In his memoir, Bigger Than Me, Ryan Capitol shares the compelling story of his addiction to love and sex and how his compulsions led him into a world of pornography and abuse and, eventually, on a path to healing.
Capitol narrates a horrifying and often graphic journey through childhood sexual abuse that began with his older brother and continued on for ten years through a variety of sexual predators who were unfortunately also family members. As he details the human side of sexual abuse, he illustrates how sex became his only way to show love and affection. With an honest and self-disclosing style, he chronicles how at age eight, he made his first sexual overture toward a little girl and how, at age eleven, he boasted about making it to first base with at least four girls in his class—all while battling internal demons that unleashed him into a downward spiral from which he would not emerge for many more years.
For anyone who has ever wondered why men and women sexually molest children or rape someone in the middle of the night, Bigger Than Me tells the gripping—and sometimes shocking—story of how it all starts.
Excerpt
When I tell people my story about how I became addicted to sex and love, I tell them it started at about the age of four, but in reality it started even before I was born. This was only where my history started in the line of things. The actual history behind my behavior actually goes back several generations. My addictive behavior is one that is a family secret that only until the truth of the matter is told, wills a cure be foreseen. For a long time I had the idea that I was the only one who had this problem. That turned out to be a false accusation. In today’s society, times are changing for addictive behaviors, doctors and medicines are being developed for people, to help them fight the urge to have sexual compulsive behaviors. I am not a doctor, but I am an addict, and believe me those medicines work very well. But again this book isn’t about getting help anymore than Dr. Patrick Carnes’ book “Out of the Shadows” which describes many areas of sexual addiction and love addiction. I would suggest that anyone who feels that they have a problem with sexual compulsive behaviors to read this book and even more I would suggest this book for any of those people who are having the feelings of a significant other who is controlling in bed, or if that same person spends more time alone than with others, that “Out of the Shadows” is probably for you. This story is about how my addiction started, how it progressed, and how it unleashed me into a world I couldn’t have known existed had it not been for those people who truly loved me. I know now that I wouldn’t have survived had it not been for love. Even though I was addicted to love, affection, and intimacy, I couldn’t begin to know what love was until I was shown it outside of my family. I couldn’t see love as anything but sex and intercourse with another human being. That is what this story is about. This story is about the human factor of my addiction and how it started for me. I can’t speak for anyone else’s beginning of addictive sexual behavior because everyone else is different from my story. Most of the time it only takes one event of another person to awaken sexual awareness and impurity. I can sympathize with every one of their stories, however. And I know that everyone of them including myself has suffered the same fate as the ones we have harmed, if not worse than how we harmed others. It is only a part of our reasoning to show affection towards those whom we feel attractions to. For me it was women in general.
The experience of a young adult trying to figure out what they want to do for employment or education can be overwhelming. My book will give them insight to what it means to be a carpenter. And the progress unions have made in discrimination.
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This book has been eight years in the making. It is mostly a jumble of thoughts written down in old spiral notebooks and hidden in the bottom drawer underneath various manuals for software packages and hardware long since turned obsolete.
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