Ulysses Resists - Ongoing Journal

Agreed, I'm not saying I agree with 100% of these. These are just just some that help me with nofap motivation. I don't believe all the superhero hype about semen retention. In general, I know the benefits because I've experienced a lot of them and I know when they are exaggerated. Most of the time I need reminded of the benefits when I start to lose motivation. I would say though that excessive PMO probably does prematurely age you like any any addiction would.

 

Most of us are here because we want to stop PMO because we know it's become unhealthy for us. I don't see a need to think about the possibility that it might be healthy for others, that just leads to compromise. Even if I can be healthy while practicing PMO, as I did for years, I would have been much healthier without it. If for no other reason, I would have gotten more sleep and had more time for better things.

 

This is part 2 of my recovery testimony for Celebrate Recovery:

Part 1 is here: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-3#post-3740472

In my desperation, I started researching sexual recovery. I wanted something faith based. When I found a local church had a Celebrate Recovery, I decided to try it. I quickly found a sexual addiction sponsor who was also a Sexaholics Anonymous alumnus. He walked me though my first 4 steps and I shared my whole story with him when I did my Inventory, which is not what an inventory is supposed to be. For some reason, he dropped out of the program before I completed my steps and I was on my own to finish with the group. I did walk through the rest of the steps in a group step study and I had multiple accountability partners, and step studies since, but I never seemed to find someone who was farther along than me in sexual recovery to be a sponsor in this area. No one else was really talking about sex and porn addiction as openly as I was. In turn, men felt safe to share with me as I was bearing my soul with them on a weekly basis. I sponsored many men as I became a leader in our local CR.

I got about a year or two of sobriety when my daughter was born (21 years ago). I remember relapsing on a business trip and feeling horribly guilty, that I had betrayed her, my wife, and of course God. We had struggled with infertility, and I felt somehow that my addiction was to blame. My wife almost died during delivery and she did not want to risk having more children, so we began the process of international adoption. We adopted a boy from India when my daughter was 2. We didn’t know he was a special needs child at the time, but we were so idealistic we thought that love and faith could fix anything. We were wrong.

By the time my adopted son was 5, we knew something was really wrong. His energy levels were through the roof, but he also had very strange, destructive, and violent tendencies. He would regularly threaten to push my daughter or wife down the stairs, he would jump on my daughter’s head, he would try to remove my daughters’ clothes. When playing games with peers, he would “accidently” hurt them. He began stealing from other children and using what he stole to manipulate others. Most therapists didn’t believe us and couldn’t see anything wrong with him. We finally found a social worker who recognized that he was a budding sociopath and confirmed what we feared: He was a danger to our family. We went from counselor to counselor, tried a myriad of medications, went through countless hospitalizations, and finally went from residential treatment center to more residential treatment centers. Nothing helped.

During this time, I was still a leader at CR, but almost every CR night, I would come home to an incident that he had created, basically terrorizing my wife and child. I began relapsing as a coping mechanism and became addicted to sleeping pills because I could not sleep with all this stress. One of my sponsees reported me to the church leaders because I was still confessing my relapsing, while maintaining my position of leadership. He was also angry at me for having a disagreement with him about his own recovery. I decided to quit CR and just focus on my needy family.

My youngest son was born when my adopted son turned 9. This was a miracle birth story for later. My adopted son even tried to hurt the baby more than once. I found that most counselors, pastors, and friends, couldn’t understand our story, or didn’t believe us. They would judge us, and sometimes blame us. I eventually learned not to trust people, or talk much about it. My family became isolated in the midst of extreme heartache, stress, and trauma.

For Part 3 of my testimony, click here: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-4#post-3755340

 

I'm 56 days without any self-masturbation and orgasm (only married contact). It feels great. The only way I was able to do this was by dying to all the fantasies and fetishes and refusing their thought and refusing all compromise. Some days I struggle more than others, but overall, sleep is better (I've struggled with insomnia all my life), my mental clarity is clear, my discipline to diet and exercise it better and I'm making gains, and my motivation is better. I also used to struggle with depression, and now I only feel that when my sleep starts to lack.

 

Thank you, I appreciate it.

 

For Step 5 work see: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-3#post-3735985

Step 6:
“We are entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”

1) I was able to turn over to God: My family, my sexuality, my career, my health, my sanity. What am I still holding on to, my male insecurities, my obsession with strength.

2) What does easy does it mean: In my experience, it takes time. I wasn’t able to let go of fantasies and Masturbation, until months after giving up porn. It also means a relapse could mean months of recovery again to regain this success.

