Help

Man, I’m not doing so good. I had a year of sexual sobriety and also a year off drugs + no smoking. I ended up breaking up with my gf because she couldn’t get down with the idea of no sex before marriage. She didn’t want to get married any time soon and I would occasionally have relapses with her. I say I was a year sober because we were long distance, so the slips only happened a few times when I would visit her and i didn’t engage in any other sexual behavior that whole year. In any case, the night I broke up with her I just felt - numb. We have a child together, and a lot of my recovery was me trying to keep our family together. I regret having such a strict definition of sobriety now - but at the time, it’s what I wanted. If I came back to the rooms I’d have more of an SAA approach and b okay with sex in a committed relationship but that’s another issue. Anyways the break up was 6 months ago and I lost my job, started smoking weed and cigarettes again, and am acting out primarily with strip clubs and porn but also with escorts massage parlors and video booths. It is very hard for me to want to go back to recovery. At best, I would like to stop the extremely dangerous stuff - escorts and video booths etc. giving up strippers is hard for me. I am an attractive young man and unfortunately I have the ability to have sex with strippers for free. They are all in my age range and for lack of a better term I am pretty smooth. It’s hard because there’s like a real connection there - or it seems like it. It’s raw, it’s visceral and it just hits different when I know they really want me and I’ve successfully crossed out of the customer threshold into a romantic interest. Within this bender, all of my support system has turned from SA guys to strippers and bartenders. Some of them are really good people. I don’t want to let them go but I’m slowly killing my self. I have also unfortunately contracted herpes. That’s all I really got. Thoughts? I contacted an SA guy and he thought that trying to taper down was bullshit but it just doesn’t seem realistic to stop all at once without my head exploding. How can I slowly taper off? How can I * not* spend all my money on strippers? What do I do