I've been pretty forward about my issues gaming lately, but there is another element that I've left out, which affects my gaming pretty heavily, which would be my sex addiction.
For a long time I was in denial about it, but eventually, and only recently, I decided to come clean. I was angry about a month ago due to my problem, and I decided to make a change in my life. I can report it's going well.
It's been a month. I'm doing better, but meanwhile I've been sitting on my thoughts for weeks, deciding whether it was worthwhile to share my somewhat painful story with others. After a lot of back and forth, I decided my story maybe is of some significance to others. So here goes:
A burgeoning sex addiction that lasts multiple years is different from the need to consume alcohol, drugs, or prescriptions in order to wake up and remain functional. The latter three demand the presence of foreign substances in the body, while the keys to sex addiction jingle away in your mind daily, waiting to be used. Thoughts, chemicals, and twitchy nerve endings are already there, things just have to fall into place. Once there, it is extremely difficult to shake away.
The general public has stereotypical images of addiction. Alcoholics are generally fat, bearded, pudgy faced men passed out on a sidewalk, and functioning alcoholics are mildly in shape rich guys losing their hair in their 50's. Drug addicts are almost always uncomfortably thin people in their late 20's, early 30's. Prescription med poppers are always college kids. But the sex addict has no stereotype, no visual to ground the imagination, because of how easy it is for him to hide his issues. There are no tell-tale needle track marks on the wrist or pungent smell on the breath. No discolored eyes or wispy hair. None of these appear on the sex addict because he or she has the greatest chances of not developing physical signs of a personal struggle. Safe sex is easy, safe heroin is impossible. How did my tragedy start?
I am not the creepy face you see sitting on a park bench who will probably end up in the local paper as “That guy who got caught masturbating on a public bus.” I am a tall male, currently 185 pounds of pure, Anglo-Saxon muscle, with steely blue-grey eyes and hair so naturally rich in color that not even my hairdressers can not get the same shade with professional dye treatments, not even close. As I have been told by numerous women in the course of my escapades, I am quite well endowed below the belt. I am a spring chicken at 22 years of age. But I wasn't always this way, not at all. I hovered around 200 pounds in high school, all fat and bones, then buffed up in college, while losing the fat. As I approached the latter half of college, due to self-loathing, the weight started to put itself back on.
I in no way was a lady's man, socialite, or hardcore partier in college, never have been. I went to a handful of parties in college and got laid exactly zero times (not counting the one girlfriend I carried over from high school freshman year). I never much even tried to talk to women, mostly out of nerves. As my interests in German World War II era military history, small arms technology, and collecting of both increased, I felt more and more isolated from everyone in my generation. I would go out occasionally and feel absolutely no spark in my soul, even with buddies. This largely stems back to the fact that I am an old soul, but in my 22 years of existence, I have also had exactly four girlfriends. The first kiss in 8th grade, the emotionally abusive thief of the physical V card in 11th, the first true love and meaningful relationship in 12th, and the long-distance girlfriend freshman year of college—with all that entailed. All four relationships were wrought with their own joys and sorrows, as all four young ladies were virgins and I had sex with the latter three, but the last one sent me hurtling over a cliff, because that marked the first time I had initiated a break up. I essentially in a metaphorical sense ripped out her heart and crushed it under my combat boots, and I felt terrible. I wanted nothing to do with romance, women, or relationships after that. As someone who had been dumped three times only to unleash that pain on another beautiful girl, I was simply fed up with the stress and drama associated with relationships. I didn't know it at the time, but I wanted fun without commitment.
Sure enough, three months went by, and some time in my freshmen year, I found myself in a grimy lap dance booth getting head from a Brazilian girl in her late 20's, condom on of course, I had to be safe every time. It's funny how that is all I remember from the evening, and I was completely sober. I don't recall how I found the place on the internet, when I decided I was going to go to a strip club for the first time, or how I even felt about the whole mess. I just remember being there. I assume it's a common thing for sex addicts or just plain addicts in general, your clearest memories are the ones in which your stimulation was at its apex, but it's an especially weird phenomena for me because I have an unnaturally sharp memory. Then again, addiction also clouds the mind of all non-essential processes, according to the addiction that is.
In due time I was spending unhealthy amounts of time banging strippers and illegitimate masseuses. It rose and fell in waves, but had been a problem for the better part of three and a half years. Strangely, unlike drugs and alcohol, it never interfered with my social life. I didn't have to go bend a Ukrainian blonde over a chair in a dimly lit closet before playing video games with my friends or visiting relatives. I could “turn off” the urge temporarily, but it always returned in greater force when I had idle time. I had a car in college, but spent many hours riding taxis to get to and from these places in the odd parts of town, the kind you wouldn't want to be lost in at night.