3) We can know we need to change, but unwilling to give up the little pleasures that keep us bound up, whether that’s an occasional drink, overeating, or looking at sexy people.

4) Replace defects with strengths is the goal, what strengths for you? Helping others with recovery, sharing my story openly, continued body, mind, and soul development. Determination, spiritual authority to defeat the enemy in my life.

5) How have you enjoyed your growth? (See above) There are so many benefits of being sober, namely I’m finally sleeping better. Depression and brain fog is rare now. I’m able to focus. I fear the future less, and am trusting God now. I’m enjoying life again.

 

I think the question is not "Why won't God take these thoughts and desires away?" but "Why won't I leave these thoughts and desires behind?" The truth is none of us need sex, masturbation, porn, lust or perverse fantasies to stay alive. These things are not inevitable, but we actually have choice in our actions and thoughts. It's true, a stray thought can be hard to avoid, but it shouldn't be hard to let go of, unless we are holding on to it for some reason. For me the struggle was to let go of the idol of sex itself and the lie that I had to have it. Now, I'm 6 months free of porn and 68 days free of masturbation. I can't believe how well I'm sleeping and how much more productive I have become.

 

Thanks Tao. Another great question is what do we think we are gaining or holding onto by not giving up the idol of sex? For me, I think I actually felt I was giving up my manhood by giving up these fantasies and the frequency of ejaculation I felt I needed. Also, in a twisted way, my fantasies affirmed my manhood, made me feel manly if only for a moment, and the fantasies I put myself in were actually worshipping my manhood. When we realize what we are holding onto and why, it's easier to see the absolute lies behind it.

 

This is part 3 of my recovery Testimony.

For Part 2 click here: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-4#post-3749213

I was on my own with my recovery and aside from the professional help of a lawyer and one counselor we trusted, we were on our own to deal with our sociopath son. Apart from CR, I adopted an Old Testament attitude that my sexual actions had probably caused all these curses. I thought that If I maintained sobriety, then God would bless and protect me and my family and if I failed, I would experience the curses of disobedience and be out of God’s protection. I saw this play out during relapses and times of abstinence, so it became reinforced. This worked on and off, but was too much pressure for me to handle. Every time something bad would happen with my adopted son or my work, I would blame it on the spiritual curse of my relapses. And boy did the curses continue to come. Covid came around, my daughter had a mental breakdown, got into witchcraft, and attempted suicide. My job turned into a mandatory night shift, to destroy any positive sleep patterns I had left. I added alcohol to my sleeping pills in order to get any semblance of sleep. My criminal son began visiting our neighborhood and looting our neighbors. I became desperate to make a new start and to escape this painful life. After almost 6 months of interviewing, I got a position across the state, picked up everything and moved for the sake of my daughter and my own escape.

During the first year, I saw the signs for CR and thought about attending. It had been more than 11 years since I quit CR to focus on my family. I had stopped drinking when I moved, but I was still addicted to sleeping pills. After some painful and miserable episodes recovering from sleeping pills and porn hangovers, I began to research how to ween myself off. Within 2 months, I had weaned off sleeping pills but still struggled at night with insomnia and masturbation. I also still routinely relapsed with porn during business trips. I began to feel the Lord was telling me to join this CR. I needed friends, support, and accountability. Additionally, I had hoped to get my daughter involved so she could begin dealing with her hurts. I started for her, but then stayed for myself.

I had and have some mental issues to overcome as well. My Old Testament guilt attributing every one of my failures to the apparent curses in my life was legalistic. I thought I was being cursed because of my addiction. What I came to terms with in the last year is that sometimes the righteous suffer. This is why the book of Job exists. I don’t claim to be perfect or righteous like Job. But I also must recognize that neither the curses or blessing in my life are necessarily deserved. In general blessings naturally flow out of righteousness and curses out of disobedience, but sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes righteous people suffer and it is not their fault. Job, Jeremiah, Hosea, Joseph, and John the Baptist are examples. At other times, wicked people prosper. I also needed to understand that the cross and grace exists for all of us regardless of how righteously we live. As the CR acronym for GRACE illustrates: G is God’s gift, R Received by our faith, A Accepted by God’s love, C Christ paid the price, and E it’s an Everlasting gift. We all need grace and no one is perfect and we all need the blood of Jesus to forgive and give us a new start. Ephesians 2:8 states “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

With the support of my friends at CR, I had been able to stay clear of porn for several months, but then came a series of business trips, surgery for my hernia, my wife going out of town, and me traveling to help my mother with cancer treatments. With all the stress and opportunity, I relapsed last spring and went on a binge streak for 4 months, going further into porn than I had ever gone. I was painfully aware that the porn I was gravitating toward was more demonic, dark, and violent than anything I had looked at before. I felt trapped and compelled to keep looking for more. Finally, on my last trip, I removed all my accounts and material and when I got back home, I installed Covenant Eyes on my computer and asked a CR leader to monitor me. I was finally ready to surrender and give up these defects of character again. I fully committed to recovery and became willing to take the risk to trust other men in my life again. Making that commitment, trusting people, and being accountable helped me to finally stop porn.

