My first sexual experience was at the age of eight when my neighbor across the street molested me and forced me into orally copulating him. That afternoon was the start of the worst year of my life, until this year. Thanksgiving morning my grandfather woke up sick with what we all thought was either the stomach flu or food poisoning. By Easter he was being treated for bile duct cancer. He passed away several months later in July. My grandfather was my male role model and the first person who I was close to that died. The entire time he was sick I would still on occasion be molested by my neighbor, which also eventually progressed into him sodomizing me as well. A couple of months after my grandfather died as I entered the 4^th grade, I had an extremely authoritative and emotionally abusive teacher. With the emotional loss of my grandfather as well as the sexual abuse at the hands of my neighbor I began having disciplinary issues at school which only led to me having more troubles at home.

Things managed to settle down and the abuse from my neighbor stopped, however when I started middle school I was attacked in the boy’s locker room by two older boys. That incident was the first time that I had an orgasm. Not having any idea of what had happened I was left utterly confused by the feelings they had given me and even though I was terrified by what they had done, on some level I wanted it to happen again. I began puberty around this time and became one of the tallest kids in school. This helped me make it through the rest of my schooling without any real incidents and as a good student.

Things were different around home. Most of the kids around my age also had younger siblings. As I turned 15 my erotic thoughts and feelings started to change and often centered on doing things with the younger boys who lived on our street. I was pretty sure that I was gay. I had also been raised in a Catholic household and firmly believed that it was a mortal sin to be a homosexual. I was terrified of my parents and classmates finding out. Feeling like I had no one to talk to that would understand, I escaped by spending hours looking at pictures of boys between the ages of 8-14 on the internet. That would eventually lead me down the road to the outer periphery of the dark web and chat boards. Being in denial of the dangers of what I was doing I would openly confess on those boards to being 15 years old and sexually attracted to my younger neighbors. In the beginning I was seeing validation and support about my feelings and my sexuality. Those sites also hosted child erotic images and soft-core pornography of young boys fully nude. Eventually, I’d make the mistake of asking older members for pictures from their private collections involving child pornography. These images “triggered” old feelings and intensified my sexual obsessing.

At 17 I was able to drive myself to school and back home and depending on traffic resulted in me getting home from school about 20-30 minutes before everyone. That would regularly be time for me to masturbate to whatever hot guy I saw in the locker room or look at pictures from that site of younger boys. One afternoon when I was alone in the house masturbating to nude boys on the family computer, I left the room and my mom and sister came home and saw them. I was forced to come out to my mom although I tried to say that I wasn’t really gay, just confused. My mom decided to get me into therapy to change my behavior. That attempt would last barely a month until I swore to my mom that I had learned my lesson and would never do that stuff again.

That was a lie and the first of what became the pattern of lying that I would need to do in order to cover up my compulsive sexual behavior. However, my behavior would only get worse and things more unmanageable. Now in college I had classes free on Friday which meant I had the entire day, from the time I woke up to the time my sister got home from school, to look at child erotica and masturbate. It was also around this time that I started posting ads on-line for casual hookups. I had my first consensual sexual experience with another man, but it only brought back painful memories and flashbacks to the molestations I had gone through as a kid. This led to several attempts to work on my “issues”. After several months and several therapists I realized that I was still not fully ready to come out of the closet and admit to being gay. One positive did happen, it helped me to finally realized that I was going down a path that could lead me to getting arrested. That helped to get me to stop looking at images of child erotica, but I still would regularly post ads looking for guys to have sex with. Slowly this started consuming more and more time cruising until I met a guy that I could hook up with “regularly”. The only problem was that he was 17 and I was 20. Eventually, he would move away to go to school ending what “relationship” we had.

During my final year in college a fellow student called the campus police after finding my lost thumb drive containing pictures of underage boys that I had saved from the internet over the years. I was charged with possession of child pornography. I accepted a plea agreement to a lesser misdemeanor charge and sentenced to 3 years of formal probation. After twice violating my probation I was then sentenced and served 40 days in county jail. The one positive thing that came out of this was that I found a sex addiction therapist who I still see to this day.

