Journal. Cheer me on?

@CPilot @Tao Jones @RedeemedIowan

Thanks a lot everyone. Very grateful for the messages and encourgements. And the prayers, wow.

I tried to work my job at the start of cancer treatment but it wasn't sustainable, so right now I am on unpaid carer's leave. Thankfully my wife earns more than me and she is still on fully paid maternity leave (thank you UK law) so we are OK. Right now my work is the things I listed: Caring for three, cooking, washing up, tidying, managing the house. That fills most of my days! But as I have mentioned I get support from a funded nurse on weeknights and on days when my wife is in hospital. I do try mindful meditation, but I need to grow in it, and I do read at the end of the day, but often only manage a little bit before I pass out. When I am not too exhausted, I get up very early in the morning (4.30 / 5.00 am sometimes) and write, before everyone wakes up. This never happens at the weekend, because no nurse, and these recurrent crises keep happening at the weekend, as you have seen, so I tend to go a bit crazy at the weekends right now and so struggle with temptation. Phew.

Thanks. I am not super. I am often very grumpy and selfish and resentful and angry and impatient and distracted and I can swear a lot under my breath. But I am growing. Some days are better than others.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I spent the day being useful, without much grumpiness or resentment at all. Caring, housework, and yard work. Hopefully more of the same attitude today.

 

There are a few other people's journals that I want to post on, but I haven't had time. I will get to it eventually.

Here's me with reference to addiction right now, with some questions:

Physical intimacy two days ago. I only share this because it may be relevant to what follows.

I had another nocturnal emission last night. Two in one week! I really don’t understand how these work…

Again, no idea why now. Maybe it was because the biological system has not been used in a while, but now it has, and this has primed it? (I wasn’t counting the time of abstinence for a while, but then I did count—it was 40 days and 40 nights since the last time—very Biblical!) Maybe it was because I let some lust in? I struggled a bit with street lust the past couple of days. It’s very hot and lots of women aren’t wearing very much. This time there was a P dream with the event.

Anyway, today I am super horny. I guess this is the chaser effect? I have a very strong urge just to MO, not even really for P. I feel like I could spend the whole day masturbating. I feel like I’ve just got to get the semen out of me, and then I will feel sated and better. [Re-reading that…urgh. It's how it feels, though!]

I have to remember from experience that if I MO, the urge to MO will go down, for a while, but it will also likely be attended by shame, confusion, anxiety, depression, lethargy, heightened obsession and P cravings, and it will come back stronger and more frequently. I am not just choosing to MO once, but regularly, because that is what my brain will expect. I am not prepared to do that, and I know from past experience that it messes me up. And I am committed to not doing it.

I am going to share really vulnerably and candidly here. Sometimes I worry that this forum isn’t truly anonymous and people in RL will connect these posts to me one day. I guess nothing is truly anonymous in this day and age of the internet, so I will just share things to do with me. Another thing in the mix is that during the recent time of physical intimacy, when it came to the part that guys stereotypically enjoy most, it was over faster than I would have liked (though I think I managed longer than I might have!). Thankfully I seem to have gotten a lot better again at doing my job over the last six months (i.e. giving my wife pleasure), which actually may be related to not doing MO so I should remember that, which I am very grateful for. However, when it comes to my *purely physical* side of the equation, I often feel that things are over very fast and that they stop when I am just getting warmed up and going. If my wife is into it and aroused, I can really not last all that long at all. (Sometimes if she’s not into it at all, then I can get DE, which is horrible, but that’s another story). It always seems to be either PE or DE. Hitting the sweet spot of lasting a long time while she is also aroused seems impossible. Like, say, 10 minutes seems completely out of reach. So I think when we are together, which happens very rarely at the moment, it leaves me chomping at the bit and wanting more!

I guess it’s maybe like fasting chocolate, and then every once in a while having a little bit of chocolate, and then being like OH MY GOODNESS CHOCOLATE I WANT CHOCOLATE GIVE ME MORE CHOCOLATE NOW! And some of that raised desire and chaser effect seems to be coming out in the raised temptations and nocturnal events… I guess?

Anyway, I am pretty sure I have asked this before, but anyone got any good advice on lasting longer?

It is almost impossible to find good resources on this. Some of the supposedly sensible resources, including the National Health Service page for the UK, say to practice lasting longer using M / do M ‘an hour or two’ before sex, but that is not an option for me for obvious reasons outlined before.

I thought for a while that this might get better with age, which may be happening a bit, but I’m not sure. And I read something recently quoting research which says that specifically this does not improve with age, which is annoying.

