Bruce Wayne's Journal - Fixing the Broken Bat

Porn addiction is just a symptom of other problems. You say you're depressed, socially anxious, etc. As you mention above, you should definitely start lifting weights again. Not at home, at a gym where you can combine it with other exercise too.

Exercise will lift your mood (as well as improve your body) which will hopefully clear your head to work on your underlying problems.

 

Well, I’ve decided to seek therapy. I feel that it’s the only way to really deal with my issues.

It’s something that I’ve contemplated for a long time and usually put it off because I felt ashamed and felt that being a “man” meant overcoming your problems by yourself, but I just can’t do it by myself anymore.

I made the decision to call my mom earlier and ask her advice since she has gone to therapy herself for anxiety, which is something I also have and just that talk I had with her about this whole thing and what’s been bothering me for all of these years was helpful. It really opened my mind to some of the things I’ve been repressing.

I haven’t felt confident in years and I just feel like I’m in a prison daily. Like I can’t do the things I want to do because of my anxiety lack of self-confidence and I try to compensate for these things by wearing nice clothes and driving a nice car and trying to put on this persona that really isn’t me. I just find it very hard to express how I really feel about things at times and I find myself being overly-invested in how other people percieve me (particularly women). It’s not fun living like this.

 

Hi BruceWayne, I empathise strongly with what you have been going through as someone who has had strong anxiety for many years now. It is a really positive step that you are going to get therapy. Have you had a thought about the type of therapy that you will try?

I can also relate to what you write about seeing the need of help from others as a sign of weakness, as I have been there myself. I was reluctant to seek additional help for a while until things got extremely difficult with my anxiety and addiction that I hit rock bottom. I gradually learned that seeking help from others is a sign of strength. Recognising that you cannot do everything by yourself is a gateway to liberty. I have grown so much in seeking wisdom and support from other people. It is helpful to remember too that there are things that other people can learn from you. Learning is a two way process.

I agree with that, Londoner. What I would add is that quitting Porn allows us to confront our issues directly by allowing us to feel pain. It is this pain that pushes us to find solutions or new approaches to looking at our situation. In quitting Porn, we also develop the willpower to make lasting changes. When I was acting out, I was seldom successful in building long-term healthy habits because I was eroding my faculties of discipline, while also masking the reason why I had to change.

 

Seeking therapy is fine. Only a small minority of people would be able to fix their own car or set a fracture they have. You can bungle around and hope you end up getting it right. Or you can get someone who is a professional to help you. It's the same with your head.

Good luck with the therapy, i'm beginning my own soon

 

I’m borderline excited to start going. I just need to find a good therapist that I’m going to mesh well with.

Woke up with some anxiety this morning. This after staying up really late last night looking up therpaists in my area online. Sucks because I was already really tired before I went to bed last night so now I’m extrememly tired plus I have anxiety.

Also should mention that I PMOed three times yesterday and this morning along with a session three days ago. Other than this my porn use has been very limited over the past two weeks.

I just hope I’m able to get my confidence back. I think I have a lot of unresolved issues from my childhood that don’t allow me to live my life fully.

 

Do you weightlift Bruce? Just putting thisbout there, because I view weightlifting as vital to my own sense of self-confidence.

And I would suggest to use this new energy and get yourself in the door of a therapist. I know I would be someone to search for the 'perfect' therapist instead of just going to one.

 

I do weightlift, probably not as much as I should but I’m afraid that somewhat acts as a way to compensate. I feel that if I put on enough muscle and I’m not skinny anymore than people will respect me and women will respond more positively to me.

There actually was a point about two years ago where I put on about 10 pounds of muscle. I was getting quite a bit of attention because of how much I changed and finally caught the attention of this girl I had my eye on. We ended up seeing eachother a lot that summer, mostly just through social events and there was clear mutual interest to the point where when our group of friends would drink and stay at our one friend’s house’s instead of driving home we’d sleep together and cuddle and ended up hooking up one of the nights.

But, my lack of confidence which led me to have very bad anxiety around her caused me to be afraid of making a move beyond what I had done and things fizzled out but there were other reasons for that to happen also.

This is why I want to see a therapist. I just get so anxious when trying to take actions that would be beneficial to me that I can’t do it. It’s paralyzing and defeating and takes a very serious toll on my self-esteem far greater than I had originally imagined.

Situations like I described have plagued me for years and I’m almost certain I have some unresovled emotions from my childhood that are the cause.

Around the age of ten I had lost almost all of my confidence. Prior to that I was a very confident young boy. I was athletic and very in to baseball. I also was a goofy kid who liked to make other people laugh.

