Very enlightening @KevinesKay. I also read a number of times that online porn and the $ involved actually drove most of the technological advances of the internet. From security to advertising to video and audio streaming and compression, etc.
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Okay, so we just got done with my youngest daughter’s birthday party. She turned 6 today. We had a huge Easter egg hunt to start things off and invited the whole neighborhood. Why does my wife always have to throw the biggest parties? We were up until 3 am last night. And I still had to go to work the next morning. But it turned out great. I couldn’t make it. But I came back from work just in time to help clean up. 
Then I took a huge nap. Something has been happening to me.
I have always been guilty of entertaining sexual fantasies throughout my life. Never involving my wife, usually leading to MB. And naps are a toxic environment for that behavior. Well I was really tired. I slept. And I can honestly say that I have not entertained an immoral thought since my sobriety date. It’s not like I would beat myself up if it occurred. But this last relapse has hit me hard. For the first time ever, I’m feeling a deep inner hatred for what I’ve done. And I see the brutality in what I was pleasuring myself with. I’ve been at this well over 20 years. I have never felt this strongly about this before. And each day, I’ve been listening to podcasts from anti-porn sites disclosing how porn has negatively impacted lives. For most of my life, I’ve fooled myself into thinking that these performers were enjoying every minute of it. I wanted that so bad to be true. And I imagine that it will take the remainder of my life to truly embrace reality.
So maybe I’m still in the pink cloud, but the desire to act out is just simply not there. I just can’t bear myself to do it.
Meanwhile, yesterday I caught myself entertaining very violent angry thoughts. Out of nowhere. And I don’t want to entertain rage in my life either. That’s common for my addict to come out in different ways when he doesn’t get his primary fix.
I’m not happy with how I’ve progressed in my to-do list so far this week. When I don’t take good care of myself, it’s natural for resentment to build up inside of me which leads to acting out. So I’ll focus on making some amends to myself and catch up on some healthy outer circle behaviors. That should help release some of that inner resentment. Thanks everyone. Have a great sober rest of the weekend.
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You really are a great poster…I enjoy your experiences in writing.
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I’m glad that this time is different for you. I haven’t really had any temptations to look at porn since my last fail either (almost 2 weeks ago!). Today was a little tougher but mostly because I’ve had a lot more time alone and usually I turn to porn when I get extremely bored. I wasn’t really tempted but the thought came to me multiple times to search something. Fortunately, I was able to quickly bat those away. I expect it won’t always be like this, I’m enjoying it while it lasts and preparing myself for when thise thoughts get a lot more intense.
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@BrLo, it’s good to know that you’re committed to sticking with this. Keep pressing on. You got this.!
Okay, it’s time show my weekly to-do list.
04/02/17
Prayer. 5
Bible. 4
Worship. 3
Pray with wife. 2
Clean. 5
Workout.
Family. 3
Read with girls.
Outreach. 3
Forum. 7
Wife.
Work.
Total 32
More points than last week, but I’m still not very proud. I guess it could be worse.
But I intend to do better. It’s not enough for me to just stop acting out. I’m a good white knuckler. I’ve white knuckled myself all the way to a 6 month chip on more than one occasion. But that doesn’t work for me on a long term basis. I need to work on making my life count.
Still no interest in acting out with porn, MB, or fantasies. But going to the store this morning, I found it difficult to avoid checking out the ladies. I honestly didn’t succumb, but the desire was there. There’s my addict! I thought I lost you for a second! 
Makes me feel alive. In the sexual addiction community, it’s referred to as lacking custody of the eyes.
So I’m at home here on my day off reprogramming myself my reading material on anti-porn sites. Seems to be helping me to get my head back into reality.
It’s so good to be part of this community. Thanks for being here. This is helping me a lot. Keeping working it and stay strong everyone.
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Hi @KevinesKay. I’ve been wanting to ask something and I hope this is not overstepping. In your SA what is your version of sober? You mention many things you don’t do, but what are you allowed? (I assumed your not trying to be asexual)
When I had SA my version of sober was different than yours. Looking on street was ok, even occasional adult imagery was ok, but anything beyond that was a relapse and “cheating” - like strip clubs, or even online chat.
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@JohnSee, you raised a very good point. Because sex addiction can be expressed in so many ways, it’s important for each person to decide what acting out is for him or her.