I’ve tried asking my wife if we could go for a couple of times during a session before, or if we could incorporate an extra O for me before intercourse, both to help things last longer, but it’s not happened yet. Maybe I will try asking again…

 

Today thankfully the MO urge wave is passing / has passed. Just some P urges to look up a topless film scene that I once watched with my wife but shut my eyes. Desperately curious to know what the actress's breasts look like. I surrender this.

This time the comical weekend involves me and my son both having an upset stomach. The most sleep I got in a row last night was three hours. He woke at 0130, 0215, 0300, 04045... URGH. I FEEL SO TIRED.

You are absolutely right. It has to be a friendship. That is the only thing that will survive everything else. And is the foundation for truly intimate sex too, when it happens. Such a good quote.

And lol at the urologist! Yeah, I've heard 2 minutes is standard too... So maybe I should just be content with my lot... See below...

Yeah maybe I am just being greedy. It could indeed be pornified thinking. When I was deep in PMO as a teenager I would edge for hours. Like I could go for hours and hours doing M, hunting and seeking P, sustaining a dopamine bath in my brain. Maybe it's like my brain is trying to get that back through normal sex. I do still wonder if it might be possible to go for a bit longer and that this desire might be ok, though...I will try asking again sometime.

I'm not overly concerned about my own anonymity (though it would be mighty embarrassing to be associated with this journal). It's more that I don't want to say things about my wife that she hasn't cleared that could be linked to her. Hm.

 

Hunted and sought. No P. No M. Need to indicate this in my signature somehow. Circumstances were very difficult but no excuses. I'm sorry, God. Don't have time to change signature or explain more right now. Damn. Shame and pain.

 

Explanation in addition to above: I had the most awful night of sleep last night, for the second night in a row. Very frequrntly interrupted by both children. I was so very tired. But this is an excuse. I hadn't done my daily sobriety renewal and I put some TV on in the morning while I was with my baby son. Coverage of a music festival going on at the moment was online. I navigated to footage of a favourite artist I have heard but never seen perform. I should have been less naive. To my surprise, she was wearing highly revealing clothing. I got blindsided by lust. I lusted a bit, to my shame. Then, to even more of my shame, I quickly scanned through the footage to see if she took off her dress at any point in it (ridiculous, the video would have been flagged with a 15+ rating if she had). She didn't. But I had still quickly scanned through the video. When I realised what I had done I felt terrible. But I still did it.

I have spoken to my SA sponsor and he agrees with my instinct that it was a foolish close call but not a sobriety reset. SA's sobriety definition is 'no sex with myself or another other than my spouse and progressive victory over lust'. I did not have sex with myself or another other than my spouse. I am still ashamed and disturbed from this slip, but I am going to file it as a setback in 'progressive victory over lust' rather than a loss of sobriety. Thus I have put that in my sig, as I need to not do this again, and track distance from it. It is important to me that I know, concretely, that there has been a length of time since I last looked at porn and I last masturbated. If my wife asks me 'Have you looked at porn or masturbated since we last checked in about this together [a fair while ago]?' I can say 'No--though I have had some close calls with temptation sometimes.' However, I am open to other people's comments on this. I know I have been harsh with others about this sort of thing. Pride comes before a fall. I guess I didn't deliberately seek out something at first, and when I did, briefly, I didn't find it. Phew.

I am wasting too much time on this forum. I have posted on some other people's threads where in some places I am getting sucked into debates and discussions but actually with my current circumstances in life and level of recovery I think it is a waste of my time. It is very hard to find time in private to make calls right now, but I think I need to use calls, texts and face to face support more than I am.

 

Another crazy weekend happening. I've realised it's often the weekend because of when my wife has her chemotherapy infusions (Monday). It takes time for the side-effects to kick in She has had to go to hospital again. Raised temperature and pain. Antibiotics and chest x-ray. High stress.

Thought temptation always worst in depths of night and at edges of sleep--going to sleep or first thing waking up. Is different when up (though still sometimes bad).

Things to journal about in future:
-Conversations with sponsor and monthly therapist this week about recent near-miss
-Attachments to particular actresses / scenes, the extent to which things got burned in in the past
-What is 'better', 'more pleasurable'

There are no excuses for acting out. NONE. I don't need more information, I need to act on the information I already have: Turn to God and others. Today I choose reality over PMO.

 

I did it. God did it. Made it to the end of another weekend. This one was horrendous. So little sleep. I am so tired I can barely remember my own name.

 

Last week I talked with my sponsor and my therapist about my near-miss a couple of weeks ago. I agreed with my sponsor that it was not a sobriety reset, and to move on, to let go of self-berating and perfectionism. My clinical psychologist (for OCD) therapist suggested it was more akin to looking around on a beach than to deliberately seeking out and using porn.