The first time I attempted to quit, and did for about five months, I had to have my best friend from college lock up my charge card in his apartment for almost a month. I allowed myself only to take money out and spend it if he were present. It was hell, and a great temporary fix, but it couldn't last forever. The real turning point for the worse in this saga, and one that planted seeds for the period of absolute lunacy of the final six months, happened in fall of my junior year. I was at one particular den of ill respite (massage parlor), and unlike any other past experience, this masseuse was American, and just three years older than myself. She gave me her number after I paid to absolutely thrash her va-jay-jay in the best way possible, and we talked on and off for about two months, never seeing each other again after that. I don't even remember her name, but I do know that from that point onward, American, or at least heavily Americanized girls were my new ticket to pleasure in an addiction that had become as stale and seedy as some of the massage joints I frequented. And this is where things started to fall off the rails, cause American girls are expensive. Sometimes I would settle for an Asian or Hispanic woman, but white girls without Eastern-European accents became the goal of my addiction, always clawing at the more primitive parts of my mind.
Fast forward. I had just graduated college. I was holding down an decent job. But, things snowballed out of control in a millisecond; as my visits became more frequent and with less and less care about their consequences, even if the sex was absolutely horrible, which it was for the most part because of how much I had already experienced. When you do this as often as I did, the good gets great and the bad gets bloody horrible; the extremes stretch you beyond normal psychological boundaries, and start to rationalize your sickness in any way possible to excuse chasing the next bio-chemically infused high. All of that changed just one month ago in March, 2019.
I was going to one of my usual massage parlor haunts, when I just felt like something was wrong in the back of my mind. I didn't feel the excited nervousness that accompanied past trips in diminishing form. This time I didn't feel it at all. I swore it all off and said “ What the hell, I'm here, I may as well go ahead and enjoy my time.” During the start of my massage, I felt a sudden urge to just get up and leave. I felt sick, weird, annoyed, angry, frightened ,and disgusted all at the same time. I went through the motions, banged my service provider, a basic-ass American girl in her late 20's, but something just felt off. Then it hit me, I wasn't happy.
“What am I doing here?”
“You okay, handsome?”
“Yeah...I'm fine thanks.”
I got into my car when the deed was done, deflated, and started to drive home. I had to pull over on the side of the highway, where I sat for an hour with my hazard lights on and watched the sunset from atop a hill overlooking the next mile of concrete ribbon, to angry at myself to even cry. I was just silently, and angrily fuming at myself unable to finish my drive. Thankfully nobody stopped to offer me help, they'd have probably thought I was nuts. I was dizzy, queasy, and wanted to go home, but most of all I wanted to be held and coddled by one of my female friends, to let go mentally. I felt alone in the world, having spent chunks of the past three and a half years engaging in pointless exercises that spanned three continents and could have easily made me a marked man for life with an std by sheer frequency of indulgence alone (I've been tested three times, all results clean). I leaned back in the front seat and stared at the drab ceiling of my car, listening to the sound of other motorists whooshing by and feeling the displacement of the air rattle my vehicle as hot air rushed out of the dashboard vents. Despite the fact that I earned honors in college, that I had transformed myself through proper diet and exercise, that I had cultivated three incredible friendships in college, none of that really felt worthwhile right now. It all felt tainted, every last thing I had done since first setting foot in that strip club in the industrial part of town. The sun would be gone in about twenty minutes, and I knew I had to come to grips with the one factor I had ignored this while time, money.
I do not remember how much I spent in the course of this whole mess the first two or so years, but as time went on I started to get more and more gonzo about it. I parted with collectibles and immediately spent the money on sex, stole out of my parents' wallets, and drained my bank account multiple times. I spent most, not all, but most of the money I made working two different jobs on it too. As I briefly mentioned earlier, the last five months of this addiction were absolute lunacy. I transferred my childhood savings account to my personal one with a debit card in the latter half of last year. At that moment I had about $1,000 in checking and $10,000 in savings. Today I sit with $600 in checking, $3,000 in savings, the vast majority spent on illicit sex.
The most frightening part, and one that still makes me furious sometimes even though I haven't once entered a lair of debauchery in exactly one month, is that I managed to not only hide my addiction from everyone I know, but actively convince the ones I told about it that it ended several years ago. I recall watching the ending of Christian Bale's “American Psycho,” a long time ago and feeling a strange connection which I now realize rang more truly than I imagined. I was pathologically lying to everyone who knew, and camouflaging it from everyone who didn't without fail, but it was all just as easy as taking a piss. I've never been so good at hiding things from people in my life, and for a while that realization frightened me.