Please bear with me because I’m going to be using multiple posts to address this question. Thanks for asking, by the way.
@TabulaRasa briefly shared about the three circles in his last post. That refers to a pamphlet published by Sex Addicts Anonymous. And it’s a helpful tool that I use today.
In the three circles, the inner circle represents the behaviors that are considered acting out and loss of sobriety. It’s also known as the bottom line.
The middle circle consists of behaviors that are not necessarily loss of sobriety, but they are not healthy for my recovery. In fact, trampling on my middle circle behaviors for a time will definitely lead to acting out in my inner circle.
The outer circle consists of behaviors that are allowable, healthy, and encouraged.
It’s helpful for me to view this like a target. For years I was living in this little dot of a bullseye where sex was my world, my reason for living. So I was missing out on all the other beautiful things surrounding my tiny little world of sex. By choosing to leave that world, I’m not actually missing out like my addict would try tell me. I’m actually expanding my world. Still, it’s easier said than done.
As with overeating, it’s simply not always healthy to just turn the sex off. That would be acting in. Sexual anorexia can be just as destructive as sexual addiction. It’s common for a sex addict to revert back and forth from acting out to acting in.
In my experience, establishing good boundaries is a lifelong challenge for a recovering sex addict. And it’s something that few put the right amount of time and work into.
In healthy families, good boundaries are established. Kind of like raising and lowering the shields on a starship. Healthy families are able to raise and lower the boundaries as needed to ensure that good things are getting in and bad things are not. In disfunctional families where the boundaries can be too rigid or too loose, bad things are getting in and good things are not.
Many addicts like myself come from disfunctional families so establishing boundaries in my life gives me the chance to reparent myself; to put in my life what was missing as a child.
I’m going to move on and start a new post to describe my journey towards working out those gray areas where a sex addict might question whether a particular behavior is healthy or unhealthy.
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So now onto the next chapter. Things I want to address here are fantasy, pornography, and masturbation.
First of all, let me reiterate that having a sexual fantasy is not necessarily acting out. It doesn’t mean that it’s encouraged either. I can give myself a pretty good fix based on a fantasy alone. So that behavior is in my middle circle. I have never reset my counter because of entertaining sexual fantasies in my head. Could it be possible? If I acquired the habit of fantasizing to orgasm, then yes, I would consider moving that behavior to the inner circle. But that’s not my MO, so keeping fantasies in my middle circle works for me. Let me reiterate that when I mention fantasies, ones that exclusively involve my wife are not in my middle circle. Those are healthy and belong in the outer circle.
When I mention pornography, that can include a lot. Because a porn addict can turn a lot of things into pornography. I can act out from R rated movies, National Geographic, YouTube, Sport’s illustrated. Addicts can even turn The Price is Right into pornography. So it’s important for a recovering PA to determine what his or her definition of pornography is.
For me, I use the Playboy standard. If it’s as graphic as a Playboy magazine, then viewing it, for me, would be crossing my inner circle (or bottom line) and considered loss of sobriety. That doesn’t mean I give myself free reign to check out women in bathing suits or to get high off of artistic nudes. Viewing questionable material or oggling at women walking past me would still be in my middle circle. Unless, I’m masturbating to the stimuli. Then I would consider it loss of sobriety.
Speaking of masturbation, that’s been a hotly discussed point of contention in the sexual addiction community. Sexaholics Anonymous is the only S-fellowship to mandate masturbation to be placed in the inner circle (or bottom line). The other 3 S-fellowships leave it up to each member to decide where to place it. My first sponsor, for instance, did not place MB in his bottom line, but he did make a middle circle boundary to limit his MB to twice a week.
I struggled with where to put MB in my boundaries for a long time. I later decided to just throw it in my middle circle and concentrated on obstaining from my other higher risk behaviors. And that worked for me for awhile. I guess I wasn’t ready for the next step yet.
But as my recovery progressed, I came to a crossroad in my recovery. Let me share something that I wrote in a previous recovery journal.
We all know that there is a lot of misinformation going around about masturbation. It’s been a stumbling block for me. For most of my years, I just threw masturbation in my middle circle and left it at that. However, one day in 2005, I felt like I was truly getting a fix and a high after one episode. I made a decision to stop completely, at least for the time being. I’ve gotten really creative. During that time, one of my night plan behaviors was to sleep fully clothed. However my flesh/addict simply found a way to masturbate fully clothed at night without the use of my hands. This was going to be a tough one.
