Traumatic Porn and Desire for Sex

[Crystal]

Has anyone ever heard of any research done that suggests porn can traumatize kids and make them sex-repulsed?

From when I first learned about sex at 11, until I was 18, I was repulsed at the prospect of participating sexual acts with another person. I feel this is in part due to the fact that I was traumatized by pornographic scenes I watched in films as an 11/12 year old. The first couple of movies I saw that depicted sex were historical ones. They depicted the women being used, without being pleasured themselves, to produce a male heir. The Duchess and The Other Boleyn Girl are burned into my memory in particular. I remember being quite horrified, and even when I watched movies later on in which the woman was fully satisfied and respected as a person, I was appalled at ever doing such a thing.

I've never heard of anyone else having this experience, so I'm quite mystified how it happened to me. Has anyone here had this experience?

 

[Arcturus]

If you can't get rid of these memories, then I believe, the only thing you can do in your situation is to find that movie, and watch it again and confront it. Exposure therapy. It might be the only way. Otherwise the myth of that experience will only grow in your head. This way it should get out of your head, evaporate itself rapidly. I did this myself with a particular film that got mystified, legendized at the back of my memory. After 10 months of rebooting and rewiring I watched it again and I busted and shattered the legend.

After just 10 months the film looked irrelevant, like a joke. By this time my brain was, fortunately, well trained to recognize porn as a trick, as something that looked remote and foreign. Since in the last 10 months I got used to look with no shame at real, minimally dressed women on the street and look them in the eyes, when I watched the porn, my brain tried to 3 dimensionalize it and found it unconvincing, foreign, remote, unreliable, deceiving, pointless. Although I got aroused obviously, I did not masturbate; didn't feel like it, because my brain simply didn't and couldn't believe in it anymore. It was saying to the actors in the film 'Oh really? Give me a break. You're not fooling me, come one... I don't have time for this.'

So once you believe you have rebooted yourself for a considerable period, try to find it and confront it. I'm sure that your present, adult mind will find it irrelevant and not worth your time or your thought and that it will look a lot different to you now. Your brain will say: 'What? Is this what's been bothering me all this time?? I can't believe it'. Just make sure you don't masturbate with it! If it gets you too aroused, wait a couple of hours and then have a MO session and think of a real person. Make sure you seal off the memory of what you saw and you will be fine.

All you need to do in order to recover from this addiction is to separate the two behaviors and to seal porn off from your sexual behavior and thoughts until it will no longer have any relevance or influence over you.

 

[Crystal]

Thanks Arcturus. Congrats on overcoming that yourself!

 

[offaxis]

I appreciate the advice around exposure is well intended but this can also be really destabilising as well.

I think it very much depends on you and where you are in your recovery.

Personally I would never now go back and watch porn for any reason. I understand enough and don't need to face it like that. But that's me.

I think it would be a lot more productive and insightful to discuss those reasons why with a therapist in a safe environment without stimulus that is likely to be triggering. That is, what about it puts you off or makes you feel repelled and why. This may come down to specific experiences in your childhood.

Stay safe.

 

[Arcturus]

I appreciate the advice around exposure is well intended but this can also be really destabilising as well.

I think it very much depends on you and where you are in your recovery.

It sure does. It doesn't really matter that much if you watch porn again. What matters is the reason why you watched it. Images on the screen don't mean anything. It's how your brain interprets them. If you reboot yourself for long enough, it will no longer see it as a reward. It takes time, many months, maybe years but the brain will, eventually, forget how to enjoy it. It's a wonderful feeling that I couldn't have imagined at the start of my journey, because I had a different brain, a different neural structure in my head. Now I feel almost immune to sexual imagery.

I think the more you fear porn, the more it will chase you and tempt you, because even if you go a full year, the strong memories of intense pleasure will not change (unless you look at them with your new brain so that it will believe that it indeed no longer needs them). Therefore I've come to believe that cold turkey doesn't really apply to porn. That's why people relapse big time even after very long periods of time. There's nothing wrong in checking, in experimenting, after a long reboot period, to see where you're at. And even if you end up PMOing, you will learn from it and you will have a better estimate of how long you need to go to be immune. The words reboot and rewire aren't as descriptive. The best word I would use to describe this is immune.   

I believe that exposure therapy is her only chance to break free from that memory. Even though she may have to go through some harmful content initially in order to find that film, it will pay off in the long run. In my case, after 10 months of not looking at a particular film, when I watched it again it looked like a different film. It wasn't the thing that I remembered... the actors looked like they weren't the same. It didn't feel like a relapse. It didn't disturb me in any profound way. And it wasn't the film that changed, obviously. It was may brain. 

