Porn

One Month Sober – Reflections

Today, February 1st 2015, marks the first full calendar month that I have stayed sober from pornography. Throughout my efforts to quit last year, the longest I ever went was 13 days, and that was once – generally I would relapse on average after about 7 days, so I’m pleased to have made it to one month. Here’s my progress month-by-month since July 2014:

The first chart is from a Google Sheet with a simple table containing each month, number of days in each month, number of days clean that month, and what that is as a percentage. The second image is from my Google Calendar, into which I mark each day with a red X or a green🙂 depending on whether I acted out or not. As you can see, January is all green!

Ironically, this milestone comes at a period of time when I’m feeling a bit down and unmotivated. I’ve had a tough few days over the last week, in terms of urges, and it has left me feeling a bit embattled, so I thought it would be worthwhile as a motivational tool to reflect on the positive changes I’ve seen over the last month.

Before I start, two caveats:

Firstly, I’ll tell you now that this is not going to be a revelatory-filled I’M LIVING A NEW LIFE-type experience. I’m actually a bit put off by the expectation set by many ex-porn addicts that you should settle for nothing less than a total revitalisation of your life, a fresh view on the world, spiritual enlightenment, etc etc. I think it is slightly irresponsible to be preaching these things without proper context – everyone has different experiences and is at different steps of the journey and I’ve definitely felt disappointed with my progress when compared to these ideals. So now I’m learning to be content with the progress I’ve made in relation to my own life and goals.

The second caveat is that many of the things I’ve noticed are not directly because I’ve stopped watching porn, but more because of the self-exploration I’ve been taking myself through. This month I’ve really focussed on revisiting my childhood, my parenting, my schooling and other factors throughout my life that have led me to be who I am today and led me to addiction. Exploring these, and exploring how I deal with emotions and other daily life events, has been the single most significant factor in improving my life and achieving success with sobriety in the last month.

So, here’s what my wife and I have noticed about my behaviour over the last month:

I’ve started to face up to my responsibilities. I’ve stopped thinking they are things to avoid at all costs, no matter how trivial, and started to embrace them. My wife is pregnant and I’ve been very slow in stepping up to the duties to take care of her, but she’s noticed a marked improvement now – she no longer notices resistance when she asks me to do something!
I’ve started to become more aware of my emotions as they happen, and therefore been able to take appropriate action to ensure I respond to them in a healthy way rather than my default negative self-soothing and destructive behaviour. For example, if I’m feeling especially tired on the cycle home (I commute about 10 miles on the bike) and I can feel grumpiness setting in, I make a plan to eat food and consciously relax as soon as I get home, and don’t allow my stress to get the better of me.
As a consequence of being more aware of my emotions, I’ve been able to stop taking out my withdrawal-induced frustrations on my wife. Many times in the past I would blame her (in my mind) for the anxiety I’d feel when the urges struck, simply as a way of deflecting responsibility, but now I have been able to rise above that and not allow my own struggles to spill over as resentment, anger and frustration directed towards her.
In line with my recent appreciation of the importance of empathy in the recovery process, I’ve been trying hard to think about others and not put myself first. Also trying to do more selfless things – actions which help others at no benefit to myself, in order to learn how to connect better with others.
I’ve been going to bed with my wife nearly every night, when in the past I would stay up playing games/watching porn almost every night of the week.
I got to a place of understanding where I felt confident enough to tell my sister about my addiction.
I’ve noticed similarities to porn addiction in other behaviours, such as mindless computer gaming or other means of escapism. I may not be ‘addicted’ to them, but I still use them for the same purposes as porn – namely avoidance, reclusion and escapism. I’ve stopped playing games for hours just to pass the time, and instead limit my time so I’m only conducting these behaviours for shorter periods, with a healthy mindset (i.e. not trying to escape!).

It has been a really pivotal month for me. It has also been really hard. A self-conducted character assassination, whereby I pull apart as many elements of my personality as I can and explore where they came from and how they fit into addiction, has been a pretty intense activity, and sometimes leaves me feeling a bit deflated. It can be hard to know what areas of myself are just normal fluctuations of an average personality and how many have strayed too far from the norm into unhealthy or addiction-tempting realms. It has also led to some less than favourable appreciations of the role my parents have played in my life, which has led to its own set of challenges as I still have a strained relationship with my father to put into its place in my new ‘healthier’ life.

