ddmmyyyy
Member
Hi all,
first off, thanks to everyone who contributes to this forum. I've been coming back to the site for the last 2 years and the profound information about porn addiction and it's effects as well as the journals have been a tremendous help!
I'm a 35 year old single man and I've been struggling with porn for over 20 years.
I was a happy fine looking kid with a great childhood for the first decade of my life. But when puberty hit and the hormones did their work, transforming my body from child to man, my appearance as well as my mood changed a lot - and not exactly to the better. Afflicted with heavy acne and my facial features being a mess for quite a while I was all but a confident teenager. Add to that my complete lack of style, my inability to interact with girls and my desire to still be friends with the cool guys and you can imagine how I had to deal with some nasty bullying during that time. Now I know, that this was the perfect mix to start my porn-career.
After two or three years of having a hard time, things changed back to normal. My face kind of grew together again and my social life improved. But I was still very insecure about myself. And already conditioned to use porn and masturbation to cope with feelings of sadness, anger and frustration. With my first computer at the age of fifteen and the arrival of the internet, things got worse of course. I was also a pathological collector. At times I had amassed about 2 terabytes of porn. Neatly indexed and stored - usually to be never watched again. I would search for new exciting stuff next time anyway. For the next 10-15 years I had absolutely no clue how bad this affected me. I remember being proud of myself one time, not being prone to any kind of addiction at all. I had no trouble to quit smoking, after being a casual smoker for some years. While moderately experimenting with different drugs, I never felt any danger of loosing control. In retrospect, I have no clue how I could not see at the time, that (considering porn) I was the worst addict of all!
So I spent most of my 20s struggling with the basic challenges of life. A lot of times, all of my energy went into maintaining the facade of being a content grownup while I was heavily depressed. I would not rate my 20s as completely lost though. I've always had a set of close friends and, despite my struggles, I was part of great work projects in the creative field, sometimes in leading positions. So I had good times as well. But they were usually followed by long periods of depression and moments of near panicking. Having my only real relationship - for about 3 years - also helped to keep me going. Especially during the first year it brightened my mood. But in the long run, it made holding up the facade even more difficult and, still not realizing that PMO is the main culprit, I tried to hide my problems from her just hoping she would not leave me and that I would miraculously get better and happier one day. By the time she broke up with me, I was a completely empty shell of a person. My character had eroded and I had no drive to achieve anything in life, no real interests and no goals. I would say, that this was my emotional low point, with my financial low point following about a year later. Still heavily depending on financial support of my parents (being well over 30 allready!!) my bank account was dried up and I had to borrow some money from a good friend.
At that time I deleted all my porn, and promised myself, to finally grow up and get my life under control. Of course I failed at first, not being equipped with the right tools for such a challenge. But eventually I stumbled upon "Your Brain on Porn" and other PMO addiction sites. I remember the first time I realized that I am an addict and that I would have to live a life completely without porn in order to avoid these downward spirals into PMO and depression. I was horrified. I just could not imagine it. But once the truth started to sink in, I felt like on a road with no turning back. It's a steep, bumpy and curvy road with a lot of reflective work and mental setbacks. In the 2 years that have passed now, I actually never made it beyond being PMO free for more than 20 days. But usually not PMOing for 4-8 days in a row, with regualar relapses in between already made a huge difference compared to the almost daily sessions of PMOing before. Often for 4 hours or more in a row. One of the most difficult things for me was, to not only abandon porn, but also my habit of frequent fantasizing about sex and porn related scenarios, which always paved the way for relapse.
Right now, I am feeling a lot more confident about myself in general. My ability to cope with stress and pressure has improved. And, despite being more of an introvert and a bit shy, I feel confident with women most of the time. Still, I am far from where I want to be. One of the problems my long time porn abuse has caused is my inability to really connect and fall in love with women. Apart from my one and only long term relationship, I only had one night stands and more or less meaningless affairs. I always thought porn doesn't interfere with my sexuality, because I never tried to introduce porn fantasies into my real sex life. But thinking about women, I have this complete separation in my mind about girls I want to have sex with and the type of girls I would want to have a relationship with.
Anyways, this post is already far too long and the sun has just came out after a long period of meteorological dullness. So it's definitely time to abandon the computer screen and get outside...
I am on day 15 of my current reboot attempt right now. Optimistic about making the next step. I will start my actual day-to-day journal this evening.
