Some of this is raw, disgusting, and disturbing. It was difficult to write and is difficult to read. Names have been changed for privacy. My sexual journey started in kindergarten. I was the only boy in a large class of girls and was borderline worshipped by my female classmates. I can't remember how, but I arranged with one of the girls to meet me in the bathroom one day during recess. We pulled our pants down and inspected each other, without saying anything. It was my first sexual experience with a girl and would be my last until I was 21 years old. I discovered climax one night when I was 10 or 11 years old, grinding on the sheets after wetting the bed. It felt so intense and I was hooked immediately. From then on, I often peed in my bed on purpose then rubbed myself to get that warm exciting feeling. Around that time my family got our first computer (a Gateway with dial-up internet), and I discovered right away that I could look up literally ANYTHING on google! Every time my parents were out of the house was my opportunity to freely explore this awesome new world. Soon I was masturbating furiously to naked girls every chance I got, always listening carefully for slamming car doors and footsteps when somebody came home, so I wouldn't get caught. I quickly escalated to pictures of girls peeing (this is between 5th and 8th grades). Around this time I started feeling more and more isolated from my classmates at school. I didn't know what was happening, but I started to feel inferior and socially behind everybody else. I became more of a loner. I remember being put into the "special" class in my elementary school and telling the counselor that my goal in life was to go live in a cabin in the mountains away from everybody else. "That's called a hermit" she said, which stung. I felt I was smarter than most of my classmates, but I couldn't figure out how to access my capabilities and I felt blocked. I started to fall further and further behind in grades and socializing. My parents enrolled me in a math learning class called Kumon, hoping that would help my delayed learning, but it didn't. I had very few friends, I was bullied and hit frequently on the playground, and the two girls I liked didn't know I existed. It hurt, and of course I had no idea why it was happening. I also had no idea about internet browsing history, and one day my dad brought me into the computer room, and confronted me. I was so ashamed- there on the screen in front of both of us was a page full of my frantic horny teen-aged search phrases: girls peeing, nude pissing, golden shower, naked girl pees etc. He told me to stop, and I agreed. It scared me a bit, but not enough to stop. I made sure to clear my history after that, and my porn use continued through middle school. One year I asked for my own laptop for Christmas. That was the beginning of a loooooong dark phase in my life. With my own laptop I now had access to the internet whenever I wanted without interruption, and videos and streaming sites were becoming common. Soon I was binging all night. This was around the time that I started high school. My pattern became: get home from school, attempt/pretend to do homework, "go to bed" early, marathon binge porn and computer games for 8-9 hours until 4am, sleep for 2 hours, get up, go to school, sleep through most of my classes (often getting my fix in the bathroom during lunch), rush home and repeat. On weekends I don't remember leaving my room much at all. This continued throughout high school with ever escalating genres. I came to hate contact with other people, because it reminded me of how far behind my peers I was in socializing. Being an only child didn't help much. I was pretty much a walking zombie and a loner for my entire time in high school with one exception. I went on a summer trip to Nicaragua between freshman and sophomore years to help paint a schoolhouse and teach English, and there was no laptop or internet in the town I lived in. I sort of made friends with the other two American boys I was there with (they were always closer with each other than they were with me, which I resented). When I came back from the trip, I remember proudly announcing to my mom, "I don't even feel like using my laptop" (she didn't know about my porn addiction, and I still haven't told her). I think that with the break from porn use, I had started to realize that the addiction was hurting me. I remember trying to keep away from my laptop, but it was probably within one week that I was back into that nether existence, deeper than before. From that Nicaragua trip on, my addiction got worse and worse. Heads up, gross part coming. I escalated to occasionally watching videos of girls pooping along with my normal mix, which made me shudder thinking about when I wasn't watching it, so I tried not to think about it. My parents were concerned about my failing grades, so they took me to a series of psychologists, who diagnosed me with ADD, depression, and an "unspecified learning disability". They took me to a life coach, EKG brain training sessions, put me on an "individualized education plan" in school, and even put me on medication. Nothing helped at all, and I hated all of it, those things just made me feel like more of an outcast. I say made me feel, but honestly I didn't feel a whole lot of anything during this time. I was not even slightly attracted to girls in the real world at all. One time a girl asked me if I wanted to go to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and I said no, because I had never done anything social like that- and I didn't really like real girls. She ran away crying. I went to school purely out of obligation, but every day I couldn't wait to get home and see what new exciting material I could find for my all-night binges. This went on 7 days a week for 4 years with little exception. I was emotionless, and became like a vital-functions-only zombie. I could barely hold a conversation and my only "friends" were the other two loners I ate lunch with. One time I was walking out of the cafeteria when a girl with a camcorder asked me an interview question for a graduation video or something like that. As I blundered and stumbled through the interview, I remember the look of horror and disgust growing on her face as I endeavored to put together coherent sentences. I think she cut me off saying, "ummm, thanks." I felt so outcast from everybody else, and at the same time I wanted to be a leader. My senior year I got onto the Band Leadership Council, an accomplishment I was really proud of. The position came with added responsibility. I remember having the distinct thought: other members of the band look up to me; I'm supposed to be a leader, and I secretly masturbate to girls taking dumps. The shame of that sucked, but it was not enough to make me stop. Warning, this is really gross. One time I experimented outside of porn, taking a shit in the shower to see if it would turn me on. It did. I think that scared me, so I didn't do it anymore. I procrastinated on everything, and missed the application deadlines for all the colleges that deep down I probably really wanted to go to (my grades wouldn't have cut it anyway). I was good at taking tests and scored well on the SAT, so maybe I could've gotten into a good school. But I had sunk so deep into a fog that I felt like I didn't really want to go to college, or do anything else. The cycle had really taken hold. One day in senior year of high school, we were released early and I came home around noon. I went into my dad's office on autopilot, and walked right into him masturbating to internet porn! I rushed out, and he came and apologized. I told him it's ok, it's natural, but in that moment I saw him as weak and lost all respect for him. Secretly I was scared by the thought that I could potentially still be jerking off to porn as an adult. The thought had never occurred to me before. I really wish I could talk with him about it now. I finally got my shit together enough to send in an application to a mediocre late-deadline school called Rhode Island College, and luckily I got in. I say luckily, because I think I only sent in an application to one or two schools. College is really difficult to write about, because it was really hell and honestly I was in such a haze I don't remember a lot of it. I thought that by getting far away from home (west coast to east coast), I could change my life for the better- but I just became more of a loser. I continued to masturbate to porn compulsively; I really wish that I had made the connection between that and my failing life. In college I had absolutely no friends. I majored in music and I fell in love with a beautiful piano student in my music program. I gathered the balls one day to have a heart-to-heart with her alone in a practice room, and opened up a little bit about my life. She gave me a pitying hug with a pat on the back saying, "Aww, sometimes I think some people just need a hug!" That pierced right through my porn-induced numbness and hurt, bad. I thought of myself as such a loser that it must have begun to show on my face and in how I carried myself. One day walking between classes, a random adult stranger driving through campus stopped his car on the road and rolled down his window. He looked straight at me, hissed "Puta! (bitch)" and spat in the road, then slowly drove off- glaring at me the whole time. There were several similar incidents like that. I was constantly wondering when, or if, my life would ever change. Porn was such an integrated part of the rhythm of my life during this time, that I don't remember specifically masturbating to porn, but I'm pretty confident it was twice to three times daily on the low end and ten or more times plus on the high end. I hardly did any homework and I was floundering with my grades. Honestly I was just not present for most of this 1.5-year period and I don't remember much more than that. I was a