Heading into my second night without PMO or MO. To be honest I am anxious how this is going to go as quite a few years back I withheld from fapping for due to feeling guilty about fantasising and the result was some very disturbing sexual dreams. I have always been pro fapping after made to feel guilty in my Catholic upbringing, so it feels wierd to be listening to what the Catholic priests were saying and abstaining from it! My reason for taking this challenge is to try and break the nasty PMO habit that I have had most of my life. P has varied from mundane catalog clippings to some wierd shit I'm not proud of viewing. I have abstained from hardcore for some time now, but for the purposes of this challenge I will be going the whole way and regarding P as any kind of visual stimulus. I am totally intrigued by what a reboot might do for me. I probably need a kick up the ass as well as a reboot. There is a good chance I have what it takes. I'm an alcoholic and I've been sober for 18 months now after 27 years of severe addiction so I'm hoping I can take what I learned from that addiction and apply it to this addiction. Alcohol and PMO were responsible for my fiancé leaving me and breaking off our marriage. I want to be able to enter another relationship under much better circumstances without these self-defeating addictions. I felt the urge to MO last night. Today I feel a little tense and normally a PMO session would bring some relief but I'm fighting it. I have to let go though and not fight it as otherwise I will fail early. The secret I think is acceptance and letting go, not fighting against it.
Keep going, you're doing so well. One hour, day and week at a time. It takes courage to admit we have a problem. I have lost people in my life too because of this. Go to AA meetings if u need to. You don't have to talk. It'll keep u away from the booze. Always remember; We have the freedom to choose what we think about. The best is yet to come.....! It's a whole new life once our brain has rebooted. Aslan
ZDU, Welcome man. I am also a recovered alcoholic and I think you'll find that your experience in that realm will translate to this one. This does get easier and easier and the results are undeniable. It will get uncomfortable for sure but well worthtbe journey. Keep posting.
Welcome ZDU, I also am a friend of Bill W. You are in the right place to address P addiction. Most alcoholics are multi-addicted, I have found. Welcome! Read here and post often to this thread you have started (now your recovery journal). pc
Thanks for the support everyone. Nice to know there are some fellow sobriety nofap peers! Aslam I like your tagline: "PMO-A very lonely prison, idiographically built to a very high standard, in accordance to one's own self de-construction plans. PMO-A very lonely prison, idiographically built to a very high standard, in accordance to one's own self de-construction plans. Designed to keep people out, as opposed to keeping people in. This ain't easy!
Welcome aboard, ZDU. Plenty of alkies here. I think I'm almost six years clean. I don't think I would be here quitting porn if I had not quit the alcohol first. They used to go, umm, hand in hand...
Just passed the third night and its starting to her harder... In so many ways! Went to the local store and there was a practically naked hot little babe there (beachside town). Any time I'd take that visual imagery home in my head and MO building a sexual fantasy around what saw. Unsure if im meant to avoid stimulation like this in the early days? I think I need to treat it like distractions in meditation, acknowledge it as real, then let if pass. Lay awake with a boner in the early hours of the morning for longer than I like - normally I would just answer the call. I feel like the pressure is building and I long for the rush of orgasm. It's a lot like when I used to try and give up alcohol - I longed for the rush, that feeling of the alcohol coursing through my veins and altering my state. I just want a quick hit. Night3 I slept in loose shorts whereas Night2 I slept in tighter briefs so I think I will stick to snug briefs for sleepwear. I noticed a few times yesterday I had my hands in my pants playing with my genitals, fondling whilst reading or watching a movie. Obviously and almost unconscious habit to warm myself up for a MO session. Practical steps I took towards achieving reboot goal: - deleted the Stash app on my iPad where I stored the images I fap to. - deleted all the links on my iPad to porn sites like R_dT_be - deleted the browser links to places I regularly collect NN images from - purchased Breaking The Cycle on Kindle - $10 is cheap help! - read a fair bit on YBOP and posters here I originally set my counter goal to 30 days no PMO as I did not want to be too ambitious but after doing some reading 30 days is just not going to be long enough for the residual to clear from my brain. The suggestion seems to be 90 days which interestingly is how how many meetings AA reccomend attending in 90 days for beginners. I went for 100 as its easier to divide into group so I can make a progress chart. 100 has a nice ring to it - a century. Steps still to do include: - Shredding printed porn I have stashed away - Clearing computer of saved material - Getting rid of fetish items I had accumulated a large collection of fetish clothing items. I had actually been starting to sell some of my collection off on EBay to raise cash when I was out of work. I planned to sell more over the next few weeks as I get the chance to list but I'm not sure if that's something I should stay away from as it will be stimulating. I have a clothing shop dummy that I photograph the clothing on as it fetches a much better price if photographed nicely, but the process tends to turn me on. As its artificial sexual stimulation I figure I should avoid it. Perhaps I should just put everything in storage for now and find non sexual things around the house to sell? I need to get put of bed and go for a walk or something to take the attention away from the desire in my loans for release. Grrrrrrr.
