The Prisoner

[tom386]

Hello everyone,

I'm 24 years old and have been a porn addict since I was about 11. When my wife and I first got together many years ago, I promised that I would stop looking at porn. I thought it would be so easy to just stop, but at that point I realized that I was an addict as much as any drug addict you read about. What progressed from that promise were years of guilt, shame, and lies; always wanting to give it up but never having the strength to follow through hours or even minutes later. My wife believes that I stopped looking at porn years ago, and that's the person I try to become when we are together, but when I'm alone I turn back into the prisoner of my addiction.

Apart from the constant lying (somehow over the years I have been very lucky and have never gotten caught) and obvious negativity of being an addict making me want to stop, I am also diametrically opposed to porn on a philosophical level, as I consider myself to be an anti-porn feminist. However, this isn't what has finally led me to seek external help for my addiction. In a few years we will start having children, and I cannot let this addiction taint my parenting in whatever insidious unconscious ways it can. I had always told myself that I would stop before we got married, but having children is the true hard line. I cannot and will not be watching porn when I am a parent, and I know that I need to really work towards that goal now before it's too late.

I find that loneliness is my biggest trigger, as I spend several hours at home by myself every day. I don't have any problem with M or O, although I do them a lot. On some advice that I read online, I tried to stop M, but my wife found that I became depressed in general if I quit on purpose for more than a few days. With my wife's feelings in mind, my goal is to stop looking at porn, but not hold back on M or O.

I hope that reaching out to others will finally stop my addiction.

edit:
Below you will find my chart for percentage of the last 60 days in which I have P and PMO. The blue line represents P and the red line represents PMO.

 

[tom386]

After I posted yesterday, I went the rest of the day without looking at porn, which is great! However, while at work today I was reading up on a certain unfolding story, and I ended up absentmindedly clicking on a link that I knew would lead to pornographic images. I wasn't at all aroused before or after clicking on the link and looking at the pictures for a few seconds. I'm not sure what to make of it, and am not sure whether or not I should reset my timer. While the whole point is to not look at those kinds of things, I didn't feel any of my normal triggering feelings before or during it. But, this could all just be justifications on my part, and since the timer is really supposed to be keeping track of how long I go without purposefully looking at porn, I will reset it.

I find just doing things, even if it is M and O, helps a lot to resist urges to look at porn. I would say boredom right up there with loneliness in terms of being a trigger for me.

Maybe I should outline my vision of the successful future here. I would like to eventually be able to see what would now be triggering things to me and not be triggered. I essentially want to be in a state where it is as if I was never a porn addict. I know what you are probably thinking: I will always be in danger of relapse, like any other addict, and thus it is silly to expect that kind of outcome. But I would still like to strive for it, maybe my defenses can eventually become so strong that I don't even notice them anymore. As much as possible, I would like to become the person I say I am to everyone else.

 

[Promise]

Hi Tom, welcome to the forum.  I too share your cognitive dissonance of considering myself both a feminist and a porn addict.  Starting a journal has been one of the greatest boons in my recovery, and I'm sure it will help you too.  Chronicling your thoughts and feelings on a day to day basis and having somewhere to vent can be incredibly cathartic.  Although I've had a few slips, I've managed to cut down my PMO a fair bit, and am feeling more confident about being able to stop entirely.  I now know I have the strength.

I'd start by outlining all of the reasons you want to quit, everything you want to get out of life, and how you intend to do this.  Detail your triggers, and how you're going to avoid them.  You could write about loneliness being a trigger, and detail how you hope to avoid this trigger by taking long walks, or phoning a friend every hour during the day.  Stuff like that.

You said you become depressed in general if you stop MOing completely.  That depression is probably withdrawals.  See, your brain isn't addicted to porn per s?, but addicted to the dopamine that is released when you view it.  MO, especially when combined with pornlike fantasies will cause a dopamine spike and re-inforce the PMO pathways of your addicted brain.  If you want my opinion, the best thing for you to do is avoid P and MO completely, and just stick to sharing your sex with your wife only, and avoiding all fantasy.  If you get moody, just remember, it's your brain scrambling for the next dopamine high.  Pull your britches up and get through it; it won't last forever.
If your reboot is interfering too much with your marriage, making you moody, impacting your performance, whatever, then at that point it might be best to come clean.  I don't know the details of your relationship, so I'd rather not stick my nose in too far and tell you what to do, so take it with a pinch of salt.