So I am filing it under 'minor setback in progressive victory over lust’. I will keep the event logged in my signature for my journal on here, though, to remind myself about where my boundaries are. If I keep the boundary firm at ‘not lusting’ and work on that with God, I am much less likely to fall into full-blown pornography and masturbation use.

Mental lust is a different matter, though. I find it much harder not to cross the boundary in terms of thinking about P memories, especially just before going to sleep, or on waking up, or in the dead of night. The trouble is, when I was aged 13-20 and deep in addiction and my brain and my sexuality were developing lots, there were some scenes that I must have watched hundreds of times. I used to often go back to my favourite ones and watch them on repeat on Windows media player. Or in the early days I would find a topless scene on a DVD film and play it back again and again. These scenes are burned into my memory and I can play them back to a large extent just by thinking about them. Has anyone else had this experience?

There is in particular one scene that often comes back to me and plagues me even now. When I was a teenager and I first found it, it must have fit my erotic template very closely, or my body must have been in a weird place at the time, because I had something like 5 to 8+ Os in a row to it. It’s just a topless scene from some B movie, but somehow the way that the actress smiles and nods

Spoiler: trigger warning

and her breasts and nipples bounce up and down

just seems to get me. When I relapsed after 9 years this was one of the scenes I looked up, and it still got me. Even though I haven’t viewed it in now over 5 years, I still find it hard to let go of, and it can still come to me / I can still turn to it in the night.

Does anyone have any good tips or resources on dealing with P memories that have been burned in through repeated viewing, and repeated O to them?

One of the things my addiction says to me about this scene when I am tempted and not in a good place is ‘You will never be able to get this much pleasure except by going back to this scene and doing PMO’. And you know what? Besides reflecting that it may not really be possible to ‘quantify’ pleasure, I’ve found that the only effective counter to this has been to say ‘Well, yeah, maybe.’ It may be the case that PMO is more pleasurable than anything else, in the same way that a heroin hit is more pleasurable than anything else. Freedom doesn’t come from finding something more pleasurable and than becoming enslaved to that instead. Freedom comes from acknowledging that maybe it would be more pleasurable than anything else, then surrendering it and giving it up to God anyway, dying to it. But that’s not a one-off thing. I have to do it whenever it comes up again.

I have been having some MO-by-itself urges lately too. These stopped completely for a while, but have come back. Not entirely sure why. Exhaustion has been the name of the game for a while. Actually, I do remember that even before I relapsed after my 9 year period of sobriety, when my daughter was first born I would get hit by very very strong P memories and MO urges in ways that I hadn’t very often before until she came along and deprived me of sleep. I guess tiredness really is a trigger. The trigger is real, but it won’t be there forever. Still a small part of me is tempted to believe the lie that I am just one of the members of the population who has a drive which means I need to MO, and that I won’t be happy without that outlet, but I must challenge this and remember that there is so much evidence to the contrary.

 

Written yesterday (nofap was down):

Another weekend from hell. This one started early because, of course, the week after my wife has what was hopefully her last ever chemotherapy infusion, and when she will be at her lowest point, the ****ing nurse decides to take an extra night off to go to a family wedding (the couple have been co-habiting for decades—who cares if they get married?) and my step-mother who was meant to take the 5yo for two nights comes down with a ****ing throat infection, so who does everything now fall on? ME!

Last night the 5yo woke me up at 1am after I fell asleep around 10pm, with a nightmare and then a tantrum when I wouldn’t stay in her bed with her. Her sleep is actually often worse than the baby’s at the moment. It took me till about 3am to get back to sleep because I was agitated and I have had an itchy rash break out on my hands for some unknown reason. Then the baby woke me up at 4am with crying. Baby up at 5.30am for the day. Both are being extremely demanding during the day and I am neglecting my wife who is very ill in bed as a result.

I am so incredibly fed up. Why did my wife have to get cancer while pregnant, have treatment while we had a baby? Why did the nurse have to take extra time off in our hardest week and my Step-Mum have to get ill in it too? Why haven’t they offered extra time elsewhere in compensation? Don’t they realise how difficult this is?

Yes, conscience, I know, I know, this is an opportunity to go deeper, become more dependent, grow in love and sacrifice. Well you can **** off right now. I don’t care. My entire life right now is childcare and housework and being berated by my very ill wife for not being there enough for her emotionally at the moment.

I am so angry and stressed. I need to do some serious forgiving when I can catch a moment. But moments are few and far between right now and I have just wasted this moment while the baby sleeps and 5yo watches obnoxious children’s TV writing this drivel.