This post was originally written on my journal, but I wanted to put it here as well for all to see. It is done. It’s time. Finally, it is my turn to do this. I’ve succeeded! Two weeks ago, I had sex for the first time. It lasted approximately 5 minutes, and ended with me going limp. Still, it is the biggest accomplishment of my life until now. One small trust for a man, but a giant leap for my manhood. After that, I have had sex about 5 times, each time improving. Becoming better. It’s been a six-year long fight since I disappointed my first girlfriend in high school, and since then I have been ashamed and felt guilty about my sexuality. It is like a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. There are no more excuses. Nothing more I feel ashamed about in my life. Nothing more to stop me. It is the most significant shift I have ever experienced in my life, and I know that once you will reach it too, you will wonder how you could ever even consider this something out of your reach. I promised to post this way earlier, but this has been incredibly difficult to write. It is so strange to complete a 6-year project of this magnitude. To not have to worry anymore about something that has been challenging me for as long as I can remember. Finally, I get to be the guy that has sex. I get to truly be the guy I have always wanted to be. Porn is like a faint memory already, and it feels weird to consider it any longer. There are so many people to thank for helping me along on the way. I especially want to thank @TheUnderdog, @CJJackson , @Wabi-sabi, @Bauldr and @Journey_to_freedom. This is an amazing forum, and I will never forget the help I have gotten from all the fantastic and strong people on here. I hope you everybody who reads this finds motivation and inspiration from this post, and can learn from my journey. This post is for all of you guys, thank you all for staying here with me and helping me. I would never have become ME without YOU. For this I am forever grateful. Not only have I finally become a guy that has a healthy sex life. I have become more of a man. I’m in University, studying something that I love, and the people around me respect me. Everyday I improve myself, and it is only because this addiction forced me to face my problems. I am truly happy to have had such a challenge in my life, because I am certain I would never reach my potential without it. The obstacle is the way. On this journey, the quality of girls I have met and talked to have only increased. It is not some hooker who I lost my virginity to. The girl who took my virginity truly is amazing. With this girl I feel like we are a team. And it is not even me and her against the world. It is US together WITH the world. Goddamn, what a difference that attitude makes. Thanks to this forum, every day I have focused on strengthening the pathways in my brain that make me more of the guy I want to be. Many days I have failed, and I have had many major setbacks. But I have never given up, and now I get to reap the rewards. However, my life did not change overnight. It changed gradually, and each step on this journey have made me love myself and my life more. On my journey I have done truly amazing things with my life. I have travelled to beautiful places I never even dared to believe I could go to. I have played many great concerts with my band. I have made new friends for life. I have improved my health and body beyond recognition. I have started my own company, and work at it on the side of university. I love my family, and feel grateful for them every day. I have fantastic friends that I get to do awesome things with. I have a girl I truly enjoy spending time with, and who I can be myself around. If you compared my life when I began this journey, and right now, it would hardly be the same person. Hardly the same thoughts, the same values, the same spirit. I still have so many things I want to improve, and so many places I want to go. But this time I get to do it with dignity. Self-respect. The journey is awesome, and I am never going to step of the path of self-improvement. I can promise you this, from the day you truly promise yourself to never give up, and constantly improve, you have already succeeded. Steady wins the race. An alternative to the conventional reboot So much great material has already been written on beating pornography addiction. The one post that set me on this journey is this one (https://yourbrainrebalanced.com/for...ughts-on-rebooting-extremely-long-post.15558/ ) by the underdog, which I’m sure you have read if you have look around on YBR. However, there is some of the information there I completely disagree with, and I believe is destructive to success. I will cover that after I cover all the good stuff the post contains. I read the underdogs post 3 years ago, and shortly after bought the book “Slight Edge”, which has been essential on my road to liberation. This post has a lot of fantastic information, and is a great basis for rebooting. It alone won’t take you there, but it will set you on the path to never-ending self-improvement, which is why that book has been instrumental to my recovery. And no, this is not some book-plug. Alright, lets dive into it. The good stuff First of all, underdog start off covering how pornography addiction is being severely underestimated, and how abstinence is not recovery. I completely agree with this. Taking this addiction seriously, and realizing that it really is just a symptom of an overall larger problem is incredibly empowering. I also completely agree with the foundation of a proper reboot. