A Proper Introduction

With respect to religious traditions, I'm a pretty serious student. I was an extremely active member of a western Sufi order for over two years. I've studied Fourth Way (Gurdjieff/Ouspensky), Golden Dawn, and Thelemic traditions. I also have a background in Reformed Christianity (traditional Presbyterianism) and consider myself to be well-versed in both mainstream Christian scholarship and esoteric Christian thought. I'm also basically a non-theist and consider my spiritual interests to be "psychological" in nature, though that in no way diminishes their significance for me.

It is day 4 of no p/m/o, and this is my introduction to everyone here.

I'm going by "Tomato." I'm a male. I'm 29. I've been divorced for a little over a year. (I was married for around two years, but the relationship itself began about three years prior to the wedding, which means the relationship lasted five years.)

I'm addicted to masturbation and pornography and I also overeat. (It's all dopamine, right?)

I own (and have read with enthusiasm and gratefulness) Cupid's Poisoned Arrow. I've been lurking on this site for nearly a year, though I haven't posted anything in the forum. I have managed up to about 16 days of no p/m/o before relapse. I think I can get to at least a month if I have community support. I am trying to use Mars's tracking chart. (Just a suggestion: since Mars's chart relies on Josef's "sexual impulse alert scale" it might be a good idea to provide a link to the entry where Josef explains his "alert scale" somewhere in the comments to Mars's entry.)

Josef's "sexual impulse alert scale": http://www.reuniting.info/node/1483

When my siblings and I were children, we were abused by an older teenage female cousin who often babysat us. I hesitate to use the word "molested" here, as there was never any genital contact that I can remember. On one occasion (I think I was about five or six) she proceeded to chase each one of us down (each time enlisting the help of the other siblings) in order to strip us naked. This was always somewhere between a game and actually pretty horrifying. Once naked she then had us close our eyes (I can't recall if she blindfolded us) and proceeded to make little red marks with lipstick all over our bodies. She then informed us that we had some kind of disease (evidenced by the red marks) and that we needed to take a bath to remedy it. If nothing else, this was for me, at six, a certain violation of my privacy. On another occasion that I remember (this time I think was about 12) she had several far-too-frank conversations with us about (believe it or not) sexual abuse on the pretense that she was learning about it in school herself (which perhaps she was). She explained that the expression "scared stiff" was a reference to being so frightened that a male would get an erection. She demonstrated in a seemingly off-hand manner by placing a hand between my brother's legs without actually touching him. We were both fully clothed and she never asked "do you have an erection?" When I was about seven she showed us the film The Shining, in which there is brief full frontal nudity and a tremendous amount of death and blood. Was that molestation or not? Borderline? It certainly left a profound mark on me.

My sexual fantasies (even today) seem to echo those experiences. Imagine my poor ex-wife trying to accommodate my roleplaying fantasies of her being an an older adolescent or adult female and seducing me as a young boy. (We also did it the other way around, with me as an adult or adolescent male and her as a young girl, but I definitely tended towards the former.) She really deserves a lot of credit for trying to make me happy when she found what I wanted her to do so disgusting and tried expressing her distaste for it as politely as possible, several times. That's not why we divorced though. I divorced her because she was physically abusive towards me and her mood swings were terrible.

My pornography of choice is text with themes of incest and underage characters (straight or gay) and has been since I was about fourteen and came into contact with some of this material on the internet. Most of the visual pornography available online today is less edgy and interesting to me than the themes discussed freely in the text medium. There is one particular side-effect to my interest in text pornography: since it requires a lot of visualization (as there aren't any pictures), in a pinch, I am pretty adept at constructing a vivid edgy fantasy scenario to masturbate to. I even used to write out my own fantasies to masturbate to. So I hesitate to "masturbate without porn" as that only encourages me to fantasize.

I'm pretty disgusted with myself. Writing this was difficult. But I encourage questions if I have been overly vague in any respect.

I am presently reading Perfect Matrimony (Samael Aun Weor). I am also listening to Mean Genes.