It was Sunday afternoon and Joseph's wife, Mindy, was concerned.
"What's going on? Is something wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing's wrong. I'm just playing League of Legends. Is there something wrong with that?"
"I usually don't have a problem with you playing," she said. "I don't know why it's bugging me today. I guess it just seems like you've been in zombie mode for the last few hours. You seemed off even before you got on the computer to play."
Joseph got off the computer. He was annoyed about it at first. But then he realized he should sit down with Mindy and unpack why he'd gone into zombie mode. What had been eating at him before he detached?
He knew that this is the way it had often gone when he used to relapse with porn: he'd feel some kind of underlying negative emotion, he wouldn't address it, he'd start playing games or escape into some other screen activity, and after a while he might move into the realm of porn.
So he sorted through the events from earlier in the day in search of it: was there some underlying negative emotion he'd been trying to escape?
Their pastor, Steve, had asked them all to volunteer at least an hour each week over the holidays to in their church's food pantry. He'd told himself that with the extra hours he was putting in at work this month and the demands of their young family, he wouldn't have time. But then he'd started feeling bad about not helping. He'd laid down to take a nap once he got home from church, but he couldn't fall asleep. He just ended up feeling lethargic. He played a game on the iPad with his oldest son. Then he'd gotten on the computer to play.
"Yeah," he acknowledged to Mindy, "I'm feeling pretty burned out with all of these demands bombarding me. Seems like there's always something that's not getting done. But more is still piling on top of me all the time, regardless of what I've gotten done or still have left to do. Plus I guess I've been wanting to set aside all the trivial demands of life and do some meaningful service activity, so when Steve asked us to do that part of me was like, 'Yeah, this is perfect, it's what I've been looking for.' I guess I shut down that generous, giving part of myself and maybe part of me was feeling bad about that. It's a drag when life is all about the grind, very rarely about doing something extra in a meaningful way."
Later Joseph said to me, "It was good to talk it all out with Mindy. Once I unpacked all of that and realized what had been troubling me, it made more sense why my brain wanted to go into zombie mode."
These days Joseph, with Mindy's help at times, is getting better at catching zombie mode and evaluating why he is detaching before it ever reaches the point of sexual temptation.
That's good, proactive recovery.
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