Personally I would never now go back and watch porn for any reason. I understand enough and don't need to face it like that. But that's me.

You have to learn to look at it without looking at it, if you know what I mean. At that stage you will be able to truly forget it and not fear it anymore. But yeah... it may take many many months. For now just make sure that you go hard mode as long as possible.

I think it would be a lot more productive and insightful to discuss those reasons why with a therapist in a safe environment without stimulus that is likely to be triggering.

Therapy works sometimes, but often it doesn't. The therapist looks at your whole life through a keyhole. Sometimes you just gotta take matters into your own hands because no one knows you better than yourself.

 

[Crystal]

I appreciate the advice around exposure is well intended but this can also be really destabilising as well.

I think it very much depends on you and where you are in your recovery.

Personally I would never now go back and watch porn for any reason. I understand enough and don't need to face it like that. But that's me.

I think it would be a lot more productive and insightful to discuss those reasons why with a therapist in a safe environment without stimulus that is likely to be triggering. That is, what about it puts you off or makes you feel repelled and why. This may come down to specific experiences in your childhood.

Stay safe.

Thanks for your concern Offaxis. Personally, I have a written erotica addiction. I've never been hooked on watching sex scenes so I'm not concerned re-watching those clips would trigger an addiction. We're also talking about scenes from PG-13 films if that makes any difference to you.

I agree, this is something a therapist may be able to help me understand better.

 

[offaxis]

Personally I haven't reached that level of sexual detachment yet. I still have some elements of fantasy present mentally and probably always will have to a level. For me, that's a slippery slope.

I used porn for almost 20 years. That's a lot of conditioning. I did over 100 days "hard mode" reboot earlier this year. That helped. But I know personally I do not have the strength to look at porn now to "test" myself. I don't want to relapse so I avoid it. That's very simple and works for me. I would see myself as a reformed alcoholic going into a bar to try one drink and it wouldn't end well. But this is me and a reflection on the depth of my own problems. I don't ever want to believe I am immune because I would be afraid of relapse and the damage that would cause to my life and dreams. Like the alcoholic, how often does one then try to "test" themselves?

I agree strongly with you about asking the right questions of yourself and your motivation for using porn. That I think is critical and very important. Why particular things attract you in that way and what you get from it or are otherwise missing in your life etc. Personally for me porn wasn't much of a reward ever. It was an avoidance and coping mechanism.

I prefer to talk to my group friends IRL meetings etc. regularly to keep accountable. That will likely be part of my life now for many years ahead and I really value it. But that's only what works for me. Everyone has a unique path.

If you're able to detach and do that then I applaud you. That is really great and I can imagine you feel free and unburdened. It is brilliant and I suspect you have worked long and hard to reach that point, it hasn't come from nowhere but from much effort and sometimes difficult learning experience.

Honestly for me, that's not my goal and I am happy just keeping porn and fantasy out of my life. I understand it well enough and the effect it has on me that I wouldn't subject myself to it anymore. Also I know my wife would find it hurtful and damaging as well.

Peace

 

[Arcturus]

I agree strongly with you about asking the right questions of yourself and your motivation for using porn. That I think is critical and very important. Why particular things attract you in that way and what you get from it or are otherwise missing in your life etc. Personally for me porn wasn't much of a reward ever. It was an avoidance and coping mechanism.

In my case I don't even know what the hell it was. When I first started as a 16 year old kid, it was for pleasure. It was tempting. Later on it became a habit and eventually an addiction. In the last years of my addiction I always hated myself for doing it, thinking that I look ridiculous while doing it and that it was a necessary evil given that I was single. But I never made the connection between my PMO habits and my lack of libido towards real women, even those hot ones that I actually desired and who sometimes showed interest in me. Gabe filled the biggest gap in my knowledge.

I prefer to talk to my group friends IRL meetings etc. regularly to keep accountable. That will likely be part of my life now for many years ahead and I really value it.

I wish you the best of luck!

If you're able to detach and do that then I applaud you. That is really great and I can imagine you feel free and unburdened. It is brilliant and I suspect you have worked long and hard to reach that point, it hasn't come from nowhere but from much effort and sometimes difficult learning experience.

The burden of porn is finally off my shoulders. I can hardly believe that I ever was an addict. Now I'm working on something else: the ability to stay on hard mode indefinitely, like saying that I want to go hard mode 6 months or a year if I wanted to and without effort and then be able to really do it if I really wanted to. Once I enter that mood and feel that level of control, my abilities will be limitless.

