Overconfident Newbie Feb 2023

Hi path-forward,

Tomorrow you reach 100 days again. How are you planning to keep sober this time?

I know that when I reached 100 days you get the feeling 'I have this under control' and
that is when we are all at risk.

Anyway congratulations!

 

Thanks a lot DBA! I will share my thoughts on 100 days on my own thread tomorrow.

 

Trying to check in on my own journal every two weeks on average. Been doing very well. Keeping busy, and napping when nothing to do. LOL.
Really don't want to jinx it, but the past 4 weeks have been totally PE free, and the past 2 weeks were almost completely "ED symptom" free. She didn't even have to jump on me really fast at all the past 2 wks, things held up on their own much better pre-penetration. Being able to be patient and not lose the erection is just awesome. It's not perfect or effort-free or fear-free but doing SO well! For the first time in YEARS, I managed to even pull off a "round 2" about 15 min after the first. Holy cow!
On the home front, in a way, my time ALONE all week has been even more impressive. Somehow the fear of failure and memory of failure, that haunted and stressed me when alone all week - was blissfully absent 98% of the time! Oh my God did it feel amazing to not have ED/Failure/Fear/Etc on my mind for such a long stretch. Felt like my old OLD self a bit. I often use the metaphor of a snowball rolling down a hill for the problems we all face sometimes, well... THIS is the type of snowball I want to keep rolling! Oh yeah.... SHE is happier too, in and out of the bedroom, with my successes recently. I know my personality is a lot more upbeat when the demons are on vacation. Someday I hope its a Permanent Vacation.

 

New Frontiers, that is really good news. You are lucky that the ED is getting better so fast. The key is to try to work on performance anxiety, relax and just enjoy whatever happens.

One word of warning, but I guess you know this already. There is a stage in rebooting when you feel you have it mastered. And it then that you can be tempted to think 'one
cigarette won't hurt' or a sexy image of a woman in a swimsuit won't hurt (a psub). I am speaking from experience. This happened to me when I had done over a 100 days.

I'm not trying to discourage you because you are doing great. It's really good to see that things are getting better for you.

 

If I didn't have my one small slip.... I'd have 176 days. Almost 6 months. ED was really good about 6 weeks after starting, then went South again. Trust me, I'm well aware this is not a linear path, and am just really trying to sound and reassure myself positively because my bad habit (curse) in life is to treat myself harshly, poorly, unfairly, and suffer from bad bouts of anxiety and so on for the smallest infractions.

 

Are you too hard on yourself? I discuss any slips with my recovery partner and both he and I have had ones recently. We talk about whether
they do or don't count as a relapse. I don't mean to say that we are not hard on each other, but at the same time we do distinguish
between a slip (eg just looking at an advert of someone in a swim suit that comes up on a Twitter feed, but without M) and a relapse
(looking for an image or video and then MO).

You say you treat yourself harshly. I guess we all do that, perhaps because we get depressed and anxious, and our self-image is terrible.
Would it be worth saying what your slip was (perhaps you did say earlier in your journal) so that someone else could say whether
they thought you were right to have made you start your counter again?

I'm not arguing, of course I'm not, that we should allow ourselves psubs as the term is used on this site. There is indeed a slippery
slope, but if we don't actually go down it perhaps it was just a slip, not a relapse.