Thanks. I will stopp counting and only start with it again in case of a relapse. I have the date of my last PMO session below my posts in the signature which I will update in case of a relapse.
Things are going ok. Even that it seems like life problems are getting bigger, I don´t want to complain. I am able to see the challenge in them which might be very helpfull for my long term growth, while hopefully overcoming them. @Rudolf Geyse Thanks.
I have been reading through your journal, can identify with your experiences... I found the quote below from one of your recent posts a good reminder to help me keep on track, as I still find my brain going down the route of "if only X had not happened I would not have been in this situation" "Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses, and start making changes.” Great clean streak ... Look forward to hearing more updates on your progress and also learning more about what's being effective in your recovery.
Nothing new to report at the moment. Staying the course. No PMO, MO or P. More and more real life stuff is coming up and I am getting almost overwhelmed with real life problems, but as the quote says, maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses, and start making changes. To consolidade more my position of a life without the escape drug PMO, I was looking for something in addition to meditation which I do first thing in the morning for half an hour regularly. To cope with the stress and anxiety that seemed to get worse at the moment, I found an exercise online I do now every day. Stress was a mayor trigger for me in the past. I am always stressed and tense and I tend to shut down when it becomes too much and in the past I went to PMO and hiding to calm myself down and feel secure because I never knew how to process or calm down this inner tension and anxiety. I found a lot of videos and information about the vagus nerve and the parasympaticus and simpaticus system which can be stuck in the fight or flight position in some cases which causes huge stress and tension and malfunction of body systems. The guy in the video makes it short and simple and the exercise itself takes me around one minute now for both sides till I yawn and it really helps me to calm down. Maybe others will benefit from it also. All the best.
The relationship with your father sounds complicated. As others have indicated, he's not going to change. You talk a fair bit about 'real life problems'. It's likely this stuff is coming to the surface because previously you've been hiding from it. We have a tendency to fight seeing what's true, because it it's not what we want it to be. But it's important to deal with the bad stuff even if it's uncomfortable. I like what you wrote above about being able to see the challenge in your real life problems - to look at ways of accepting and overcoming. That's how we grow and evolve as people.
@forlorn Thank you and you are right. Acceptance of what is and what is true, is huge and frees us in many ways, resisting reality is a huge drain away of our energy and motivation. Thank you very much. Thinking about it, this is the second longest streak without PMO I have since becoming addicted to this shit. The last time I went as long, a few years back, it was a constant fight and struggle every day against PMO, like even that I was able to stay away from it for a number of months, it felt like almost the same as if I had done it every few weeks. This time, the main fight for me seems to be more like a one to face life and it´s challenges and not let myself slide into avoidance mode, and not so much the fight against PMO. Like I am facing the real struggle, which is life and staying aware and in the moment without escaping into a PMO session (like after the fight with my father a few weeks ago, a shift to using what happened to trying to find a constructive way to deal with it). Like as if the enemy I focus on has shifted from PMO, which was a symptome to life and it´s adversity, I know this sounds horrible, to see life as the enemy, but it was for me some kind of enemy. The pressure from the outside, parents, the government, the employer and even I myself, my thoughts, had huge expectations , which I was only able to meet for short time periods but against my inner wants. So to be able to function I used PMO to escape for moments and find some relieve from the pressure of expectations and disapointments. Now it seems that I can accept reality a little bit better. Now my view on the expectations from others and myself has changed. I see them no longer as something almighty, unreachable or mean, more like obstacles or things to overcome and reasons to grow my abilities to be able to navigate them in a constructive manner. Reading what I wrote, it seems very positive, but I am often very down and depressed, so I don´t want to appear as everything has changed for the positive, I am fighting every day, but not so much against PMO, more against not avoiding life and it´s responsibilities and expectations and pressure. To sum it up, even as a child, I always wanted to be free, but looking back, I should have worked on things to become at least more free, instead of escaping into an addiction to flee reality and forget the prisson of society and the prisson of my own thoughts and expectations and frustrations and self hate for a few minutes or hours. I am fighting to face life.
