Ben's Story: "I stayed drunk on web porn..."
Excerpt from “The secret life of a sex addict,” Essence, May 2003, Vol. 34, Issue 1.
Computers made my career and computers ruined my life . Computers fed my addiction to hard work, creative planning and hard-core pornography.
My story began as the classic African-American success story. My parents are government workers who saved up for my college education. My wife is a schoolteacher. My affinity for computers landed me an excellent job. I invented a software program that saved my company millions, and I became a senior vice-president with a big office and private bathroom. I moved my wife and three children to the suburbs and took them on Hawaiian vacations. A division of 50 people reported to me.
In my off-hours, I started dabbling with some of the milder sex sites. No big deal. But as the years passed, these sites became more explicit. That excited me. So did the changing technology--chat lines, Web cameras, E-mail photos. The world of Web porn became endlessly fascinating, but I still wasn't worried. I restricted my sex surfing to my lunch hour.
Then an hour in the afternoon. Then an hour at home after my wife had gone to bed. Soon I was ordering secret credit cards as a way to hide the expense. I was suddenly visiting sites--and staying for hours--where Web cams were showing things that had me dazed. I didn't realize my behavior was so extreme until a colleague, who had inadvertently seen me on-line, told my boss. Because of my value to the firm, I was given a warning. I was told that if I were caught again, I'd be fired. Rather than seek help, I bought a handheld computer that I could operate in my private bathroom. I spent at least half my time at work in that bathroom. This time it was my secretary who reported my secret behavior. That was it: I was terminated, and my wife was told why. Infuriated and frightened, she took the kids and left.
I can analyze my situation with clarity. As a child, I discovered an uncle's stash of porn magazines. The images confused and excited me. They were more than any child could handle. As a result, I was still seeking the thrill of that early discovery. Then came the computer.
The computer is addictive in and of itself. Combine it with porn and you have two mighty addictions operating in tandem. No wonder I capitulated. No wonder porn is a multibillion-dollar on-line business. But all the clarity in the world does not get me my family or my job back. And the worst part is, I'm still deep in the addiction, even after a weeklong stay at a rehab facility.
The rehab was intense, but once I was home, I was back online. The therapists urged me to attend regular meetings, but I wasn't comfortable there. "The idea isn't to be comfortable," said the head of the program, "but to process your feelings by speaking your emotional truth." The truth, though, is that the other addicts didn't have my education or my intellectual understanding of the addiction. If I could find a group of my true peers, maybe that would work. I've been told I lack humility, that without humility--admitting that I can't do it alone--I'll get worse. But having lost everything, living alone in a run-down studio apartment, sitting in front of this computer night and day, staying drunk on sex sites, I don't see how I can sink any lower.