walking vegetable, with little to no emotion. After 3 semesters of college in Rhode Island, my dad had a second severe stroke that left him disabled, and I responded by returning home- I told myself it was to "take care of my mom and dad". In reality I was in no position to do so, and it was really just to try and escape the hell I had been living in. I was trying to run away from my shitty life, slightly suspecting but not consciously realizing that I was carrying that shitty life around with me. Back home, I failed my way through the next semester at a community college and lived rent-free at my neighbor's house (I'm still grateful to my neighbor for giving up his son's room for me to live in, there's no telling where my life would have gone if I had lived back at the house I grew up in). I couldn't tolerate my mom at the time, and I couldn't have gone back to live at home anyway. 2013 is my "lost year". I spent almost every waking moment I could jerking off to porn, and looking back, that entire year is gone- my brain was not recording many memories. I was put on academic probation and I must have dropped out of college that spring, although I literally don't remember even attending. My dad died that Easter, and the only two memories I have are getting the call from my mom and thinking, "huh, I don't feel anything" while listening to her sobbing, and then looking at my dad's body on the table in the funeral home and also feeling nothing. I casually wondered if I was a sociopath. Those are my only two memories from that entire year. For most of that year I didn't go to school. I had no job, no friends, no life, nothing except porn, sleep, and (my neighbor's) food. I do have one more memory from what I think was towards the end of that year. This is part is really disgusting and I hate it, so skip to the next bullet unless you really want to know the dark shit. My search for novelty escalated to the point that one night I found myself looking at illegal pictures of naked underage girls, posing. I don't remember if it was on a website or if I had actually downloaded them. I just remember I had sought out either the site or the photos, not to jerk off to (my brain told me), but just out of curiosity and novelty. Knowing what I know now, I'm sure that given enough time I would have eventually masturbated to them. I remember looking at the photos and feeling sick. It shocked me out of my porn induced haze long enough for me to delete the photos, or block the site, I can't remember which. I remember being really scared and disgusted at the same time. It's so opposite of who I am and I didn't know what to do or think. Even writing this now I feel sick. I'm sickened that I'm even talking about myself in the face of the exploitation of those girls, and that I am on the wrong side of it. That was by far the darkest moment of my addiction, and now I'm carrying the shame of it (to say nothing of what the girls in those photos have to deal with). Around this time I realized that I had to change something or I was headed down a very dark road. Unfortunately however, I could not bring myself to fully quit porn even though I knew it was terrible for my life, and it remained mostly an unconscious habit in the background. At the end of that year I committed that on January 1st, I was going to start going to the gym, looking for a job, and going back to school. I followed through and got a job at Chipotle, and started training in the gym for the first time in my life! Over the next year, a lot of changes took place. I went back to school and resolved to join the military. I stopped using porn daily, although I did keep using 3-4 times a week. I learned to swim, and woke up to go to the pool, then the gym, every weekday at 4:30am. While I was working at Chipotle I met a beautiful girl named Sierra. She was the cutest girl I'd ever met, and we spent lots of time working together. Feeling confident in my budding new life, I asked her out, and that year at age 21, I had my first kiss while we were watching a movie at home. It was amazing, and still one the best makeout sessions I've had to date. I moved things into the bedroom, but she wasn't willing to have sex. I found out later that she liked girls! Oh well, it was still phenomenal, even though I got blue balls like a motherfucker. 