In addition to my previous post: In a healthy upbringing, the obstacles of real life grow and get bigger gradualy with the abilities of the child and the stages the growing child goes through. If parents can give the right environment of support and right distance to give the child the room to breath, letting him figure things out, without taking over and doing it for the child because they are impatient or are in competition with the child or want to show him that they can do it better and need the ego boost of being better in certain things even in the comparison with their own child. So the child and his abilities can grow without becoming overwhelmed by life. I could point out specific incidences, but this does not serve the point, but generaly, I felt incapable of dealing with life from a very young age, I would even say as long as I can remember. Even that it did not appear on the outside to others, on the inside it always felt that way. Of course no one has the ideal childhood and we have to figure it out later, how much we became programmed and are not ourselfes in certain aspects. So this is no excuse for anything. I am not using it to complain or to have excuses but to become clear about myself and state the facts as I see it now, I got stuck in many ways and so the inner grow in certain aspects was not concruent with the grow of my body. The main reason why this went on for so long is, that I saw myself as unable to overcome and grow. Instead of facing life, I escaped into the fantasy world of porn which kept me stuck and prevented an expansion of my comfort zone and growth of my abilities and minset which kept me depressed and misserable. All this, the past, is no reason to stay stuck in this way of thinking or expecting a badge of honor for doing normal grown up stuff. I am here to face it. No excuses, no complains.
I hear that trauma can arrest our emotional development, and I agree with you that P short-circuits natural progress in maturity, coping skills and emotional development. The first step is facing up to this, as you are. When you identify these issues you can start to tackle them head on. Stay on this path towards progress. Much strength to you for your journey.
This sounds familiar. I think many of us here felt the same as what you describe. As we develop a greater awareness of our programming and perceived limitations we are in a better position to overcome our subconscious beliefs. The belief that we're somehow not good enough - it needs to be challenged.
No M, no P, no PMO for around 4,5 months now. If I notice even the slightest triggers or temptation or urges, I get mad now. The perspective on it is different. Before I looked at it like the huge monster, that has power over me and my life and that I would not be able to live life witout fighting it. That gave it power and importance. Yesterday I felt tempted for a short moment by a feeling of loneliness and I looked at it and thought, how could I have been so weak and pathetic to give my life force away for nothing, only to forget my misserable life or circumstances for a brief moment. It does not make any sense what so ever. I get filled with rage when I recognize now what went on for so long. I was in a state of helplessness and hopelessness, more concerned about how to find the best excuse to not have to take full responsibility for everything in my life. And it does not really matter if I really accomplish something or not, my duty is to show up and face life. It also does not really matter if I relapse today. So what! It will happen as long as I havent learned what I have to learn and it will delay my growth as a man. There is no place to avoid life, there is no place to hide, if I hide, I destroy myself and my spirit and become stagnant. Eather I show up and face life, or I stopp living, because wanking of to some soulless pixels, is no life or living, no matter the accomplishments on the outside. It never was. Not sure what motivated me to this rant. Yesterday I got angry when I felt this little temptation because I could see why I was tempted, I felt lonely. And I felt so stupid, because now I could see why I was tempted and I could see so clearly, that doing PMO would be actually the worst attempt and most counterproductive way to overcome loneliness. My behaviour of the last decades towards life and painfull emotions does not make any sense and was stupid and counterproductive. I am not sure yet, why I could not see it as clearly earlier in my life. A relapse does not mean anything. So what. What lead to it? What will I do differently the next time? Thats all there is. Nothing more to it. I am angry at myself for taking so long of my life time to actually get angry at myself for living a life in missery. And I am not talking about outside things, Wish you all a good week.
Could've quoted that entire paragraph. We are in similar situations. Years ago when I first almost beat this it was about the PMO. This time around it is more about life. I totally empathize with you in that regard. Thanks for working it out so openly. It is helpful to others! RD
Yes, your last few posts have really resonated with me too, Libertad. I think people who shake whatever they're addicted to come to the same realizations you are speaking about. Thanks for being so eloquent about this.
