Another year, Another victory

First of all happy new year to all! As I enter the new year, I find myself blogging less and less. I’ve also significantly reduced my involvement of reading and participating in online addiction discussions. I feel that I need to move in with my life, and that distancing myself from the entire sex addiction circle is part of this procedure.

Looking back at 2008, I can proudly say that I did not engage in any type of addictive sexual behavior such as visiting prostitutes etc. And this is quite a success, considering that my last previous “clean” year was way back in 1995. In 2008, there were a couple of close calls, and other warning signs that could have diverted me off track. I guess you can’t truly talk about recovery, if you don’t go through these crises though.

For 2009, I intend to continue to my struggle for recovery by focusing on other parts of my life. I want to try to remove everything in my life that makes me lazy, unproductive, and procrastinating. I want to have a happier, more aggressive outlook on life. I want to wake up each morning and look forward to the upcoming day. I want to treat every problem, every obstacle as a challenge. I want to have goals in my life, and I want the achievement of each goal to give me a sense of fulfillment. I want to steer well clear of any risk of falling back into the addictive spiral.

Good luck to all of you in 2009.

Life inside a sex clinic

There is an interesting news article over on the BBC website regarding life inside a sex addiction rehab clinic. TO be quite honest I did not even know these places existed. It would be interesting to hear comments and feedback from people who have actually spent time in one of these rehab centers.

I am quite sceptical how effective these places can be in treating sex addictions. I mean by isolating someone from all the sexual triggers you may get a short-term abstention, but what happens when this person is released into the free world again? How exactly will he/ she be trained to fight those daily urges that all addicts experience in recovery?

Read the article here

The Pornography Trap

When I first faced up to my sex addiction, I realized how destructive the influence of porn had been. My saturation with porn had created distorted perceptions of women but also sex in general. That is why throughout my recovery, porn became a strict off limits area for me. I installed porn filters on my PC, in this way isolating myself from the potential influence of porn.

For 14 months now, I’ve gone without porn. There have been the occasional unlucky moments where you bump into porn, by coming across late-night tv, or flipping through a magazine with erotic content. Lately however I have found myself having more casual encounters with porn. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. My therapist had emphasized to me in the past, that I should gradually learn to manage porn situations and should learn to treat them like any adult male should. Banishing sexual images from my life is impossible, and I should gradually get used to it again.

However I also found myself in situations recently that made me feel very uncomfortable. I was checking out the newspaper stand the other day, only to come across the porn mags. I looked at them with interest. In fact I toyed with the thought of buying one. I caught my mind coming up with excuses. I tried to convince myself that printed porn is not as bad as internet porn, and I can always throw it out if I want. (I guess because I associated internet porn with my sex addiction)

Worst of all though, I caught myself feeling that weird thrill. Checking left and right if anyone is looking at me. The feeling of doing something secret, no-one needs to know. And this thought gives me the Chills: because it reminded me all too much of the sex addict I used to be.

A big Thank You to all…

One year ago today, Christina suggested that I start a blog to talk about my battle to fight my sex addiction. I took up her suggestion, and a year later here I am, my blog is alive and kicking and its been viewed nearly 16,000 times. Looking back at my past posts its interesting to see how I have evolved in the past year, how my writing has changed as my recovery entered different phases.

This blog has provided tremendous aid in my quest for recovery and I am happy to see that I am also helping many other people. I really want to thank all you out there who regularly read and contribute to my blog, as well as to all those of you who have placed links on your blogs/ websites.

Special thanks to Christina, SAWife, Kellee, A year and counting, Rae, Banana, Charlotte’s web, Mary MPJ, Peridot, Scribbling Mum, Gentle Path, Aneris, pornaddict, straggler, Talie, Adam, Ken, Matt Addict and many others… . All you have kept this blog alive with your comments, interesting contributions and provocative questions. I am sorry if I forgot some of you!

