STORIES OF TRANSFORMATION

Intimacy and closeness with other people has always been a challenge for me. Friendships with other men have always been colored by my fear that I’m not masculine enough. I know now this isn’t true, but nonetheless it’s a message that’s deeply ingrained in my psyche. In relation to women, I pursued sex, thinking that was the only way to intimacy and closeness. Another falsehood, yet another ingrained pattern.

When I first started with Neulia Compulsion Solutions, I was in the grips of both of these lies. As I’ve gotten older, I began to feel that time was running out. I needed to figure out why my relationships didn’t last and why they didn’t seem to bring the satisfaction I’d always longed for. This led me to Neulia Compulsion Solutions. I began a long series of conversations with a sex addiction therapist. These conversations have greatly impacted my sense of self and where I fit in this world. It’s been a long journey, and I’m far from the end of it. Yet, I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned that my masculinity is something that I get to define; it’s not defined by my dad or the culture that I grew up in. While these factors still influence me, I know they do not represent the truth. The truth is simply that my masculinity is unique to me.

In my relationships with women, I’ve come to see them as friends and allies rather than conquests to be made. I’ve become willing to be tender and vulnerable with them, and this has led to more fulfillment and happiness in my life.

This is a lifetime journey, and although I’ve come a long way already, I look forward to a future where I find even greater courage to be who I am, to share myself, vulnerable though I may be, and to continue to grow closer to others.

I was 15 years old when my brother and his friends took me to a massage parlor for the first time. My brother put his leather jacket on me and sprayed me with cologne. It was my first time paying for it, and I was forever changed. I had a cast on my hand from playing football, and the cologne that lingered on the cast was a constant reminder that I needed to get back to that place. I would drive the 30 minutes and pay the 100 dollars often as I could.

My brother also taught me how to cruise the streets and pick up prostitutes. You had to know what to say and where to keep your money. My brother introduced me to high-priced call girls. From there, I began to go to pornography shops. I then graduated to the adult movie theater.

The shame and guilt was a never-ending firestorm in my head. My way of avoiding the adult theaters was to call a line where I could have long conversations about the stories my mind had created. I would spend hours talking to the ladies on the phone about my fantasies of being dominated.

I felt bad because I was spending so much money on these calls, so I found something even better than prostitution or girls on the phone. I found mistresses to humiliate me and force me to surrender my masculinity for the right price. One mistress even made me go to a dressmaker to have a pink maid’s dress custom-made for me.

When I discovered chat rooms online, I began to play the role of the female because I learned I could get much more attention by being an attractive girl who needed to be humiliated. To feed my sex addictions I was able to impersonate a female voice on the phone and had an arsenal of pictures to “prove” who I was. I found some really twisted men who wanted to control and humiliate me.

I had chat rooms and my phony yahoo accounts running all day at my office. My behaviors were completely out of control before I finally called George for sex addiction help.

I will never forget the first time I spoke with George. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was understood. I could tell him my deepest secrets that I was going to take to the grave with me. George knew what was driving my sexual compulsive behavior. He helped me manage my shame and embarrassment so that I could be free from the hell I was living in.

I worked hard trying to understand that the only way I knew how to feel loved was if I were submitting to my mother and feeling her control and humiliation. Unfortunately, I had also married a woman just like my mother.

I called George in May of 2010, and today I am proud to say that I do not engage in any of these sexual compulsive behavior anymore. I do not look at porn. I do not go to chat rooms. No mistresses, prostitutes, call girls, massage parlors, adult bookstores, NOTHING! I’ve learned that these were all unhealthy coping strategies I used to ease the pain and suffering that I was living in. Unfortunately, my brother committed suicide when he was 30 years old and never had the opportunity to meet George. Now, I’m at peace with myself. I am doing okay and I do not have to be emasculated in order to feel loved. Love is not humiliation. Love is unconditional, and now I’m able to give this to my two beautiful daughters.

My business has flourished since I stopped spending my time in chat rooms. With that extra time, I became a yoga instructor and get great joy in teaching others how to access inner-peace. I am working on building healthy relationships with women where there is genuine unconditional love and acceptance.

I am forever grateful to George for my sex addiction recovery. He helped me see and separate fact from fiction.

Five years ago, I enjoyed a successful career and was married to my wonderful wife, Betsy. However, I had serious sex addictions that manifested in online pornography use and massage parlors. I had no prior experience with any type of sex addiction therapy, but I knew I needed help. My life and my marriage was in serious jeopardy.

I started doing research on the subject of sex addiction recovery, and was thrilled to read George’s brilliant, plain-speaking book — Breaking the Circle. I immediately called Neulia Compulsion Solutions in California and George answered the phone. I live in New York, and I asked George if there were any professional sex addiction therapists that he could recommend in New York. He said, “I recommend that you come to Walnut Creek and work with me for 3–4 days.”