I’ve also had some incredible support from others, without which I probably wouldn’t have made it. I’ve been going to weekly Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings and spent time before and after each gathering meeting fellow addicts, sharing stories and getting inspired by their tales. I’ve connected with loads of fellow addicts on twitter, such as @MattNoFap, @Neverfap and @NoFapCyclist, who have all shared their experiences and motivations and together we’ve become a pretty good team!

If I was to give any advice to others in the same boat, trying to hit their own sobriety targets, I’d say:

Connect with other addicts and non-addicts as deeply and honestly as possible, be it on the internet or face to face. Everyone’s journey of public admission is different so only do what you feel comfortable, but don’t be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone – you’ll be surprised what you might find.
Understand why you use porn. What pains or realities is it helping you to deal with? I can’t stress enough how important this is. Just abstaining from porn but not learning about yourself achieves only sobriety, not recovery.
Listen to yourself. Learn to respond to your own emotions in a healthy way. Spot when you get stressed, tired, annoyed etc and make sure you do something healthy in response.
Think about others and try putting them first for a change. Ask how others are. Pro-actively offer help without having to be asked.

I remember when I simply couldn’t imagine staying sober for a month, so I’m really grateful to all those who have helped me get here – thank you all of you, you amazing people – but also to myself, for putting in the effort. It is certainly a rewarding feeling. Now for month 2! I’m certainly not complacent about my ability to stay sober another month but I know it is possible – if I put in the work I can do it.

Here goes!

Milestone #4 – Telling my sister

This weekend I told my sister about my addition. To me this represented the 4th milestone in my journey of recovery. Those milestones have been:

#1 – Admitting I was addicted to internet pornography and telling my wife

#2 – Going to see a therapist for the first time

#3 – Going to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting for the first time

#4 – Telling my sister

Deciding to tell her

Beating my addiction has had surprisingly little to do with day-to-day practicalities (i.e. how to physically not look at porn – although these have been very important), and instead has predominantly been about self-evaluation – understanding who I am, how I got here, what my life is like and how I deal with and respond to it, and how I use porn in relation to all these things. That’s an army of blog posts in itself, but the one aspect that led me to telling my sister was the idea of removing secrecy. Addictions thrive in secrecy and shame, and it became clear to me that I wanted to unify my ‘secret’, porn-watching persona with the public-facing persona everyone knows, so that I’m moving forward with more honesty in my life. That meant embracing the fact that I am an addict, and not hiding it; living a unified self that includes my addiction without hesitation and reservation.

And so it became clear to me that I needed to start telling people. Not immediately, hurriedly or insensitively, but methodically and in a considered fashion that is conducive to my recovery and mental well-being. I spent a lot of time thinking about who I could tell. My wife already knew, so I started thinking of friends and family. I don’t have a lot of (any?) close friends these days so I couldn’t think of anyone that would share this journey with me – I didn’t want to just tell a friend and then move on and not see them again for 6 months; it would be a waste and wouldn’t really benefit either of us. I wanted to tell someone who was a significant enough part of my life that they would share this journey with me, for better or worse.

Last week, once I got home after a long evening with members of a London Sex Addicts Anonymous meet-up, I had a period of clarity of mind where it became clear to me that I should tell my sister. I had actually initially thought of telling her and my dad at the same time but due to the fact my dad has his own sex-related issues (totally unacknowledged but suspected by my sister and me), I decided to treat him separately – he may be in early stages of denial and so I’d need think of a very tailored approach to talking about this with him. So, putting my dad to one side left my sister. She is family, and she needs to know what I’m going through.

The call itself

I texted my sister: “So, I have something I’d like to talk to you about. Do you have an hour for a chat sometime?”. She lives in a different town so doing it in person wasn’t an option, and I couldn’t wait ’til we next met up. We agreed a time, and yesterday she rang me and I sat down on the sofa to explain the biggest secret of my adult life.

I told her that I’ve been assessing my life (we’ve talked about it quite a bit recently) because I’ve realised I’ve not been dealing with it in particularly healthy ways, and in one way in particular – porn. I explained how I had started looking at porn at school, and how 15 years later it was so woven into my daily life that I didn’t even realise there was a problem until I tried to quit, at which point it occurred to me I might have an addiction. We talked about the steps I’ve now taken to quit – seeing a therapist, going to SAA meeting, involving my wife, assessing my life. We talked about my childhood, our parents, my schooling and how my experiences may have led to porn, and we talked about porn addiction – what it is, what it isn’t etc. I recommended a film to watch (“Thanks for Sharing“) if she wanted to get an idea of the SAA meetings.

