Good Days, Bad Days and Giving Up

First things first - keep in mind that a lapse doesn’t have to lead to giving up quitting.
Just pick yourself up, re-commit to stopping and learn from what went wrong.
Plan to come back stronger and wiser.

Cure vs lifestyle
Unfortunately, there is no cure for having a compulsion towards child-porn – if part of your life revolves around targeting and interacting sexually with kids on the net, or you can’t help yourself logging on to child-porn sites, then there is no effective ‘off switch’.  In fact, if you use child-sex activity on the net to deal with your immediate feelings then hoping for a cure might be part of the problem – for some people, child-porn is itself a cure of experiences of powerlessness or humiliation, or of a dread of sexual inadequacy, or just plain relief from overwhelming sexual urges.  To use one cure against another is the problem – a better solution is accepting that these feelings and memories may stay with you for the rest of your life, but you can change your life for the better.

Changing your lifestyle means changing your behaviour first, then redirecting your conscious thoughts and ultimately changing your feelings.  Using a more spiritual perspective, you might change your way of ‘being’, ie your whole way of relating to the world, including relating to your history of child-porn use.  Lifestyle change can be hard-work, but you have done it many times before – when you left home, when you started work, when you got into a relationship, when you started secretly using child-porn.  Each of these situations was most likely accompanied with a sense of looking optimistically to the future, that you were getting into something exciting or worthwhile.  If giving up your child-sex activity seems like hard work, keep in mind that the effort now will pay off in feeling free later.

TOP TIP:  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘not at all’ and 10 being ‘absolutely’, rate yourself on the following comments:

Your responses to these points will give you some insight into your confidence, which you can incorporate into your Stop plan.

Dealing with good days and bad days
It’s a good idea to expect bad days, especially when you have just quit using child-sex activity.  It takes a while to adjust and all your habits, routines and thinking processes will realise that their needs are not being met by you anymore – this leads to withdrawal symptoms (most often anxiety and stress, and occasionally physical symptoms like sleeplessness) which in time soften into cravings, and then to memories which come and go.  If you know bad days may come then plan for them – have a flexible strategy and goals in mind for these days, and remember to increase your rewards as you get through the bad days.

Most people probably don’t prepare for the good days – those times when it feels like you’ve ‘cracked it’, feel great and will never return to child-porn (or even feel cured).  Whilst these moments might feel like a great relief, they may be setting you up for a fall (which can undermine your confidence to succeed) or may be the result of a blind spot (try your Johari’s Window exercise again) or a psychological defence (an experienced counsellor or psychotherapist can help here).  This might seem a bit depressing (like you can’t have good days), but the growth that comes through not being overly distracted by the best and worst of days is potentially substantial.  Rudyard Kipling puts it better in his poem, ‘If’…

Stressful life events
Research into when men with convictions for sexual offences are most likely to reoffend suggests the following life events are risky:

These are so generalised that it would seem that any event that you find stressful could undermine your Stop plan.  It is worth noting that many men who are convicted for child-porn offences are much more likely to experience the above events – this seems like a downward spiral of child-sex activity leading to enforced stressful life events leading to a higher risk of repeating child-sex activity.  You may choose to get off this downward spiral now by quitting, or keep off the downward path by sticking to your Stop plan.

TOP TIP:  Are you expecting a stressful life event?  Have you used child-porn to deal with your feelings in the past?  If so, how will you cope with the stress?  Are there people around to support you?  If not, look up people or agencies you can seek out for support, make a list of their contact numbers and call them.

A day at a time
If you’re having a bad day, or a moment of withdrawal or craving, then just focus on safely getting through a short period.  It might be a day, the working day or even an hour or ten minutes.  Self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous use the phrase ‘just for today’ and this is just as helpful when quitting compulsive child-porn.