Noticing women when in public.......

Why is Lust OverPowering you?
You have a wife!
Look at your wife, give her a kiss.
Surround your world with love, not lust.

I can understand P may have filled your head with weird fetishes and that provokes thinking and fantasising about them, in turn when you see women, those thoughts get fuelled, yeah?

So first work on learning to stop fantasising. Please Understand:
Occurrence of thoughts is inevitable, but Entertaining them is in your control.


Have you tried Meditation? It can certainly elevate your awareness.


Think of your wife! Don’t do it for her. It must be so killing for her.

Go give her a hug and tell her how you plant to change yourself.

If you feel appropriate, Involve her in this process, so it’s better for the both of you.

 

Giving up porn is not going to make you never notice a pretty woman again. That’s nature. It’s what you do after you notice. Do you bounce your eyes or do you let them linger? Do you start to fantasize about the person or is it just “ wow she’s pretty”. Or dang she’s got huge breast but then the thought is gone. Because even I have those thoughts without going beyond. Noticing someone and leering/ogling are completely different. One is nature driven and one is lust driven. A csat counselor told his sa group the first look is on God, the second on you.

 

@Grey_Cat, I'm curating a list of useful threads about this in my journal post here. As you can imagine it is a topic that crops up frequently! Hopefully you'll find some motivation and techniques in those threads.

 

Hi, few years ago I noticed I was looking at women to much and was becoming an obsession. I looked for the attractiveness of specific things I liked and if they noticed me. I noticed it was to much and not useful and might have looked like staring.

I trained myself to look away as soon as I notice its a female form. This is before I see some of the specifics. As soon as I notice I acknowledge it and move my view and my mind. If I need to interact I keep it as short as possible and if I need to talk I look only at the eyes / mouth. Sometimes I notice more than I would like, and tell myself in my mind what I notice, so I don't have to look at it again or dwell on what i saw.

 

I struggle with the same. It’s normal but I am retraining my brain to look away and stop the lusting. In the middle of a flatline now and enjoying it. I hope it lasts a month.

 

Preface: Please do not try to attach meaning beyond what I am saying in this post, I am attempting to share some observations and the mechanics that have helped me.

Do to my current work and state and past experiences, I know you can live life in a way where you do not "notice" women and it isn't simply ignoring them. Its being able to go down the street and there are probably women about, and it doesn't occur to me. When I do see them, sexually related concepts are not what come up, but the person comes up (more on that below).

The key to this change is acknowledging what the current meaning women mean to you (object) and letting that go away through a change of intention and attitude and permanently start trying to see them as the people they are and to a greater extent the World as it is. There isn't much around this issue for someone with an addiction or addictive personality. I am working on some writing to put a lot of my experience and work into a communicable format, this is just a musing I put together. If you're open to it, try this exercise, it can be done anytime you go out, not just driving, which I recommend because there's a lot of muscle, mind, and emotional memory to rewrite.

1. Before going outside where you live, acknowledge to yourself that women exist and live out in the world, that you will run into women, they exist as separate people and that has meaning and value. Imagine what you want to do, what is the best possible case scenario for yourself, and why that's important to you.
2. Like you were saying, if you are driving, try to focus on the driving, if you are walking, get in touch with your physical body, what are you feeling etc, try to do each task with personal intention, make it a game even, the best driving you've ever done, if I never walked before, how would I want to walk for myself. The purpose here is to start making a personal stake in everything you do that creates authenticity.
3. Whenever you see a woman, because you will, the first thing is not allow your mind to work on description physically and be real with yourself when it does. Try to work on imagining what the woman is like as a person, maybe they are having a hard day at work, maybe they are on the phone talking to a spouse. Sometimes that might go further, a woman is older, what was it like when they were young? Maybe the woman is young, what will it be like when they are older? What were their dreams as a kid? What kind of things are they feeling right now? Try to think of them as a person and that they have a whole life to themselves. The purpose here is to retrain the mind and the associations you have not to be physical. Sex Addicts associate physical features with shame and guilt, powerful emotions that we tie to sex, the most intense creative energy (a form of it). It becomes addictive. You might discover a lot for yourself. A tip though is not to fantasize, stay realistic and keep it to a few seconds maximum without continuing to look of course, try to go for the feel of it if visualizing isn't working or is bad for you.
4. Be honest about what happened, did you see her, did you not, seeing someone or not is not wrong or morally bad, it simply is. The meaning we put on it is what gets us into trouble. After you have times where you feel guilty or ashamed, try to let go of judging yourself and instead work on just recording what you felt, what you thought of. It takes work but you will see patterns emerge over time and that's where you can apply yourself. Typically journaling helps, even writing down the times you saw a woman or "noticed" one, just noting it to yourself will open up a more objective stance, try not to judge yourself for it in this process.

Try to work with it, the key point is not just not staring or looking, and why do you look out? Typically we feel "bored", so we look out to experience from outside instead of living a life from our selves. The tragic part of this is that we look out because we have no idea what's going on inside, which would entertain us to no end if we bothered looking at it and listening.

We're looking to co-create a rich inner life, part of that is the mind. The eyes simply follow the tendencies of the mind, and I will warn you they are typically the last to follow any self-work. Generally I see addicts follow this pattern: EMOTION (ignored, usually uncomfortable type of feeling - shame, guilt, sadness, anxiety), the emotion pressures the MIND (racing thoughts, obsessive, worrying, assumptions, thinking of sex), the mind then pressures the BODY (eyes moving around, fidgety, "aroused", movement). Yes, there are also ways to train your eyes, a specific eye meditation is to make a circle on a piece of paper (small circle), try to keep still and keep your eyes in the circle for 5 min. Do this every day at the same time for probably a month. That level of consistency and dedication will change your ability to guide your eyes most likely. But based on addiction its like trying to work backwards, which can have good effects like relaxing can (Body > Mind > Emotion) or some format of the chain, they all affect one another, but this is all temporary. There are many many pieces of advice, but the biggest piece, especially for anyone with an addictive personality, is to stop looking outside of yourself for fulfillment and start working on what its like to be you. That will give you a centered attitude toward life that you always go towards or come back to, and over time you will find it easier and easier to go there instead of towards women (men/porn/sex etc).