The three circles - A tool to help you prevent yourself tricking yourself when you are acting out.

When I started this streak I did it with a vague idea that I wanted to stop PMO. It was going quite well but around day 10 I found a folder with porn in my computer (I had tried to clean it a few times but I have so many things there that I guess there will still be some surprises). I felt totally triggered and I decided that I had to delete it. However, my mind played a trick on me, and convinced me that it would do no harm to check the folder, just the thumbnails, out of curiosity as I did not really remember what was in that folder.

No need to say that I ended up checking every pic and video in the folder full size and eventually spending three hours visiting porn sites. I just did not masturbate. I managed to limit myself just to watching. What saved me from masturbating is that I had just joined a support group online and my commitment to the guys there was and still is very strong. Anyway, you can imagine how difficult that was and how triggered I was that day and the following days.

Then I had another problem. I was not sure if I had acted out and if I should reset my counter. Since I had not PMO I thought I had not acted out. But something felt wrong.

I was very lucky to have very good advise from Charlie, a friend from my support group who has a lot of experience. He told me: “what I found helps (and this comes from SAA), is to be really clear on how you define acting out. Like, really crystal clear - write it down. Decide whether watching porn but no m counts or not etc. Then in the future you'll know exactly whether what you are doing counts as a slip or not only you know what is right and wrong for you. I try to listen to my gut. If I'm asking myself "is what I'm doing acting out?", then it probably is. One thing that happened to me a few times was that because I'd tell myself "I'm only watching porn, not masturbating, so it isn't really slipping", therefore I would start spending ages watching porn without masturbating, which was essentially just as bad.

This has helped me a lot. Actually it made me realize that deep in my mind I had always known that my main goal was to stop watching porn. And yet after that episode I was ready to believe that watching porn was ok just to save my counter!

Here you have the explanation Charlie gave me about the circles where we can define our goals: they call it circles - there are 3 circles inside each other, with the 'inner' circle being acting out, the middle circle being 'dangerous' activities that aren't acting out but could definitely lead to it and are things you should aim to stop doing, and the outer circle which is healthy activities that you want to try and do more of. So your looking at porn briefly might have been a middle circle, depending on how you choose to define it.

And here you have my three circles as an example.

My inner circle (red) is watching porn or any other graphic material that I feel I am reaching out to arouse myself sexually.

My middle circle (yellow) is watching at certain women’s body parts (basically anything under the neck unless there is a good reason) on the street. This is in my middle because if it would be I my inner I would have to reste my counter daily. Masturbation (without watching anything) is also in my middle circle. I want to reduce it and I try to be very aware of the kind of fantasies I use. I may move this to my inner circle at some point. I keep track of my masturbations in a excel sheet, I take note of where I did it, for how long, if I reached orgasm and which kind of fantasies I used. At the moment I don’t masturbate much if I don’t watch porn, around once very 10 days. And very often I get bored after five minutes and stop it without reaching orgasm.

My outer circle (green) is meditation, being aware of my body (posture, breathing),being aware of my feelings, being less selfish, being a more compassionate, empathic, loving person. I am lately giving a lot of thought to becoming a vegetarian or a vegan.

That’s it. I hope this is helpful.

I love you all!