I really enjoy looking at this blog’s statistics and trying to understand how people find my blog, and what interests people the most. For example did you know that my top referrer is Rae from Raes Confessions? Also that my most read post was about the death of a Greek TV actor who paid his sex addiction with his life? (Of course officially no-one mentioned his sex addiction, just that he was assassinated by some gay immigrant). Lots of people stumbled across my blog looking for details of his story.

When people find my blog through sex engines, apart from the predictable search terms like “sex, addict, addiction, partner etc” I also got 70 hits from people who clicked on the tag prostitute (I guess they were seeking out other information). Also people typing in entries like “prostitute in Athens” or “massage Athens” are not uncommon. I hope that at least some of these people devoted a few minutes to my blog before they proceeded to find what they were looking for in the first place.

Finally, for those of who you who are interested how it all started here go my first three posts:

http://sexaddiction.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/hello-world/

http://sexaddiction.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/i-decided-to-face-my-problem/

http://sexaddiction.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/thank-you/

Internet scammer posing as a sex addict

…and he is out to destroy people in recovery

A few days I get this email from a guy called James, claims he is a doctor and is based in Europe. Tells me that he is a sex addict, and how closely he relates to my blog, how he needs someone to talk about his problem, how he’s tried quitting but cant quite manage. Here goes an excerpt from the email:

Reading your story just showed how things could have panned out I suppose, and I wanted to get in touch because reading your blog is a semi alter ego. I would love to talk to some people who can actually understand or relate. I’ve tried to share some of these things with friends of mine who just don’t seem to ‘get it’.

Its always nice to get encouraging comments from other readers. There were however, a few odd things about the email, although I wasn’t really concerned. First of all he claimed how he admitted his entire sex addiction problem to his girlfriend and to his friends. Doesn’t sound like the typical behavior of a sex addict!
I responded to him in a warm manner. Told him some of my stories to see if he could relate. How he can fight this problem. I get a response straight away: Once again, he tells me about how similar people we are, and how we need to unite in this struggle. As I read on, he seems to be very descriptive about prostitutes and young ladies, describing them as pleasure and how great and tempting they are. He even tells me of an encounter with an escort who claimed that she was his soulmate (A whore may give you tons of flattering compliments but she will NEVER tell a client something that warm and emotional)

At some point I realize this guy is flaky. He starts telling me how his big problem is that he is very talented at picking up women, and that he can’t avoid the temptation. Here goes one of my favorite bits

Now get this. I am a trained pick up artist. Yes. A pick up artist!I’m sure you have heard of them. And I’m very good at that. Actually I’m quite well known in it. It’s tough for me talking to you about it because not knowing who you really are, it’s one of those things that I struggle with. I talk to gorgeous women in the bar without a problem… I probably have a success rate of around 35% (from the approach to getting the sex). That’s actually pretty high.

A bit of searching and googling gave me the answers I needed. I realize this guy has some website giving advice on how to pick up women, and he seems to be getting referral money for linking with matchmaking and whoring sites.

I didn’t pursue this conversation any longer. Its obvious this guy is not a sex addict. In fact this person is out to destroy people in recovery by luring them back into their addiction. Everybody watch out and spread the world.

Sexually Transmitted Diseases

Carrying on from my previous post, I want to talk a bit more about STDs. We are living in the age of AIDS, and it seems to me we have forgotten that AIDS is not the only STD out there. We all obsessed about how we could contract HIV, and safely assumed that if we protect ourselves from AIDS, we were shielded from all other STDs.

STDs have been around forever, unlike AIDS which is a post-1980 thing. In fact AIDS is longer considered a life threatening disease (at least not in the western world). However no-one talks about the HPV virus that can trigger cervical cancer as well as other types of cancer. Why don’t we talk about Chlamydia and Gonorrhea that can cause permanent damage to the reproductive system? Worst of all a lot these diseases can be asymptomatic. We can be carriers and pass them on to others. The diseases are not always detected in diagnostic tests.

