Do I always need a title?

(content notice: sexuality, addiction)

I keep typing with my phone even though it exacerbates the pain in my shoulder, by the way, and it is like writing which is self care but making my shoulder worse which is the opposite of self-care at the sake time.

A lot to think about since last night. Started reading a book that was mentioned in passing that looks quite good and thorough: Facing the Shadows: Starting Sexual and Relationship Recovery. A lot of the exercises look quite helpful even though I don’t have a whole lot of sexual ‘acting out’ behaviours. I started realising how much I probably do have in common with sex and love addicts who are not anorectic even though most of those behaviours and compulsions are not really present in me.

Still the absolute horror of intimacy and relationship obsession and these kinds of things… it is the same sort of thing, two ends of one spectrum… though I think I would differ from many in that I would not consider it a disease. I don’t think. Though it does seem to cause me dis-ease.

A lot of my ‘acting in’ behaviours or lack of action rather are hidden so I don’t realise they add up to one big larger problem. The exercises in the book are interesting to think about: what secrets do I keep and from whom? I feel like when I am distraught I hide what I actually did with my day. I am afraid of being seen as lying in bed too much or meditating too much or not taking care of myself (and when I am afraid of that I just do more of the not taking care of myself stuff because I feel shame about it and like I need to hide it), or as masturbating at all, and when I am afraid of being found out or covertly shamed, I will start to hide other inconsequential, insignificant things.

Yes, I use it to cope with stress and to cope with childhood sexual abuse and with trauma in my body… and having been covertly shamed and brought up in repressive and not sex positive environments, I started to feel more and more shame and fear of judgment while all the while believing that the act is innocent… I think as a result of having been repressed and shamed, and coning to feel shame myself, it takes on characteristics of addiction. More and more I didn’t care if I was discovered, I almost wanted there to be consequences because I was already so afraid of them I might as well experience them. It is not something you can really openly talk about in this culture and I wish you could just settle things so people around you are aware and okay with it but more and more I felt like I had to hide it and that something terrible would happen if someone found out… so I started acting out and risking others seeing me more and more, since I was so tired of hiding, and since at its core I believe experiencing sexual pleasure is innocent and healthy, I rationalised my exhaustion with hiding and willingness to be found out as a sort of sexual activism…

I started feeling guilty about this but on top of that just about my life in general. Shame. Like why am I having to hide the fact that I do this, if someone understood what was going on inside me, they’d get how innocent it is… and it is innocent so I should release shame and not be afraid to talk about it… which turns out to have been one of my most regreftul mistakes ever.

I started thinking maybe if I was less afraid of being found out by my mother and somehow tried to be okay with this around her (not in her sight) and be more sex positive without worrying so much about that it might help me deal with my shame and make me less afraid to open up to her about other things… but no, instead I think I found out why it is so hard to open up to her about anything, and experienced all sorts if indirect sexual shaming and trying to be sex positive around her was just the worst idea in the world. It did not help me feel in any way better about anything. I should have kept my privte life more under wraps, not less… and I made the mistake of believing that since I thought it wad innocent and the world is way too repressed in so many ways that my actions and the words I spoke about my actions were unlikely to be harmful… and that is the furthest thing from the truth. I look over this list of consequences of sexualaddiction behaviours in this book: thoughts of suicide, hopelessness and despair, depression, paranoia, fears of going insane. Yup.

Oh my gosh this fear of going insane particularly after being f***** with so much at these hospitals is particularly strong in me. I fear if the boytom falls out of my life that is exactly what will happen because I am terrified of going back to a place like that and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Loss of life goals, strong feelings of guilt and shame, isolation and loneliness, strong fears about the future, emotional exhaustion. Yup, all of these, and I feel like all of these consequences have something to do with either my anorectic acting in or this one outlet I have for acting out… if I did not have a problem with huge enormous crushes, for example, or a sort of obsession with imagining relationships, I probably would not be feeling all these things right now. And it so sucks but I am grateful there are groups I can attend every day that can help me ride these terrifying waves and… I am grateful for this way of discovering and healing my woundings that I might find my original goodness and this path of learning about myself. I am grateful for those who encourage me that it does get better, who affirm for me that I am in the right place, when I seek out community that is also dealing with these sorts of things… I feel like finally I am addressing (or beginning to) certain things that have gotten in my way forever that I didn’t know were getting in my way because I had no one to talk to about them. When I met people who identified as sex and love addicts that didn’t feel like a point I could relate around and admittedly I did not understand and probably made unfair judgments. And judge not, lest you not be judged… I hope I will find understanding and compassion in the world for who I am, too.

Now it does feel like part of an addiction and I do not know what to do because when it is accepted in a sex positive environment it is hugely helpful with C-PTS responses… but when I feel like I have to hide it and it comes with all sorts of negative feelings about myself and such, well, I think it can become a sexual acting out behaviour, and I have been caught in the spiral of masturbation causing shame which I want to fix with more masturbation which definitely feels like addiction though I do not think masturbating even a lot is necessarily a bad thing at all. But it is one way I ‘act out’ with all these other ways of ‘acting in’ like abandoning myself and perceiving myself as unworthy and not taking care of myself and not making connections or not knowing how to find people I am happy being around who I can be myself with where the connection feels nurturing, not taking care of myself financially and in terms of the physical environment where I am staying, etc…