It couldn’t have gone better. Due to her slight resentment of my dad and his sex issues (he’s recently admitted to infidelity in his earlier days), I was worried she may have associations and not respond well. I couldn’t have been more wrong – she was totally unfazed, completely supportive and made it clear she was proud of me for opening up and that she thought I was really brave for telling her and for the general steps I am taking in my life. It was an incredible thing to hear – that this thing I’ve been doing that I’ve held on to so secretly is now known by someone and they don’t mind – she hadn’t fallen off her chair in disgust, she hadn’t disowned me – she was just supportive and encouraging. My sister is a very inquisitive person, and so she started asking loads of (non-intrusive) questions about addiction etc, which I was happy to discuss. Not that I had any doubt, but this call demonstrated a maturity of character in her that was awe-inspiring – I had handed her a piece of my self – my weakness – and she handled it perfectly and with such compassion and I was/am so grateful.

The call lasted an hour. I ended it by making it clear this is not a taboo subject. I encouraged her to ask me (as long as she is comfortable doing so) how it is going whenever she wants, and to not feel like she shouldn’t talk about it – it is important we all face this openly as the secrecy is the most dangerous aspect. I welcome questions and discussion, and I asked her to tell her husband who I get on well with, so at this point, a day later, he too now knows about this.

How does it feel?

It does feel like a weight has been lifted, but not the usual storybook type weight you’d imagine, just a feeling of reassurance that I’ve made a little (or big?) step further into recovery. The most significant thing I feel is that by each step like this I take (e.g. the milestones above), I feel like I’m putting my old acting out days further behind me, and putting more of a space between the old addict-me and the future in-recovery me. Each step makes it harder and harder for me to imagine slipping back into dark days of my addiction.

The next milestone?

What’s the next milestone? I think probably telling my in-laws. That’s going to be harder – they are emotionally attached to their daughter, are of an older generation, and are extra-protective of her right now as she is pregnant. Telling them that their daughter’s husband is a porn addict may be tough for them to hear, so my wife and I are mulling this one over to figure out the best way. We think they need to be told something because my wife is finding it harder and harder to hide the fact I’m going to SAA and therapy – she is close to her mum and she doesn’t like hiding things. We could perhaps tell them I’m getting help for an addiction, or just personal issues, but not be specific, but for me that’s just more secrecy so I think we’d have to go all the way. Watch this space.

So there we go. My wife, my sister and my brother-in-law now know about my addiction – that I am a recovering sex addict (specifically porn, but I think sex addict is the correct term as porn addiction is just one form of sex addiction). I feel more people are going to find out soon enough. I’m excited and scared at the same time, but I know I’m doing the right thing.

Christmas Eve 2014

Its Christmas Eve and I’m full of thoughts.

I suppose it is inherently a time of reflection but for me my current situation in life has left me to perhaps be more reflective than usual.

I went to my second 12-step meeting yesterday, and the majority of people who shared expressed worry about getting through the Christmas period. I remember thinking at the time that this doesn’t really apply to me as I don’t consider Christmas to be a time of weakness, but I’ve been unexpectedly hit by it in a different way.

My mum died about 14 months ago. Last Christmas was pretty terrible but at least my sister, brother-in-law, wife and gran were here with me and my dad. This year, it is just me and my dad. We’ll be having Christmas Day at my 96 year-old grandmother’s house as she has become too frail to leave the house.

So I’m feeling pretty down. Thoughts about my mum, my gran and also some clarity over the relationship I have with my dad. He harbours his own secrets. Cannabis and sexual activity (porn, maybe more) I think, but we’ve never spoken about it. Just like my days of old, he lives a successful and social life, but I suspect he has secrets that no-one knows, and he appears to be ok with that. I think he’s probably past the point of having a desire to reflect and change his ways, and I have no desire to visit these areas of his life with him.

However, I am currently in the process of trying to understand how I can remove the shame and secrecy from my addiction and my life. This means formulating a plan to start telling people about my addiction, and living a singular, honest life that includes my addiction, rather than keeping it secret. Unfortunately, being at home with my dad has made me stare into the face of someone doing the opposite – unable to share any form of honest emotion with their son and content to hide secrets and keep up appearances. I don’t see any way I can further my relationship with my dad while this dynamic remains, and taking it a step further I could say that interacting with him may actually be a detrimental activity for me. That’s a strong thing to say so I’ll sleep on it.