Good luck everyone!
first off, thanks to everyone who contributes to this forum. I've been coming back to the site for the last 2 years and the profound information about porn addiction and it's effects as well as the journals have been a tremendous help!
I'm a 35 year old single man and I've been struggling with porn for over 20 years.
I was a happy fine looking kid with a great childhood for the first decade of my life. But when puberty hit and the hormones did their work, transforming my body from child to man, my appearance as well as my mood changed a lot - and not exactly to the better. Afflicted with heavy acne and my facial features being a mess for quite a while I was all but a confident teenager. Add to that my complete lack of style, my inability to interact with girls and my desire to still be friends with the cool guys and you can imagine how I had to deal with some nasty bullying during that time. Now I know, that this was the perfect mix to start my porn-career.
After two or three years of having a hard time, things changed back to normal. My face kind of grew together again and my social life improved. But I was still very insecure about myself. And already conditioned to use porn and masturbation to cope with feelings of sadness, anger and frustration. With my first computer at the age of fifteen and the arrival of the internet, things got worse of course. I was also a pathological collector. At times I had amassed about 2 terabytes of porn. Neatly indexed and stored - usually to be never watched again. I would search for new exciting stuff next time anyway. For the next 10-15 years I had absolutely no clue how bad this affected me. I remember being proud of myself one time, not being prone to any kind of addiction at all. I had no trouble to quit smoking, after being a casual smoker for some years. While moderately experimenting with different drugs, I never felt any danger of loosing control. In retrospect, I have no clue how I could not see at the time, that (considering porn) I was the worst addict of all!
So I spent most of my 20s struggling with the basic challenges of life. A lot of times, all of my energy went into maintaining the facade of being a content grownup while I was heavily depressed. I would not rate my 20s as completely lost though. I've always had a set of close friends and, despite my struggles, I was part of great work projects in the creative field, sometimes in leading positions. So I had good times as well. But they were usually followed by long periods of depression and moments of near panicking. Having my only real relationship - for about 3 years - also helped to keep me going. Especially during the first year it brightened my mood. But in the long run, it made holding up the facade even more difficult and, still not realizing that PMO is the main culprit, I tried to hide my problems from her just hoping she would not leave me and that I would miraculously get better and happier one day. By the time she broke up with me, I was a completely empty shell of a person. My character had eroded and I had no drive to achieve anything in life, no real interests and no goals. I would say, that this was my emotional low point, with my financial low point following about a year later. Still heavily depending on financial support of my parents (being well over 30 allready!!) my bank account was dried up and I had to borrow some money from a good friend.
At that time I deleted all my porn, and promised myself, to finally grow up and get my life under control. Of course I failed at first, not being equipped with the right tools for such a challenge. But eventually I stumbled upon "Your Brain on Porn" and other PMO addiction sites. I remember the first time I realized that I am an addict and that I would have to live a life completely without porn in order to avoid these downward spirals into PMO and depression. I was horrified. I just could not imagine it. But once the truth started to sink in, I felt like on a road with no turning back. It's a steep, bumpy and curvy road with a lot of reflective work and mental setbacks. In the 2 years that have passed now, I actually never made it beyond being PMO free for more than 20 days. But usually not PMOing for 4-8 days in a row, with regualar relapses in between already made a huge difference compared to the almost daily sessions of PMOing before. Often for 4 hours or more in a row. One of the most difficult things for me was, to not only abandon porn, but also my habit of frequent fantasizing about sex and porn related scenarios, which always paved the way for relapse.
Right now, I am feeling a lot more confident about myself in general. My ability to cope with stress and pressure has improved. And, despite being more of an introvert and a bit shy, I feel confident with women most of the time. Still, I am far from where I want to be. One of the problems my long time porn abuse has caused is my inability to really connect and fall in love with women. Apart from my one and only long term relationship, I only had one night stands and more or less meaningless affairs. I always thought porn doesn't interfere with my sexuality, because I never tried to introduce porn fantasies into my real sex life. But thinking about women, I have this complete separation in my mind about girls I want to have sex with and the type of girls I would want to have a relationship with.
Anyways, this post is already far too long and the sun has just came out after a long period of meteorological dullness. So it's definitely time to abandon the computer screen and get outside...
I am on day 15 of my current reboot attempt right now. Optimistic about making the next step. I will start my actual day-to-day journal this evening.
Good luck everyone!