For the next several years I continued looking for hookups and was not always careful about checking how old they were. I now had stable full-time employment, which meant that I could afford hustlers and prostitutes.While I was able to be financially responsible for a lot of things, any “extra money” was spent on obtaining sex. This became more problematic over time. In 2016, I started working for families with kids who had developmental delays. I found myself attracted to and fantasizing about one the children that I was assigned to. I knew that I could never do anything sexual with him, so I found some regular sexual partners that I paid to roleplay and act out some of my fantasies. I was now spending more and more time cruising on hookup apps and trying to set up the perfect erotic encounters. I found that I was less able to manage all the details involved. Later that year I was terminated for leaving inappropriate materials at the job. I decided to change my career path and go back to school to work in the medical field. Since I hadn’t really saved any money I moved back home and became completely dependent on my parents. This additional stress only made me find new ways of acting out. As my addictive activities became more risky and dangerous the more I needed to escape. Eventually, I was able to get a job at a Covid testing site. The long hours at work helped to build back my bank account that I had completely depleted.

Eventually one of my hook ups turned into something more, for lack of a better term it became a sugar-daddy relationship. He knew how to manipulate my self esteem. It wasn’t long before I developed some very serious feelings for this boy and became willing to do anything he wanted me to do. We carried on this pay-for-love relationship for roughly a year. It was hard to remain in denial as I would drive him around to meet with drug dealers so he could get his fix and then ignore me while he got high enough to be willing to do stuff sexually. I guess that’s what Love Addiction is, continuing to stay with a person in spite of all the red flags. Even with all that I continued to stay with him. Our relationship only ended when he eventually blocked me on all his social media accounts. I no longer had a way of communicating with him.

This became a bottomless spiral that would lead me to my rock bottom. Work became my distraction from the pain and shame that I was feeling. I didn’t want to be around any of my family or friends, so I became more and more isolated. This isolation only fueled my addiction for underage boys. I escaped into the internet world of pedophiles. Eventually my “ex” would reach out to me and created yet another story, another reason for me to give him money. When that didn’t work, he resorted to blackmail, saying that he was really 16 when we met and the pictures I had of him would be considered as child porn. I called his bluff. Several months later I was arrested at my parent’s house for possession of child porn and Distribution of Obscene Matter to a person under the age of 18.

The stress of the child porn case carried over to my job and I was asked to take a paid leave of absence. I felt like I was having a mental breakdown. Even the pending court case did not stop me from needing to act out. I contacted someone who’s profile said that they were 18, but relatively quickly into the conversation he told me me that he was really 14. That’s when I entered the addiction bubble and turned the conversation to sex. We agreed to meet later that night. In reality there was never a 14-year-old boy, and I stepped right into a sting operation set up by some online vigilantes with a film crew. Eventually, they would call the police, and I would be arrested again. I’d spend the next 5 days in custody before being ROR’ed by the judge. Four months later we reached a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s office, and I accepted a plea to a lesser charge and agreed to attend SCA meetings.

So, what have I managed to get out of this SCA 12 Step program since I’ve been attending? Mainly it’s helped to break down all the isolation that had become such a big part of my life. It’s also to some degree helped me see that I am not alone in my struggles with sex and love addiction. I’ve become more aware of how denial and minimizing is a big part of this disease. I have found a sponsor and started to work the first few steps of this program. It has also helped me become more aware of things that I hadn’t realized had as much of an effect on me and those are things that I now know I need to address in my therapy. The program has also shown me just how powerless and unmanageable I let my life get. Working with my sponsor has given me an appropriate outlet where I can talk and discuss the things that may not be safe to be brought up in therapy. He’s also given me someone who I can check in with rather than immediately act-out over. But most of all it has shown me just how compulsive my behavior was and is, and if I use the tools of this program I will manage to successfully redirect myself, one day at a time.