Me and Addiction and Sex.

After writing last night I feel compelled to write more, which is funny, since I thought I'd abandoned this blog. Guess now that I'm actually thinking about these issues I really do need to have space to write my thoughts down, and maybe that's the whole point.

While thinking about my resentments, I have started to take another look at my sex life, and I have to say it's a touch of a sore-spot for me. I'm proudly sex-positive, and I believe that healthy sexuality is good for everyone, and that that "healthy sexuality" is different for every person. This belief is important to me - it forms part of my general views on tolerance and understanding others, and itself is linked to how I have accepted other parts of my identity, specifically my sexual and gender identities, and it's important to me that people enjoy their sexuality, however it manifests.

But I am one hell of a messed-up person when it comes to actual sex. I'm a crazy-ass neurotic man who barely has a clue what he wants and has a harder time asking for it. And that's before I started being treated.

My first attempt at treatment for my addiction was to stop very specific fantasies that I had found terribly distressing, but couldn't stop being aroused by. The treatment I was given was basically a form of mental reprogramming - to dissascociate arousal with the fantasies I had, and work to rebuild arousal with more acceptable fantasies, while at the same time building negative emotional attachments to the previous fantasies, by imagining the consequences of anyone finding out. It's fairly standard procedure, but it's by no means an exact science, and what I found later on is that this approach actually pushed me back into my shell quite a bit - when I realised that these particular fantasies were terrible, it made me very uncertain as to what else in my fantasies were unacceptable or not. Didn't mean I stopped using those fantasies, but there was a lot of angst about where, exactly, I was allowed to draw the line.

And that was problematic, because I was a pretty natural kinkster. I was nominally a switch, but after the fantasies I started pulling away quite a bit from the dominant fantasies, especially about women, and started pushing more into submissive fantasies, and fantasies surrounding men. Further pulling me away from liking girls was a pretty bad breakup with a girlfriend, and a lot of unresolved issues about that. And then there's my rape a short time after that, and you'd better believe that that's screwed up my sexuality a whole bunch more.

I've digressed a little. My apologies.

The point I was intending to make is that previous attempts to "fix" my sexual problems have had this big tendency to just bring up new issues, so now there's this next big scare - By working to control my porn addiction, what will this do to my already screwed up sexuality?

Already I find there's a few bits and pieces. I can now no longer watch porn, but my boyfriend still can. He doesn't watch it often, and he's very particular about the kinds of porn he watches (a complete opposite to my behaviour), but he does still occaisionally find interesting things that, because of the images involved, I simply can no longer participate in sharing with, certainly not alone. Even though my primary issue is the private watching of porn, I'm still very wary of such images anyway, and it makes me nervous.

And with all the issues I have around women, I still occaisionally get into questioning sessions about whether I'm really bi or whether I'm just gay. After all, going through all the steps to have sex with a woman is frightening and nerve-wracking. I just can't "pick-up", because I get very anxious around women I don't know.

I'm sure that this is all irrational - I'm certain that part of the addiction was caused by my screwed up sexuality, and that working through all the issues that surround the addiction will probably include working on that sexuality. Still, with everything I've been through? I worry.