Have you noticed how beginnings can be so small, random and seemingly serendipitous? I have just finished reading another biography where the success of the main character can be traced back to a small event that if not jumped upon could have been missed. For great or for destruction the beginning often seems so harmless.
The trap was set and I walked straight into it and was snared, they had used a type of honey that satisfied a sweet hunger in me. As a tall gangly teenager, the oldest child of four, it was my job to break in the parents. They weren’t ultra strict but were really distant during those years of adolescence where I was the first of the kids to go to the school dance, the first to venture into the murky waters of ‘boy – girl’ relationships, the first to get the sex talk (a book dropped into my bedroom and a quick ‘did you get it?’ from dad after a school organized sex ed talk.). Sex was hidden in our house so I learned that any sexual urge I had was to be kept hidden. I was an average kid, not accepted into the higher echelons of coolness at school but was good at sport so flirted with being somebody. Because I came from a religious family I never did fit in with the other kids anyway.
So where did it actually begin? What act set me on the road to an addiction to pornography, well it was so small an act that I can’t tell you as I don’t know what it was. I can tell you about finding ‘The Joy of sex’ book in my parents room and masturbating to the pictures and the playboy magazine found tuck away in the hedge of the local park and the ‘blue’ movie hidden at the back of the cabinet at my friends house…. I know my actions are my responsibility and I cannot blame another but as I look back to the period of my life when the ‘seed’ was planted for this pornography addiction I can see my lack of confidence with people, my parents inability to engage with me about sex, the invasion of sex through movies and advertising (the 80’s) all combined to create a fertile ground for the seed of addiction to grow.
Now I wonder if a better question is ‘how did I let the addiction grow to an issue that overtook my life?’. It was one small exposure on another that built my addiction. When the 14 year old kid planted the seed little did he know the 30 year old man he would become was going to have access to the internet that would tend the mighty ‘oak tree of addiction’. Many kids have a similar experience to me but didn’t get caught in the vicious cycle of pornography, or did they?
It is so easy to plant the seed that leads to addiction. I write this from a café where today the waitress just threw open the latest fashion mag in my face with half naked women posed in explicit situations and asks ‘what in the world are they doing?’ Indeed the seeds are everywhere!
Do you find yourself in the same spot as Jason was? Are you looking for a way to get help and accountability? Check out our resources or maybe you are looking for an accountability group and can not seem to find on around you. Take a look at the X3 Groups Online. New groups starting in February.