For Part 4 of my Recovery Testimony, click here:
https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-4#post-3758591

 

I've also been posting on Fortify, which is a really good site I recommend. It is more Christian based:

It's hard to stop because we use it as a treatment, a medication, a cure for all life's other problems. We use it to escape a painful reality, a poor self esteem, loneliness and isolation, feelings of inadequacy and failure. We medicate ourselves from these pressures and do feel a temporary reprieve, but the after affects make us feel worse, so we feel we need more of the medication to feel better again. This is the way drug addiction works too. The only way out is to face life without it, and do other things to address life's hurts that are productive.
The joy though is that as you do this, you begin to feel better and better, you start doing more things that make you feel better leaving the addiction further behind. The withdrawal is hard, but once you are through it, you begin replacing all the old bad habits with new good habits and feel better and better at each step out of it. You become addicted to recovery and it's a good thing.

 

This week has been hard, I got some negativity from my boss at work. I've been binge eating junk, not sleeping good, and edged a couple of times (no O). I'm also stressed about getting a new job, which my wife seems to be demanding. I guess I should feel good about my Boss's negative feedback, because now I can feel better about leaving. I really liked this job for the last few years, and feel it helped me with sobriety because it was less stressful, but now I'm stressed again. That's life. Helps just to express it.

It dawned on me today, that my boss can find another employee pretty easily, but my family can't find another husband and father (without a lot of hurt). I'm all they got right now. My decisions have to be for them. This is also part of the amends (Step 8), I'm sure I owe her for all my addiction.

 

Last night as I was struggling to get to sleep and fumbling with petting myself, I decided to turn on the text to speech prayers of deliverance. They really helped me to focus mentally on resisting the devil and being rid of the the fetishes and I fell asleep fast and slept real sound. When I woke up for my normal urination, I did the same and it really worked. Best sleep I've had in over a week.

Here's a good one for that: https://deliverancerevolution.org/w...from-Spirit-Spouse-Night-Attacks-Insomnia.pdf

 

This is Part 4 of my recovery testimony for CR (this part mentions nofap, but not by name)

For Part 3, go here: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/ulysses-resists-ongoing-journal.356154/page-4#post-3755340

It was about this time that the CR Men’s Step study started again. I decided to commit to it as well. When we got to the lessons about sponsors and doing an inventory, we had a frank discussion and found that few of us had an official sponsor. When trying to get to the reasons why, I realized we all were making excuses, but we were essentially too afraid to ask and commit. I decided what the heck, there’s no good reason not to ask for this and get a real sponsor to work my inventory with again. So for the first time in about 20 years, I asked the man who had been my accountability partner on Covenant Eyes. I shared my full inventory with him and it was amazing. All the secrets and vulnerability I was afraid of being discovered dissolved away as I realized, I was not only understood, but still loved. He was not affirming my sin, but affirming my dignity as a man. I didn’t have to feel shame any more.

While working on my inventory, I became aware that I had idolized sex and based my identity on being a sexual male. I needed a new perspective on sex. When sex became unavailable or impossible with my wife, I became bitter and resentful, thinking that I was entitled to act out because this is who I am. Even the church and men's Bible material enforced this with passages like "It's better to marry than to burn with lust" or "a husband and wife should not deprive each other except for a time" and "may your wife satisfy you always." Once again, although generally true, it reenforced the lie that I needed and deserved sex. I also bought the lie that men need sex and cannot live without a sexual release. The lie feeds the huge modern lie that masturbation and porn are normal and ok. This made it almost impossible for me to resist porn when on a business trip. I felt entitled to it.

In the last few months, God used an online secular online group of men who are refusing porn and masturbation to convict me about abstinence. It is essentially a group of men who have discovered how destructive porn is in their lives and to their brain. They have dedicated themselves to not only stopping porn use, but also masturbation and fantasy. Much of it is based on neuroscience that the brain releases huge amounts of dopamine with Internet porn use that is just as addictive as heroin. They believe that by abstaining, they can retain their masculine energy and strength, and it will produce more confidence and mental clarity to achieve success as a man. Now, this is a very secular group that accepts all faiths and all sexual life styles, and some are proponents of eastern mystical beliefs and LGBT lifestyles. Some are naïve thinking that this will give them a super power to get women, increase testosterone, build muscle, and be successful. Even though these claims may be exaggerated, I couldn’t deny that many of those benefits were true and by setting these standards they were fulfilling the Biblical command to be sexual pure and abstinent.

