Tonight I was watching the local news and there was a story about a Catholic priest who was caught with thousands of images of child pornography on his computer. A a sex addict I feel the need to share my thoughts and feelings on this subject which seems to be on every news channel all across America ceaselessly.
Let me begin with being very clear where I stand when it comes to my own sex addiction. My behavior started out with very vanilla phone sex....nothing exotic. But that can only last so long. After a while this particular drug (your fantasy) isn't strong enough to produce the desired effect. So you need to use a stronger drug, which would be a more "intense" fantasy or more intense real life behavior or perhaps acting out your fantasies for the first time with others. Perhaps something you wouldn't act out in real life, something you wouldn't want to tell other people. And this fantasy or fetish or paraphilia also ceases to work. So you develop more fetishes or fetishes that are more shocking, taboo and "dark". This is where I have been and am right now. I have developed a rich fantasy life which includes a plethora of exotic fetishes, including the one I will be speaking of rather often on this blog, a blasphemy fetish.
Now I have used phone lines, online chat rooms, instant messengers and pornography of all sorts to act out. My behavior is so solitary in fact that there is a real sexual anorexia thing going on in my life underneath the addiction. So anyway, time to make a point!! Could MY addiction progress to the point that I would end up looking at images of child pornography on my computer while ignoring the inevitable consequences of that behavior?
I must say that as bad as my addiction is I have rules. If I keep acting out will I break these rules? Will I cross these boundaries I have established for myself? All I can say is that I am desperate for this illness to not progress and I am actively working to arrest it and transform my life. Am I trying as hard as I should be? Am I doing the right things? Could I be doing better? I don't now. I feel like I am just keeping my head above water at this point but I think I can keep from going to "the next level" if I don't abandon myself to the addiction and keep fighting.
So, anyway. My rules. I am not aroused, nor have I ever been by causing others pain or hurting people in any way. So the idea of emotionally, physically, spiritually and psychologically scarring a child is just not an acceptable option for me. The natural extension of this thought is that by using child pornography you are actively contributing to the destruction of the lives of who knows how many children. That being said...I have to wonder if that priest I was speaking of at the beginning of this post had said the same thing to himself at some point in time. What did he start out with? Some mild behavior like compulsive masturbation? Or perhaps he has always had an orientation of being attracted to children, a true paraphilia that he has struggled with his whole life.
I simply can't judge this man as my behavior is so unhealthy, so morally repugnant, so outside cultural norms. I know the readers of this blog would scream at me about casting the first stone if I lambasted this or any other priest involved in any number of inappropriate sexual behaviors. But all this leads me to ask, did he seek help? Did he go to Sex Addicts Anonymous website to look for meetings? What did he bishop do to help him?
Another thought come to mind here as well. How much does the suppression of normal healthy adult sexual desires, be they heterosexual or homosexual (I'll discuss my view on homosexuality at a later time but for the sake of this post let's view it as morally neutral) lead to the eruption of aberrant sexual desires? Perhaps the Church gave this man the impression that sexuality is evil? Perhaps he became a priest in the hopes that God would free him from his homosexual (if he happens to be gay, I don't know) inclinations? Perhaps he hates himself, hates his sexuality, believes God hates him and in an attempt to just bury it all away instead it burst forth as sexual deviancy. Maybe this man just needed to find an adult that he could love without guilt or shame to make him whole and all of this could have been avoided. Of course this is all wild speculation but it's only a blog no one is going to read anyway so I'll say what I want.
So what about my aberrant behavior? I in fact have attended Courage meetings ( http://couragerc.net ) the Catholic apostolate to gay men and women (as the call it, people who suffer from SSA, same sex attraction) who are never allowed to have sex with anyone ever again unless they somehow become heterosexual, which apparently requires wearing flannel and playing football and chopping wood or for the women watching Martha Stewart every morning until you can macramé a tea cozy. Oh, I am so sorry, was that sarcastic??
I also was involved in reorientation therapy with a counselor from NARTH ( http://www.narth.com ) where they practice what is basically Freudian psychoanalysis where you blame your homosexuality and everything else in your entire life on your evil parents, or more specifically your smothering mother and distant father. For those who don't know psychoanalysis has been replaced with a more effective approach to mental illness...it's called DRUGS!!!!!
So I am left wondering....did I do this to myself? In an effort to please God (or appease society or make my mother happy) did I repress a normal healthy sexuality and replace it with this addiction? Could be!! By they way Courage and reorientation therapy never made me heterosexual. Next week I will be entering a group home to become Asian! We'll see how that works out.
Finally I would like to make one final statement about the Church and sexuality. When the Church points to people and says things like "Look at those naughty gays, having parades and sodomizing each other in their own homes like consenting adults, they are all going to hell!" the gay community and everyone else in the world at this point points their finger at the Church and say "Well, at least we aren't molesting children!!" So for me at least, I just can't take the church's teaching on the morality of homosexuality and homogenital acts seriously anymore. They have lost all credibility in my eyes. The need t cast the beam out of their own eye before they tell me where to put my penis, or anyone else's for that matter.
OOOPS!! I was ranting about homosexuality. So what about this priest, who I should mentioned tried to kill himself when he was caught, what should he have done? Someone should have told him God loved him regardless of what he had done and that there was indeed help. He should have used his computer to find out about sex addiction recovery and used his computer to connect with others suffering in a similar way and struggling to get well together. I wish I would have met him on an email loop for sexual addiction recovery...I would have tried to help him. I am not sure I can even help myself,but hey....I think I will put some recovery links on my blog right now!
Peace
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