I am a porn addict. Or, at least I was. The thought "I am a porn addict," or "I am addicted", are thoughts that were totally alien to me 2 and 1/2 years ago. I did not even think such things were possible. I laughed off the concept. I thought that porn, like sex, was just all American fun. I was the opposite of a puritan, I believe in sexual freedom, sexual expression, I just saw porn consumption as an extension of that freedom, that lifestyle. I was wrong.
Now, 2 and 1/2 years into this journey, just a bit over one year clean, I have learned more about porn addiction and myself than I ever wanted. I'll tell you something funny that is not really funny, and that is that I have, through this journey, picked up a skill that I can never use anyplace but a place like this, a skill that is taught no where: learning how to quit porn addiction. Just as I never thought I could become addicted, I never thought I would be proficient at quitting it. The do not teach "How to quit porn addiction" in the public schools.
I post here for newbies who want to quit. Yes, I said "quit". There is no way to overcome porn addiction unless you totally eradicate porn from your life. If you are a newbie, reading this, I imagine you are thinking something similar to what I first thought: "What the fuck, you mean I am addicted AND I have to give up porn??!! No fucking way!"
Overcoming the addiction is a bitch, no doubt about it. The thing is, there are two types of guys here and you need to figure out which group you are in because only one group is going to successfully reboot and rewire.
The first group is a group of totally wonderful guys who have come to accept, reluctantly, still somewhat in denial, that porn is a problem in their lives. They hate it, but they love it, and giving it up is not their intent or purpose. They want to control it, but keep it in their lives. That wonderful group of guys is doomed to failure. That group of guys, though they may not think it so directly, are really here just trying to control porn. They have not deduced, yet, that if porn controls them, if they are addicted, it is impossible to control porn and keep it in their lives; if you are addicted you cannot control porn, porn in fact controls you. Until and unless they understand that they will never regain control of their lives, which is very sad, actually, because porn has absolutely no value, does nothing good, so struggling to keep it in one's life makes no sense. But then, as addicts, we cannot be said to be thinking clearly.
The second group of guys have come to accept that porn controls them. This is a very humiliating and humbling thought. We hate to think anything controls us, and we especially hate the idea that our quiet little hobby is in charge. But this group of guys will succeed, because they know that to conquer porn addiction, porn has to be totally deleted from their lives.
Now, I see a lot of guys stumble into this forum desperate to overcome their problem. Many do not know what the problem is, they may not even have put a name to it. Many have not studied it, most are not willing to suffer to fix the problem, most are not prepared to suffer at all. They have not prepared to beat the problem. If you are one of those guys and you are reading this, let me give you some cold, hard, facts. If you are addicted, you did not get there yesterday. Most guys who get to this forum with this problem have had the problem for years. They may not have understood it was a problem until quite recently, but they have been feeding their dopamine pumps through porn consumption for years, whether they understood that or not. There is a fix for the problem, but this problem is not fixed over night. You might as well accept it will take a few months, most guys say 3, and you will not fix it without some advance preparation.
This brings me to an interesting concept, "Mise en place." This is a French term that has absolutely noting to do with porn addiction recovery, but, rather has to do with preparing to cook food. It translates literally to "put in place" but can also be meant as "setting up." If you are a porn addict not only will you not overcome the problem overnight, but you won't overcome it unless you put a program in place, in advance, and set up your recovery. I have seen many guys come completely clean about 90 days out, but I have never seen a newbie start the recovery process without advance preparation and be successful. Now, you can learn all this on your own the hardway, meaning start in ignorance and relapse 40-100 times before you start to adopt a successful method of quitting, or, you can adopt a method of quitting that has been shown to work. Let us begin.
