THE PROBLEM

Many of us considered ourselves inferior, despicable and we felt scared and alone. What we saw inside us never equaled what we see on the outside of others.

From the beginning, we feel disconnected: from our parents, from our peers and from ourselves. We isolate ourselves from the world through fantasy and masturbation. We tried to establish some connection by immersing ourselves in photos and images and chasing the objects of our fantasies. We persecuted with lust, and we wanted to be pursued with lust as well.

We become true addicts: sexual relationships with ourselves, promiscuity, adultery, dependency relationships and increasing fantasies. We get sex with the look; we checked it, we sold it, we exchanged it, we gave it away. We were addicted to flirting, to provocation and to the forbidden. The only way we knew how to free ourselves from the tyranny of sex was to plunge ourselves further into him. “Please, relate to me and fill me,” we implored on our knees. At the same time that we were looking for lust trying to achieve the final state of trance, we gave our own will to others.

This produced feelings of guilt, self-hatred, remorse, inner emptiness and pain. We locked ourselves more and more inside ourselves, away from reality, from love, and lost within ourselves.

Our behavior made true intimacy impossible. We did not know what real union with someone was, because we were interested only in the illusory. We were attracted by the “spell” of the physical-sexual, the contact that produced magical effects; precisely because this way we avoided intimacy and true union. Fantasy corrupted the real, lust killed love.

First addicts, then unable to give love, we receive from others to fill the void that existed inside us. We were fooled over and over again by thinking that the next person would be the one to save us, and in the meantime, we were wasting our lives.

For The Problem:
© 1982, 1989, 2001 SA Literature
Reprinted with permission of SA Literature.