Unlike AIDS, you don’t need direct sexual contact or open wounds to get some STD’s (such as HPV) They can be contracted by oral sex and simply contact of the genital area. And that’s why sex addicts naively assume that they are not at risk from contracting an STD. As long you use a condom you are not at risk – which is total bullshit. Furthermore it seems that all those whores that market themselves as some glamorous top model escorts that provide premium services are the filthiest and dirtiest. They offer various extra services like unprotected oral sex. They are not licensed prostitutes and therefore never get tested.

How has this changed my outlook on things? My girlfriend is still struggling to deal with the various crap I gave her over the years. She may not have had cervical cancer in the end, but she still has a serious condition triggered by an STD. My latest experience has made me realize how filthy this whole prostitution thing was. Every time I think of a prostitute I think of pure filth and dirt. And I guess in the context of my recovery, it’s another good method to scare away the bad urges.

I don’t expect that a sex addict will change their behavior after reading this post. Addiction is too strong to be put off. Just how a smoker carries on smoking although he/she knows that they could cause cancer to themselves and others around them, just how a druggie knows that the next hit could be fatal, they still carry on doing it. But we must all realize that sex addicts and prostitutes are carrying diseases and they should accept responsibilities for their behavior.

Five days of horror

It all started on Thursday. My girlfriend went for a routine gynecological checkup. Only that it didn’t turn out to be so “routine”. The doctor discovered genital warts and a very dangerous looking lesion on her cervix. He ordered an immediate pap test to determine the nature of this lesion, and mentioned that dreaded “C” word (cancer). What followed for both of us were five days of horror. Five days of waiting for those damn results. Five days of tossing and turning in bed not being able to sleep. Five days of spending endless hours online trying to read everything available on cervical cancer. Five days of looking at cancer images and freaking out.

And for me these were five days of realizing that my girlfriend may have cancer because of me. I read all about the HPV virus, the virus which is known to trigger cervical cancer. I learnt that HPV is sexually transmitted. I learnt that HPV causes those genital warts. I learnt that women who have many partners or whose partners had many partners are at greatest risk. I learnt that condoms do not provide 100% protection against the HPV virus. My sex addict past came back to haunt me. Over the years I had been with all these prostitutes, who knows what I may had contracted from them. And who knows what I passed on to my girlfriend.

The tests came out yesterday. We breathed a huge sigh of relief. There was no incidence of cancerous cells. However the results did show the existence of several abnormalities and infections. For me this was a sharp reminder of the consequences of my destructive past. What for me seemed to be a cheap thrill, put other people’s lives at risk.

I’m reaching out to all those people who may have been exposed to HPV. Get yourself tested for STD’s. And to all you women, whether you are sex addicts, partners of addicts, or prostitutes do regular pap tests. Spread the word. You could save lives.

Whores are Whores

I am sorry if the title of this post offends you. It’s just that I really want to say this as bluntly as possible: Whores are Whores.

I am reaching out to all those sex addicts and people in recovery trying to break free from their whore addiction. I don’t feel like using polite names for them like prostitute, escort, call girl, masseuse, hooker, working girl etc. I am tired of being politically correct.

Sex addicts look for excuses to continue doing what they are doing by bullshitting themselves: She is a masseuse and she doesn’t get paid for sex. Therefore its OK if I do something with her. After all she claims to be very selective and gets sexual only with very special clients. And I guess you are Mr.Hotshot that got lucky with her. Well guess what five other sad morons got the same treatment today from her. Face it she is not a masseuse she is a whore!

And what about that chick that offers the “girlfriend experience” on her website. Its not exactly like going to a prostitute is it? Of course it is, she’s still a whore because there is no such thing as the girlfriend experience. I suppose you are giving her the boyfriend experience, and she is feeling really intimate with you! Face it, she is a whore and she’s getting paid to have sex with you.

And then there’s that escort only charges for her time and for companionship. Yeah right, if she only charges for her time would you pay 200 bucks to go for a walk in the park with her? I don’t think so. You are paying a whore to have sex with you.

Do I need to mention the female profiles on dating websites looking for generous men for casual relationships? They are whores as well.