So what’s next? Well, my predictions / goals for 2015 are:

I will become a dad in February
I will continue going to 12 step groups, become more familiar with the programme and start to see some tangible improvements in my life, especially in the duration of my periods of abstinence
I will start to tell people about my addiction, including my sister

I feel like I am going through a mental upheaval – revisiting almost all areas of my life to assess the state I am in today and who “I” really am. The goal being to restore balance to my life and adjust specific areas in order to compensate for the loss of my addictive behaviour. I don’t think I fully appreciate the extent to which this will change my daily life (for example, I received two phone calls today from 12-step attendees I met last night, just checking in on me. That could be a daily occurrence for the next x months or years…!). But change is good and I will embrace it.

I don’t know better. There is so much help out there if I seek it out and allow it into my life. It will just take commitment, courage and humility, and if I can’t offer those things in my life, what sort of life will I really be living?

Happy Christmas everyone. I wish you all a wonderful holiday and a fulfilling and empowered 2015.

The Identities of an Addict

Recently I have become more and more aware of the separation I feel between the ‘outer’ me – that people see and interact with – and the ‘inner’ me, that is constantly aware of my struggle with porn and the fact that those I am speaking with have no idea about this secret of mine.

Despite being regarded as a very outgoing and socially capable person, I often feel very isolated internally when I am with other people, because I am so conscious of this secret. I have also started to slowly admit that despite my ‘socialness’, I have actually very few, if any, close friends. At least not any that I see with any regularity. I have good friends that I see maybe once a month, but that’s about as good as it gets.

In thinking about why this might be, (and credit to a new therapist I have been visiting), the notion arose that I may be subconsciously struggling to build these relationships because of the knowledge that no-one is really getting to know the ‘full’ me – they are always shielded from the fact I have an addiction (because I don’t tell them).

One of the benefits I think I will get out of going to a 12 step group like SAA is the ability to meet people who, for the first time in my life, will be able to get to know all of me – warts and all. They’ll know what I’m going through and vice versa, and there will be no hidden agenda or pre-occupation (hopefully).

I’m quietly quite excited about this prospect. Of being able to speak to another human being without permanently having to remember I’m hiding something from them and worrying about saying something that may give away my secret.

Merging the two identities

Leading on from this, I now need to consider what my life will be like in recovery (not that I’m doing very well at recovery at the moment). I.e. I think I need to start defining myself as an addict, rather than as a normal everyday person with a dirty secret. I need to stop living two lives – one being the normal guy that people know and like, and the other being a shameful and embarrassed porn addict.

So I think I’ve decided I’m going to start telling people, with the goal being to, at some point in the future, be living a relatively open and honest existence whereby people know I’m a porn addict and it isn’t something I actively try to hide from people.

This is obviously a huge step but I think it will be a powerful one that could really deflate the shameful feelings associated with the addiction and allow me to continue to tackle it in a healthy way and start growing a single identity of who I really am.

The question is who to tell! And when. I rarely get the time to spend with any of my friends one-2-one for a period of time, so I don’t have an answer yet, but I’m working on it.

A pretty detailed account of my (porn) life

Today, while browsing r/NoFap, I came across a video called “Share Your Story” by a guy (supposedly) called Noah Church. Watching his other videos, he’s an articulate and charismatic ex-porn addict who is spreading the word about addiction and providing help to those still struggling with it (here’s probably his best video – a 20 minute entertaining speech about his journey).

In the comment of the video, he recommended r/NoFap and also the Your Brain Rebalanced forum, as great places to share your story, and actively encouraged doing so.

So, I headed over to Your Brain Rebalanced to see what’s what. There I found a very active community of people so I set to work writing my ‘introduction’. This turned out to be a ~3,000 word account of my life from a porn perspective, from school, to adulthood, to the admission of my addiction to both myself and my wife, through to the present day and my thoughts and current actions regarding recovery.

I may post it separately on this blog as a record, but for now, here’s a link:

By way of introduction, my story so far

Trauma, Self-Esteem and a Hypothesis

There are two aspects to beating porn addiction – the physical process of abstinence and the methods of doing so, and understanding the psychological background and context that has led to the addiction. They say that to really explore the latter, you need to achieve the former. This post is about the latter.

