Someone asked me once, in an early recovery group, “what are you feeling right now,” and I genuinely did not know how to answer. Not because I was hiding it, but because I actually could not locate the feeling. I could tell you what had happened that day. I could tell you what I was going to do about it. What I felt, I had no idea. I’d gone straight from a bad day to a compulsion without ever passing through the part where you notice and name what’s going on inside you. For years I thought that was just how I was built, low on emotions. It turns out it’s more common than I realized, and it has a name.

It’s called alexithymia, which just means difficulty identifying and describing your own feelings. Researchers have found it shows up again and again in people who struggle with addictive behavior, whether that’s alcohol, gambling, or the thing that brought you here. The theory makes sense once you hear it: if you can’t identify what you’re feeling, you can’t do anything useful with it. You can’t talk it through, can’t sit with it, can’t let it pass on its own. All you’re left with is the raw discomfort, looking for the fastest exit. The compulsive behavior isn’t really the problem in that moment, it’s a shortcut around a step most people take for granted, the step where you notice you’re anxious, or lonely, or hurt, before you decide what to do about it.

Learning to name feelings sounds small, almost too simple to matter, but it was one of the most useful skills I ever built in recovery. I started keeping it embarrassingly basic. Mad, sad, glad, scared, tired. Just picking one, out loud or on paper, before doing anything else. It felt clumsy at first, like learning a language as an adult. But that pause, the one second between feeling something and reacting to it, is where all the actual choice lives. Skip the naming and you skip straight to the reaction. Slow down enough to name it, and you get your say back.

You’re not broken if you can’t answer “what are you feeling” right now either. You’re just early in learning a language nobody taught you. Start with one word. It’s a small door, but it opens into everything else.

Spencer

For a long time I thought I was chasing a high. Looking back, I wasn’t chasing anything, I was running from something. Underneath every binge there was some kind of pain I didn’t want to sit with: things not going the way I wanted, uncertainty about where my life was headed, boredom I didn’t know what to do with, loneliness I wouldn’t admit to anyone, fears about myself I’d never said out loud, and older wounds I’d never actually dealt with. The addiction wasn’t the problem showing up, it was the exit I built to get away from the problem.

It doesn’t matter what the exit looks like. Pornography, a drink, food, hours of scrolling, they all work the same way. Each one gives the brain a fast, artificial spike of dopamine, and for a few minutes the pain goes quiet. That’s the whole appeal. It’s not that any of it makes you happy, it’s that it makes the hurting stop, even if only for a little while.

Here’s the part nobody tells you: that same trade doesn’t just turn down the pain, it turns down the joy right along with it. The chemical flood that mutes the bad feelings mutes the good ones too, so the birthday party, the good conversation, the ordinary win at work, all of it starts registering as less than it should. And it gets worse from there, because right behind the high comes shame, guilt, and a low, heavy kind of sadness, and those three do their own work burying whatever joy was still trying to get through. You end up further from happy than when you started, not closer.

This is why chasing the high never actually fixes anything, it just adds another layer on top of the pain you were already avoiding. The way back to joy isn’t a better high, it’s finally letting yourself feel what you’ve been masking, the loneliness, the fear, the old wounds, out loud, with people who won’t run from it either. That part is slower and harder than any spike. But it’s the only path that actually leads somewhere, and the joy you thought was gone for good is still in there, waiting on the other side of the honesty.

Spencer

I used to think my relapses came out of nowhere. One minute I was fine, doing the work, feeling solid, and the next minute I was right back in it, wondering how I’d gotten there so fast. It took me a long time to notice the pattern underneath the pattern. It was never really about opportunity or being near a screen. Every single time, if I traced it back, there was a feeling I hadn’t dealt with a few hours or a few days before. Stress from work I hadn’t let myself feel. Loneliness or boredom I’d been pushing down. Anger at myself or someone else that I hadn’t said out loud. The acting out wasn’t the first breakdown, it was the last one, at the end of a chain I hadn’t noticed forming.

This lines up with what researchers are actually finding now. For a long time addiction science focused mostly on the reward side, the chase for the high. But newer research is pointing hard at something else as the bigger driver of relapse: our ability, or inability, to manage difficult emotions. People struggling with addiction consistently have a much harder time managing hard feelings than people who don’t struggle in the same way. Not because they feel more, but because they’ve never built a reliable way to sit with what they feel without needing to escape it. The craving isn’t really craving the behavior, it’s craving relief from whatever’s underneath.

That means the real work isn’t just white-knuckling through the moment of temptation, because by the time you’re standing at that moment, you’re already several steps downstream. White-knuckling is like hanging off the edge of a cliff, trying not to fall the rest of the way. The real work is earlier. It’s noticing the stress building on a Tuesday afternoon and actually identifying it and acknowledging it instead of stuffing it. It’s admitting the loneliness instead of pretending you’re fine. That’s not a spiritual failure to catch it sooner, it’s a skill nobody taught most of us, and skills can be built. The goal is to stop and slow down long before you’re anywhere near the cliff you already know is there.

