Living a Double Life

The seeds of my decades-long pornography addiction began at the of ten.  I found my first pornographic magazine as a 10-year-old, and I used the magazine as a way to cope and escape from the difficult things happening in my life at that time.  Through adolescence and my teenage years, I used pornography as a coping strategy anytime something difficult or hurtful was happening in my life.  Little did I know, but I had planted - and was watering - the seeds that would grow into a decades-long struggle with addiction.

I believed marriage would end the addiction.  It did not.  I believed having children would change my focus and take away the addiction.  It did not.  I believed that as long as no one knew what I was doing, no one would get hurt.  I was wrong. I was living two separate lives.  The one life looked good and put together on the outside.  This was the life that showed things were going well.  The other life was the private one where I was miserable inside and filled with shame and guilt.  These two lives constantly battled each other.  It was an exhausting and never-ending fight to live in the two separate lives.  No matter how well I thought I was in control of both lives - especially the addictive life - I found out there would be life-changing consequences.   In 2015, my world came crashing down and life imploded.  Finding myself a divorced father of three children starting over and unsure what would come next was a difficult and scary place to be.