Ever since reading Paula Hall’s excellent book Understanding and Treating Sex Addiction, and having a short conversation with her skype-to-skype, I’ve been very interested in exploring my childhood and other environmental factors of my youth that may have led me to porn addiction – factors that hadn’t previously occurred to me.

Trauma

One key area to explore is trauma. Trauma comes in various guises, from the obvious (e.g. child abuse), to the more subtle (e.g. lack of the required dosage of love and affection as a child, separation from parents, etc). Having spent most of my pubescent life in boarding school (from age 8 to 19), the concept that this itself could be considered ‘a traumatic event’ was intriguing to me. I have always told anyone that would listen that I wouldn’t send my kids to boarding school, primarily because I want to be the person they come home to and talk to about their day. For me, for 11 years, that person was a House Master, Matron, or most often no-one. I had a very formal relationship with my parents and we did not talk about anything too personal, and still don’t. They were masters of ‘keeping up appearances’ at the expense of honesty and emotion, but I never judged them for it – they are from a different generation.

Self-esteem and self-worth

So what has any of this got to do with porn addiction? Well, the last few weeks have revealed other areas of my psyche that relate to this and provide further context. Firstly, my wife sent me packing for 2 days to do some thinking, and one of the key things that dawned on me is that I have pretty low self-esteem. I genuinely don’t consider myself that interesting a person, and am confused as to why, for example, a daughter would look up to me. I don’t think I’m worthy of being a father, and generally consider my contribution to this planet as minimal. Low self-esteem is a good recipe for destructive behaviour, so this is an interesting area for me to explore in terms of understanding my porn addiction.

In addition, as a soon-to-be dad, I have been reading Raising Girls by Steve Biddulph, and one of the first things he talks about is how the most fundamentally important thing for a child is to receive copious amounts of love from its parents. Babies are by default in a state of ‘panic’ and need constant re-assuring and calming, so they know that everything is ok and they are loved, which gives them the future confidence to go out into the world and explore. Without that love, they will not have the same levels of courage, and an inner doubt can manifest. Now I’m not saying I wasn’t loved as a kid, but it is interesting to consider whether living away from my parents for 11 years may have had an impact on my own self-worth.

False confidence

People who know me regard me as confident and outgoing, able to strike up a conversation with anyone. My wife envies that in me as she is ‘shy’ in social situations (she’s actually just got a lot of self-confidence and so doesn’t feel the need to make small talk – something I envy in her). I, on the other hand, have always considered this confident persona quite artificial and fake, and not the ‘real’ me. Quite what the ‘real’ me is I’m not sure, but I feel as a result I have lots of short-term and shallow conversations/relationships and hardly any long-term deep ones. As an example, I don’t really have a single friend who I see regularly, or who would notice if I wasn’t around, at least not for a month or so. This reinforces my opinion that I’m just not that interesting, or nice, a person.

So to tie it all back to porn addiction, what I am exploring here is the sort of person I am, the upbringing I had, my view of myself, and my interpretation of my relationships with others, and how all of this could fit together to create a state of mind that may lead to addiction. If addictions are a way to numb negative emotions and escape from personal troubles (consciously or unconsciously), then I owe it to myself to understand what it really is that I’m trying to escape from or avoid with porn. I’ve always thought it was general adulthood responsibility, but I’m starting to think I may have deeper issues with my own self-worth that may be encouraging me to seek solitude in porn.

A working hypothesis, based on the above

How about this:

A prolonged period (11 years) of separation from a loving family home, combined with life in the bullying culture of a boarding school, contributed to the formulation of an overly confident persona that allowed deeper emotional shortcomings to remain unresolved. This, combined with the usual teenage desire to rebel against authority (which in my case was the school regime of being told what to do from waking ’til sleeping), the perfectly-timed arrival of the internet and the porn it contained, and the on-set of puberty, was the perfect storm of escapism, allowing me to find solace in staying up at my computer for hours after ‘lights out’, watching porn and feeling superior in my rebellion, while unintentionally prohibiting the emotional development that I needed in order to avoid what has resulted in a low self-valuation and the continued regression into addiction.

Lots to digest! And who knows I may be barking up the wrong tree, but this feels like an important process to go through.

Now what?

