At my first SA meeting, the man who became my first sponsor told me that I needed to stop masturbating. I was shocked! In my view, masturbation was the only thing that kept me from doing the really dangerous things that I might otherwise have done. My habit kept me sane, I thought. It relieved the urges that would otherwise eat me alive, I thought. It made me feel a bit better in times when I was dangerously depressed, I thought.
But my sponsor paused, then told me more. He said that masturbation was actually feeding my problems. Every time I acted out, he said, I was activating the lust drugs within my own body--the adrenalin and endorphins--and my body had become addicted to those drugs. So long as I continued to masturbate, those drugs could be in my body at a high enough level to keep me satisfied. When I stopped masturbating, my physiology *craved* those drugs in the same way a heroin addict craves his drug. But also just like that heroin addict, the constant level of those internal drugs kept my mind fuzzed and unable to process the world properly. I felt sane, he said, but those drugs kept me at a level of insanity.
So I tested his theory. I stopped.
And I went through three weeks of withdrawal that was as bad as anything I’ve heard about from a heroin addict. But after those three weeks, my mind cleared and I was astonished to feel a renewed clarity of thought that I hadn’t known for years.
Apparently, he was right, and I’ve been sober since February of 2014