I still miss it sometimes, still get caught downstream before I notice the current. But I catch it faster than I used to, and that’s the whole game. You’re not failing every time you feel something hard. You’re actually closer to freedom the moment you can identify it and name it instead of run from it. Identifying it and naming it early is how you step back from the edge before you’re ever standing on it. That’s the fight, and you’re already winning more of it than you know.

Spencer

For a long time I believed something was permanently wrong with me. Not wrong in the “I made bad choices” sense, wrong in the “I am built differently than people who can just walk away from this” sense. I’d hear stories about people who quit cold turkey and never looked back, and I’d think, that’s not going to be me, because whatever wiring lets a person do that, I don’t have it. That belief did more damage than the addiction itself in some ways, because it told me there was no point trying to change something that couldn’t be changed. We hear some version of that message everywhere, that people don’t really change, that who you’ve been is who you’ll stay. I’d taken it further than most and made it my own identity: I was a quitter, plain and simple, and quitters don’t get to be the exception.

Here’s what changed my mind, and it wasn’t a sermon, it was science. The brain is not a fixed circuit board. It’s closer to a trail through the woods. Walk the same path enough times and it wears in, gets easier to follow, becomes the default route your feet take without thinking. That’s what years of acting out did, it wore a deep trail. But trails that stop getting walked start to grow over. And new trails, walked on purpose, over and over, get their own wear pattern. Researchers who scan the brains of people in sustained recovery see this happen for real. After months of abstinence, the areas responsible for self-control and clear thinking show measurable growth again. I’ve felt that shift myself, more than once: temptation showed up, and instead of getting swept past it the way I used to, I actually had room to think it through before I decided anything. The brain doesn’t just stop working against you, it starts rebuilding the very parts that got weakened.

That reframes the whole fight. I wasn’t missing some willpower gene other people have. My brain adapted to something it was repeatedly exposed to, the way any brain would, and it can adapt again in a different direction. This is why the small, repeated choices matter so much more than one big dramatic moment of resolve. Every time you choose the harder right thing, you’re not just winning a moment, you’re wearing in a new trail. It adds up slower than we want it to, but it adds up.

I don’t say any of this to make the work sound easy. It’s not. But it means you’re not fighting a losing, unwinnable battle against a brain that’s permanently against you. You’re doing slow, real construction, and construction holds. Your Creator built a brain that can heal, not just one that can break. You were never a quitter, you were just walking the only trail you’d ever worn in, and every step on the new one counts, whether you can feel it yet or not.

Spencer

I got really good at lying to myself. Not the obvious kind of lying. I wasn’t sitting there consciously making things up. It was subtler than that. My brain had developed this whole internal script, a set of stories that ran automatically whenever I was about to act out or when someone (or something) pressed me to look at my behavior honestly. “I can stop whenever I want to.” “It’s not hurting anybody.” “I’ve had a hard week. I deserve this.” “One more time, and then I’ll quit for real.” And somewhere in that same pile of lies was the story I told about my wife. I always had a reason she didn’t need to know. I told myself I was protecting her, that telling her would only cause her pain and I loved her too much to do that. It took me a long time to see that story for what it actually was. I wasn’t staying quiet to protect her. I was staying quiet to protect myself. I didn’t want her to know that I was already betraying her. That’s a hard thing to admit, even now. But it’s the truth, and the lie I wrapped around it was one of the most convincing ones I ever told myself. I believed all of it. That’s what made it so dangerous.

Researchers who study addiction call these cognitive distortions: patterns of thinking that consistently bend reality in ways that keep the behavior going. But I didn’t need a clinical term for it. I just knew that my mind had learned to build a case for the thing I was addicted to before I even had a chance to think clearly. And the longer the addiction went on, the more convincing those stories got. The brain is incredibly efficient. It will reinforce whatever it’s been trained to reach for. So if you’ve spent years reaching for pornography as a way to escape stress or loneliness or boredom, your brain doesn’t just learn to crave the behavior. It learns to justify it, automatically, in real time. The thought and the excuse show up together, as a package deal.

What finally started waking me up was learning that these stories aren’t the truth about me. They’re symptoms of a hijacked thought process. That’s not an excuse, but it is an important distinction. When I realized that my rationalizations were reflexes and not reality, I could start questioning them instead of just living inside them. “I can stop whenever I want.” Really? Then why haven’t I? “It’s not hurting anyone.” What about the version of myself that’s slowly disappearing? What about my wife, who deserved the truth and kept getting excuses instead? Something greater than myself wasn’t asking me to pretend those stories weren’t there. It was asking me to stop letting them be the last word. That’s where recovery started for me, not in willpower, but in the willingness to ask whether the story I was telling myself was actually true.

If you’re reading this and you recognize those voices, the ones that smooth over the problem right when you’re most vulnerable, I want you to know that noticing them is already progress. You don’t have to believe every thought you have. The story your addiction tells you is not the story something greater than yourself tells about you, and it’s not the story you have to live. Recovery is, in a very real sense, learning to rewrite the narrative one honest thought at a time. You can do that. I’m still doing it. And every time I catch the lie before it takes over, I get a little more of myself back.

Spencer

There is something humbling about returning to a place you left.