These secular men are an example of Romans 2:14 “Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it.” Even though they didn’t know the Bible, they see that abiding by the Biblical Principal of abstinence is not only possible, but they will achieve physical, mental, social, and emotional strength. They see that a man who has mastery of his sexuality can have mastery of himself in all areas. This was ground breaking for me, because I now had solid examples and hope that abstinence is possible. I was also furious, that today’s church provided few if any healthy examples of abstinence and purity. I don’t have to have sex to be a man, even as a married man. I can actually stop this activity, regardless of how horny or deprived of sex I feel. It also convicted me about important Biblical principles I had given up on like staying sexually pure, avoiding impure thoughts, not coveting or envying, practicing self-control, and giving my whole body, mind, and spirit to Christ.

 

Stumbled upon this thread the other day and it's a fascinating read. It's a 1760 book about the evils of masturbation. It's actually written by a doctor who is approaching it more as a disorder. An accountability partner and I are reading through it and commenting on it. Here is my latest post about it. See the first thread of the link for the free PDF. I think it would be an awesome discussion in the Christian forum.

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...masturbation-cures.357680/page-2#post-3759232

 

Because that forum explicitly says non-religious, I'm copying my post here just in case I get deleted. For being a site that is dedicated to sexual abstinence, it's amazing to me that it can be so anti-religious and anti-Christian. It's hard not to look at this book and look at abstinence in general and not make Biblical connections.

The evils of masturbation and treatment (onania)
By Dr M Tissot
https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/pdf/b30534070

This is a really interesting book. I love the old English. These guys were no idiots. They understood a lot of biology, science, and also had a keener moral insight than we have today. And all this before electricity, computers, and all our advanced medicines which seem to cause more harm than good.

Yea, that's what struck me as he didn't seem to be a puritan (not sure), but he seemed to be commenting on masturbation as a problem that society generally agreed was unhealthy, and destructive, if not immoral. Also, dreams of immoral sex with emissions were seen as pollutant to your soul. How far we fallen.

I assume you know what Onanism is and it's Biblical roots. I'm not sure that passage is about MO, but more about birth control. Interesting that back then, everyone accepted that it was MO. It kind of shows that men have been struggling with sexual desire and Masturbation for years, but it's only been recently that we were told to accept it. I'm in my 50's but I remember in high school, my pastor talking with the youth about sexual purity and he literally said, the Bible doesn't say anything about Masturbation, and insinuated that it was a better outlet than acting out in sex. I remember thinking in my heart, I just know that is wrong, and that he is wrong, because I know how destructive it is for me.

No he wasn't advocating porn use. These were the days before the internet, and I had little access to porn and wouldn't have kept it due to shame and guilt if I got it. I did have access to R movies which was a porn starter for me. Anyway, for me I know it was compulsive, and addictive. I also know my fantasy world was degenerate. In my immature mind, I couldn't articulate all that other than I felt it was wrong for me to do and I felt guilt and shame when doing it. Not because someone ever told me not to, I just knew it was lust.

Here's something I got out of the preface: "My design was to write upon the disorders occasioned by masturbation, or self pollution, and not upon the crime of masturbation. Besides, it is not the crime sufficiently proved, when it is demonstrated to be an act of suicide? Those who are acquainted with men, know very well that is is much easier to make them shun vice by the dread of present ill, than by reasons founded upon principles , the truth of which has not been sufficiently inculcated into them. "

Yea, that's basically the nofap approach. He realizes it's easier to motivate someone to virtue by explaining the harms of the vice as opposed to discussing the morality of the action. He obviously believes it is immoral based on the use of his descriptive words. From the examples he gives, it seems most in his culture agreed with him. Yet he knew that a compulsion like this cannot always be abandoned just because you believe it bad, you must understand how harmful it is. The reference to suicide is also insightful. This is an act of self harm, but the harm itself is evidence of the immorality of the action.

The funny thing is no one ever told me it was possible to remain abstinent, or what to do with pend up desire until nofap. About 12 years ago before nofap I studied some online resources based on Taoism that semen retention makes you stronger and it is better to retain to maximize your masculinity. That was good, but I didn't completely buy it because I was married and wasn't sure it was possible (could it be a eastern myth?). It did help me for a short time, but I was edging so I couldn't maintain it.