It was important for me to determine why I want to stop. There are a lot of reasons floating around. Some are extrinsic motivators as described below.
Extrinsic motivators
God abhors it.
My wife hates it.
It’s disgusting.
It’s gross.
It’s sick.
It’s perverted.
It’s immoral.
It’s wrong.
It’s sinful.
It will make my palms hairy.
It will damage my penis.
It’s worship of the Devil.
I have to be perfect.
It will impress others.
The SA program renounces it.
My church renounces it.
I will go blind.
I’m fantasizing about someone’s daughter.
Now, some of these may be noble reasons to stop masturbating. For instance, pleasing God is a noble reason to stop. Pleasing my wife may also be a noble reason to stop. However, neither one of these reasons are sufficient enough to get my soul to choose to stop. Some of these reasons are simply lies. I still refuse to believe that masturbation should be interpreted as worship of the devil. Even if it is, holding that view won’t help me one bit.
What my soul needs are reasons that truly speak to the heart. Ones that make sense to the soul. Maybe a little selfish, but as long as my soul believes in these intrinsic motivators below, I stand a better chance.
Intrinsic Motivators
The fantasies in my head while masturbating depict a woman more magical than depicted in any pornography I’ve ever seen. That makes it, for me, counterfeit sex. Although there is no guarantee that I will ever have genuine sex or love in my life, using counterfeits is not going to get me anywhere. It is a guaranteed failure.
I want to embrace more the idea that sex is a privilege and an option as opposed to a need.
Sexual release via masturbation tends to nurture my female side. And I want to embrace my masculine side more.
I want to give myself more opportunities to feel my feelings. My flesh/addict is terrified of certain feelings and will use sexual acting out to run away from them. It has severely impacted all of my relationships. When I’m feeling a sexual urge, I’m never considering the fact that I’m just numbing my feelings. I’m just looking forward to the narcotic feeling that sexual acting out brings. I’m like a junk food addict whose body craves junk food constantly, but actually, deep down inside, needs healthy nourishment. I constantly crave sexual acting out thinking that it is all I need. But actually, deep down inside, I need to allow my true feelings to come out.
My addiction was there to help me cope with the pain I was dealing with when I was young. At times, I’ve created and allowed painful situations to provide the excuse and entitlement to act out. As an adult, I am no longer defenseless, and my life is not characterized by pain. For the first time in my life, I am safe. My soul needs to understand this more.
I want to embrace a more realistic view of women and relationships.
Masturbation has stopped working as a sleeping pill, and the release I’m getting from it is becoming more temporary.
I want to challenge and nudge myself into doing other dopamine stimulating behaviors such as working out and, worshiping while singing and playing the guitar, instead of using masturbation to shoot myself up with dope and remaining passive.
I want to challenge and nudge myself into getting support from God, family, and friends instead of sexualizing this need by using masturbation and remaining isolated.
I want to be more content with my life and demonstrate a more complete love for myself without needing that magic lady to make me feel better and provide me validation.
I’m already sexually anorexic with my wife, allowing masturbation in my life will just make it that much more difficult to work on that area of my life.
With the new technology of smart phones, tablets, TV, cable, streaming video, it’s virtually just as easy to act out with pornography as with masturbation. Physical boundaries to keep porn inaccessible at home or the workplace just don’t seem to work like they did before. Hence, when I do porn, I will masturbate. When I masturbate, I end up viewing porn. Each one is so accessible that one triggers the other and vice versa.
I want to concentrate more on what I do have; to appreciate, develop, and exercise the many gifts that God has given me, as opposed to feeling sorry and pitiful for what I don’t have, things that masturbation tends to remind me of. I do not want to become a dry drunk. I want to focus on positive acceptance and enjoyment of the life that God gave me in any situation.
So now on to sharing my three circles boundary sheet. sorry @JohnSee. I warned you that my response is long-winded. But I hope it’s helping people see a glimpse of what recovery looks like to me.