The purpose of a reboot is to starve your brain of the dopamine that porn gives it, and allow it to reboot to natural sexuality.  Good luck, post here often and let us know how it goes.  Be brutally honest, trust me, getting shit off your chest makes you feel better and helps you cope with it.

 

[tom386]

Thank you, Promise.

In response to one of your main points, my two main reasons for quitting porn are to stop all the lying and to prevent it's influence from tainting my future parenting. I definitely agree with you, I am addicted to M. However, the fact that I am addicted isn't what bothers me so much or is why I want to make this change, as you can see from the reasons I gave above. I know that there are very good reasons not to be addicted to M, but my main concern now is to pare away the porn.

Hopefully the two don't go hand in hand, because then my quitting affects my wife in a more obvious way. I think I'll try to only stop using porn for the next two months, using M as a tool for this purpose when I need it (refractory period just takes all the desire out of you). If it hasn't helped me reach some meaningful goal towards porn elimination by two months, I will go all out and try to stop M as well.

That's my plan anyways.

 

[Promise]

Good luck.  Some people can M during a reboot, some people can't.  I find I can't!

 

[noises1990]

Are you sure you don't want to let your wife know? I know it s hard but she may offer you great support during the reboot and also she ll know why you sometimes will become moody and shift between emotional states so fast!
I'm not saying that you should, and it s only up to you, but give it a thought!

 

[tom386]

Thank you noises for your suggestion. However, if I can beat this addiction without her ever finding out, that would be ideal. I would rather keep this to myself to spare her the emotional burden of finding out about all the lies, and just become the person I want to be, if possible.

No relapse yesterday. I M'd as soon as I got home even though I had no desire to, just to make the rest of the day easier. I ended up watching some TV, so that might be a good way to combat boredom in the future.

 

[Promise]

Seems to me that you're not Ming out of horniness or desire, but merely compulsion and comfort.  Like I said, take what I say with a pinch of salt, as I don't know your experience, but those probably aren't good reasons to M.  You might find your reboot goes better with abstinence.

 

[tom386]

Promise, thank you for your suggestion. You are right, on Friday I wasn't horny at all, but normally I am a lot when I get home. I just wanted to make the responsible decision to M without porn while I was still able to.

 

[tom386]

No porn yesterday. I always find it incredibly easy to quit porn over the weekend, as my wife is around and I don't have any opportunity to feel lonely or be on my own. Today will probably be easy too, we'll just do fun stuff together. Monday and the weekdays after it will be the real challenge, to see if I can keep up my streak. Although I feel very hopeful, it isn't often that I've been able to go 2 weekdays without masturbating to porn (even though I reset my counter).

 

[Vincent]

Hi Tom,

you did the very right thing in joyning here. Many guys and girls here have the same problem as you.
As promise said, you will have to define you route through this journey. This is indeed important:

-you want to stop the lying? Then you eventually will have to get rid of porn. Since you are still consuming porn while telling your wife your're not, I assume you feel guilty about this and weak at the same time, not being in control of yourself.

-> You want to finally be "free of porn", naming yourself the prisoner suggests that. So you have to actively fight yourself. On the one hand, without help this is very hard to do. on the other you are the only person able to judge your journey, being the only one knowing what you do and think.

My first advice: in order to be truthful to others you got to be truthful to yourself. Don't cheat yourself, don't ly to yourself - you are the one person this cannot work on anyway;D.

My second advice: isolate the triggers, check out where you look at porn, get analytical. Since you want to be a good father and don't want porn to meddle with that - taking that from what you wrote - you got to see it as what it is: an addiction problem with a solution that is at your feet -> meaning you WILL MAKE IT. A positive mindset is crucial regardless of how many relapses, depressions, bad days you go through. You decide you life and not a fucking bad day!
So approach this problem: when, where, why. Then go over to: how can I solve is? my approach was to simply hinder myself from watching porn at all -> Open DNS/K9/Pron Block Pro/ and other parental software. I blocked every search engine except google and enabled the safe search there with password so I could not change it, I deleted my browser on my phone and disabled google search - i did never need to look something up and other apps still work.

This however is not enough. Because you still will find a way around it if you want. What it helps with it to make your job only to overview yourself. start with 5 Days, as you did. You WILL MAKE IT.

Then go on with 10, double it every time. You will see, that it is not as hard, as one might think.

Most important: The reboot is no linear thing! it is a rollercoaster and one you will probably never get out of. You will however get accustomed and pretty soon see, that it is more of a nice boat trip with occasional wind, actually not affecting you that much.