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to set yourself a vision, and work on your emotional life. Having a vision and working on it everyday will not only give you a better self-image, it will improve your life in ways you never even knew possible. If you do basic journaling it is incredibly rewarding to look back and see just how much your life has changed. This section of the underdogs post is gold, make it your bible. Be the change you want to see in the world. Do it for you, for your integrity. Living with integrity is about being congruent to your values, this is the basis of self-respect. Your focus should be on improving EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. It should be to become more congruent with your values, to building the life you want to have. Most of us overestimate how much we can achieve in a month, and underestimate how much we can achieve in 5 years. It is all about baby-steps. It is absolutely essential to truly grasp this mindset of constant improvement. Managing your emotional life is also extremely important. You have to be honest with yourself, and realize the role pornography is playing in your life. For me, pornography served as a way to vent, as a tool where I could let out my violence in a way. I often found myself watching porn whenever I was overwhelmed, or felt humiliated and defeated in one way or another. Managing your emotions, and realizing how they influence your life is also essential for reaching your vision. This will completely redefine your confidence and esteem of yourself. I would also recommend diving into the book “six pillars of self-esteem” to help in this regard. Where I go a different path Where I disagree with underdog, however, is in how he chooses to not think about sex and abstaining from masturbation. There is a much easier, more achievable and more dignifying way to reboot. It has been talked about before, but I want to make a new and clearer case for this technique, the masturbation reboot. The focus of the masturbation reboot is to have surmountable, actionable, concrete goals and actions to constantly improve your sex-life to the point where porn is not interesting anymore. Our problems stem from pornography, not from masturbation and fantasizing in itself. Masturbation is completely congruent with a healthy, vibrant sex-life, just not the kind of masturbating we in this forum typically take part in. Masturbating once or twice a week, touching yourself, moaning and fantasizing about real, healthy sex is actually the one habit that truly liberated me. It made overcoming porn feel manageable, and made it didn’t make me feel ashamed of my sexuality. Looking back, the feelings of guilt and humiliation I had about my sexuality were the biggest enemies of recovery. Demonizing my sexual thoughts only worsened this. Thinking about it now, I have no idea how I thought I could recover any other way. There is a myth going on here that you have to completely abstain from sexual thought and imagery to be successful, and somehow try to suppress the arousal you feel when you watch girls in the real world. But you quickly find this extremely hard to do, and feel guilty for not being able to do this for a longer period of time. This again demotivates you, and even the thought of ditching sexual thoughts for a week or a month seem insurmountable. Your friends talk about porn and girls, and having so little control over this aspect of your life just makes you feel even more like a misfit. Even the most hardcore Christians who have never had problems with porn in their life find abstaining from sexual thoughts to be incredibly hard. So, for us addicts removing masturbation completely from our life is a truly hard challenge. Porn, of course, has no place in our lives. Neither has depraved fantasies and unhealthy sex. Healthy fantasizing, and healthy sexual thoughts however, should not be thought of as the enemy. They are your friend. The first you have to make yourself a concrete and actionable vision of where your sex life is going to be in 1 year, 5 years and 10 years. Create an image of who you will be when you have your optimal sex-life. Who will you have sex with, how often will you have sex, what kind of sex will you have, will you use your sexual energy for other things besides sex? How will you view women and how will you view yourself? Tony Robbins has written fantastic work on the subject of vision, and how to awaken your powers in “awaken the giant within”. I can promise you that this book will change your life as well. It is not important that you are able to fully answer these questions about sex right away, but you HAVE to make it a daily habit to search for the answer to these questions, and ACT towards becoming that person. Truly be honest with yourself about the sexual life you want to have. So, how did I go about this? Firstly, there are plenty of great books to teach you how to be great at sex and how to view women. I HIGHLY recommend “The sex god method” and “The way of the superior man” on these subjects. I can guarantee that they will completely change how you view sex for the better, and it WILL be an instrumental step on your journey. It will give you more dignity, and less feeling of shame and guilt about your sexuality. The most important thing the books will do for you is make you think more like a person that has sex. They will make you understand what a healthy sex-life even means, which in turn gives extreme confidence. “The natural” by RSDMax is also an extremely valuable resource I have learnt so much from. It is quite expensive to buy, but I know it is possible to get it other ways if you can’t afford it. He is one of the few of the RSD people I can agree with, and feel comfortable