I started this site with a clear purpose — to be a resource for those fighting their way out of sexual addiction. Then life moved fast, and the posts stopped. Five years passed. The site sat quiet while the world kept spinning and people kept struggling.

I thought about coming back many times. I would open the laptop, stare at the screen, and talk myself out of it. Who was I to show up after five years of silence? What did I have left to offer? Those thoughts felt familiar. If you have spent any time in recovery, you recognize that voice. It is the same one that tells you that you have already messed up too much to start over. That the gap is too wide. That it is easier to just stay gone.

I have learned not to trust that voice.

So here I am. Not because I have everything figured out. Not because my story is finished or perfectly wrapped up. I am back because I believe this space still matters. Because there are people out there who are right now where I once was — isolated, ashamed, and convinced that no one else could possibly understand. I want them to know that someone does.

In the months ahead I plan to write weekly. We are going to dig into the real work of recovery — not just staying sober, but learning to feel again, to connect, to become the person that addiction tried to bury. Some of what we cover will be backed by research. Some of it will just be honest conversation.

All of it will be for you.

Welcome back. Let’s get to work.

Spencer

To gain recovery all addicts utilize some form of step work. But there is one crucial step that needs to be taken before that work begins. It is the moment of realization that there is a problem and we need to fix it. Before this realization, we know that there is a problem but we foolishly believe that it is under control. We believe that we are not hurting anyone. Because of the temporary pleasure we feel we are blinded to the true pain we cause ourselves and others. We are still not fully awake to the damage we are causing. 

The moment we realize that we need help can come at different times. For some, it is when they are caught by their wife or children. Others may lose their jobs or get arrested. And there are those who are exposed but still believe they can continue with even more determination to hide it. There are the rare few that acknowledge their addiction and get to work without damaging their relationships. 

 It does not matter how we got to this point in our lives, what matters is that we accept and embrace this step. It is the beginning and it is painful but it allows us to strive to be free. This is where we start taking the hammer to ourselves and start demolishing the parts inside that need remodeling. It is hard work to remodel especially ourselves but in the end, we become an honorable person. It all starts with waking up.

Who of us has not tried to overcome our addiction and yet always fell? We would decide enough is enough and grit our teeth, clench our fist, and out of sheer determination not act out again. How long did we last? For some, it may have been a few hours. Others, days weeks or maybe even months. And yet we always returned to acting out. Feelings of failure filled our hearts and minds. Yet we always attempted again and again. Our desire to break free was true so why could we not accomplish what we desired. Why could our minds not control our bodies?

Our brain alone is not superior to make meaningful change. For a significant change in ourselves, we need to include the heart and not just a determination or will power.  Determination must be part of our recovery, but it cannot be the reason. Determination alone lacks the continual motivations. True desires sink into our soul and we feel it in our heart. The heart may have been a part of our desire to change but it was not necessarily significant. To change ourselves we need to change our heart and then we can change our minds and ourselves. How do we begin to change our hearts? For me, it was I needed to give up things I thought I needed. Things like music, privacy on phone and computer. Others might be the gym, sports, or even work. Our desire to change needs to be more important to us than anything else and we must be willing to give up things to allow that change to happen.

A change of heart and determination need to work together to create change within ourselves. It is possible to have long periods of sobriety with just one of these, but it is when you use both together as a complete tool that transformation begins. In the end, we want to succeed in our mission. We want to show ourselves and others that we are not who we once were. We want to shed the feelings of shame that come from failure after failure. This is possible. We can be free if we change our true desire in our hearts to determine what is most important.

Current circumstances have left us isolated from others. Isolated from the support we need. Loneliness grips us all at times. For some, it is a daily companion. Others seem to be around people daily and still don’t get what their heart truly needs. Whether we know it or believe it, we need some form of emotional connection often. We all yearn for some way to connect with someone. We are looking for something to fill us. The great part of recovery is we need to connect almost daily with someone to get out of our minds. Connecting with other like-minded people continues to allow us to give support as well as receive it.

Consistent connection with others in like-minded endeavors support us in the ways we need. This is our community. We can have multiple communities at different times in our lives. A community for addiction recovery, one for weight loss, another for achieving financial freedom, and one for religion. We may not share all the same beliefs of those in our groups but we share enough to help each other draw strength and affirmation from. We can draw support from them when we are feeling weak and provide the same support when we are feeling strong. Our hearts yearn for connection and when we make the effort to find and connect with these groups, then our hearts start to be filled. It will assist us to overcome depressions and loneliness. It will help us find happiness.

How many times a day to we look at our phones, the internet, Facebook, or Instagram. We are constantly looking for something that will inspire us or connect with us. The thing about technology is it provides a great way for us to connect to the people and the world. Yet for many it causes them to be depressed and feeling worse than when they first go online.  We look and lust after people and things. We compare ourselves to others. We look at our little screen and see everything perfect for others but not ourselves. Yet if we took that little screen and blow it up on the big screen in front of us, what would we find? Will we see how dirty the countertops are? Would we see the massive amounts of debt that people have to keep this perfect charade? What we may see is that many of these people are just like us, lonely and looking for someone to talk to and express their frustrations and concerns.