mousemat1 said:
You haven't set yourself back to square one. 5 months is a fantastic run without porn and will have helped to weaken the porn networks. You just need to start again with renewed strength and commitment.
Good luck!
I'm sorry, but this isn't always the case.
Gary Wilson once did a lecture explaining the intermittent use/disuse of Porn. It basically shows that after abstinence of x period, once someone relapses, the porn pathways not will only fire up, but would grow even stronger and causing a worse ED.
I also experienced this, on two occasions (before I even saw that Gary Wilson clip!). This is what happened:
- January 2017 I quit porn but was doing MO. (not a new year's resolution!)
- My first PMO relapse was in August 2017. The day after the relapse, I checked my erection..... HORROR! My penis shrunk noticeably and there was less blood flow. The erection was for sure worse. Seeing my shrunk penis and less blood flow made me extremely distraught and that was the moment when I quit Porn. (To this day I have had no urges or interest whatever to look at Porn - that's positive the out of this episode.) The discovery, for whatever reason, also made me feeling 'scared' about sex and sexuality all together. I don't know why.
- So, after that relapse, I of course decided to go HardMode for the first time.
- I did that until I relapsed to MO in June 2018 (I had a few MO relapses before that, but it didn't cause anything noticeable) Now, unfortunately this MO relapsed replicated the effects of my August 2017 PMO relapse. (Yes, an
MO relapse replicated, in the brain, the effects of a
PMO relapse). The following day after checking my erection, I noticed yet another reduction of blood flow to the penis (so that's nearly a year's worth of no PMO wiped out because of a MO alone) Now, the reason that this MO on this occasion produced the same effects as the PMO, is because my masturbation technique (using the thumb and index finger to message the 'cherry' part of the penis) for the MO was exactly the same technique that I used during my PMO days. Was absolutely gutted about that. It was so hard to take that approx a year's work was wiped away (judging by the reduction of the bloody flow.)
Anyway, the basic point is that, even after going through a long time without PMO, one relapse can awaken the pathways and make it even stronger (as they were stronger before hand.) It's like going to the gym training your muscle: if you've come back after a long lay off due to an injury (and you've lost a lot of muscle), you will probably build more muscles faster than someone who has never been to the gym (assuming this someone's other variables are not too dissimilar to you).
I'm sorry about this disheartening post - but it's better to know it now rather than relapse every now and then thinking that it was only one relapse.