Tag: personal development

We publish here T’s new testimony, written six months after making contact with the Blue Angel Association for the first time. You can easily see how being listened to and supported positively impacted him. The needs T and thousands of others like him express are clear and our experience, like this testimony clearly shows, tells it’s possible to give an answer.

 

Six months after meeting with Latifa and the Blue Angel Association

I had already written on June 19th 2015, soon after meeting Latifa and starting to come off an addiction to child pornography. I had ended my story on a positive note and I was totally right as today my life has meaning again!! So I can say I’m happy with my current life. So I would like to write again to give hope to people who are addicted to child pornography and tell them that it’s possible to pull through and live a much healthier and happier life, with joy and serenity.

1: The contact with the Blue Angel Association and Latifa Bennari

So I can say that Latifa saved my life since without her I would have never been able to pull through. I think I’d still be hooked to those videos, photos and other child porn mangas. I say “saved my life” because I had piled on so much frustration, such an awful self-image, so much isolation and deep distress that I think I would have ended up killing myself, or perhaps even trying to enact what I saw on those images and videos I found and that I felt were so unhealthy and terrible but with which I “fed” my mind for hours each day.
So I contacted Latifa via e-mail and she answered a few hours later…

Her answer changed my life. I had felt totally isolated, thinking nobody could understand me. Thanks to her, I understood the only way out for me was coming off completely from those videos and images which were the main cause of my unhappiness. We exchanged some more e-mails, then had some phone calls which were a huge help.

I’ve also read Latifa’s last book and I could identify with some of the stories in there, and it also allowed me to understand how I had ended up like that, understand that I wasn’t a monster and that more importantly I had the possibility to pull through by myself.

I’ve also participated to a dialogue group organized by Latifa that allowed me to meet other people with my same profile and most of all to listen to the pain of ex-victims of sexual abuse during childhood. Seeing them in front of me, listening to their testimony about the pain they endured as children and the impact it had during their lives up to today was like an electroshock and it really opened my eyes.

Meeting with the Blue Angel was essential to my new life. I will never have enough words to thank Latifa and all the people I met with the Blue Angel.

2: Personal Development

Latifa had given me the keys to come off my addiction. Then I started looking for solutions, while I was weaning, to stand the impact and try and lead a fuller life, to replace the time I used to spend on my pc looking at child porn with something beneficial. I don’t like reading much, but I used to listen to podcasts and thanks to that I began listening to podcasts about personal development.

Afterwards I also read some books that helped me get more self-confident, less bashful and meet new people to get out of my loneliness.

Thanks to those podcasts and books about personal development I was able to work on myself in depth and understand some of my behaviors that blocked me in my everyday life, rooted also in my childhood. I could observe that my mental lockdown in that addiction was for a big part because of my huge bashfulness, since I preferred staying confined in a digital world raher than going out and trying to meet girls my age.

Personal development helped me get better a lot, it allowed me to better myself in many areas of life and I keep being interested in it everyday.

3: Meditation

Meditation was very important to me too. I started practicing it in full conscience a little more than 3 months ago. The first month I didn’t feel much of an effect but with a regular practice of 10 to 20 minutes a day, I felt my anxiety, all my negative thoughts, the useless fears diminish. I got more serene, I could spot the moments when I would have been more vulnerable to a relapse. It also allowed me to understand a bit about the workings and the frailties of my mind.

To this day I practice every morning a guided meditation of about 20 minutes. I want to point out that I’m an atheist and therefore the meditations I practice are non-religious.

4: The psychologist

Since these six months I’ve been in therapy with a psychologist, and I bit the bullet and told her about my history of addiction to child pornography. I think she finds it difficult to put herself in my shoes because she doesn’t have the tools to understand. However she was still able to help me in other areas of life, which means I’m much better today. I couldn’t see her as much as I would have wanted since that would have cost too much money and she had a very full agenda anyway.

5: Final assessment since my encounter with Latifa Bennari and the Blue Angel Association

Today I’m happy to be alive. I keep fighting everyday, my life isn’t perfect, but I appreciate it how it is. I want to point out that during my weaning I relapsed three times, 3 evenings when I watched child pornography again, but I got back on track the day after. I hated myself a lot after the first time but the others, I took them as experiences and tried to understand why I had relapsed. Now I think that young and little girls have taken back their right place in my head: that of children and not that of objects of desire. Of course I still find them pretty and I love their spontaneity, but I see them differently than before meeting Latifa.

The way forward has been difficult for me, but compared to the agony that was my life before the 1st mail to Latifa, it’s like nothing. I’m just at the start, but thanks to the work I did on myself and most of all to the Blue Angel Association, I have no doubts anymore about the fact that I will forever stay an ABSTINENT pedophile. I hope I will soon find the future mother of my children, there’s still the rest of my life to live, and the pitfalls of life to be vigilant of!!

I hope my story will give some hope back to people who, like me, were at rock bottom. And I hope that there will be more people like at the Blue Angel Association, with a heart huge enough to be able to pierce our armor and give us back the joy of living and of being able to pull through.

T