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Pornography and masturbation had been a part of my life for over two decades. We had a relationship, an understanding. It was give- and-take, but I always felt that I was in control, that I could manage it. Of course, I was just deceiving myself.

The dependency I had built up over time and the expectations I had on my Great Escape’s ability to help me cope with all of life’s twists and turns were simply unrealistic. My use of porn was never stagnant. It was dynamic and ever changing, just like the medium itself. It ebbed and flowed. At times I could take it or leave it, and at other times I needed it and had to have it. But there were two key limiting factors that had kept my use of the material in check. Those were the lack of availability (or accessibility) and anonymity.

But the Internet had smashed through both of those barriers. I could now access any images I wanted, tapping into new genres or categories of porn that I never knew existed before. And I could do it all instantaneously and anonymously. The stealth factor was perhaps most important to me because I needed to keep things hidden. My habits needed to remain out of sight from others, especially Patty and the boys, if I was going to continue to use. The Internet allowed me to fly under the radar while actually increasing my consumption of the material. I thought I had it made, especially since I was a tech industry insider with high-speed Internet access. I was the wolf guarding the hen house, and all I needed to indulge my senses was more time.

That time was granted, but at the expense of time spent with my wife and family. It started off with using while on business trips—time that I figured was already mine away from family. I thought as long as I was traveling on business, I wasn’t really cheating them. But I was, not to mention stealing time from my employer. I would add a day or two here and there to my travel plans, stretching them out beyond necessity for the express purpose of creating more time to act out sexually.

While traveling on business, I was on my own and accountable to no one. As long as I took care of business, the pleasures I would indulge in—on pay-per-view cable movies and undisturbed time cruising the Internet—were well deserved, or so I reasoned. But I convinced myself that I deserved it. Eventually, that practice caught up with me in the way of subpar sales performances and having a higher cost of sales than my peers, two factors that led to my inability to hold a good sales job for more than two years.

The humiliation that I would feel losing job after job and lying to my wife and kids and friends about the reasons just acted to heap more guilt and shame on my shoulders. I was a good salesman and certainly had the list of impressive corporations on my resume. I sold my curb appeal to others like a master of his craft. But when it came time to do the work, my loyalties were always divided. Losing jobs created more stress and financial problems, which propelled me back into my Great Escape as a way to numb the pain of the consequences. But it wasn’t enough to get me to stop. I just kept going back. Lust had become a relentless taskmaster, and I was enslaved to it.

The more time I had to myself, whether employed or not, the more time I spent indulging in porn. Now fast access was becoming available at home. But there was another factor at play here that led to an escalation of my growing addiction. Having access to a broader variety of genres, or categories of images, I started exploring the steamier side of porn out of sheer curiosity. Stuff I had only heard of or never even knew existed before—group sex, S&M, girl on girl, Web cams. There were literally hundreds of niche categories to explore, and I was hungering for more.

— Need help with pornography?

Adapted from Porn Nation.
Copyright © 2008 Michael Leahy. All rights reserved. Used with Permission. Published by Northfield Publishing.

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