faenoe said:
DAY 1:
This past week has been a nightmare. I have not only relapsed but I have felt the addictive mindset begin to return to me. Almost all throughout work yesterday I was thinking about looking at porn and then when I finished at work I wasn't able to stop myself. I felt totally trapped. Right now I'm at the point where I don't even want to quit because of how addictive porn is, but I am going to try anyways.
GOALS
- one week without any artificial sexual stimulation
- post on here every day for the next week.
Porn is very addictive. I didn't even think that it could be this addictive when I started my attempts on recovery. The problem with porn is that this is an addiction that doesn't involve substances. It gets stored in our memory and then it comes to bother the hell out of us. What you're describing there, I've had that a tone of times. Working in front of the computer but doing things on autopilot and only thinking about what porn to watch at home. At the same time, I was screaming at myself, inside: "No, man, you won't go home to watch any fucking porn!" It's like the new Joker movie. He laughs like a maniac but he can't stop himself. It's very hard to stop thinking about porn. So far I've been following a plan, figuring out what I had to do to avoid a relapse. I reached the point where I did a good job staying away from deliberately searching for porn and porn substitutes but I could not stop fantasizing about porn and this is what eventually made me relapse. During this current streak, I've had a couple of moments when fantasizing about porn almost got me but I managed to stop myself and then I told myself that I had to do something about fantasizing. You see, I want to quit porn, of course, but there is this part of me that begs for any ounce of dopamine. And because I stay away from watching anything, it tries to get dopamine in any way, and the only thing that remained was the porn stored in my brain. It kept sucking dopamine from that hoping eventually to push me to a full blown relapse, exactly what the brain loves the most. We need to learn everything about our porn behavior and world. I don't think we can succeed without this. It's becoming easier, in my mind, because I feel like I'm getting closer to understanding how my addiction works. It didn't come overnight. It meant a lot of relapses and post-analysis to figure out what the fuck was going on. The thing is, this addiction works like the saying "Give an inch, take a mile". If you fuck with it, it will make you fully relapse eventually. Maybe not today but it adds up. You could start the relapse a few days before by messing with porn, porn substitutes or even porn flashbacks and fantasies. Everything that stimulates the addicted brain must be avoided because it's the first piece of domino that starts everything. I know, when hard urges start and the craving gets unbearable, something "small" looks like a no big deal. "It's just a little, I won't watch porn," but this is not you, it's that voice inside your brain that is the first domino piece. I don't think we can succeed if we don't stay away from everything. Porn, porn substitutes, fantasizing, maybe even masturbation. It can lead to relapse for some people. Maybe not for everybody but it does this to me, that I know.