Day 1 Letters: P.S.
Day 1 Letters are letters written by clients to their younger selves on their very first day of recovery. Share in their wisdom and knowledge gained.
If you are on Day 1 of your recovery, embrace the hope for a brighter future. These letters are posted with client approval and have been anonymized.
“Hey self,
It’s day 1 of realizing that you have a real problem that you can’t passively fix. You are scared, you are alone, you don’t want to believe that you have a problem, you don’t want to believe that porn/sex addiction is real, let alone something that could hook its claws into you and not let go. Most of all you do not want a single soul to find out what is going on with you.
The cold truth is, you’ve had an unhealthy relationship with sex since 6th grade. It started as a blend of finding porn sites on your laptop you got for christmas, and engaging in sexual virtual chats with girls in your school on facebook. You compartmentalized these online encounters with random girls in your school, never making actual eye contact with them in the hallways or in class & never acknowledging the encounter that you had just the night before.
This compartmentalization bled into your first real relationship with a girl that you loved. You could not stop these chats, and eventually that led to physically cheating on her. This became a massive source of drama during your high school career, leading you to dissociate for what now feels like 5 years.
Now that you understand that you have had this problem since way before today, I’d like to give you a few tips from what I have learned 2-3 years into recovery.
Unsubscribe from BrainBuddy and any other blocker, app or service that you are currently paying for. You are way too smart to let a piece of software get in your way when you want to act out, you are simply wasting money. The ‘communities’ on the app are either full of misinformation or ghost towns. Plus, do you really want to build more soulless online connections? Your addiction has gifted you millions of those. The daily ‘tasks’ on the app just become some mindless checklist to complete after a relapse, they themselves become a part of the addiction cycle - they do nothing to actually take you out of a dissociative state and into the present moment. Also, do not purchase a phone lockbox. Your ideal ‘sober life’ does not include locking your phone in a box for 10 hours a day, so why use it as a part of recovery.
You need to break isolation. Pick up the phone and call a friend or a family member, addiction feeds on isolation. Your family and friends love you and they also need someone to talk to. Do not feel anxious to go meet new people, trust me - I felt exactly how you felt but I pushed through and have formed some new friendships that I cannot imagine my life without. Get out there.
Tell someone what is going on with you, it can be anyone you trust. They will not oust you, and it feels good to unpack this addiction and move it out of your own head.
Get a journal with good paper and a nice pen, and write ‘check-ins’ daily. This will help you to start the day off present and gives you a real chance to analyze your behavior the day before. If it was a positive outcome, review what activities led to that outcome and incorporate them into your overall process. If a negative outcome, do the same except work on ways to cut back on the activities that led to it. I believe writing it down on pen and paper is a million times better than using some app on your phone. It helps you to break free from your reliance on the phone. I also feel that using the phone activates something in your brain related to acting out, similar to a drug addict looking at a plastic baggie or an empty needle.
Get professional, 1:1 help. You don’t know what you don’t know, there are professionals out there with years of experience that will help you shape a recovery process for you.
Keep going.”