Heading into Night 4 is feels so much like when I had to quit alcohol. The tightness in the chest and feeling of anxiety is the immediate feeling. Beneath that is a feeling of loss, like my best friend died. I know when I gave up alcohol I could not imagine what life would be like without the euphoria of drinking. It's the same now, I can't imagine life without the euphoria of masturbating to porn. What gives me strength is that I know that today I live free of the craving for alcohol and I know if my brain can adapt to overcome that addiction it can also adapt to overcome this addiction. I have been masturbating to porn for the same length of time as I drank - 28 years - so it's a deeply entrenched habit. Today I can walk past a liquor store and not be bothered by it of feel the urge to drink. Tomorrow I will be able to see images and use a computer without the need to collect, hoard and masturbate to artificial sexual stimuli. Well... Not literally tomorrow, maybe 18 months from now. In the mean time I'm not enjoying the physical symptoms of craving.
You are doing well, ZDU. It's time to let the cravings go and enter into flatline, that blissful period when the crazy sexual addict part of your mind goes quiet for a while. I find it interesting that you write of the "physical symptoms of craving". For myself, there is no physical craving. It turns out that it is, and always was, completely in my head. BTW, how's the porn pitch-out going? Assuming you work Monday through Friday, Saturday might be a good day to take care of that important task... The day I permanently deleted my porn stash (88 GB) was a day of freedom.
Welcome ZDU and good luck with your progress. It seems like you have a good understanding of things and good strategies in place.
Welcome ZDU, You have taken some great steps these past few days. You are building on the energy that's around your desire to deal with this addiction, and this will become a good foundation for the days ahead. You are getting great support here and I just want to be part of those that are walking this path along with you. Paz
Greetings to you ZDU; Although I'm not an alcoholic, I know the program well enough as several people very close to me are. And for years, I have attended open meetings. That has helped me a lot. No one knows better the self-written doctor's excuses our brains give ourselves for what we do than a well-saged recovering alcoholic. For me, my recovery from PMO hell has been twofold:. Like anyone, there's the withdrawal symptoms; either physical or mental. Then there's the searching for what the hole is that led me to self-medicate through PMO. I am so very infantile in my recovery. This place has become my "safe place." It is my "three meetings a day" place. I'm not always posting. But I am always reading. Just like the real meetings, Styrofoam cup in hand, borrowing strength and wisdom from all the others around me. One thing I have learned, there is no rank and social darwinistic order in any form of recovery. Just because one person has mega years of sobriety doesn't make them resistant to the pitfalls. And that is a very beautiful thing for every one of us. Even though the guy or gal in the chair next to you may have 30 years of program practiced sobriety; they're still one hour - one day - one week at a time. And any alcoholic like any PMOaholic is just one drink away and one peek away from falling. There's a reason why the meetings close with a circle of held hands during the Lord's Prayer. We keep ourselves from falling by holding on to each other. So just like its said in that old basement room; filled with smells of old coffee and stale cigarette smoke. "Keep coming back. It works if you work it." Be well, my friend.