1) First, you have to identify your problem. What is your problem? Are you an addict or not? If you do not acknowledge the addiction you cannot and will not overcome it. So, are you? Not everyone is. If you go to Gabe's home page, on the upper left side, you will see a link titled "Road to Recovery." Click it. He identifies acknowledging the addiction as the first step. I know what you are thinking. "Porn addiction, no fucking way, that is horrible, I am not in that group of freaks." The first thing to understand is: It's not that bad, you are not a freak, you are just a guy whose dopamine reward center, through years of porn abuse, became hypersensitive to porn, and probably desensitized to reality. It happened unknowingly, unwittingly, casually, over time, and was something 100% you did not plan on or intend. In a sense it is not your fault. Most of us become addicted almost by accident, but it is important to understand you will only become unaddicted on purpose.
2) Study the problem, get educated. One of the things about acknowledging porn addiction is that we tend to blow the problem out of proportion, it seems so horrible, but, actually, the porn addict has a relatively small problem requiring a relatively small solution. The porn addict has, unknowingly, trained their brain to reward viewing porn with a dopamine release in the brain. Dopamine is released naturally to sexual thoughts, but in reality, without porn and specifically High Speed Internet Porn, we as a species do not run around high on dopamine. In reality most of us can expect a handful of sexual partners in our lives. But our brain's dopamine reward center cannot tell porn from sex and rewards both. The problem is that, unlike sex, porn is available 24/7, it offers constant newness and novelty--things the dopamine reward center loves. You could sit in front of a computer for years and never see the same image twice. Eventually, that reward center comes to like, and reward, porn over reality. That is when guys start experiencing ED. I encourage everyone reading this to view the Gary Wilson TEDx talk, a link to which can be found here on Gabe's home page under the title "The Great Porn Experiment." Under the concept of mise en place, I will say that in the beginning I not only watched that vid before starting, but I probably watched it 40 days out of the first 80 quitting. I don't watch it so much now, but it helps to understand that you will want to watch porn in that 90 day reboot period, and to plan on watching something else when you want to watch porn. Gary Wilson's TEDx video was my "alternative vid" when I first began quitting; when I wanted to watch porn I watched it instead, and it was great at explaining why I wanted to watch porn. Ask yourself, why do you like to watch porn? What is so fascinating about it? What is so interesting you can lose hours watching it? Why is watching porn so much more interesting than, say, watching the ocean, or watching the sun set, or, walking at night under a full moon? Why is that activity so fascinating for us? The answer is: due to our primitive brain being unable to distinguish porn from sex, we get a dopamine rush when we see it. We don't get a dopamine rush like that at seeing much else.
3) No porn no porn no porn no porn no porn no porn, oh, yeah, and one more thing, no porn. If quitting porn was easy we would not have these forums. You are not addicted to porn. You are addicted to dopamine. Porn is just the button we push to get it. When quitting you have to turn off the dopamine pump, so to speak, and that means you have to quit pushing that button. Easy to say, hard to do. My advice, part of getting prepared, is don't bother trying to do this with will power alone. Can it be done with will power alone? Yes, but, make it easier on your self and install blockers. If nothing else they act to remind you you are quitting porn. That is something we need to be constantly reminded of when quitting because if we are not careful we can constantly access porn. After years of abusing porn we have become experts at locating it, finding it, we know where it is, and it is easy for us to get to, but if you are going to overcome this problem you must stop pushing your dopamine button. You cannot push it a little bit. The addiction will reason with you, but you cannot give in. I have had all the rationalizations. For instance, your addiction might say," look, you use every day. This week just cut out Sunday, next week cut out Sunday and Saturday, the following week cut out Sunday, Saturday, and Friday." Sounds reasonable, right, just cut back. The problem or reality is, however, that porn addiction can be starved to death (a good thing) but it cannot be starved to death if you are using porn even a little bit. You ask "what do you mean by 'using'?" I mean using it to get a dopamine high. That is the only reason we use porn, for dopamine. Understand what we are talking about here--and again this goes to preparation--you need to block 90 days of your life, and for those 90 days you need to become "a man quitting porn." It will be difficult, but we are talking about blocking a set period of time, and one not that long, one that does not require you quit work or school, to address and correct a learned behavior that took years to develop. You trained your brain for years to reward porn with a dopamine high, you may not have known it, but that is what you did. You need to accept it is not going away overnight, and that on average the successful rebooter reports success only after 90 days clean, no porn. So, back to blockers, put them on your computer and make your purpose in life NOT to see porn or have hypersexual thoughts for that 90 period.
