The fourth Principle of Responsibility is to stop hiding from ourselves.  There can be no recovery when we continue to isolate ourselves and our feelings from the outside world. In addiction we used our emotions to protect us from reality.  We guarded our delusions with anger.  We masked our pain with fear.  We obscured our difficult choices with shame.  We blurred our send of self with sorrow.  In recovery we take responsibility for our decisions and our actions.  We somberly realize our past does not let us off the hook.  We are now ready to truthfully examine our life.

     In step four we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  Self examination becomes our ongoing commitment to recovery.  We now accept reality; surrender to what is real, no matter how inconvenient. In essence we are taking responsibility for our own lives without masking the fear, pain, and sadness. Instead we look back and realize things don't always turn out precisely the way we thought they would. We now gently replace fear, pain, and sadness with our hopes, dream, and intentions.

     Responsibility is about asking the question, "Who Am I." During addiction we wove a tapestry of frightening threads: denial, avoidance, justification, and irresponsibility.  In recovery, we examine our life and weave a new tapestry of eclectic threads of joy, sorrow, loss, achievement, friendship, love, disappointment, loyalty, and betrayal.  This new tapestry - one of hope, health, sanity, and serenity becomes our security blanket.  We do not gloss over anything as we examine our feelings and actions only to discover what part we may have played in all this. We no longer expect everything in our lives to turn out the way we thought it should.  Instead we follow the principles of acceptance, awareness, spirituality, and now responsibility.

     Experiencing recovery is like learning a new language.  In the beginning we think about each sentence and mentally translate very word.  As you become more fluent, some phrases become natural and eventually mental translation is replaced with processing in the new language.  This is similar to psychotherapy.  In therapy, we examine our life with a therapist.  In the early stages we examine during the session and wait until the next session to examine more.  Eventually we realize our greatest growth comes from self examination outside the therapist's office between sessions.  Over time, this self -examination becomes automatic. Once we become aware of what we are feeling, we can do something about it, instead of staying addicted to our past, thinking we can control our emotions with alcohol, drugs, sex, food, or gambling.

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Tuesday 1:30 ED

I'm wondering if it may be helpful to educate on how the industry ACTUALLY works.

I'm a filmmaker and a journalist, so please allow me to help if I can.

What we're dealing with in the pornography industry is simple: the MEN making this stuff know, for the most part, what will sexually excite other MEN.

Rather than a singular man "interacting" privately with a female, what we have is another MAN (or group of men) behind the camera looking for a way to make money off of the singular man's sex drive.

This is a perspective I see nowhere among those who are trying to rescue men from this abomination and mental/emotional prison, and most men already caught in the net don't realize the truth about it--that they are considered fools by the makers of the product. And I'm sure most men don't want to be used or toyed with by other men who are making money from their most personal foundation of soul.

Would it help, I wonder, to teach that rather than some woman enticing or performing for an onlooker in a pseudo-intimate, one-on-one setting, there actually is a lot going on, and multiple takes are recorded, then edited later, to get the effect, and a MAN is directing the female performer from an off-camera position, and also is either handling the lighting and sound himself or has others working for him.

So, again, instead of this being a "private" activity, it is in reality a GROUP effort--a form of advertising which lures into more consumption of the "product."

By teaching me to ANALYZE what they're watching for what it is: a product being sold by some other guy--perhaps they could stop the process of being hooked in. It will be tough going though, because of the chemical addiction coming from the viewer's own brain.  The pornographers are essentially drug pushers.

I hope that helping men see that other men are ripping them off by constructing a product that (naturally) would excite the sex drive and begin a physical and psychological addiction in the brain due to the manipulation of the brain by another man (an enemy), will be at least somewhat of a turn-off to at least some men struggling with this form of visual marketing.

May G-d bless your efforts to free the sons of Israel.

Cindy Ingold