So far, my month without illicit sex has been going well. I am tempted, oh am I ever some days. A couple of times in the past month I've gone to the ATM, driven to a familiar location, parked in the parking lot, and then forced myself to go back, redeposit my money, and go home. I've found that by doing that, the excitement associated with “escapades” as I used to call them, has worn off. So much so, that the last time I tried to go I stopped half way and returned home because I felt spiritually tainted. I think that if I've successfully paired the prospect of buying sex with physical discomfort, that's a damn good (if strange) step in the right direction.
Am I worried that one day I might cave in again, sometimes, but I never felt this dedicated to quitting before, and I have a healthy base of motivations to help me along the way to full recovery. My job is going well, and I have personally vowed to not spend a cent of my paycheck or any other financial possession on those illicit activities ever again. A high school reunion is coming up, and younger friends will be having graduation parties that I will be delighted to attend. My performance at the gym is at its zenith, I'll be buying some new firearms and collectible Wehrmacht items with the money I earn at this job, I'll be hearing back from the grad school I applied to soon, and the cool breeze and delicate warmth of a mid-American spring and summer are just around the corner. All in all, I feel happier over the past month than I have in many years.
But at the same time I am much more of a reflective thinker. This isn't because of my quiet introverted self I mentioned earlier, who doesn't really understand or fit in with the social activity and habits of Americans in their 20's. It's something different. Sometimes I'll just stare at the wall and think for half an hour or so, contemplating the bio-chemical nightmare I was trapped in for so long, and what I'll be like now that it's over, how I'll change when I didn't even realize I had for so long. My porn consumption has plummeted to nearly zero (barring a few relapses recently), another pesky issue I have been working on for a while. I masturbate very little now, maybe once a week (ladies, ask your male friends how difficult not touching yourself for a whole week is, you'll understand). Will that return to a more “normal” pattern? Maybe. But right now I am burned out, and have decided to keep anything remotely sexual far away for a while until by some chance a girl offers to take me to bed. Until then, I won't push it and focus on other productive things in life. I feel happy, but I have figuratively stepped backwards and in absolute silence observed the now dead and rotting monster I was once fused with, that I created without even knowing it. Though I get along with my friends and family perfectly fine, I feel a disconnect with the world, as if I have been asleep for five years.
For a long time I was in denial about it, but eventually, and only recently, I decided to come clean. I was angry about a month ago due to my problem, and I decided to make a change in my life. I can report it's going well.
It's been a month. I'm doing better, but meanwhile I've been sitting on my thoughts for weeks, deciding whether it was worthwhile to share my somewhat painful story with others. After a lot of back and forth, I decided my story maybe is of some significance to others. So here goes:
A burgeoning sex addiction that lasts multiple years is different from the need to consume alcohol, drugs, or prescriptions in order to wake up and remain functional. The latter three demand the presence of foreign substances in the body, while the keys to sex addiction jingle away in your mind daily, waiting to be used. Thoughts, chemicals, and twitchy nerve endings are already there, things just have to fall into place. Once there, it is extremely difficult to shake away.
The general public has stereotypical images of addiction. Alcoholics are generally fat, bearded, pudgy faced men passed out on a sidewalk, and functioning alcoholics are mildly in shape rich guys losing their hair in their 50's. Drug addicts are almost always uncomfortably thin people in their late 20's, early 30's. Prescription med poppers are always college kids. But the sex addict has no stereotype, no visual to ground the imagination, because of how easy it is for him to hide his issues. There are no tell-tale needle track marks on the wrist or pungent smell on the breath. No discolored eyes or wispy hair. None of these appear on the sex addict because he or she has the greatest chances of not developing physical signs of a personal struggle. Safe sex is easy, safe heroin is impossible. How did my tragedy start?
I am not the creepy face you see sitting on a park bench who will probably end up in the local paper as “That guy who got caught masturbating on a public bus.” I am a tall male, currently 185 pounds of pure, Anglo-Saxon muscle, with steely blue-grey eyes and hair so naturally rich in color that not even my hairdressers can not get the same shade with professional dye treatments, not even close. As I have been told by numerous women in the course of my escapades, I am quite well endowed below the belt. I am a spring chicken at 22 years of age. But I wasn't always this way, not at all. I hovered around 200 pounds in high school, all fat and bones, then buffed up in college, while losing the fat. As I approached the latter half of college, due to self-loathing, the weight started to put itself back on.