It's been difficult indeed. I never thought that it was possible be so cool and detached and uninterested when it comes to porn. But perhaps there are a few notable details in my history of porn use that helped me to arrive at this stage:

First I didn't become a regular user until the age of 16. Yes... internet came to my house as late as 2007 and I'm so happy about it! This delay was a blessing perhaps. This must have been a game changer. Previous to that I didn't PMO much due to the fact that porn was not available in my house except on cable TV, only from 1 AM to 5 AM and the TV was in the room where my parents slept. When my parents left, they took me with them, so there were very few occasions for me to watch it. Starting with the age of 14 and until 16 when I got internet, I literally PMOed only a couple of times (perhaps no more than 10 times in 2 years). Not enough to get wired to porn. These were still happy days. Girls in school, girls on the street looked great. Then the darkness came. But now I'm starting to go back to these days. I really am out of the dark again!

I discovered Nofap and its many benefits by myself as early as 2009. Didn't know if other guys did it and I thought I was a lunatic. At the time I didn't believe in what I was doing and I thought the bad I felt after PMO was due to an inherent weakness /sensitivity of mine and not due to porn being bad. At the time everyone spoke about how good it is and how normal it is and how everyone watches it and when I tried to talk to my high school classmates about Nopaf / No PMO I got ridiculed, deemed a weirdo and I thought that people generally feel good after watching porn, that only I need days and weeks of abstinence to recover, thinking that I have a weakness towards sex. I continued to try to quit MO / PMO nevertheless.

Although at the time I was too young and didn't have the strength and the will power to go more than 1-2 weeks, I more or less continued this trend until I discovered Gabe's channel. One day in November 2015, an unknown force within me told me to write the word porn on YouTube, with the express intention of learning more about it, about what it means to society and to other people. And surprise! I found Gabe's channel. Such a respectable channel followed by thousands of people, where Gabe was already dealing with the problem and his approach was based on the scientific method. Within minutes I knew that I was saved and felt such joy. It was the joy of a big discovery. But more than joy and happiness, it was a huge, limitless relief. A guarantee that new times will come. All of a sudden, after 8 years, I had the answers that I thought would never come, that I thought were not possible. There was nothing wrong with me. It was the porn!

Last but not least, during the later stages of my reboot, I was actually able to go exactly 5 weeks with no O and no wet dreams. I recommend this type of superhard mode to anyone. It's not that difficult. If you can not piss in bed when you are unconscious, then you can also train your brain not to O in bed.

 

[mobilfreak]

If you can't get rid of these memories, then I believe, the only thing you can do in your situation is to find that movie, and watch it again and confront it. Exposure therapy. It might be the only way. Otherwise the myth of that experience will only grow in your head. This way it should get out of your head, evaporate itself rapidly. I did this myself with a particular film that got mystified, legendized at the back of my memory. After 10 months of rebooting and rewiring I watched it again and I busted and shattered the legend.

After just 10 months the film looked irrelevant, like a joke. By this time my brain was, fortunately, well trained to recognize porn as a trick, as something that looked remote and foreign. Since in the last 10 months I got used to look with no shame at real, minimally dressed women on the street and look them in the eyes, when I watched the porn, my brain tried to 3 dimensionalize it and found it unconvincing, foreign, remote, unreliable, deceiving, pointless. Although I got aroused obviously, I did not masturbate; didn't feel like it, because my brain simply didn't and couldn't believe in it anymore. It was saying to the actors in the film 'Oh really? Give me a break. You're not fooling me, come one... I don't have time for this.'

So once you believe you have rebooted yourself for a considerable period, try to find it and confront it. I'm sure that your present, adult mind will find it irrelevant and not worth your time or your thought and that it will look a lot different to you now. Your brain will say: 'What? Is this what's been bothering me all this time?? I can't believe it'. Just make sure you don't masturbate with it! If it gets you too aroused, wait a couple of hours and then have a MO session and think of a real person. Make sure you seal off the memory of what you saw and you will be fine.

All you need to do in order to recover from this addiction is to separate the two behaviors and to seal porn off from your sexual behavior and thoughts until it will no longer have any relevance or influence over you.

I must say that when I'm in my presence, adult state of mind, everything is clear and like u say, the brain don't want P. Or any other P-subs. I belive the big fight is not P itself. It's to be in your present adult mind to be in control over your own life.