@Mozenjo and @ruggerdoug thank you, you two for taking the time and for the compliment. It really means a lot. A few thoughts from today morning, maybe they are more like a rambling, but I want to have more clarity and writting them down sometimes helps: There is something about giving up, not fighting any more. I in the past used the word fight a lot here and in my thoughts. Fighting this addiction, fighting to face life. I need to fight to become right. I always thought, sayings like: What we resist persists are something for pussys and I only need to become strong and though enough to beat this addiction and thought the right and strong way is, that we have to level up in all categories of our lifes, set goals, concentrate on what we want, visualize, motivate ourselfes, kick ourselfes in the bud to motivate ourselfes and than we will become what we want to be. All of this sounds right, great and positive and admirable and strong and builds the ego and like a successfull mindset and like what we are told a successfull person or society thinks. Is it really? Do I not often use this way of thinking to escape something? Today I noticed that I was uncomfortable, I put walking clothes on, put already the car keys in my pocket and was at the door to take a long walk in the woods because a walk always makes me feel better in the moment and even afterwards, the feeling like I have accomplished something good. Like I pushed myself to do something, overcame the comfort zone, did something for my health and all the positive points one can see in such an activity. But deep inside I noticed that I wanted to run from something uncomfortable, escape from my thoughts. But it hit me, in reallity I was running from my self, from a negative feeling and I use often a healty activity to cowardly not to have to deal with what really is at the root of addictions. I do meditate regularly every morning and looking at it, even meditation can be used to escape and build the ego, even that it seems contradictory. This is not to say that any of the healthy activities is wrong or bad or that I don´t will continue to do a few of them daily. And even if I notice that today I am using meditation to escape something that comes up inside me, I will still meditate, or take a walk and all that, but I will attempt to take a moment, look at what is bodering me, sit with the feeling and not run from it, and face it as best as I can. Because for myself, the root causes why I used to escape reality with PMO is what is coming up, uncomfortable feelings and thoughts after being able to feel and see the inside and outside more and more. Reality can really slap one in the face when waking up from the foggy and funky addicted mindset and the fog clears and one can see what he made out of his life time.
In Addition to the previous post: Most likely this is the reason why I kept relapsing, of course this is nothing new, we talk here often about the root causes. But I can see it very clear now, that I was basically often just changing the bad habbits like PMOing, for good ones while running from the root causes of the pressure and urge to escape reality and hoping that over time the underlaying causes would resolve themselves. The more the brain fog cleared (clean streaks), the bigger the need to run away from the root causes became, eather with unhealthy or halthy habbits, because the clearer I became, the more and more the causes came up into my conciousness. The first stepp could be not to run any more, feel the pain and still use and do the healthy habbits, but pause for moments and look what is really driving the need to do them or the bad ones. And be as honest as possible to myself.
Nothing new to report. It is going ok. To all comrades here, I wish us all that we can dissolve what brought us here and to all of you a happy christmas and a great new year 2022.
The other day I watched a few episodes of "My 600-Lb. life" and was thinking that I was basically doing the same as the participants but instead of food for comfort I used PMO. Both are unhealthy over the long term but PMO is more sneaky because the sourounding people can´t see it as clear as with being overweight. Basically staying away from PMO is like these people do when eating more healthy and less food. It takes time to reach a normal weight or in my case a healthy way of being. They are also all encouraged to go to psychotherapy to work on the root causes that made them eat so much. Like these people don´t expect to loose 400-Lb in three months, I should be patient and not expect too much in a few months. Just a few thoughts.
I am accepting were I am in life. Things could be better, things could be worse. Here I am. There is no point in fighting reality. Coming from decades of self hate and depression, being here, in the now, in reality, at least what I perceive as reality for me at the moment, and not wanting to escape it, seing and feeling it as neutral, is acceptable for me. I am not running any more from it. 5 Months without PMO and I am grateful for this time.