2014 was my "year of triumph!" I stuck with my new habits and applied myself in school, and started receiving straight As for the first time in my life. I started reading articles on dating sites on how to be better with women, and pretty soon I was attracting a lot of female attention. In the group that I was training with for the military, there was a girl named Desiree who I could tell liked me. I asked her out to a movie and after the date I took her home, where we made out. The same thing happened as with Sierra and she refused sex, but I invited her back the next day, and that night I lost my virginity- just days before my 22nd birthday. I thought it was not that great; kind of a letdown actually, and I liked the kissing and blowjobs a lot more. All through this period I was still using porn, although less frequently. I remember a few times opening up the old sites and thinking, this is silly and childish- I'm not even attracted to this stuff anymore! This is just immature, I'm over this. And yet I would still masturbate to it compulsively. I guess I figured I could gradually wean myself off while I worked on making my life better. How wrong I was! It became a shameful and non-congruent part of my life, because I actually did create a pretty awesome life for myself at that time. I had started to notice negative effects in the days following a porn session, and sometimes went porn free for streaks of about 5 days, but I would always come back- consciously making the hard decision to quit just wasn't something I considered. This year was the highest point in my life so far, I was the leader of my military training group, I had slept with a girl (just one time, she didn't come back after a lackluster performance on my part), and I was killing it in school, where there were more girls I was pursuing. Soon, in January of 2015, my entry date for the military came up. I won't get into it too much here, but I served 4 years of active duty from 2015-2019. My semi-active sex life consisted of basically blundering around on tinder, meeting girls to hook up with here and there. I began to notice a troubling trend where I would go completely soft when it came time to enter a girl. This got more gut-wrenching with every occurrence, but I just wrote it off as nerves. During my whole time in the military I continued intermittent porn use, a few times per week, and I was back on the poop stuff. I was dealing with a lingering feeling of low self-worth. I treated real girls like my little fuck-toys, which was gratifying for my damaged ego, but my soul felt empty, and I still had never had a girlfriend. I could never feel fully satisfied even after marathon sex sessions. And I kept going soft half of the time. Towards the end of my service in the military, I found another tinder girl to play with. She came over to my apartment, no date, sight unseen, which had become my preferred procedure. Within 5 minutes of meeting, we were having sex. She ended up spending the night, mostly because I was so starved of female affection at this point that I would try and get some cuddling out of every random encounter. Her name was Mona, and she was also coming to the end of her service in the Marine Corps. We had a great time in bed bantering, having sex, and trading jokes, and I remember having the thought "oh man, I am fucked." I really liked her. At the same time I was certain she was extremely promiscuous, the kind of girl with a lot of partners, past and present. Not exactly my dream girl. We kept seeing each other, and my suspicions were confirmed when on the third date, we were out to eat and she started receiving tinder messages on her phone. The way she casually flipped her phone over made my stomach turn, and I decided to stop seeing her. After I left the military in 2019 I started school at Arizona State University with the aim of finishing out my bachelor's degree that I had left unfinished since before entering the service. One day I was working out at the campus gym (I had kept the weightlifting up, and was becoming kind of a stud, physically) when I ran into Mona in the hallway. We traded numbers again (she had blocked me), we got drinks, and we ended up in bed again. I still liked her, and she liked me, so a few weeks into seeing each other, I asked her to be my girlfriend. I don't regret this! Even at the time I knew it was a poor decision, but I was extremely self-conscious about being 26 years old and never having had a girlfriend. And I was really falling for this chick, and she was falling for me, so I hit the fuck-it button. Things escalated extremely quickly. Her lease ended and she moved in with me into the house in Phoenix that I had just bought with my VA loan. I set her up in one of the spare bedrooms and charged her rent, but she was soon spending every night in the master bedroom with me. For a few weeks things were fantastic and we were a no-bullshit couple. She told me that she had had over 40 partners- which again turned my stomach. Even though we were both 26, she had slept with quadruple the number of people I had, more dudes than would comfortably fit in my house...barf! But she also told me that I was the best sex she'd ever had. I was kind of glad to just have a girlfriend like everybody else and feel semi-normal. I also felt justified by asking loyalty from her, while affording myself the freedom to still sleep around, which she agreed to. I'm still not even sure whether or not to call what we had a proper healthy relationship, but regardless I wanted to see it through to its conclusion. With a girl in my bed every night, I stopped using porn completely. A