

 

My aim is to belittle no one.

 

Clumsy,

Yes. Very sad. A tragedy turned to comedy in the end. Thanks to the love of a very special woman.




Vision,

Yes, indeed. As I look back and make sense of my life, I'm stunned. I've been surprised by love.

 

hopepeacelove,

I've shared my story with the hope that my witness will point others not only to love but to the Higher Power.


radlight,

Indeed, I hope you and all unmarried fapstronauts find good wives.

 

My success came about once I accepted the love of the best woman breathing oxygen right now, but music helped play a role in encouraging me in my recovery. I love music (I know -- everyone does!), love to sing and play guitar. I even teach a course on the history of rock and roll at university.

This is to say that we all have our favorites riffs and swells and lines in songs that really speak to us. One lyric that hits home with trying to break an addiction is this:



"It's not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with every start"



So, come, my friends! Roll away your stones!