The first week.

So, 15 years of addiction, various attempts at therapy etc.

What is different this time is that I have been to a specialist therapist dealing with sexual addictions, and porn addiction.

This has lead to me feeling occasionally much better over the past month to six weeks.

However, since even weekly consultations at great expense have not enabled me to stop and stay stopped, I asked my therapist for a referral to a psychiatrist who has prescribed me sertraline. After further lapses and a second consultation with the psychiatrist I decided to go with the sertraline, which I started 5 days ago at 50mg.

Six days ago, Thursday 19th Sep, I also attended my first group session. This is not a 12 step program, being less evangelical and perhaps less all-consuming in terms of appropriating one's entire identity into that of "recovering addict".

Today is Wednesday but I have been more depressed over the past week than I have in some time, yesterday, Tuesday, was particularly grim.

Of course causality is very confounded. Contributory factors to this change in mood could include:

1.The direct effects of the sertraline
2.The effects of going to group therapy
3.The psychological effect of knowing that sertraline will reduce my sex drive and thus affect my opportunities to form a new relationship
4. Neurochemical withdrawal symptoms from being porn free for a couple of weeks
5. Some sort of mourning process of having to face the world without the comfort of addiction and fantasy - while contemplating where I am and how much I have to do to get better things going.
6. Ordinary issues affecting my sleep quality such as the noise and disruption caused by new animals in the household.
7. Realisation that my relationship with my ex (which I ended myself) is truly over.

Probably it is a combination of all of the above.

This morning when I was walking the dog, I chewed out a complete stranger who was being slightly obnoxious, I even threatened him with violence momentarily. This sort of impulsive outburst is worrying - it is not totally out of character, but it is undignified, it is not who I am, and is something I thought I had grown out of years ago. I actually thought it was linked mostly to the after-effects of the porn - the hangover - which I have known for some time makes me irritable and impulsive.... so not a good start to the day. I understand why I was rattled by the incident, but why was I not able to surface my conscious will and control the situation?

Tomorrow is the one on one therapy followed by the group session. I do not look forward to the group session - me and four other guys all failing spectacularly in our lives - compared with one another we are each doing better in some ways and worse in others - which leads to a room full of men who are probably thinking what I am thinking: "I may be a disaster but I wouldn't want to be you". Yet our experience of addiction is remarkably similar four all 5 of us.

And so there is this forced intimacy with people who one would not normally choose to be friends with - and in whom each of us can see his own nightmares. But it has got to be done. I don't want to make new friends with these new people, I have real friends already. I want to be with healthy people, not share in the pain of others.... but this is a process that  I am told is important to recovery, so I am going to do it and see how it goes.