As I mentioned before. I don’t view my boundaries as a list of dos and don’ts. My Three Circles is an action plan to help steer my life in a different, better direction. The boundaries need to be specific. They need to be clear enough so that if I have any question if a particular behavior is acting out, I should be able to refer back to my boundary sheet for the answer. I don’t go by my own instincts to determine if I acted out. My instincts can often be wrong. And if my boundaries need to be adjusted, I talk it through with a sponsor or other guides to help me through the process. And yes, boundaries do need to be visited regularly. Changes in my life and environment require me to stay vigilant with them.
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By the way, the choice I made to avoid MB was an awesome one. Do not confuse celibacy with sexual anorexia. I was not married at the time and I was not in a relationship. And sex is a healthy important component in building intimacy between two partners. But it’s not necessary simply for the sake of physical release. That’s something that my addiction fooled me into thinking. But the truth is I don’t need an orgasm. I will not die. I’m not going to explode. Lots of people are living perfectly fulfilling lives without having sex. Why should I be an exception?
This is so well written. I think these concepts are so helpful and could be used in many applications for other issues. I’m not dealing with SA, but I found this very helpful in dealing with my major struggle in life. I’m going to have to really think for a while. Thank you!
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Inner Circle
No using pornography. That includes soft-core and hardcore magazines, videos, pictures, and computer generated images or internet pornography. Use the Playboy standard. If it’s at least as explicit as Playboy, than it’s crossing the bottom line.
No entering of adult bookstores or the adult section of any video store.
No entering strip joints of any kind. That includes lingerie bars as well.
No using of escort services.
No using of street prostitutes.
No paying a woman for any kind of sexual gratification.
No entering massage parlors.
No using phone sex services.
No deliberate acts of voyeurism such as window peeping or looking under skirts.
No taking advantage of opportunities to perform indecent liberties on women without their approval.
No sexual conduct that is deemed criminal.
No having sex with anyone other than your wife.
No attending events places that are notorious for having a lot of sexual energy and tension such as Mardi Gras, Nudes-a-Poppin, or Fantasy Fest.
No deliberate acts of exhibitionism.
Refrain from masturbation. I understand that there maybe moments where you catch yourself starting to masturbate such as in the middle of the night while sleeping. It’s okay. give yourself a break. Count it as loss of sobriety if the masturbation lasts longer than 60 sexonds or if it leads to orgasm.
Middle Circle
No cruising or patrolling. That means no driving or walking the streets hoping to spot street prostitutes. No driving around for no reason. Plan ahead where you’re driving to before you get in your car.
No strolling. That means no walking around with or without the dog to spot opportunities to act out (i.e. peek into windows).
Keep your eyes away from neighbors’ windows as you’re walking or driving down the street.
Avoid using the computer/internet early in the morning or late at night when your wife is sleeping. Limit usage to 2 hours per day. And no browsing; stick to sites you normally use.
Avoid watching TV early in the morning or late at night when your wife is sleeping. Limit watching TV to an hour per day. Don’t allow access when alone.
Limit playing video games to an hour per day.
Don’t carry around too much cash. No more than $20.00 is sufficient.
Stay away from places, environments, or people that are known triggers for your addiction.
Do not keep pornography in your home. No security stashes allowed.
Limit watching movies to one per week.
Don’t read literature that is overly and inappropriately sexually explicit and will trigger your addiction.
Avoid movies that contain a lot of inappropriate sexual scenes, situations, and energy.
Stay away from certain sections of the bookstore or library such as the photography or sex sections.
No gambling.
Be financially responsible and live within your means.
Limit naps so they you won’t disrupt your sleep schedule.
Don’t flirt with women other than your wife. Don’t give them the wrong impression that you’re willing to have something more than a brotherly friendship with them.
Try to maintain a stress-free lifestyle.
Stay out of bars and night clubs.
Avoid violent forms of entertainment such as boxing, “big-time” wrestling, and violent TV shows or movies. Instead, learn to trust God when He says, “Vengeance is mine,” and leave it at that.
Refrain from any lust and fantasy as much as you can. Don’t get legalistic about it. Focus on loving yourself, God, your wife, and others in healthy ways. Refrain from these behaviors with a positive attitude and looking forward to the learning experience of enjoying everything that God has in store for you. And if you do fall into lusting or fantasizing, do take measures to regroup yourself and get back on track.
Outer Circle
Get up early to start your daily routine. Usually, 5:00 A.M. is sufficient. Make sure you get enough sleep to accommodate this.
Eat healthy and nutritious.
