Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been over a year since my last confession.

Well where am I at?
I spent a year in counseling to deal with the coprophilia issue, eventually I realized that wasn't the biggest thing in my life, but I still got issues.

I go in and out of worrying I am going to get caught for looking at the wrong photos, or reading the wrong stories online.  I don't think I seek things out, but I worry that in my haste I'm not always careful.

I noticed just a little bit ago that someone had commented on here once. I  have spent a few weeks thinking about this kid... and it makes me really sad to think that he believes he is somehow sinful just because of this issue.  To be clear, I don't think I am sinning by being into scat or anything else for that matter... I think I am "sinning" because it keeps me from believing in myself, from acting with integrity and honesty, it keeps me insecure and non-social, self centered (in my contempt) and bitter/resentful. It keeps me focused on parts of a person rather than the whole...    But those are the sins, not being into kinky sex.  They are societal sins, we are taught to hate the things that are different, we are taught to try to be something we are not, and to dislike ourselves for never achieving "perfection" and "normality"  which aren't real things.  So if you ever come back, please please please know that you are not bad or sinful because you like shit (or anything else).  People have liked shit since people existed.  Its what we make of ourselves that is the real test.   I blame myself for acting out of my insecurity.  You don't have to make the same choices I made...  be loving and kind.  Know that there are people out there with the same desires and that indulging in harmless fun is not something you should be ashamed of...   I wish I could be there.  I am determined to someday not be ashamed. 

I am also wondering a lot lately if my porn habits have lead to unrealistic expectations of a relationship.   They say common symptoms of porn are things like voyeurism, trophy-ism, objectification  and I don't think I do these things in public to a degree that is harmful... my female friends don't complain, in fact they find it odd when I do act like that.  But maybe part of my trouble with getting into relationships is that I have ideas of perfection from porn that can't be appeased in the 2 minutes that I am making snap judgments.  Maybe its not just that it satisfies sexual needs, maybe it also causes impatience in my seeking behaviors.

oh well... this is all lust and sloth

I hope you are well...

The storytelling

So I am in therapy, or pre-therapy really.
I hope to feel better about myself, more complete and have some control over myself from this exercise. Already I think just thinking about getting better has helped. At the same time, I feel like to some extent the therapy is only making me worse. Usually when I get stressed I resort to old tricks, but in this case its not the stress, its the ease with which my therapist handles these situations. If I were amongst normals I would feel guilty and embarrassed, they would make me feel that way -with looks and silence, disgust or genuine anger and inability to understand. My therapist however only wants to help me deal. Get me to stop feeling bad for the things that are part of me, and get me to feel good about stopping the things I claim to want to stop... but I never really know if I do or not.
I mean, I enjoy sniffing my roommates underwear. I love it! Its so exciting and so delicious. Yet I hate the idea that I would do that to her. Make her uncomfortable or betray her trust. Its got nothing to do with the underwear... and everything to do with my meeting my selfish desires while ignoring hers.

So my therapist asks me to write about one of these events to try to figure out what I am thinking and feeling at the time. I can't figure out when I am not thinking about it, which makes it hard to talk about... but when I just choose a moment to start writing about it I go on and on because my thoughts don't stop. They haven't ever stopped.
At any moment the desire is there.
Yet I understand the behavior is not impulsive... I am doing it after intentionally deciding to do it. When I retreat (as I did a minute ago before writing this) I do so intentionally feeling the situation is wrong.

The hardest thing though, is that I want to tell everyone. I want to tell my roommate, my friends my family my therapist. I sometimes even want to tell my coworkers things.
I get so excited both by the thing itself, and my feelings for people, and my desire to get rid of it all, and the process of letting it go that I want to rush through it.
I want to tell the world.


Probably because I am hoping they will react like my therapist.
But my therapist has been trained to pretend to not care... these people would all be hurt.

Porn

 "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been 15 days since my last confession."

I mentioned in my last post that I became quite the viewer of  pornography. At times in my life I have spent 4-5 hours in front of a computer or tv screen, or reading a story or magazine that enticed my lust.  I have questioned this desire many times, am I an addict? 
By some definitions I could be: 
Has it interfered with my relationships? Yes
Has it kept you from fulfilling other obligations? Yes
Has it made you tardy or absent from school/work? Yes
Has it changed the way you view the world and yourself? Yes


Has it kept you from meaningful relationships? No
Has it kept you from making new friends or interfered with family? Previous post excluded NO

Has it caused legal trouble? No
Has it caused the loss of a job or other similar punishment? No


Most importantly for many:
Does it make you see yourself or the opposite sex as an object?  No, not in real life at least



I have a hard time taking these things seriously in that sense, am I voyeur by choice? Is it learned or genetic? Did it come from obsessive excitement seeking or was it already within me?