But then some stuff started happening to me that I just wasn’t able to cope with efficiently at the time.

I had a teacher in school that was very mean to me and had some friends that turned on me and picked on me which led me to be completely beside myself. I hid everything from my parents and made it seem like I was okay. I also had no brothers or sisters to confide in since I was an only child.

Then shortly after my parents got divorced which kind of was the icing on the cake.

I don’t remember being the same at all since then. I was completely out of confidence and had a very tough time fitting in at school. Really didn’t have many friends until the age of 12.

Porn became a big factor in my life around this time. I don’t think I reazlied it at the time but I was using it to self-medicate. I had some brief run ins with it beforehand but that was only on cable tv. I had found it on the internet and I continue to use it to this day.

I just want the old me back prior to those tumultuous two years.

I remember thinking to myself that I shouldn’t feel this way about that time frame and that people have had way worse things happen to them in their childhood and have turned out fine but right now I don’t think the severity of what happens to us really matters. It’s how well we are able to cope with it and how well our support systems are able to help at the time to get us through it, that really matters.

Unfortunately when you’re that young you don’t have the skills to deal with stuff like that and if someone is like I was they’re going to hide what’s happening to them from the only people who could’ve helped which is exactly what I did.

One problem I’m running into while searching for a therapist is finding the right one and I also don’t know what kind of therapist I should see. Not sure if I should see a full-blown psychiatrist or someone who is a counselor.

 

Have an appointment tomorrow with a therapist. Kind of nervous about it. Something I never thought I would do and was against for a long time but I think it will be beneficial to get some outside help and really help me take that extra step towards becoming the person I want to be.

 

That's good bud. I'm sure it'll be good for you, but you have to choose to be open to the new ideas and really allow yourself to transform. For example, there is a great deal of overthinking I find in your attitude towards weightlifting. Just go and lift weights. All this extra stuff about what it means to weightlift and compensation and identity crises and all that is just your former unconfident self's voice coming up with excuses for you not to go and actually change from an unconfident person to a confident person, because changing like that would mean the death of the unconfident self and that self will do whatever in its power to pull you back in and say it's not worth doing.

Anyway just my two cents. Good luck

 

Yea, I can’t really disagree with you on the overthinking part. I do feel like at times that there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be confident because if I’m confident then I don’t have an excuse to keep living the way I’m living.

 

Had my first appointment with my therapist yesterday. Not gonna lie it was kind of weird telling someone stuff that I just met all of this stuff that I’ve had going on for years in my head. But I told her everything. About childhood, about my lack of confidence with women, lack of confidence in general, and about my porn addiction.

She was understanding and good with everything but one thing that I noticed while I was telling her some of my problems is that felt good just saying this stuff and I realized that some of my problems seem so less serious and so easily fixable when I say them out loud instead of thinking about them in my head.

I think this is definitely going to be beneficial for me however I think I may shop around at some other therapists because I think I could find a better one for me.

 

Back to the overthinking thing that YOC mentioned, I think that would explain a lot of my problems. I tend to make things more complicated than they need to be by overthinking. Not only overthinking but overanalyzing and looking for things that really aren’t there.

Also, I need to have more courage with women. I can’t let myself be afraid to approach or talk to women. Not that I can completely eliminate the fear or anxiety but I need to still act even while feeling those things. This is a point that is made in Mark Manson’s book Models.

I also need to be more vulnerable with women and need to be 100% honest with my thoughts and feelings. I tend to put on a front around women and try to portray an image that I think will be likeable instead of just being myself.

My love life is probably the single biggest thing I want to improve at the moment. Not only do I want to meet someone but I want to get laid.

 

I went out over the weekend with some friends and got a little drunk Saturday night. Had a good time though. When we were at the bar it was pretty anxiety inducing being around so many attractive women. My friends kept trying to coerce me to go and talk to some women but my anxiety would go through the roof every time I thought about doing it.

I ended up trying to talk to some women who were walking past us as we walked to another bar but they said they had boyfriends. As they walked quickly away I yelled something smart ass to them since they obviously were lying. My friends got a good kick out of it.

I did towards the end of the night talk to the one girl since I recognized her from school. Chatted with her a bit. She wasn’t really all that attractive but I figured it would do me good to at least talk to one girl that night.

Just the fact that I got out of the house instead of staying in and playing video games made me feel better.

Kind of sucked being hungover though the following day since I almost always PMO when I’m hungover.

I think that I PMO in general because I’m not doing enough for myself in life to get the enjoyment and stimulation out of it that I need.