Porn will not vanish. But you will not be the one to reach for tissue and headphones anymore after just thinking about a boob.

If you want to be free, you will find your way on your behalf.

My three pillars are:

- courage (to start and accept who you are)
- determination (to begin a new chapter)
- endurance (to go all the way)

I am sure that you can make it - so convince yourself of that, too.

all the best,

Vincent

 

[tom386]

Thank you for your post, Vincent!

This weekend went well, I didn't end up having any urges to look at porn at all (which is almost always the case when I'm spending lots of time with my wife). Today I was very aroused when I got home from work, so I had a quick MO, which cleared my head.

I plan on watching a documentary today to keep my mind busy, and maybe MO later if I need to. I'm very excited about my counter almost reaching 5 days, I can't wait until I break some kind of record. This is already the longest I've gone without looking at porn in probably the last few years!

 

[tom386]

I wanted to do a quick check-in because I wanted to put something in writing. Recently today I read what could realistically be called erotica. While I didn't initially specify that that was porn before, and thus is how I fooled myself into reading it, I will now consider it as such. The reason being is that stuff like that portrays women in unrealistic and degrading ways, which makes it bad for the same reason porn is. Hopefully this declaration will keep me from convincing myself in the future that it will be ok to read.

Should I reset my counter? I'm not sure I should, as my lazy interpretation of porn in the beginning of this made it especially hard to reason at a point in time where I was tempted. I feel as though I shouldn't reset my counter, due to the fact that by reading the erotica, I did end up preventing myself from probably looking at actual porn, and also that it wasn't defined as such in the beginning.

Edit: I decided to reset my counter anyway because I feel like full disclosure is best, and the decision was eating me up inside.

 

[Vincent]

if you're true to yourself, your're on the right path, I think.

 

[tom386]

Thanks, Vincent.

Well, today I didn't do so well. It began with me getting worked up at work of all places after reading a couple of arousing articles. Then I came home and looked at porn.

I think in the future I will limit myself to just normal news while at work, and hopefully that will keep me sane enough to resist temptation when I get home.

However, there is a silver lining. Up to this point, journaling here has let me go the longest I have gone without looking at porn in probably the last couple of years. This leads me to believe that journaling can really change things for me.

 

[tom386]

Not much to report today. I came home, took a nap, watched a documentary. No porn today, which was paradoxically really easy to do, as I didn't really have any drive for it.

 

[tom386]

Quick update: Things went well today. I turned on google's safesearch thing, so hopefully that will keep me from accidentally getting triggered. I'm only going to use incognito mode to go to this forum and post here, everything else I will try to use normal browser for, since I shouldn't feel self-conscious about my wife seeing anything else I do.

 

[tom386]

On Friday I came home and didn't end up having any urges at all to look at porn. When I was at work, I got a twinge of an urge to look up something triggering, but I suppressed that, and I think that is why I didn't have any urges yesterday. And of course now it is the weekend, which will be porn free by default.

 

[Username]

It's good to read that you're not falling for the part where your addiction is telling you that peeking just a little bit would accordingly do little damage to your recovery.
That's an important thing to get down and I'm confident you will become stronger as time goes by. Let's do this together!

By the way, is your title a reference to the Dark Tower novel series by Stephen King? I'm just curious about that.

 

[tom386]

Username, yes it is in fact. I've always identified with Eddie Dean due to my own addiction.

I did just fine over the weekend, just like normal. However, today I peeked at work and ended up looking at stuff when I got home. While I didn't M to any porn, I'm resetting my counter anyway. I've noticed this pattern of getting worked up at work leading me to relapse at home. Usually if I don't look at anything at work, I'm fine at home. This is what I will try to do from now on.

I find it very strange that I somehow can convince myself that I'll just look at some porn, but won't M at all, and that will be the end of it and everything will be OK and it won't count against me. That's the horny brain talking, which never makes much sense at all. I can see how it leads some people to go out and do stuff they get arrested for, like jacking off in public and whatnot. Things just make so much sense when you are in that mindset. I'll try to recognize when I am in that mindset in the future and not do anything that could hurt me until I am out of it.

I feel very very good about doing this journaling. I definitely have gone the longest without looking at any porn at all using it. And I am really happy about how long I have gone without M to porn as well. I feel like I keep getting better at it. The urges keep going down and down: even though I looked today, I didn't feel completely consumed by the desire like I did last week to the point where I couldn't help M to the porn.

I really believe that this week is going to be a good week, if things continue with this pattern.