The three most powerful words I thought in ending my addiction were "I am addicted." You acknowledge this, so you have taken a huge step toward fixing the problem. It takes humility to quit porn addiction. You have to understand you cannot control the addiction, so to overcome it, you must totally eliminate it from your life. You cannot keep porn in your life and overcome porn addiction. It is not possible. But, there are guys who still try. They are destined to fail. A porn addict cannot keep porn in his life and overcome the addiction. It is all or nothing, it is black and white, there is not grey area; you either keep porn in your life and stay addicted or your eliminate it and get free. You are either a slave or a free man. I invite you to this side of free.
There are three things you must do: Get Educated, Get Tools, Learn to Love Withdrawals.
The education. There is a very small, understandable, manageable solution to porn addiction. But to use it, you have to understand the small, understandable, manageable cause of porn addiction. On the homepage here in this forum, on the right side, about 1/2 down, you will see a link to Gary Wilson's Great Porn Experiment video. Most important video I saw in my recovery. Watched it, and I don't think I watched porn again. Watch it, understand it. Porn is a button we push to get a dopamine high. Dopamine is the best drug in the world, we love it, but it comes to cause problems. You have some of those. Understand what you are fighting before you start to fight it. Study the enemy. Know what you are up against.
Get tools. Install K9 or porn blockers, put obstacles between yourself and porn, make it difficult to access, put up road blocks that prevent you from accessing it, yet remind you you are quitting.
Set a goal. I suggest your goal be the total eradication of porn consumption in your life...forever. Go big or don't go. Ask yourself what value porn has for you. If you want to repost here and tell me about that value, I will repost and explain to you why you are wrong and that porn is valueless, it has no value, it does nothing for you, it improves your existence in no way, and I can then go on to tell you how it is detrimental to your life and how with porn in your life your life will be lessened, without it in your life your life will be greater. But that is a discussion for a different posts.
Withdrawals. Physical, mental, and emotional pain. They are that "crawling the wall" feeling we get when we go without a dopamine fix for...a minute, a day, a few days, or a week. You need to plan on 90 straight days of that hellish feel. You won't feel it for 90 straight days, or even for most of those days, but during that initial reboot, you will have days back to back when all you want to do is give in and relapse. You have to anticipate that, expect it, embrace the inevitable, and understand you don't get to this side of clean without experiencing those things. That is your brain rebalancing. Years of porn abuse sets things in our reward center off kilter, and it will take a few months to get back to "0", so to speak.
For newbies, I have a thread that I invite you to read.
http://legacy.rebootnation.org/index.php?topic=1256.0
Give it a read. If you take something positive from it, leave a positive reply at the end.
I have absolute confidence you can overcome this. Gabe did it. I did it. Many others have. But it takes a very serious commitment. Don't walk this path unless you are determined to see it to the end. On this side of recovered is...freedom form the slavery of porn addiction. I invite you to take off your chains.
Peace.
Will I AM.
