Day 1
Alright, here we go! Feeling better about it all again for sure, now that I've had a bit of distance from the relapse. It's always like that for me—tons of funk after a bad relapse, then it fades and I'm able to get perspective again. I've learned a lot over the years about being patient with myself, and not beating myself up. I just still can't avoid the initial waves of feelings. Just have to ride them out generally, before I can really get anywhere.
ANYWAY. I'm back on the wagon now. Last major relapse (back before I started in these forums) it took me a few months to get my momentum back again. This time (as long as I actually
can get back up and keeping going now like I feel I can) the momentum just took me a week or two. So, progress! Not to mention that I cruised past 100 days on my last streak.
I'm thinking a ton right now about how I view women in real life. I've noticed over summer especially that I find it really hard not to be pervy and obsessive about women who are showing skin, viewing it like an "opportunity" that I don't want to miss to check out someone who looks sexy. I'm not super pervy, I manage generally to keep it subtle, but my brain is there and I'm just constantly...aware. Like I have a radar out looking for something to look at.
I have complicated thoughts/feelings about all this. I don't like it, for a few reasons. 1) I'm a "sex is for marriage" kinda guy. I wanna spend 100% of my sexual energy on my wife and only my wife. This is for moral reasons (if you want to put it that way), but I also really believe that's how things work best. Sex operates to it's fullest potential in a long-term committed relationship, and sex is great for those kinds of relationships! Wasted elsewhere. ANYWAY so that's reason #1 why I don't like the constant "sexiness radar" that I feel. 2) It's rude. Even if the woman doesn't notice, it's still a degrading, objectifying, dehumanizing way to treat a person. For one thing, it reduces a whole person down to just their physical body and appearance, which is degrading. For another thing, it treats another person's body like I am somehow entitled to it. Like it is my
right to enjoy their body as much as I can. They exist for my pleasure. Also 3) I don't like the way this radar affects
me. It twists my perception of the world, making me hungry, demanding, and needy instead of being able to just....exist and enjoy things.
Now, what do I do about it? For a long time I've assumed that a lot of this over-sexualization comes from porn, and that the longer I stayed away from porn the more I would be able to just chill out and not few women as sex objects. After all, porn is all about objectifying women. And for a long time during my attempts at recovery my porn use has involved a lot of edging, and a lot of borderline "red flag" behavior, which in a sense makes this sort of thing
worse. It puts me in a mode where I am actively hunting for women to sexualize on the internet, and actively trying to suck as much sexual pleasure as I can out of them. No wonder this behaviour creeps into real life, especially when the porn use always leaves me feeling hungry because I don't orgasm, and sometimes don't even look at actual nudity. The lust and sexual seeking spills over into real life.
And yet during this last streak, I found myself really struggling with this over-sexualization right near the
end of my streak. Being free from porn wasn't enough to free me from this attitude, and in fact I think my inability to turn this off was part of what led me back to porn this time. SO my conclusion I think is that my over-sexualization
does come mostly from porn consumption, but that getting rid of porn won't automatically fix my mindset. I need to work on both at the same time.
So what does it look like to de-sexualize the way I view women? I think I need a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, I will work on my
behavior. Noticing women is ok, even unavoidable, but I can't let my gaze linger. Even if my mind lingers, I redirect my eyes and my mind and tell myself "that woman is more than a body, and you have no rights to her body." Or something like that. On the other hand, I need to keep working on unpacking what's going on inside me about it. Figure out
where this sexual impulse is coming from (because it feels like more than just a physical, normal thing), and figure out how to deal with it. Hopefully the behavior control will give me the mental space to actually work through the internal stuff.