And then of course, the question is – how to resolve it!? One idea I’ve had, to counter my low opinion of my impact on this planet, is to to volunteer in my community. My two main skills are guitar and IT, so if I could give kids free guitar lessons, or go round people’s homes and fix their computers, I think that would make me feel like I am making a (albeit small) contribution to other people’s lives. Sure, its a bit of a selfish reason, but better that than not helping at all right?

I think I also need to truly accept that I am loved, and that I am not inherently a bad of worthless person, but that perhaps I’ve just not made the right choices and prioritisations. Addressing the emotional connection with my parents will be the hardest part, as my mum died last year and my dad has his own issues to deal with, and I really have no desire to try and have any form of emotional conversation with him about any of this.

Seeking support from others though will be crucial, either via a 12 step program, an admission to a friend of family member, or private therapy. I am booking a couple therapist to go and see with my wife, as the group therapy course I had pinned my hopes on isn’t starting now until January.

Reflections

I am writing this post from a hotel room. My wife asked me to spend time alone to reflect on the current situation that we are in. Things are, as you can imagine, getting pretty tough. To be asked to spend a few days away from home by your wife is a startling reminder that the addiction has a tangible and serious impact on her.

There are two things that she feels I need to focus on:

My battle with porn addiction and what I am going to do about it
My lack of support when it comes to her pregnancy

The first one we all know about. The second one is where I have avoided the day to day tasks and other pre-fatherhood responsibilities that I know I have to do, like researching, reading, planning etc. Instead I just play computer games, or generally do anything that doesn’t involve facing the upcoming change in my life.

Looking back at the last few months, it is clear I haven’t responded well to the idea of becoming a father. I think this boils down to a few key reasons:

I doubt my ability to be a good father
I don’t think I was ever really ready to be a father (having a child was 95% my wife’s idea that I supported because it made sense – I knew I wanted to have kids, and I didn’t think I’d ever grow up enough to pro-actively make that choice, so I was happy for my wife to lead the way)
Due to my porn addiction, I do not feel I deserve to be a father

That last one is interesting to me. The continued battle with my addiction has generally made me feel like an inferior human being. I feel that I am a slave to an external force that I have given in to, and as such I have surrendered my dignity and rights to consider myself a self-sufficient, responsible human.

There are a few other truths that I want to focus on.

My continued use of porn is no longer a solo activity – it is having a direct and significant negative impact on the mental, and potentially physical, wellbeing of my wife.
My marriage is in jeopardy
If I want my marriage and future family to survive, I have to quit for good, once and for all.
I need to face the responsibilities that lie ahead of me as a father
I must provide more support for my wife

On reading them, they sound so obvious, but it is so easy to get into a rut of denial. My constant inability to quit porn has demoralised both me and my wife, to the extent that I regularly do not feel I will ever quit – that I can’t quit. This isn’t true. I can, and I will, but it is so easy to think that just to ‘go back to how things were’, looking at porn, would be so much easier. But that’s not an option.

So I need to get back track with a pro-active plan to beat porn. I’m just so afraid of saying this because of how many times I’ve said it before. How do I know if this time is for real? What if it is for real but it isn’t enough? That’s what scares me – that I will never succeed.

Anyway, my initial plan is:

Remember that watching porn is a CHOICE. Nothing is more important to remember than this fact. I CHOOSE to watch porn, which means I am choosing to risk my marriage, choosing to hurt my wife, choosing to live as a slave. I must remember this every waking minute of my day. I can choose not to watch porn. It won’t be an easy choice, but I am in control of my life and able to make that choice.
Maintain constant awareness and mindfulness of my addiction. Spend a lot of time on WordPress blogs and Reddit’s NoFap section. Engage with others on twitter. Write blog posts. Write in my journal. Keep the fight at the forefront of my mind, as slipping into ‘normality’ is where the dangers lie.
Listen to my wife and support her. She is going through a lot and needs my support. Do my chores, don’t be difficult, and just stop being a lazy, self-interested slob.
Attend the group therapy sessions that I am booked in for, starting next week. This should be a significant milestone as for the first time ever I will meet other people in my position, and be able to talk to them. Dealing with this on my own has been really, really hard.

Two quotes come to mind that I’ve always remembered throughout my life, that ironically both are well suited to my life right now:

You’ve only failed once you’ve stopped trying

No-one else will regret what you don’t do

Status Update – more content blocking!