to get values and frames from. If he doesn’t suit you, try if you can find a pick up artist that has similar values to yourself outside of sex. Find someone who teaches you sex you feel dignifies girls, something that is congruent with your sense of morality. Change doesn’t happen in an instant. Change happens trough actions, baby-steps. You won’t go from virgin to Casanova in a night. You have to daily picture yourself as someone who has sex, and know deep within that it is within your reach to have sex. Look girls in the eyes when you talk to them. Flirt with girls, and don’t fear rejection. Don’t think of yourself as a burden when you talk to girls. Take girls home without having sex, just spooning and watching movies. Masturbate to REAL sexual fantasies. Don’t be afraid of your dick, or your thoughts. Touch yourself, explore your body without being ashamed. Pursue your dreams, overcome completely different obstacles. Read about sex, understand how you have to think to get the sexuality you want. Take classes with more girls. Listen to girls and hang out with them. Learn how to pick up girls. Read up, and internalize the frames of people with the kind of sex-life you want. All of these are great steps towards your liberation. The real difference in this approach is that it gives you more and more dignity and self-respect on every step of your journey. It is not about counters, or days of PMO. It is not about erection quality or superpowers. It is about giving you back your feeling of self, and making your sexuality a natural part of who you are. I can promise you this, girls can smell your sexual confidence on you. And you can never truly be sexually confident if your sexuality doesn’t match your values and who you are as a person. This is not a place you will come to just by abstaining from porn for 90 days. It is a place you will come to if you take small steps towards improving your sexuality, every single day. Yes, this is congruent with masturbation. You don’t have to become a Buddhist monk to quit porn. You will get to sex sooner than you know. Writing this right now, I just finished reading “the slight edge” the book that set me on this path 6 years ago. Poetically, my journey both started and ended with this book. I hope to start a discussion with this post, and the masturbation reboot. I want to hear your opinions and possible improvements. We are all in this together, it is all about becoming who we truly are. Together we are strong. Godspeed brothers, let’s kick some ass.
This post was originally written on my journal, but I wanted to put it here as well for all to see. TRIGGER WARNING (to some): So to update you guys. Since I first have sex I haven't managed to be completely porn-free. The last 5 months I've relapsed a total of 11 times. That is fucking incredible stats for me. Thats about the same as I averaged every month last year. I have way less urges, and I don't fear porn anymore. I don't fear my sexual thoughts, and I don't fear urges or erections. Even though I have had relapses I've also had sex. Plenty of sex. It is so crazy to look back and see the how different I am now. Since the beginning of april I had steady sex with my then girlfriend. We broke up roughly a month ago, since I am moving far far away to USA to study there in august. I guess she didn't manage to handle it well, and we drifted apart. It was tough, but I didn't resort to porn once. Instead, a week after the breakup I hooked up with a friend of mine (girl) and we have had a kinda "fwb" relationship since. The sex with her has been incredible. Im talking having sex 10 times in one day at the most (orgasming one or two times usually). In total I've had sex over 40 times the last couple weeks. And just hanging out with her, massaging her, getting incredible dirty snapchats from her, watching brooklyn 99 while spooning, cooking together, everything about it has been amazing. Kind of kinky sex, passionate sex, everything really. I am her 9th lay, and she is my second. Still, she thought I was the best sex she ever had. Even though our sex usually lasted 10 minutes and ended with me going limp. But the passion, the emotion, touching, the trust, dirty talking, everything made it incredible. The first night we didn't even have sex. We had been drinking and I couldnt get it up. And it wasn't a problem. I believe most girls are like that. They don't really care that you don't get an erection the first time if you just tell them that you need to be more comfortable with them first. They just don't want to feel like they are not "boner worthy". As long as you can convince them that it is a problem you have with your sexuality, and has nothing to do with them, then they will be likely to wait for you to be ready. The reason I have such incredible sex with this girl is because she can trust me, be "naked" around me and everything. She even told me im the first person she dared to let go down on her and shower with her naked while sober. The trust you give, the compliments are much MORE important than if you penetrate her or not. If you can provide on other fronts she will be likely to wait. She even told me her friends had fought over being the one who "got me". If this had been two years ago, nobody would have fought over me. If it had been a year ago I might have been fought over, but I would be to scared to act on it, and destroyed the girls "wanting" on purpose. At the stage I am on now though, acting on it was fucking amazing. Much better than I could ever think. Even when I was with this girl in public she commented on how many other girls were checking me out. At a party we went to 3/4 girls were into me and tried to get