Brush and floss your teeth each day.
Shower everyday.
Drink at least 80 ounces of water every day.
Shave everyday.
Wear nice clean clothes everyday.
Keep your home relatively clean.
Get your hair cut every six weeks.
Work out with your weights at least 4 times per week.
Play your guitar at least 4 times per week.
Go to church every Sunday.
Connect with at least 4 friends via the phone or in person each week.
Call at least 1 family member every week.
Actively work your program. Don’t just talk about it. Don’t come into a meeting or a forum empty-handed or with some emotional “garbage” to dump on the table. Make it a goal to continually demonstrate to yourself, to God, and to others that you’re actively working on your program and on your challenges.
Follow your To-Do List everyday. Work to get at least 40 points each week.
Review/Revise your 3-circles boundary sheet every 3 months and have others inspect it.
Keep a positive attitude. Acknowledge and be grateful for all the good gifts that God has given you. Exercise, develop, and appreciate these gifts as opposed to feeling sorry and pitiful for what you don’t have.
Practice the habit of saving money to rid yourself of debt, buy a home, and prepare for retirement.
It’s okay to appreciate a woman’s physical beauty. But furthermore, learn to appreciate a woman more for who she is emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually rather than just focusing on her physical attributes.
Try to maintain a home environment that is peaceful, calm, simple, and serene.
Take the first 10 minutes of each day and the last 10 minutes before you go to bed to pray to God thanking and praising him, interceding for others, and asking for help and forgiveness.
Learn to genuinely give love to others without expecting anything in return.
Do something fun with your children at least 4 times per week.
Read with your children at least 4 times per week.
Pray with your wife each day.
Spend some quality time with your wife at least 2 times per week. Work on maintaining a healthy spiritual, emotional, and physical relationship with her.
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While most recovering sex addicts tend to focus on the inner and middle circles, fighting like mad to not act out. The most important and most challenging circle is, by far, the outer circle. Learning to take care of myself and practicing healthy coping behaviors is really foreign for me, but so rewarding.
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Wow @KevinesKay, thank you so much for sharing all of this, especially it being so personal to you. I have learned a lot here. The three circles seems like an incredibly useful tool for SA, and maybe for eating disorders, and others too. I like how it can adapt to the person, and also the way that an act can move from one circle to the next depending on how problematic it may be. I can’t even recall if the meetings I want to were SAA or another variation. I also went to counseling an group/art therapy at the time. Wish the best for you and your family, and hope this will all become easier with time.
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Wow! I have never looked at it this way. I’m a huge fan. Looks like it’s yime to develop my own circles.
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Hi everyone. Today thoughts of hopelessness are going through my mind. I been at this battle for so long to stop my addiction, and part of me wonders if I’ll ever stop for good.
You see, it’s easy for me to stop acting out. It’s staying stopped that’s difficult. And I’ve had significant stretches of sobriety in my life. Yet with all I know and learned, I still went back into my old way of warped thinking. And today, I wonder when the next round of relapse will occur. Will it be in 6 months? 9 months? A year? Hmmm. I’d be happy with a year. But the slogan says One day at a time not one year at a time. One thing is for sure. I’m not going to act out today. Still disgusted at what I’ve become. Can’t bear myself to even think about acting out today.
Some things that are offering me hope.
One. My thinking. Every time I’ve relapsed, it was always preceded with allowing fantasy to enter my life. I don’t take it seriously when this occurs. I say to myself that it’s okay because I didn’t MB or use porn. Then I keep entertaining them more. And I build up this fantasy world where women desire physical sex with multiple partners that they barely know and have no emotional connection with. My mind starts playing games me entertaining the idea that porn isn’t so bad. It’s just making videos of two or more people loving each other.
Ha! I keep buying into this lie. Part of me wants to believe this lie because it feels so good.
I understand that in order for me to embrace reality, I need accept that this whole process starts with my mind. I cannot continue to be okay with entertaining pornographic fantasies because I will later scam myself into thinking that porn is okay.
Every day I’ve been filling my mind with good things. Reading the Bible. Daily listening to podcasts of people’s experiences in the porn industry. Viewing people’s posts on this app. My plan is to do that every day for at least a year. I need to change my thinking. And if I can master that, I know I can get through this. That offers me hope.