So September is nearly upon us and looking back, August has been probably the toughest month I’ve had to deal with in relation to porn addiction. My anxiety and stress levels have been through the roof, yet I’ve been relapsing at the same regularity as before, so all in all I’m finding it hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

But that hasn’t meant I’ve stopped trying, and one key change I’ve made, and continually refined upon, is implementing a holistic method to block my ability to watch porn on my laptop, tablet and phone. This is only addressing the means, rather than the motivation, but the aim is to help me get to a period of sobriety, which in turn will improve my mental state and increase my chances of a longer-term recovery.

So here’s the current setup (following one from my previous posts on the matter):

Enabled Sky’s (my broadband provider) content filter by enabling through their admin panel. As I have a Sky login (to use their services like remote record), I technically can disable this filter, but if I do, my wife automatically receives an email. By enabling this filter, all porn served to any home device via my broadband connection is blocked, and the filter works very well. There is one workaround to this though:
Using a VPN/proxy server. A VPN is a way of bypassing your ISP’s content block, by requesting web pages via a different domain service than the one your ISP uses. I happen to have a VPN to my work network setup on my personal laptop, so I can easily work from home, and my company does not filter porn on their network for some reason. So the only way to block porn delivered via the VPN is to install software on my laptop which will block porn locally, regardless of what internet connectivity has been used. I have opted to use K9 Web Protection, which does a very good job. My wife owns the password and it blocks all porn and also image searches, unless you use its own safe image search. I am still an admin on my laptop, which means I am technically able to force-delete appropriate system files to disable this block, but it is laborious and combined with the steps below, I’m hoping removing my admin rights won’t be necessary.
Enabled Apple’s adult content restriction on my iPad and iPhone. This is a very strict block that prevents a lot of websites from being shown on my phone, but better to be safe than sorry. Again, content is blocked regardless of whether I use a VPN or not, and it applies to almost all 3rd party apps as their built-in browsers essentially just use the built-in Safari engine. In addition, I have deleted all apps on my phone that can access images or porn, like Reddit and Google Search, and have disabled the App Store so I can’t download 3rd party browsers.

So I am at a point where it is basically impossible to look at porn on my phone or iPad, and the only way to do it on my laptop is to force-delete the K9 software and use my work VPN (where all my access is recorded) to watch porn. There is a huge risk of me using my work VPN, in that I could lose my job.

In addition, I have put in place two additional safeguards into my daily routine. As the most common times for me to watch porn, or try to, are in the morning after my wife has left for work and in the evening after she’s gone to bed, I’ve suggested to her that from now on I get up and leave the house with her (no more lying in bed as she leaves) and go to bed with (no more staying up late). These steps should hopefully compensate for the fact that technically there is a workaround, albeit a laborious and job-risking one, still available.

One key thing I’ve noticed is that the more I implement technical blocks of porn, the more I rely on these blocks as my method of abstaining. This has meant that each time I find a workaround, I go full on and relapse immediately to take advantage of it, then afterwards I plug that workaround and the process continues. By relying so much on the blocks, it has reduced the emphasis on building up my own mental fortifications against temptation. My most successful periods of abstinence have been in the past before I implemented a single block, and now I’ve got blocks enabled, I’m relapsing more frequently as I spend my whole time trying to break them (and often succeeding), rather than spending time building my mental strength and strategies. Now I have basically got the blocks sorted, I need to revisit these original mental techniques to start focussing on resisting temptation and improving my mental well-being, rather than just focussing on the technicals.

I must mention my wife as well – she has been hugely supportive. My stress levels have been borderline depression during my recent relapses and she’s been open to all my suggestions and has supported me all the way. She’s 4 months pregnant and so I feel terrible to be putting her through this but I don’t see any other way – she has to be involved. It is so hard to admit to her when I fail because I know how disappointed it makes her, and it is embarrassing for me, as well as being genuinely hard to do because after I relapse I tend to be at my lowest mental point – depressed, deflated, disappointed with myself, so to then admit this to someone else who will add to the disappointment is hard. But it needs ot be done and she hasn’t let her disappointment flow over into negativity – we always discuss why it happened and what can be done to prevent it again.

So there we have it. This is probably a few blog posts wrapped up into one but I just wanted to get a few things written down. I’m hoping this will be useful or interesting reading for someone at some point in the future!

Blocking porn in my house: how to do it right

When I first started taking my porn addiction seriously, one of my first steps was to implement a content block in my household, to prevent me from being able to watch porn, even if I wanted to. I wrote about the various technical steps in doing this in this post. The basic premise was to apply content blocking at the ISP level (e.g. your internet provider like BT or Sky), rather than at a device level, as this applies the block holistically to the entire house and all devices automatically.

