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.

Step four is tricky.

So tonight I begin to go forth once more with the 12 steps after what seems like a very long absence. To be honest, I have not been spending a lot of time on recovery for the past few months. I haven't relapsed, truth be told, but I haven't been focusing on the sexual addiction particularly much. Part of that is that my personal development has been moving in a lot of other areas - recently I have found a psychologist who is tackling my neuroses from another angle, one that has been challenging and difficult.

But the last few days I've found myself mulling over my life again. Last week I injured my leg as I got off a tram platform, and since then have been unable to work at my full strength and speed, which has meant that I have been clear of distractions for the first time in a while. To be honest, it's been terribly painful, and one thing that has come out of it is that I need to write down about myself. It occured to me that I'd pretty much dovetailed into the fourth step - performing a searching and fearless moral inventory, so tonight I decided to start, and actually write things down.

I've read from the blogs of a lot of other addicts how harrowing this step is, and it certainly is. Although I think I have approached this step like I used to approach my essays - I'd spent all the assignment time mulling it over in my head, and then the essay would just, well, write itself. It's not been that easy, truth be told, but writing it all down almost seems an anti-climax, and it feels like I've already done all the heavy lifting.

And don't get me wrong - thinking about all this stuff is harrowing. Noone really likes to admit when they've done wrong, I certainly don't! To realise that I am a flawed human being is terrifying. But the writing it all down? Not so much. I will be fair - this is not the last night I will be working on this, and I am sure that more will shake out of the tree, and that more will present itself. But it's not like I haven't been taking inventory of myself in the past few months, and certainly since I've hurt my leg. I've just... not needed it.

But just because I've already thought through all these things doesn't mean I don't need to write it down still. I think it's important to have the list, and once I've written down enough that it starts to feel complete, it'll be important for the next steps. And in writing it all down, I get to see where I've been thinking and where I haven't - for one thing, the Good side of the ledger is woefully bare. Not a lot of thinking done there. Also, the question of resentments - I'm not sure I've honestly gone through and thought about the who, what and where of that. Instead of constantly thinking about the same things over and over, I get to shape where my thinking goes now, and shine the torch down a few avenues I clearly hadn't walked around in yet.

It feels like progress, oddly. And I think I feel good about that.