Two. This community is so full of encouragement. And such good examples of people actually getting sobriety and recovering. And this is something that I haven’t had in a long time. Sure, I’ve been with other recovery communities before. But there wasn’t a high success rate. For the record, I was a member of SAA, SA, and SLAA for a long time. In those meetings I made a lot of good friends with good recoveries and I was getting better. But since I married my wife, she doesn’t want me to go to those meetings. It sucked. But I chose out of love to honor her wishes. The bottom line is that I feel that I’ve lacked sufficient support over the last ten years. But seeing all the fellow addicts here getting better offers me a lot of hope.
Thanks for hearing me out. I’ll keep coming back.
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Well @Melrm, you got me there. Serves me right for bringing it up.
I going to raise a whole can of worms. I first want to mention that I love my wife and she truly loves me. We’ve recently celebrated 10 years of marriage and that was nothing short of a miracle from God. Our relationship is not perfect, but there are a lot of things in my marriage that I’m truly grateful for. And I look forward to it getting even better.
So I’m going to start from the beginning. I met my wife at church in 2006. I shared with her about my past and the fact that I was a current member of SLAA. I considered myself sexual stable at the time. Our relationship quickly developed and we got married that same year.
But my wife has got some serious jealousy issues and she was upset that I was choosing to go to this non-Christian meeting every Sunday night when she felt I should be prioritizing her and the family (She had two young sons). So after weeks of badgering, I made a hard decision to put her first. That’s what love is about right? Putting the other person’s needs above your own? Many times, in our marriage, I expressed my resentment about not going to SLAA, and missing out on the friendships that I built there. And she would respond back with rage mentioning that they have worldly ideas and they negatively influence our Christian ideals.
Well, without my support system, I reverted back to my porn and MB. Having unfiltered access to the internet, I secretly acted out during the first five years of our marriage until she caught me.
So she let me go to Reformers Unanimous. I got the impression that this program would put her more at ease because it was Christian. But a few months later, she developed a problem with some of their belief systems as well. It wasn’t long before she insisted that I stop going to RU because my priority should be her and the family.
I continued to struggle in my battle with porn over the next couple of years. She caught porn on the computer in 2013. So we worked harder at securing the computer and TV. But later that year, I acquired a cheap tablet, snuck it into the house and binged on porn and MB throughout Thanksgiving and Christmas of that year. In January 2015, I checked into a porn addiction website that was geared towards Christians. Afraid that my wife would sabotage my attempt to get some accountability in my life, I decided not to tell her. But that didn’t last long. When I spilled the beans about what was going on in my life, she quickly joined the site too. For awhile, things started to go really well. But she got upset if I replied to any woman’s thread without her consent. Then she got into a huge fight with the moderator. And less than a year later, she was upset about our involvement with this site and didn’t want us to be a part of it anymore. I’ve tried to maintain the connection with the site, but it’s been more awkward now that she’s looking over my shoulder and discouraging my involvement. So she encouraged me to set up my own site for men only. Was able to get a couple dozen men to sign up, but no one stuck around. Back on my own again…
And I relapsed in late fall of 2015 and didn’t tell a soul. 6 months later, I relapsed again. I countered my behavior by adding additional internet security in my home. I did such a good job of locking down my home. I don’t have access to the TV. And I need my wife to put in a password into my computer. And my access to the internet is whitelisted to include only those sites that I actually use. And I replaced my dumbphone with a super dumbphone because I had viewed porn on that too. For the last 9 months or so, that worked, until recently, I purchased a cheap smartphone and binged on porn again this year.
So that brings me to today. And quite frankly, my wife doesn’t have a clue. And she just wants me to be done with it all. No addiction, no porn, no MB, no group, no app. I should have everything I need to stay sober alone without all this other nonsense.
So after 10 years of this, I’ve come to the realization that my wife will never support any attempt of mine for recovery. It’s not because of the women, nor because of the non-Christians, nor because of the infinite number of reasons that she can come up with to ensure me this is bad. The bottom line is that she gets jealous when I start to make other friends, when I’m spending time doing something different than being with her. So I made my decision to not tell her what I’m doing on this app because she will not support it. She still thinks that I have over 2 years of sobriety. She doesn’t even know I have this smartphone. I understand that this impacts my marriage by holding secrets from my wife, but I like what I’ve started here, and I don’t want to lose it.