The problem was that I found a workaround, and after a while I just reverted the block as it wasn’t working because of this workaround. Additionally, I felt that simply blocking porn without addressing the underlying desire was just a plaster – it wasn’t addressing the root issues.

However, during my second therapy session, my counsellor advised that although I am right – blocking alone isn’t enough and is just a plaster – it is a good way of helping to achieve a period of abstinence from porn, which is a key step in the recovery process. He advised revisiting the content block solution and so I have done, and this time I’ve plugged the workaround and am pleased to say I now am entirely unable to access porn at home.

The following is a bit technical, but may serve as a useful guide for any others wanting to block porn at home

There are two ways of blocking porn at home. One is by installing software on all of your devices that monitors what the user is doing and prevents any pornographic images or websites from being shown. The second is to apply a similar block higher up the chain, at the ISP level (Sky, BT, Virgin Media), that blocks all porn to all devices in the house. The problem with the first option is that most mobile devices, certainly Apple devices, don’t allow for such software to be installed in the first place.

So my preferred method was to implement the block higher up the internet food chain, so that my any device in my house, regardless of make or model or software, could not access porn. This method is known as a DNS-level block. DNS is a standard method of locating websites over the internet. When you type in a friendly website name like google.com, your ISP takes that name and performs what is known as a DNS lookup, which essentially converts that friendly name into a specific IP address on the web where that website content can be loaded from. When you enable a DNS block, your ISP essentially adds some rules to that lookup service that ensures that if a porn site is requested, instead of looking that site up and showing it to the user, it simply does nothing (well actually it redirects to an information page saying the page has been blocked).

It looks a bit like this:

The tricky bit is that there are many different DNS lookup services out there that all do mostly the same thing, and it is very easy to re-configure your laptop or phone to use them instead of the one that your ISP uses. Google operate a public, free DNS service for example. So for example, if I change the DNS lookup server setting on my laptop to use Google’s service instead of my ISP’s, when I type in a porn website’s name that my ISP is blocking, instead of asking my ISP for the website and receiving a blocked warning, my laptop simply asks a different company for the website address, bypassing my ISP’s name lookup service and gets the full site in return.

So how to fix this? Well I discovered that it is possible to block non-ISP DNS lookups. You do this by reconfiguring your router, and this means that your router can detect if you are trying to use a DNS service other than your ISP’s, and block the traffic completely until you remove the bypass. To do this, you first need to identify your ISP’s DNS service IP addresses (Sky’s are 90.207.238.97 and 90.207.238.99). You then need to add port forwarding rules to your router to block access to port 53 to all public IP addresses other than these IPs. So for me, I created three block rules in my router:

1. 0.0.0.0 to 90.207.238.97

2. 90.207.238.98

3. 90.207.238.100 to 255.255.255.255

This means that the only two IP addresses that my router will allow port 53 to be accessed, which is the port used by all DNS lookup services, are the two provided by my ISP.

The final step was to allow my wife to change the admin password on my router so I can’t log in and remove these rules! This is now done, and I am now unable to bypass my ISP’s content block!

Feel free to get in touch if you’d like more info on this or some help on how to set this up in your house. The only drawbacks is that it doesn’t block porn on your laptop if you connect to a different wifi network, so if you think that is a risk for you, you may want to consider also installing blocking software on the laptop itself. It won’t help for your phone or tablet though but for me blocking at home is removing 90% of the chance of me watching porn.

Monthly report: July 2014

I have been recording in a Google Calendar my daily progress. A green🙂 goes if I did not look at porn that day, otherwise it gets a red X. At the end of each month, I total up the number of days clean as a percentage of total days in the month, with the goal being to see this percentage increase as each month goes by. This is a slightly longer-term view of recovery, rather than just trying to go cold-turkey and then feel like a failure when you slip up (see post Status Update – Taking a longer view for more on this).

So here’s the summary for July 2014:

The stats

Month	Total Days	Day clean	% of month clean
July	31	21	68%

Thoughts

I generally don’t think I did that well in July. It started off well, which was my best streak from when I first restarted my drive to quit officially (which was on 30th June), but then it started declining throughout the month. Still, it is a line in the sand and something to build upon.

Healing My Brain

One man's steps into recovery from porn addiction