That was the best advice I ever received. I worked with George diligently for four days in California and learned things about myself and my family that I never knew or understood before. George taught me how to write dialogues that explored my early family life and I quickly discovered that the normal middle-class family that I thought I was raised in was far from normal. Among myself, my parents, and my siblings, we had zero intimacy. No kisses, no hugs, and zero words of affection. I never heard the words “I love you” growing up. This insight explained a lot about my attitude, particularly toward women. This lack of intimacy translated into a perverse attitude toward women and my lack of understanding of true intimacy. My lack of intimacy translated into a full-blown sex addiction that was out of control.

My discussions with George and the dialogue writing that he assigned provided me with the tools to combat my family history and aberrant sexual compulsion. Perhaps the most important thing that I learned was the simple phrase: “You are not your mind”. One’s mind lives in the past and thrives on what one has thought and done in the past. My biggest challenge was confronting my mind and my thinking about the past, and making certain that I would change my thinking and behavior in the future.

It has been a long process, but a successful one. George has given me the tools to take control of my life. Not only has George’s work helped me with my sex addiction recovery, but also my alcoholism.

Most importantly, my work with George has changed my life and saved my marriage. There will always be work to do, but I have an intimate and caring relationship with Betsy that I never could have imagined.

Before working with Neulia Compulsion Solutions, my sexual addictions were out of control. I was acting out sexually on a daily basis, and I was not even aware of what I was doing or how it was affecting me. I also didn’t realize how my sexual compulsive behavior was affecting my friendships, my intimate relationships, or my career. I was underperforming in my job, often escaping into fantasies or obsessive thoughts throughout most workdays.

Since beginning my work with Neulia Compulsion Solutions, I have been able to leave my unfulfilling day job to instead start my own successful business doing what I love. I have been able to date women and create healthier intimate relationships. And I have come out of the isolation that my addiction created. I am more social and engage with my peers and friends regularly.

Neulia Compulsion Solutions helped me realize that my addiction was a way to avoid facing pain in my own life. By facing that pain and dealing with it head-on, I have been able to experience real intimacy and live as my authentic self rather than hide in the shame, anger, fear, or pain. I have been given tools to process and work through my sex addiction recovery so I can create the.

fulfilling life that I deserve.

A little more than a year ago, my family had a bad fallout with one of my older brothers resulting in a restraining order by my parents and his own refusing to speak to any of us. In a fit of rage, he left a message to me berating me of all of my inadequacies and insisting of my alcoholic behaviors.

Being only a social drinker and almost never in excess, I took this as a superficial insult and really dismissed this characterization and continued living my life as it was, attempting to raise my two sons with my wife in a healthy environment. It wasn’t until around three or four months ago that I began to understand that my life was not ideal in the way I seemed to believe it was.

I was carrying much resentment, shame and anger with me and thought I was finding relief in watching internet porn, binge eating, smoking pot and lashing out in anger and trying to control almost all the situations life threw my way. In an attempt to find some stability and a more productive lifestyle I read a book about emotional intelligence and when I was done with that I picked up “Breaking the Cycle”.

Upon delving deeper into its content, I began to understand my afflictions, not with just internet porn, but in all my compulsive behaviors and especially found the concept of who I am is not who I was or who I think I am and the stories one tells themselves does not make them who they are very inspiring. I found it very helpful for me to follow these ideas brought forth to me through this book and continue to do so when I began to read another book called “The Power of Now” and in this book it also stated the almost same message from “Breaking the Cycle”; that my identity is not determined by the stories I tell myself.

I was a little caught off guard and slightly alarmed by this concept being in these two books and the wordings were almost identical to each other and yet in hindsight it really isn’t that coincidental. Within the first day of starting to read this book, I was driving home from the library when somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled that my wife had told me that Ram Dass had just died yesterday. I was not too familiar with him or the things he spoke about, but I do know that my wife told me once that she used to read his book, “Be Here Now” at her grandmother’s house when she was younger and I began to laugh out loud in an almost uncontrollable way, because of these epiphanic happenings.

It was a good three minutes that I laughed out loud to myself in the car and when I got home I told my wife of the coincidences, excluding my fit of laughter and she said to me that she heard in the car on the radio that Ram Dass would preach the power of laughter as a way to bring forth presence and I was stricken with unbelievability of what happened to me in the car on my way home. I then told her and she said, “that’s really weird.”

This whole scenario made me think of that saying in the book, “The Alchemist” which goes something along the lines of, “...when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.” In the end I am still practicing this guide I first discovered in “Breaking the Cycle” and am finding myself in a better way and thankful for this gift.