few weeks in, porn-induced erectile dysfunction hit and hit hard. I just could not get it up, no matter how horny I was. I had no idea what was happening. There were a few really bad nights where I stormed, raged, went internal, I took long walks to try and figure out what was going on with my fucked up brain and dick. I was so scared and angry and bewildered and hurt. I felt a growing pit in my stomach because I had no idea what was going on or how to fix it. I thought for sure Mona would bounce. In one of my darkest moments I was literally curled on the bed in the fetal position, and I was certain she was going to get up and leave. Instead, to my complete surprise, she hugged me from behind and held me, which was the first time in my life that I had felt real tender and genuine affection towards me from a woman. It positively changed my entire perspective on the world, and I felt that this life is not an entirely cold and dark place after all. However at the time, I was still scared and angry, and I shook her off and went for a walk. She told me the next day that she was too deep in love to back out, and soon afterwards she proposed a trip to San Diego to clear our heads, and I thought it sounded fun, so I agreed. The San Diego trip was fun, but a bust in terms of penis performance. I did not get even the glimmer of an erection the whole time. At one point she was begging me to stuff my flaccid penis inside her just so she could feel me and get off. I felt horrible. I tried meditating, but it didn't help. When we got back from the trip, I broke up with her. I didn't want somebody who loved sex so much to be with somebody broken like me. And I was still scared she was going to leave (now I know that I was under the influence of an avalanche of porn-induced insecurities), so I wanted to break up with her before she ditched me. The breakup hurt both of us pretty bad. She went back to living in the other room, and I quickly tried to sleep with as many random girls as I could to get over her. It was a nasty situation. With every new and returning girl that I brought home after that (I think there were 4), I was rarely able to get it up, and I started going down a spiral of depression. Mona left to go to flight attendant school, and I was stuck with a broken dick and no girlfriend. I had no idea what to do, so I started meditating and bought some off-brand Cialis, which helped a little. I was really ashamed of taking penis pills as a 26-year-old. It helped a little, but not much. I disappointed a few one-off partners during this time, and felt worse and worse about myself. Mona came back from flight attendant school, and on her first day back one thing led to another and we ended up sleeping together again. After a week together in bed (she had overstayed her flight, and was supposed to be in Chicago to start her job) I told her she had to go and she couldn't stay any longer. She half-jokingly asked me to marry her, which I turned down. When we parted ways in my driveway she was sobbing. It was so chaotic. After Mona left, I went into a spiraling depression that lasted months. I hit the porn, hard. I had never really liked Pornhub, but now that site became my bread and butter. I missed the intimacy of having a steady partner and a filled the pain-hole with porn. Some days I wouldn't leave my room. I had vivid psychotic nightmares, and literally thought I was losing my sanity. I started experiencing unexplainable health problems and I couldn't eat for long periods. Over the next 3 years I tried to get my life back on track in various ways, traveling and living abroad, and seeking out new partners. I had a fairly healthy life in Sydney Australia for a year, but underlying it all was still the porn use and social isolation. I still felt inferior and bad about myself, and the feeling kept getting worse. Sometimes, during the early days of the pandemic when I was completely isolated in that new country with no social connections of any kind, I screamed into my pillow at night to fall asleep. When I did eventually move into a house with some other people, there were intermittent periods of several days where I wouldn't come out of my room, and the other people living in the house thought it was weird. I found it incredibly difficult to make friendships and connections, which is tough in a foreign country. Also weighing me down were the facts that I wasn't making money (I was living off of savings and trading in the stock market), and I didn't have a girlfriend. I did find a couple romantic partners in Sydney, but they were temporary as always, and I didn't really like them. I kept moving to new places, still trying to outrun my shitty life. I lived in Sydney, Istanbul, and then Washington D.C. It was here in D.C. that I first tried to quit porn intentionally. It happened organically. I told myself, I'm so sick of this shit, it's disgusting and it's killing me- I'm going to see how long I can go without it. I made it 2 