I in no way was a lady's man, socialite, or hardcore partier in college, never have been. I went to a handful of parties in college and got laid exactly zero times (not counting the one girlfriend I carried over from high school freshman year). I never much even tried to talk to women, mostly out of nerves. As my interests in German World War II era military history, small arms technology, and collecting of both increased, I felt more and more isolated from everyone in my generation. I would go out occasionally and feel absolutely no spark in my soul, even with buddies. This largely stems back to the fact that I am an old soul, but in my 22 years of existence, I have also had exactly four girlfriends. The first kiss in 8th grade, the emotionally abusive thief of the physical V card in 11th, the first true love and meaningful relationship in 12th, and the long-distance girlfriend freshman year of college—with all that entailed. All four relationships were wrought with their own joys and sorrows, as all four young ladies were virgins and I had sex with the latter three, but the last one sent me hurtling over a cliff, because that marked the first time I had initiated a break up. I essentially in a metaphorical sense ripped out her heart and crushed it under my combat boots, and I felt terrible. I wanted nothing to do with romance, women, or relationships after that. As someone who had been dumped three times only to unleash that pain on another beautiful girl, I was simply fed up with the stress and drama associated with relationships. I didn't know it at the time, but I wanted fun without commitment.
Sure enough, three months went by, and some time in my freshmen year, I found myself in a grimy lap dance booth getting head from a Brazilian girl in her late 20's, condom on of course, I had to be safe every time. It's funny how that is all I remember from the evening, and I was completely sober. I don't recall how I found the place on the internet, when I decided I was going to go to a strip club for the first time, or how I even felt about the whole mess. I just remember being there. I assume it's a common thing for sex addicts or just plain addicts in general, your clearest memories are the ones in which your stimulation was at its apex, but it's an especially weird phenomena for me because I have an unnaturally sharp memory. Then again, addiction also clouds the mind of all non-essential processes, according to the addiction that is.
In due time I was spending unhealthy amounts of time banging strippers and illegitimate masseuses. It rose and fell in waves, but had been a problem for the better part of three and a half years. Strangely, unlike drugs and alcohol, it never interfered with my social life. I didn't have to go bend a Ukrainian blonde over a chair in a dimly lit closet before playing video games with my friends or visiting relatives. I could “turn off” the urge temporarily, but it always returned in greater force when I had idle time. I had a car in college, but spent many hours riding taxis to get to and from these places in the odd parts of town, the kind you wouldn't want to be lost in at night.
The first time I attempted to quit, and did for about five months, I had to have my best friend from college lock up my charge card in his apartment for almost a month. I allowed myself only to take money out and spend it if he were present. It was hell, and a great temporary fix, but it couldn't last forever. The real turning point for the worse in this saga, and one that planted seeds for the period of absolute lunacy of the final six months, happened in fall of my junior year. I was at one particular den of ill respite (massage parlor), and unlike any other past experience, this masseuse was American, and just three years older than myself. She gave me her number after I paid to absolutely thrash her va-jay-jay in the best way possible, and we talked on and off for about two months, never seeing each other again after that. I don't even remember her name, but I do know that from that point onward, American, or at least heavily Americanized girls were my new ticket to pleasure in an addiction that had become as stale and seedy as some of the massage joints I frequented. And this is where things started to fall off the rails, cause American girls are expensive. Sometimes I would settle for an Asian or Hispanic woman, but white girls without Eastern-European accents became the goal of my addiction, always clawing at the more primitive parts of my mind.
Fast forward. I had just graduated college. I was holding down an decent job. But, things snowballed out of control in a millisecond; as my visits became more frequent and with less and less care about their consequences, even if the sex was absolutely horrible, which it was for the most part because of how much I had already experienced. When you do this as often as I did, the good gets great and the bad gets bloody horrible; the extremes stretch you beyond normal psychological boundaries, and start to rationalize your sickness in any way possible to excuse chasing the next bio-chemically infused high. All of that changed just one month ago in March, 2019.
I was going to one of my usual massage parlor haunts, when I just felt like something was wrong in the back of my mind. I didn't feel the excited nervousness that accompanied past trips in diminishing form. This time I didn't feel it at all. I swore it all off and said “ What the hell, I'm here, I may as well go ahead and enjoy my time.” During the start of my massage, I felt a sudden urge to just get up and leave. I felt sick, weird, annoyed, angry, frightened ,and disgusted all at the same time. I went through the motions, banged my service provider, a basic-ass American girl in her late 20's, but something just felt off. Then it hit me, I wasn't happy.
“What am I doing here?”
“You okay, handsome?”
“Yeah...I'm fine thanks.”
