Shame--The Cave

The binge-purge system works for me when it comes to sex addiction.  I clean up for three to six weeks in the purge phase.  Trying desperately to win all the accolades, achieve the positions, do the "right" thing, and prove that I'm not a terrible unworthy person.  If I can get enough key people (especially my wife, family, and close friends) to say I'm not a POS then I can feel just barely OK for a little while.  But I know the truth and it gnaws at me from the inside out.  I'm living a lie and that adds to my feeling--scratch that--adds to my KNOWING that I'm an awful person.  The lies and the reasons that I have to lie all prove it deeply to my heart.  The anger and the conflicts are usually around someone telling me in some way that I'm not a good guy--which drives the point deeper into my soul.  Someone is able to see that I'm an asshole, a failure, a liar, a cheat, and a perversion--and that my deepest attempts to cover it all through deception are failing as well.

I can't face the monster of it all and I run to my cave.  I hole up in addiction and lay there in the warm dark.  The sticky smelly ickiness covers me and, for a while, I'm lost in the oblivion of delusion and denial.  The sludge covering me matches the sludge in my soul and I am calmed.  I am weaned and comforted by the depravity until somewhere the light breaks in and I see I'm in the cave.  I see the opening and light outside.  I smell myself and I'm repulsed.  The sludge is hard and cold now and I can't tell where I end and it begins.  But I move and it cracks--and I climb out.

I run to the cold fresh waterfall, diving under it as quickly as I can.  The torrent washes over me and I swear I will never go back to the cave again.  Drinking in the fresh water I rinse the sewage from my mouth, my eyes, and my hair.  I can breathe and I can live again.  The putrid smell washes downstream and I can even smile.  That man in the cave seems like a distant memory as I walk ligher home enjoying the freedom of cleanliness and order and peace.

But the water doesn't really touch my soul.  The taste of the cave is still deep in my throat and buried in my nostrils.  Everything is off inside me and I know that I am really a cave man, a sewage swimmer, who only pretends to to be clean for a time.  The voice of the waste will call me back because it is the truest voice I know.  Everything else is a lie.  Who can love a man like me?  I look up finally and am only slightly surprised that, instead of walking home, I'm again at the mouth of the cave.

Let us truly live.