1/2 weeks. I hit a horrible flatline where my dick was shriveled and grey, and I had zero libido. My penis looked and felt like a dead piece of vestigial flesh. I tried masturbating and it was a little successful, but soon that turned into going back to porn "just to see", then edging, then back to full-on porn-masturbation-orgasm. From there I started tracking the days on a calendar to see if I could increase my streak (my best was 8 days). A couple of months ago, a friend told me about Your Brain On Porn. I had found the website during my previous attempt at quitting, but had never read the book. I downloaded and listened to the audiobook back-to-back three times in a row over the next couple days. I started putting together the pieces of my history with porn and the aspects of my life that were plaguing me. Low self esteem, low energy, social isolation, ADD, depression, learning disability, poor performance in school, dropping out of college, late bloomer, virgin until 21, ED, lack of relationships or meaningful connections, the fact that I hadn't cried since I was a child. My mind started to pop and the lightbulbs came on! Holy FUCK!! I quickly looked up Noah Church after listening to the book and holy shit- here is the path out right fucking here! I couldn't believe it- the aspects of life that I hated were rooted, in part, in my fucking porn watching!? I heard myself in almost every one of the testimonials in the book and on Noah's channel, and I knew immediately what to do. Start today with Day 1! My first 26 days free from porn have been some of the best days of my life- I had sex for the first time in almost a year, and it was some of the most gratifying I've ever experienced. I didn't get that feeling of always wanting more afterwards, didn't get that feeling of never quite scratching the itch. I'm connecting more with friends, starting new hobbies, and feel more at peace with myself and conscious in the world. I find girls really attractive again, in a way that I have never quite felt before. It's incredible, and I'm extremely grateful for what feels like a new lease on life!
woah, this is a brave and amazing inventory. Thank you for sharing. I'm sure it helped you to write it all out and it will help others to read it and know that they are not alone, not freaks, not hopeless and helpless with what has happened in their lives. It's wild how a natural curiosity and desire to see naked women can escalate so far with what is out there and available digitally. I think we can all relate to to how PMO takes us way further than we ever thought we could go, and costs us so much more than we would ever be willing to pay. There is power in confessing and naming this stuff. Shining a light on it. Busting open the windows so air and sunshine can kill all the mold. Your story hints at some trauma and/or neglect in being left unsupervised so much at a young age. Also your interactions with your father that brought so much shame. I wonder if those are some stones for you to turn over in your recovery as you process things and progress. I hope you come back here friend, or find other avenues to live a life of recovery. Some have found success in Sexual Addicts Anonymous (SAA), or Celebrate Recovery (religious), or therapy. The recovery life is strange at first. It has its bumps and challenges. But it's a LIFE! It demands and it gives and it rewards. I used to be so lonely but now I'm so thankful for recovery.
Thanks man! I like your analogy of shining light on it. The recovery life is very strange for sure. Day 38 and counting! (porn free, no fap, and cold showers)
Thanks for sharing this, I just finished reading it all. I'm sorry you had to go through all of those painful experiences, but I bet it must feel incredible to have all of those lightbulbs go off at once as you discovered the root of the problem. A couple things from my experience that could be useful as you get onto this journey: - porn is often the 'cope' for a deeper issue, and I was never able to stop relapsing until I admitted to myself what that was. Writing out your autobiographical account was a great step! - learn your triggers and be honest with yourself (for me, I had to unfollow all of the thirst-trap accounts on social media) - manage the healthy aspects of your life (healthy relationships with friends, family, female friends -- I also found it extremely powerful to have a relating experience with a woman. For me personally, it had a major impact sharing aspects of my PMO journey with them). Have a meaningful goal you're chipping away at and feel yourself making progress towards something challenging and slow - accept that you will experience difficult emotions on the journey - anxiety, depression, anger, extreme horniness. These are transitory and will pass. But, have an outlet for this pent up energy otherwise it will exit where it habitually does. Spiritual practice, meditation, breathing, etc all very helpful Best of luck on this journey!