Survived Night4 okay. Wearing closer fitting briefs rather than loose shorts seems to be a positive move. If nothing else it takes deliberate action to get my hands in my pants! I am more aware of arousal as there is less room to grow so to speak. It feels good to put another tick in the box of my hand drawn progress chart. I'm going to elaborate a little more as I feel more comfortable sharing here. I started masturbating around ten years old. Without access to any sort of lube I whacked myself raw and remember drawing blood and having little scabs in my dick from jerking off so much. In the early years there were no fantasies associated with masturbating it was just purely physical pleasure. (What bliss!). I recall having dreams about girls in my class in late primary school and I was 12 when I tongue kissed a girl for first time. In my first year of high school I know indefinitely had fantasies to orgasm about classmates and other kids in other classes my age. When I was 13 I was sexually abused by a 52 year old man. I was scared beyond belief and never told a soul what he was doing to me. He was the adult in authority, I was the kid. I believed I somehow deserved what was happening to me. I never told anyone until I had a nervous breakdown aged 21 and told a counsellor my terrible secret. I regret not telling anyone as this man went on to molest at least four other boys that I'm aware of so I have to carry that on my conscience too. I believe (or want to believe) that the sexual abuse by a much older man arrested my sexual development and I have never followed a path of maturation. The earliest any of my peers had actual sexual contact was 16 when a friend had intercourse with the known loose girl in town. Me - I was to remain a virgin until I was 39 years old. The year I was first sexually abused by this older guy was the same year I drank alcohol to excess for the first time. My parents had a.lowed me tiny amounts of alcohol before but this time a friend and I drank huge amounts on his 14th birthday. I still remember the surge of power and confidence it have me, and I recall saying to friend how great alcohol was as it made all my problems go away. Not true, I still had that terrible secret that I had lostmy innocence to an old man. It started with collecting pictures cutout from my moms magazines. Not erotica but just pictures I found arousing. I collected the and cut them out and made posters to hang in the shower when masturbated. I can see now this was the start of a habit that spanned many years. I had friends in my teen years that had access to dads porn mags or videos but for some reason I preferred my little stash of pics even though it was not nearly as graphic. (That came later) I was about 23 when I downloaded my first pictures off the Internet. This was back before web browsers and everything was command line so I had to ftp into a server and download the files and the use a separate image viewer. The pics were all non nude but very exciting nonetheless. I painstakingly downloaded them at college (!) as personal Internet access was unheard of and stored them on floppy disks. In time I graduated from FTP to newsgroups and that was where I found real porn in unbelievable quantities. Download speeds limited how much but I collected and collected. Encoding and size limited it to pics initially as video was incomprehensible large for the Internet. Many pics were in series and I became obsessed with filling in missing gaps in series and started keeping a neatly orgnised collection. Completing a series or filling a gap probably brought a greater dopamine hit than actually viewing the images. Out of a series of 200 pics I might have only masturbated to one to two but I kept all 200 for completeness. I see the need to have complete series and no missing parts as an addiction itself. Later on this would extend to having all series, or all videos of a particular individual and I would be obsessed with finding if there was new material of particular individuals to add to my collection. As a teen I wrote my own sexual fantasy stories (some of which regrettably which my mother read when she was cleaning my room when's was at camp! How embarrassing. My mother was also aware that pages were disappearing out of her magazines and confronted me about it but I made a lame excuse and promised not to take anymore.) On the Internet I suddenly found huge archives of stories, much more graphic and warped stories that introduced me to fantasies I hadn't considered. It was exciting and novel to get off to someone else's fantasy and took me down another path of depravity including into see with minors. It didn't sit well with me and I felt terrible but it was like a drug and I'd go back and go deeper. I'm deeply ashamed of what I have read and seen. What's done is done and I can't change the past, only the future. I continued to develop my porn collections and my masturbation habits. I was petrified of an actual sexual encounter with a real human being and felt it couldn't be anything but disgusting and dirty so I remained single but very lonely. When's was 38 I met an amazing woman and fell in love. I trusted her enough to confide my early sexual abuse and she gently guided me into loosing my virginity with her at 39. (Yes! I didn't have to be the 40 year old virgin!) We were engaged to be married and it looked like I finally was getting the life I had dreamed of. But, and there's always a but, I brought two problems with me into the relationship. In hindsight it's obvious that being an alcoholic and being addicted to porn were going to bring http at relationship crashing down. My stepson found questionable images on my iPad and my world exploded. I came clean with my fiancé that (a) I had a big drinking problem and (b) I had big sexual problems. She confided in a friend and due to some of the images my fiancé had seen on the iPad (none of which were even nude) and me being a teacher the friend informed the police and then next thing i was arrested and the house raided. I was charged with possession of 'child exploitation material' due to some of the images on my PC and a sexual fantasy story in which I identified a student at the school I worked at. I lost my fiancé, my job, my career, my friends, my home, everything. So stupid in hindsight, but I was on a downward path with a double addiction. I