laid with me. And 2 of those 4 had boyfriends (which I would never had acted on, having sex with someone in a relationship is not what healthy sex is like). I'm not saying this to brag, although it feels extremely good. Im saying it because this reality I am living in is so incredibly great, and I remember feeling totally helpless, ashamed, guilty and sad, thinking I was gonna die a virgin. Like I would never be good enough to be with a girl, let alone have sex. I have come so far to where looking back at who I used to be is almost unbelieveable. If I didnt have my journal entries I am not sure I would believe how past me used to be. So my advice is: Visualize what your dream sex-life looks like, and act it out. Which habits does future you have? Does he work out, eat well, sleep well, respect himself? Does he go to school, work, travel volunteer? Is he a master at pickup? What ACTIONS did he do to get there? The choice is yours. But you have to go out there, man. Flirt with girls. Act like you would if you had your dream sexuality. Masturbate to fantasies of normal sex. Don't fear your wet dreams, erections or underwear ads. The power they have over you is shame. As long as you are not ashamed of your sexuality, porn looses much of its powers. Getting erections to shady shit in itself is no problem. But becoming ashamed because of it, and acting on it will cripple your self esteem. Porn is not part of a healthy sex life. Real sex, sexual thoughts, orgasms, hitting on girls and masturbation are all aspects of a healthy sex life. Find out how you can turn them into something great, and act it out. I encourage you guys to masturbate more, just do it to your fantasy of truly good sex and not to porn. Live your life, and never underestimate how much you can grow in a year or two. I can promise you this: In 1 year, everything will be different for you. Godspeed mates.
Thanks for these posts, Nuwanda. In particular, for making the effort to advertise ideas that challenge the norm on online communities such as this one. How are you doing on the porn front? I'm glad that you have found a way that works for you. From my experience, I think this strategy would be too risky for me as a step towards healthy sex, though that is because I am a virgin and my mind knows no other experience than porn and masturbation. When I have experimented with mindful masturbation, I have always had cravings to look for porn afterwards. The key difference between us maybe that you have had lots of experience with real life partners. Another thing is, what are your views on masturbation and sex becoming an addiction? The shared goal for a lot of people on these forums is to have lots of real life sex, but I think the line between sex and porn addiction can be very faint. I think many of us (myself included) were chronic masturbators before we even discovered porn and so going back to it is potentially problematic. Thanks a lot for sharing your journey
Thanks man! I'm talking mostly about what worked for me. I guess my biggest problem with this forum is that most people have a passive approach to rebooting. They want to simply abstain from porn, and think that once they hit 90 days, they will be casanova instantly. Thats not how it works. I've been fortunate to gather some dating experience and such the last couple years, but really, it has been a journey. As I described, I used to be extremely self-sabotaging, and would ruin great opportunities for relationships. Improving my dating and sexual mindsets has been by far my biggest contributors to rebooting. I find I usually need to orgasm around 10 times a month. I accept this fact, and make my orgasms healthy. Not having them simply makes me lust more, and doesn't lead to healthy sex. Lately, I have had between 1-3 "unhealthy" (porn) orgasms monthly, which used to be at between 10-15 these past years. So thats how I judge my progress, by my healthy orgasms and my healthy mindsets and experiences about sex. Maybe in the future I can learn the art of "sexual transmutation", but thats a future goal. I was a virgin until 4 months ago too! I used to think of sex as this big deal type thing, something almost divine. Far out of my reach, and too good to be true. It is not! With time you will get experience! Taking a girl home and massaging her and not getting a boner is a thousand times better than not taking the girl home. Doing this puts everything in perspective, and shows you where you want to end up when you are finally done. At some point, actually having sex will be almost a formality. Sex is great man, but one of the biggest revalations for me was that it is not like there are fireworks when you lose your virginity. What it represented for me, breaking free of a "curse" was of way more value. It made me realise there are so many beautiful things to be chasing in this world, sex being just one of them. I totally agree with you, sex can become an addiction. Thats why I preach healthy sexual thoughts. Going from pornography addiction to unhealthy sexual addiction is just replacing one problem with another. Most of us are people with a tendency to addiction in general. Realising this, and using it to your advantage (healthy addictions like working out etc) is probably our biggest potential, and something that makes us stand out. I remember also thinking that pure masturbation did not work. Several people on here recommended it, but I avoided it. You got to figure out yourself what your journey will be like, just don't make it a passive one. There are so many truly great things to see and behold in this world, and going out there and pursuing them is the real lesson of pornography addiction.
