Hi Gabe, just wanted to say thank you again for everything you are doing here. One of the biggest, most scary, thoughts any of us have when beginning our journey is "I am addicted to porn." That is terrifying. Your approach makes the problem and solution much smaller and much more manageable, and you remind us all that laughing at ourselves and the problem is appropriate from time to time. On some level it is a ridiculous problem, a ridiculous problem that requires a serious solution, but still, who know guys could become addicted to sitting in front of a computer rubbing one off, over, and over, and over again? Most of us did not know porn could be addictive, and so, by the time we figured out we were addicted to it, it became the worst realization in the world. I also want to thank you for your courage. Most of us here are here anonymously. For many of us our lives would be adversely affected if our problem became public knowledge. You use your real name, and that takes guts. Coming out publicly as a porn addict like you have is one of the bravest things I have ever seen. And you did it to help us. Thank you.
I enjoyed the vid, though I did not have a lot of the dreams discussed. To my knowledge I have never had a wet dream. I have had sex dreams, but I would not call them porn dreams as they were not about porn. I think I had porn addiction pretty bad, but I never had trouble having real sex. The worst physical symptom I had was difficulty reaching O during sex, but, back before I got educated, that was no problem because I always had the fall back of PMO. It was only when my partner became concerned when I could not O with her that I began my journey to becoming clean. That is probably when I realized just how addicted to porn I was. I did have one other symptom I will mention for guys reading this, and that is while I never had trouble rising to the occasion, so to speak, my erections were not as hard as they could have been. Again, being ignorant of the porn problem, I did not attribute this to porn or deem it a serious issue; I was still able to hit homers as they say. But, since becoming porn free, my erections are consistently harder, which in turn has made them bigger. It is not that I grew, it is that harder = bigger. This was not a benefit I was looking for in quitting porn, but for guys who want to have a benefit in quitting, this is probably one of the, er, biggest. In addition to the anxiety and stress spikes that came with serious withdrawals, learning how to O with my partner again was very difficult. Remember, before I began quitting, Oing was not that big a deal to me during sex, I could always take care of business later, to P. But as one of the main purposes in quitting P was to learn to O again with my partner, I first went though a stage where I thought of P just to reach O. That was in the very beginning before I realized I was just reinforcing the wrong reward pathways. Now for a long time I have had a healthy sex life and do not think of P during sex, but only of my beautiful partner. Again, porn addiction sneaks up on us, no one sets out hoping to become addicted, and there are some seriously addicted guys who have beautiful women in their lives. Quit for them if you don't for yourself, it is a worthless habit to give up to make your partner feel she is the only thing that does it for you.
I will confess that I lost morning wood along the way, while addicted. I did not really miss it, and I never attributed it to porn abuse or addiction (though in fact, it was). But, one morning, after I quit porn, it was there again and is there most mornings. I guess this is part of getting back to normal. Anyone wanting an objective sign you are making progress in your recovery, look for when you start to get morning wood back, that is a sign of recovery.
For every guy reading this I want you to listen to Gabe and read everything you can about porn addiction, during your reboot. You have to ask yourself: What am I doing? If you are addicted and you are doing anything other than quitting porn you are not seriously fixing or addressing the problem. You cannot quit porn addiction and keep porn in your life; that is a drug that has to go. If you are not serious about fixing the problem, my advice is don't even bother, you are just setting yourself up for failure, meaning relapsing over and over, which is highly annoying and frustrating. If you are serious about fixing your problem, go about it like you are fixing a serious problem, read up, get educated, and like Gabe says, be proactive, don't just say "I am quitting" then sit on the couch hoping for the desire and withdrawals to go away. Get out, engage life, find things to challenge yourself. Find something other than porn that interests you. Remember, porn is just a button we push to get a dopamine fix, that is the only reason we watch it. If we did not get a dopamine rush from porn we would never watch it; it would be about as interesting to us as watching corn grow. You know why we don't love watching corn grow? It does not give us a dopamine high; if it did, we would love watching corn grow. Dopamine is the best drug in the world; heroin is merely synthetic dopamine, it is not even the real thing, and so you can see how addictive dopamine can become. If anyone wants to read my thoughts on getting clean, please feel free to click on the link below.
http://legacy.rebootnation.org/index.php?topic=1256.0
Again Gabe, thanks. Reading posts and replying are part of my recovery, so thanks, it helps. How do we help ourselves? We help ourselves by helping others. So, any of you guys reading this, go find someone to help. You will be helping yourself.
Peace.