But could it affect my job, relationships with friends and family, future ability to pursue goals, Yes Yes Yes. 
And is that worth it?

Well I would like to say no, I will stop this minute, its not worth the risk, but at the same time I am not sure I am A) capable B) want to C) have the support I would need D) have alternatives for my sex drive. I am not currently involved in a relationship. I am not currently interested in anyone in particular and I am not currently of the view that I should stop "using" porn and start "using" women I meet in person. (Does that make sense?)


It is easy to say, well then don't "use" them, get to know them etc, but we live in a society in which 25 % of the adult population lives alone, about 30 % of the population (in any age group) is single at any given moment, about 50 % of marriages end in divorce and about 40% of children are being raised by parents who are not together.  One could say well that means there are lots of people out there right? But in actuality what these stats show is that people have a hard time meeting and an even harder time staying together in our society. 


But here is the real problem, the addiction or whatever you want to call it is a self defeating cycle. 
Like most addictions, the symptoms are temporarily relieved by the substance. I feel lonely, bored, ashamed etc, I jerk off (temporarily solving the problem) afterward I feel lonely, bored, ashamed again. The cycle repeats. Physical barriers do sometimes prohibit repeating, but that hasn't kept me from enjoying myself way too many times in a day. Also the physical release isn't even necessarily the point, but rather the excitement of the search, its not like I watch the same video over and over, it is a drive for something new, something fresh and has in the past lead to something more dangerous, something more taboo. 

These dangerous taboos are what tend to cause the massive upheavals that get people in trouble. Whether its the politician or celebrity who suddenly gets caught being blown in a Men's Room, or the teacher, priest or doctor who is accused of molesting their students/parishioners/patients. Regardless of whether they did it or not, if there is "shady" porn on their computer they are going to jail. Shady in this case being anything but vanilla sex.  Parents have even been accused of creating child porn when taking pictures of their children in non-sexual, normal-child living situations (if in the buff)... like eating, or playing with toys or whatever kids do.


So say I am a priest, I'm not because I am not catholic, but say I am really into Bondage and Sado-Masochism (its in the priestly tradition-both condoned and not), anyway one can argue that I might not be following the right religious path, but if it were to come out that I was into a fetish, should that mean I am expelled from my position? Should it mean I shouldn't have access to the parishioners? 


Or regardless of the action... If I who had some non illegal, but certainly inappropriate actions with a younger family member of the opposite sex. If I state that publicly, should I not be able to work around children? Should I not be able to have children?  What if I stopped, made effort to keep it from happening again, spent 10-20-30 years of my life trying to make up for it?


Well I have been on a tirade here... but regardless I was reading in a book about pornography addiction, that one of the proposed causes is that at a young age the fear and shame of acts becomes so intertwined with sexuality that the person seeks this form and feeling again (a mix of fear/shame/powerlessness/abuse of power/ excitement/lust).
So when I mention that I have a great deal of shame over my sexual desires, when I state that I feel a great amount of guilt and self loathing over my past actions, when I fear for my sanity, soul and moral self, when I struggle constantly with ideas of right/wrong it seems entirely plausible that both my source of mixed feelings towards my sexuality and my desire to temporarily numb myself/ excite myself from beyond those feelings through the use of porn, is indeed an addiction like state and probably caused by some mixture of these feelings at a younger age.



Now if that is the case, what do I do about it?

The Butt of Every Joke (Pun Intended)

 "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been 6 days since my last confession."
The other day in a conversation between myself and a friend I was confronted on my vanity, my pursuit of wanting to be remembered, wanting to be written, wanting to be in history as more than a crowd member. To be remembered as special- for something good.

There is a piece of me that thinks every human has this desire to an extent and of course it waxes and wanes. At times I am just as happy to be remembered by friends and family, at other times even more extreme I curse myself and hope to be forgotten, and of course at other times I wish to give a good speech, write a good paper, create a good work, a good community, and be remembered as someone good. I do not desire celebrity as such, just to be remembered fondly.

Today I was thinking, yes but at what level would your good deed have to be in order to be remembered fondly, for you see I am the joke of every person, child and adult of every culture.

From a young age I remember thinking very positively of trips to the bathroom.

I suppose all children get a certain joy from going to the bathroom, after all Freud labeled it a stage in development, the anal stage, whether his theories have any relevance to my particular shame I have no idea.

