Resolve Rating 94%

Another sober day! Today is 6 days of sobriety since my last relapse. I was recently sober for 8.5 months and if I am diligent with my recovery work there is no reason why I can’t so that again (and hopefully go on an even longer sober run!). Sometimes when you relapse after such a long time sober, you can feel like you are starting from the foot of the mountain again. Really though that is the addict making nonsense thinking and trying to pass it off as rational thinking. Even though I relapsed, think of the money I saved from not acting out for those 8.5 months! If my recovery work helped me to go long that long sober, then doing recovery work can help me be sober for that long again.

In fact, last time I wasn’t posting my recovery diary online. And last time my recovery work dropped off which linked directly to me eventually relapsing. So if I update this blog every day I am confident I can stay sober forever!

My OCD fixations were around work (my OCD voice being confused about if I am working too hard/not hard enough) and once again the stupid “My Computer is too slow”. Like I say these OCD fixations are not rational but I’m keen to mention them in my recovery diary because I think they are part of the discord that leads me to act out.

As part of my recovery work I am now going to read some more of the book I’m reading about sexual addiction. Until tomorrow – stay sober and work hard at your recovery activities people!

My resolve rating was down at 70% in the morning. There was a period just after I got home from work when I was having a nap – my thoughts turned sexual and suddenly I felt that my RR was down very low to 10% and that I was almost planning out how I was going to act out tomorrow. Luckily I got stuck into some hobbies in the evening and forgot about this acting out plan. Now I feel much calmer although my RR is not has high as I would like it to be (it’s at 55% right now). So it’s jumped around quite a bit today. Hopefully it’s only low because I am tired after the week at work. After a couple of restful nights and days hopefully it’s back up in the 90s or even 100% by Sunday. As part of my daily recovery work I am going to read some of the posts in the sexual addiction part of this forum now. Have a good and sober weekend everyone!

I know I have messed up the days for the previous titles - doh!

Oh well here we go for today. RR is 99% today which I'm feeling good about. In terms of recovery work I am about to read some more of the book on sexual addiction I am currently reading. I have made a not of my OCD fixation for the day (still fixated on the processing speed of my desktop CPU and thinking if I need a new one).

I have been thinking about how much more pleasurable it is to have the money saved rather than spent on acting out. The more money I have saved, the less pressure I am under at work. The less leverage managers have over me at work. That is a greater pleasure than acting out (whatever nonsense Mr. Hyde might come up with to rationalize acting out for pleasure seeking reasons), I mean holding more metaphorical power to flip the bird at managers at work (not literally of course)!

Weekend should be a good chance to recharge the batteries and continue solid recovery work. See you tomorrow for another blog entry!

Resolve Rating has dipped a little today to 85% which is concerning. Following on from yesterday’s entry I wanted to talk about what lead to my last double relapse, the trigger event etc. I guess I could see it coming somewhat.

As I've said, I did go 8.5 months sober before this latest double relapse. I had been keeping this diary offline and had been dilligent in making an entry every day without fail from Jan 2016-April 2016. In May 2016 though, looking back that is where gaps started to appear in the sense that on some days I wasn't making entries in the diary. These gaps got gradually larger over the next few months. Sometimes I wasn't making a diary entry for 5 days and was slacking on my recovery work (my vow/plan in Jan 2016 was to do 20 mins a day). I have seen videos from Dr. Milton Magness on youtube (channel is called gottostopit) which say that if you are getting lazy with your recovery work then a relapse is on the way.

I think what also lowered my resolve rating was something that went on for about 5 weeks. Basically some relations came to stay where I live and it meant the house was more crowded and I just wasn't at peace. These were the circumstances which saw me relapse before the 8.5 months sober in Jan 2016. I need to work harder at my recovery work, make sure I do it everyday so I am better prepared to deal with these situations and emotions.

So the trigger event for my latest double relapse was me seeing something on my private parts and thinking that it could be the start of testicular cancer. Obviously this is jumping to conclusions but like I say I have OCD/anxiety. Anyway, my “cunning” addict used this to give the rationalization for acting out –“yep, life is short, you could die tomorrow etc. may as well just enjoy today and not worry about the consequences”. The real me knows Mr. Hyde is wrong here, and that is complete nonsense. It’s nonsense because I do not ENJOY acting out. So it doesn’t matter if a meteor is going to hit the earth tomorrow, acting out would still not be a good choice.

Anyway, I went to the doctor to get checked out and reassure myself. The GP was female and checked me out but obviously this involved her checking my private parts. Unfortunately, although I didn’t want it to this aroused me sexually and in combination with the high anxiety I had felt put me into “the sex trance” that is mentioned in the “cycle of sexual addiction” youtube video by Eric Bohlin (very good vid). Thankfully, my health was fine but the anxiety I felt the previous day, maybe combined with the relief/reassurance of the doctor seemed to combine to form the trigger event.

Tuesday 12 September

Well I tried to start a thread for my recovery diary yesterday but it is awaiting Admin approval. Don’t want to wait around for that and maybe this blog section is the best place for this anyway.

Ok so I am going to be recording my recovery diary on this site. I am a recovering sex addict. I relapsed a couple of days ago by going for an exotic massage. A week before this I had relapsed doing the same thing. Before that though I had been sober for 8 and a half months.

Previously I have done my recovery diary offline but I am hoping it will be more effective recording it here. It is of the upmost importance that I make an entry in this everyday as part of my 20 mins recovery work every day. So if you guys see that I haven’t posted in here for longer than a day it means I am on the path to another relapse – so I need to update this every day!

In my offline diary, every day I record my “resolve rating”. So when this is at 100%, that’s ideal and that is when I am least tempted to act out.


Wednesday 13 September

Resolve Rating 100%. I did some good thinking today about feelings of stress/anxiety/emotional discord at work. Sometimes I feel these things even though it is not rational to do so, and I did some really solid thinking today about how work doesn’t really have that much power over my life (very little in fact) so there is no rational reason to get stressed about it. Obviously to an extent I need to go to work to earn money. A lot of my negative emotional discord that I think leads to me acting out comes from going to work. I think it’s important to not get hung up on things I can’t control at work. Even if this job came to an end, I have money saved up and there are plenty of other jobs I could do so I would still be able to earn money.

I have OCD. I know some people have worse OCD than me but OCD definitely causes discord in my life. I keep a separate diary of my daily irrational OCD thoughts and OCD anxiety rating. It’s important that I so this every day as well. I won’t go into the details of all of the fixations on here as I want to protect my identity. Today it was when I’m using CPU in room and I keep thinking this CPU isn’t fast enough/internet speed isn’t good enough. Like I say, entirely irrational because this CPU does what it needs to do, and if it was such a big deal I could easily just buy another one.

However, my OCD anxiety rating for today was 5/10 which is good as that’s lower than it has often been recently.

As part of my recovery work today I read some more of a sexual addiction recovery book I am reading.

I also want to look at my last relapse (or couple of relapses within a week of eachother). So let’s look at that now