Yes I have / I am. Does that mean it’s been a cakewalk and I haven’t had any slips? No. Does that mean I’m making steady progress and have been since I started working on this 3 years ago? Yes. Progress, not perfection.
Things that help me:
- Intimacy work. PMO, any time it becomes a habit that causes regret, always includes intimacy dysfunction and/or intimacy deficits as causes. I do not mean physical intimacy. I mean healthy, growing emotional intimacy: true, healthy, sincere, growing, exposure and vulnerability, on an emotional and interpersonal level, with your partner. It means taking risks, as individuals and as a couple, and making investments (risking something of yourself, in a healthy way, for the chance to grow together).
- Counselling. My wife and I have attended counselling, off and on, for 5 years, and in particular for the last 3, while I’ve been working on my recovery. Some counsellors are OK and some are really great; all of them have helped us move forward. They’re like coaches in sports. They train you with the skills you can use to succeed in game day (in life).
- Mindfulness exercises, in particular body scanning and tactile meditations (in my case I’m a very tactile person). www.InsightTimer.com helps me.
I know faith Is important to you as well. Kevin shared an insight yesterday that hit me hard; it’s a perspective change, taking the focus away from the self (a focus on me as the centre of things, which is strange, when you think about it: who am I, the incomplete, the imperfect, to imagine that I can, alone, fully conceptualize who I should be and where I should go (and how)) - taking the focus off the self, and resetting it to a North Star, a guiding light:
Take care Duncan and don’t give up.