I agree a lot with what you right about in the first paragraph. I think that there is also a danger of reading too much into the Nofap success stories and believing that the addiction physiologically can hold you back from leading the type of life that you want. It is definitely possible to feel withdrawals and unpleasant side effects along with extensive porn consumption, but the only progress you will ever make in recovery is the effort to change your life. Becoming porn free only frees up time and energy from a pointless activity and allows us to feel our emotions directly as mature human beings, it doesn't do the heavy lifting of change. You've obviously found a way that works for you, and I would be interested seeing, assuming this is what you want, how it serves you in stamping out porn altogether in the long run. I don't think that this would work for guys who are experiencing PIED- people with this condition would undoubtedly have to give up porn altogether before they can start to notice improvements in the bed room. What I really like about your approach and the message you have given in this thread is the need to remove shame from our sexuality. I think that it is a really important thing. Shame towards sex is a common theme that runs in the stories of many recovering addictions. It was the case with me growing up. Masturbation was a perceived as a shameful act, that I thought was frowned upon by my parents and society, especially when porn became part of the picture. As I became aware of this, however, and my views of sexuality changed, shame towards porn use no longer became an issue. My mind is still drawn to it because it has the potential to make me feel amazingly good, however hollow and short lived that it is. Some have discovered that if they can remove the shame from the sexual act that its allure becomes considerably diminished. Its interesting food for thought. Right now, the challenge I have is meeting real life partners.
Thank you for your comment, freedom. Good having you in this thread. On the part about PIED, I have suffered total PIED since I first tried to have sex at 16, and until recently (so a total of 6 years) . The only time I've had a boner with a girl before I lost my virginity, was once or twice, for max 2 min, while kissing. Mostly, I would feel absolutely nothing. Even masturbating without porn was totally impossible for me for a while. Getting to actually have sex for the first time took me roughly two weeks of purely spooning, massages and watching movies. At this point I had not watched porn for roughly 20 days, and a total of 5 the last 50 days. The first sex wasnt long lasting, but atleast it was sex! I decided to work from there. I preach healthy masturbating, and it took me long to get there. I would be overjoyed by being able to masturbate to healthy sexual thoughts and such, and it took long for me to orgasm to it. Even now, I still have problems with not getting/sustaining erections while masturbating and having sex. But doing these activities, daring to fail, have given my brain new neural pathways. There have been far more positive sexual experiences for me, than negative. This is the reason for my success. Im still working on cutting out porn entirely, which proved itself to be difficult, even after having sex. Im rapidly improving in this area as well though, which I am proud of. You can check my spreadsheet if you want to. I have color coded it. Blue= healthy masturbation. Purple = sex (orgasm or not) and red= porn usage. This works nicely for me, because what I am really tracking is healthy Vs unhealthy sex. It is this progress I am interested in. I totally agree with you on the shame part. I used to have such big shame attached to my sexuality, which is now almost completely gone. Therefore Im not afraid of porn or women anymore. which is incredibly liberating! Meeting women is a great challenge! The good thing is there is progress to be made no matter the result. The only important part is to keep it sustainable and fun. I know you will succeed in this, my guy. Good luck to you in this endavour.