I got into my car when the deed was done, deflated, and started to drive home. I had to pull over on the side of the highway, where I sat for an hour with my hazard lights on and watched the sunset from atop a hill overlooking the next mile of concrete ribbon, to angry at myself to even cry. I was just silently, and angrily fuming at myself unable to finish my drive. Thankfully nobody stopped to offer me help, they'd have probably thought I was nuts. I was dizzy, queasy, and wanted to go home, but most of all I wanted to be held and coddled by one of my female friends, to let go mentally. I felt alone in the world, having spent chunks of the past three and a half years engaging in pointless exercises that spanned three continents and could have easily made me a marked man for life with an std by sheer frequency of indulgence alone (I've been tested three times, all results clean). I leaned back in the front seat and stared at the drab ceiling of my car, listening to the sound of other motorists whooshing by and feeling the displacement of the air rattle my vehicle as hot air rushed out of the dashboard vents. Despite the fact that I earned honors in college, that I had transformed myself through proper diet and exercise, that I had cultivated three incredible friendships in college, none of that really felt worthwhile right now. It all felt tainted, every last thing I had done since first setting foot in that strip club in the industrial part of town. The sun would be gone in about twenty minutes, and I knew I had to come to grips with the one factor I had ignored this while time, money.
I do not remember how much I spent in the course of this whole mess the first two or so years, but as time went on I started to get more and more gonzo about it. I parted with collectibles and immediately spent the money on sex, stole out of my parents' wallets, and drained my bank account multiple times. I spent most, not all, but most of the money I made working two different jobs on it too. As I briefly mentioned earlier, the last five months of this addiction were absolute lunacy. I transferred my childhood savings account to my personal one with a debit card in the latter half of last year. At that moment I had about $1,000 in checking and $10,000 in savings. Today I sit with $600 in checking, $3,000 in savings, the vast majority spent on illicit sex.
The most frightening part, and one that still makes me furious sometimes even though I haven't once entered a lair of debauchery in exactly one month, is that I managed to not only hide my addiction from everyone I know, but actively convince the ones I told about it that it ended several years ago. I recall watching the ending of Christian Bale's “American Psycho,” a long time ago and feeling a strange connection which I now realize rang more truly than I imagined. I was pathologically lying to everyone who knew, and camouflaging it from everyone who didn't without fail, but it was all just as easy as taking a piss. I've never been so good at hiding things from people in my life, and for a while that realization frightened me.
So far, my month without illicit sex has been going well. I am tempted, oh am I ever some days. A couple of times in the past month I've gone to the ATM, driven to a familiar location, parked in the parking lot, and then forced myself to go back, redeposit my money, and go home. I've found that by doing that, the excitement associated with “escapades” as I used to call them, has worn off. So much so, that the last time I tried to go I stopped half way and returned home because I felt spiritually tainted. I think that if I've successfully paired the prospect of buying sex with physical discomfort, that's a damn good (if strange) step in the right direction.
Am I worried that one day I might cave in again, sometimes, but I never felt this dedicated to quitting before, and I have a healthy base of motivations to help me along the way to full recovery. My job is going well, and I have personally vowed to not spend a cent of my paycheck or any other financial possession on those illicit activities ever again. A high school reunion is coming up, and younger friends will be having graduation parties that I will be delighted to attend. My performance at the gym is at its zenith, I'll be buying some new firearms and collectible Wehrmacht items with the money I earn at this job, I'll be hearing back from the grad school I applied to soon, and the cool breeze and delicate warmth of a mid-American spring and summer are just around the corner. All in all, I feel happier over the past month than I have in many years.
But at the same time I am much more of a reflective thinker. This isn't because of my quiet introverted self I mentioned earlier, who doesn't really understand or fit in with the social activity and habits of Americans in their 20's. It's something different. Sometimes I'll just stare at the wall and think for half an hour or so, contemplating the bio-chemical nightmare I was trapped in for so long, and what I'll be like now that it's over, how I'll change when I didn't even realize I had for so long. My porn consumption has plummeted to nearly zero (barring a few relapses recently), another pesky issue I have been working on for a while. I masturbate very little now, maybe once a week (ladies, ask your male friends how difficult not touching yourself for a whole week is, you'll understand). Will that return to a more “normal” pattern? Maybe. But right now I am burned out, and have decided to keep anything remotely sexual far away for a while until by some chance a girl offers to take me to bed. Until then, I won't push it and focus on other productive things in life. I feel happy, but I have figuratively stepped backwards and in absolute silence observed the now dead and rotting monster I was once fused with, that I created without even knowing it. Though I get along with my friends and family perfectly fine, I feel a disconnect with the world, as if I have been asleep for five years.
![[Image: confused.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/confused.gif)