Something that’s added to this is overthinking things. Saturday night I realized that if I just stop worrying so much, go with the flow and just say what’s on my mind instead of thinking of the right thing to say that I can have a lot of fun socially.

I can apply this overthinking concept to other areas of my life too.

I think it’s the way I came up to try and always find the perfect solution to problems or to prcrastinate and not take care of them at all.

The Nike slogan “Just Do It” come to mind. Sometimes all you really need to do is just that.

The fear and anxiety have to come from somewhere and to me it really boils down to causing myself these negative emotions through constant inner turmoil about whether or not to do something or make a decision. It can be about multiple things. From making an important phone call, talking to my boss about a problem, taking risks that will imrpove my life, etc.

I feel that once I improve in these areas my overall satisfaction in life will go up.

 

Keep on good journey... recognise negative emotions and substitute with positive affirmations if possible... remember porn is not solution of our life actually it takes away our life how much frustration or anxiety u feel .. overcome it even if have to die for it ..there is freedom outside.and I also recommend accountability put ur phone or laptop in other room before sleeping meanwhile make as many positive habits as u can ..if u r able to make positive habits ur temptation will be less .. remember we own ourselves not addiction..make positive changes as much as u can ..we will win..love and peace

 

Have not slept well the past two nights. Mainly because of anxiety and my mind running amok.

Thing is I don’t have anything in my life that’s really all that stressful. My jobs easy. I just paid off one of credit cards so my debts finally going down.

I just have a tough time quieting my mind and sometimes when I’m already tired I worry about getting enough sleep so that in turn makes it harder to fall alseep.

This morning I woke up because some jackass decided to ride his motocycle at 6 in the freaking morning along with his radio all the way up. Some people man, I tell ya. They just have no consideration for other people.

Also, my friend was talking about going out to the bar this weekend but I don’t think I’m going to go because even though I said I had fun, I didn’t enjoy it that much. I don’t enjoy getting drunk that much anymore and I don’t enjoy that type of environment. It’s loud and crowded usually.

That being said though I still want to get out of the house and do something. Preferably somewhere I can meet women. Just not the bar.

 

I think the biggest culprit to my success is my anxiety and my mind that tends to run. I worry a lot about what could go wrong in my life.

It keeps me from taking risks.

I notice this in myself in social interactions. I’m always worried about saying the wrong thing or something that’s offensive.

I get into my head alot in general and think too much. I tend to base my actions based off of my thoughts not what I feel. Everythings calculated.

 

I really think that if you’re someone who hasn’t had much sexual experience or any at all and have used porn for a long time that you really need to rewire your sexual response to actual women and sex.

One thing that’s helped me with this is imagining myself having sex with women I’m attracted to. It creates this drive within me to want to have sex with actual women that I’ve only felt a few times in my life.

With porn it wires you to become a voyeur and to get turned on just by looking at women not by touching them. I think this is why guys that look at porn can be seen as creepy since they might stare and ogle at women a lot but never talk to them. They lose that drive to actually want to touch and be with a woman.

I need to rediscover that part of myself. That drive that makes you want to get out in the world and accomplish shit and as a male that drive has a lot to do with your sex drive. With no sex drive you’ll most likely feel lazy and unconfident.

This is just my opinion though and it’s only based off a day or two of thinking about it but I have to say that fantasizing about actual sex is benefical for me. I did it yesterday with some women on tinder and some women that I see daily and I felt grounded and confident and actually had a drive to want to talk to them. Something that’s alluded me for years.

 

I'd be careful here, Bruce. It has been proven that the brain can't tell the difference between fantasy and porn. I certainly feel triggered to watch porn whenever I fantasise.

Prioritise abstinence first and do all that you can to avoid acting out. The drive to accomplish good things and be in a relationship with a real women will happen of its own accord when you stop watching porn.

 

This makes a lot of sense to me.

 

Don’t really have much to report on at the moment. Life’s been okay.

I’ve been PMOing almost every day for the past week and a half.

Really need to get that under control.

I’ll be honest. Now that I know that my anxiety is the cause of a lot of issues in my life I thought that I could just PMO whenever I want for the time being until I figure out how to limit my anxiety to where it’s not inhibiting me from living my life.

Obviously not a good idea but it’s one of the tricks my mind likes to play on me to get me to continue PMOing.

Also, I’ve set my goal for this summer to get a girlfriend. I just want to get the monkey off of my back of never having a girlfriend. It’s something that bothers me greatly and it quite honestly kills my self-esteem and self-respect.

I know that being a in a relationship isn’t the end all be all and that there’s more to life than women but this is the one thing in my life that I haven’t had.

Also going to post here more often. I feel that this place does help a lot, especially when having urges.