What is coprophilia?

Exactly what I have been trying to understand about myself for years.

When I was young I was just interested, played like it was a toy, like it was mud, but later it became a sexual interest. When dreams became fantasies, became wet dreams. When ideas about diapers and forced feeding, punishments and presents all took the form of shit in my mind. That was when I knew I was different.

 Let me describe my earliest fantasy.

I am a small child (not the age I was when I had the fantasy). I am at the daycare I remember the most, a very clean place with many children that was part of a church center as well. I have done something wrong, I don't remember what, I may or may not have done it on purpose. The very large woman who is my daycare teacher (not a real person) says "You know what that means" I fake embarrassment and fear, and she forces me to jump into a giant dumpster of dirty diapers. She locks me in there for a long time, but rather than being disgusted I feel a strange dirty sexy feeling.

At this point I assume most people are grossed out. Being grossed out by shit is normal right?

This is why from around the age of 5 or 6 I realized I was "not normal."  This only became worse when it became sexualized and rather than thinking about girl's emerging breasts I thought about their trip to the bathroom, fantasized about being in there with them.

Its strange in writing this down I remember certain events that may or may not have contributed to this locked in shame:  A) I was going to the bathroom (an embarrassing thing for me since as far as I can remember) and my favorite girl at the before mentioned daycare walked in. She left immediately but not before seeing me on the toilet. B) When I was younger I remember showing my excrement to a group of older boys trying to impress them, rather than being impressed they teased me.

But both of these events took place after I had been playing with shit already (I showed the boys hoping I was not the only one). The desire itself has changed over time, at one point I was into spreading it all over my body, which would lead to a lot of explanation as to why the bathroom smelled so bad and why I showered so often, at other times I dabbled in self-coprophagia. These experiments also lead me to develop or notice my obsession with butts in general. In my fantasies it became not just the excrement (dirty diapers etc) but also the butts of the other kids and teachers. Eventually I started to play with my own butt, sticking fingers and small objects into it for sexual pleasure.

These experiments and thoughts had a particularly troubling affect on my social life and self esteem. During the age of puberty I not only had to recognize and consider the sexualization of this fetish, but also the normal  changes in my body and mind. Beyond that adolescence is a troubling time for any person, but throw in the idea that you are weird and alone into the mix and it becomes a very depressing and isolating experience. Luckily I had a great family and wonderful friends but I shared none of this with any of them for fear that they would not love me anymore. Instead I bottled it up, sought out information from others and eventually decided that because I would never be "normal," I shouldn't try. I sought out the weirdest and grossest things I could find. The disturbing, the haunting, the terrible things people do to each other and that happen in our world and I found them in abundance in books, movies and eventually the internet. I spent many nights trying to shock myself into feeling normal... after all if these things happen (dismemberment, abuse, torture, degradation) than what I am interested in must happen too right? I must be somewhere on the scale even if it is in the extreme.

This information though haunting also caused me to feel less isolated. I stopped thinking about killing myself and instead tried to imagine meeting people who were into what I found out was called "scat." 

For those of you very vanilla people out there, there are many people in the world who are into "weird" fetishes. These people sometimes go by the general term of being Queer, and I am starting to recognize the positive use of this term in my life, but in general the internet has opened up a world of connection where in the past people might have been totally isolated. The problem though is that this leads people to chat rooms, porn sites and risky encounters with other people who may or may not be shady. It also leads people into a world in which they continue to keep these feelings and thoughts fairly repressed and secret from the outside world. This has been my case.

With the exception of you, I have only confessed this to a few, they being my lovers it was inevitable that they found out.

There are many implications of this fetish, but one is that I always seem to have reason to doubt myself and the love of others. This brings me roundabout back to both the title and the first part of this post, the butt of every joke. How can I believe that anyone could love me, care for me, have respect for me when Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo and every third grader are telling jokes about poop being the funniest thing on earth (and anyone who likes it being contemptible). The things that make people laugh in disgust, are the things I am turned on by...
Second, how could I ever be famous enough to live it down.

Person A: Did you hear? He created world peace and fed all the starving children.

Person B: Yeah probably just cuz he wanted to eat their shit.

(Which wouldn't be true by the way)

I included wrath and envy in this one because I am often disgusted with myself over this and wish to be like others. Sloth could also be included because being so ashamed of myself I have at times been unable to act for myself or others, and have been unwilling to judge those that hurt others because I am afraid of being judged myself.
There will be plenty more on this, but that is it for now.