never regarded myself as an alcoholic. I never regarded myself as a pornography addict. It was such a gradual slide into depravity that I rationalised my behaviour completely. I knew what I was doing and regretted it and felt terrible and guilty... But I did it anyway. One night my fiancé even found me sobbing in front of the computer but I couldn't tell her why. I had been masterbating to child porn. I struggle to write that but it's the truth and that is how sick I had become. You would think that would have been enough to make me stop but I was too far gone. It was only when I hit rock bottom lying in the cold grey concrete of a prison cell that I finally realised my life had become unmanageable and was in free fall collapse. When I was released I went to my first AA meeting and although I slipped once I have been sober for 18 months. Without sobriety I would never be and tomface my other demons and be on the path of recovery in other aspects of my life. I feel so fortunate to have found this place as it offers the only hope for recovery from my addiction to porn. I have been to psychologists, sexual offender treatment specialists but I never really they could help as they had never been down this path. Their solution seems to rely on me being on a sex offender register to keep me away from child exploitation material. I never want to go,back to that hell again where I am drunk and crying in front of my screen because I just orgasmed to a child being abused. Perhaps what makes it worse is that I am that child and I was abused too - I was used for sexual gratification when I was just a boy. It defies all logic that I would then become the abused. I'll make it very clear that I have *never* sought sex with anyone underage but I'm deeply ashamed that I did chose to view that child porn and understand that parts of my brain does not distinguish between what is real and what is pixels. That is what is so deeply disturbing. But I draw strength from the fact that it is deeply disturbing to me - they means I amino totally lost. I apologise to anyone who is offended by the fact that I viewed child pornography and wrote a sexual story involving an underage student of mine. However I firmly believe its high time we started talking about the issues such as child pornography and child exploitation in more than purely punitive terms and running from them in fear and horror. Right now there are young guys, kids, 10 or 12 year olds delving into Internet porn and they sure as hell are going to find underage porn if they look long enough, or being kids themselves someone will provide showmit to them. If we don't brings these concerns into the open we sentence them to hiding behind closed doors. I hope that one day there will be open doors for those afflicted by addiction as there are for those afflicted by alcohol addiction. If we can save just one young man from years of this hell surely it will be worth a bit of uncomfortableness.
I have been reading a bit about the cycle of abuse. I find it extremely sad. The original abuser can cause abuse to occur again even two and three generations later. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/01/am-not-monster-inside-mind-ariel-castro/#ixzz2awnOzhnv Excerpt: "And, while most victims of sexual abuse harm no one later in life, Ariel Castro is an extreme example of what can happen in adulthood, when a child has been destroyed psychologically."
Wow ZDU, looks like you have reached the darkest end of the PMO and also have hit rock bottom in your life. From here, things can only go up. Never give up hope on healing!
Thanks for the messages of support. It is a vicious cycle - I am told that the man that sexually abused me had a very difficult childhood. I don't know the details but it seems that he suffered as a child. Whilst I am ashamed of the level I sank to I am not a child molester and the cycle ends stops here. It's very sad that these things happen but they can be avoided in the future is we offer help. My life would be very different if I'd been able to ask for help years ago instead of being shamed into silence and so terrified.
The tragic efficiency of the cycle is that the guy who abused you was probably abused as a child. One guy starts it, and it just goes on and on and on. I salute you for breaking the chain. Note that I do not completely agree with current United States and United States-like laws and punishments regarding child pornography. Many of these laws and punishments assume that anyone who ever views child pornography, briefly or long-term, accidentally or on purpose, will necessarily proceed to child molestation. This goes against the science, which clearly indicates that we escalate our porn viewing to include things that we would never do in real life. The criminal "justice" system being what it is, however, anyone accused of viewing child pornography--unless he is quite wealthy--has no choice but to plea bargain. Disclaimer: I do not advocate child pornography. I wish that it did not exist, and that no one had ever thought of it.
Getting back to the journaling... I shredded all my paper based porn yesterday so that temptation is gone. It was a bit like a farewell in some ways. This morning I woke 4.30am and couldn't sleep. I felt loaded with energy this morning and was pumped but by mid afternoon I was so totally drained and sleepy. I can't really excercise as I'm recovering from surgery. I hope I sleep better tonight. I'm not working at present so too much time is a risk so I will plan my day in advance so I am clear what I need to get done - idle hands etc. I cannot be sure but this has to be the longest I have ever lasted without MO since I first discovered the rush as a boy. Still got such a loooong way to go though. Yesterday I was convinced that I was going to come here and find a message saying its all a joke, haha, gotcha, we were only kidding - you can PMO all you want and it's a good idea to release all that built up tension!
You know, I think this is key. We all need to find other, more healthy and rewarding ways to release built up tension. In reality P releases in the (very) short term but just makes everything worse in the medium and long term. Keep up the good work.
If this is the longest you have been without PMO since childhood this is cause for celebration. Well done and make sure you keep up the good work...