4) Withdrawals suck. You are going to have brain fog, an inability to focus, and, really, a lack of desire to focus. You will have physical symptoms. "Blue balls" don't exist, it is a myth, your balls are not going to turn blue, they will not explode, you will not die or be injured in any way by not watching porn or masturbating. You will survive just fine. A lot of guy report jitters and the shakes, which often manifest as something feeling like a prolonged panic attack, as in hours of a day for many days, some back to back. The feeling of increased anxiety and strain can also be expected. There is depression, there is anger, there is self doubt and self blame. You will have physical aches and pains in weird places, a lot of guys report sinus pain. You will have hours of mentally kicking your own ass for having got to this place and having to go through it to get clean.
The point of the above, and this is aimed at and only at newbies, is that there is a method to getting clean. Although there may have been a porn addict who woke up one day and said "never again" and had no problems or challenges, I have never seen or heard of him. There are problems in quitting porn, there are challenges, you will feel withdrawals, and unless you know this going in and have a plan on dealing with them, even just expecting them, they can sneak up behind you and clobber you, totally derailing your reboot. You can see guys in this forum and others like it who continually fail, who continually relapse. It is painful to read their posts. Every 3 or 4 days they begin their post with "Oops, relapsed, darn, have to reset the counter, next time I am going to make a real run." I understand there can be starts and stops in this process, but if a guy is here for 45 days and is still relapsing every few days, that is a guy who has not prepared to overcome this addiction, a guy who has no plan, a guy who is hoping to quit, but is not dedicated to quitting. You cannot merely cross your fingers, turn on a counter, and hope to quit porn addiction. Quitting porn addiction takes real effort, you have to know that and plan on it.
If you are reading this, I do not want to see you be a serial relapser. Block the 90 days. Before you start, study the problem, understand what is going on in there. Don't overthink it; it takes a couple hours at most to understand the problem, and don't let the problem become big. Keep it simple; you are having an unwanted chemical brain reaction to the sexual visualization through porn. You don't like the reaction, you don't like the way it affects you, want to quit having the reaction--solution: end the stimulation that causes the reaction. Get some help with it. Plan on wanting to relapse, on wanting to view porn when quitting, and plan on what you are going to do otherwise. Me? I mixed the education with planning on wanting to watch porn, meaning I planned on watching the Wilson vid whenever I wanted to watch porn. Again, I probably watched it 40 out of my first 80 days in the reboot. Get tool, get a blocker, K9is good. I kept K9 on my computer until month 7. I really did not need it that long, but, then again, I had absolutely no reason to watch porn, so, no harm no foul. You can get an accountability partner. Write here, a lot. When I first began quitting I wrote on a forum every day, sometimes as much as 10 times a day. What was I doing? I was doing anything other than watching porn while reinforcing the fact that I was not watching porn. Porn addiction is a learned behavior, overcoming it is also a learned behavior. Porn addiction is a lifestyle, for you to beat it you are going to have to learn a new lifestyle. It can be done. Block that 90 days.
So, why do I write this? Some part of me likes to think there is a guy out there reading it who was like I was. Totally ignorant of the process, but desperate to quit porn addiction. I struggled for almost 18 months with quitting before I understand the process, before I understood there was a method to quitting porn. Like changing any routine behavior we have and do not like we have to focus on changing the behavior. Once you resensitize your brain to reality and desensitize it to porn, you will be OK. Though not hard science, I like to explain it in terms of dopamine. Once you turn off your dopamine in your dopamine soaked brain and get those levels back to normal, you will be OK. Those horrible feelings go away and you will not have that burning desire to access porn. That is called freedom.
Peace.