mikejensen88
Member
Not really sure where to start with my story as it is long and complicated. I am twenty five years old. I have no health issues. I have a great job, a beautiful wife, two amazing sons, two dogs, a house, a brand new suv and a supportive family. Sounds more like a success story than a first journal entry.....so what's the problem?
The problem is is that I'm about to lose all of that. And I have my insane porn addiction to thank for that. Things have gotten so bad for me that I have often pondered the thought of suicide. I never really considered myself suicidal, but nevertheless, the thoughts were there. I've been really depressed. My realization came when I was at work one night recently and I was typing in my web browser on my phone and google suggested "porn addiction help" before I could finish typing what I was going for. Seeing that on my screen hit me like a brick wall. For 13 years, thru all my adolescent and teen years into my adult years I told myself that I was just wrong in the head and that there was no help for me. I lived inside my own head all this time and I never talked to anybody about my problems(or what I saw then as my "habits") I shouldn't necessarily say that I hadn't talked to anybody about it, because porn was a big problem in my wife and I's relationship from day one and we had talked about it. But it was always confrontational and I didn't take the conversations seriously because I told myself that it wasn't a problem. It got to the point where I had hurt my wife so many times from watching porn and leaving her disappointed that I finally tried to stop. I'm not sure how long I went, but I remember telling her I was all done. Then I relapsed and felt so much shame and disappointment in myself that I slipped into a hole filled with self hate and shame. I lied to my wife from that point on. The porn addiction and my masturbating habits had gotten so bad that I couldn't even admit it to myself. What made it even more difficult to open up to my wife about all this was the weird porn genres I had been turned on by. At this point I was watching mostly gay porn. I had been so confused by this, being straight, and if I couldn't understand it myself, how would she ever? I don't want to go too far into the details of my marriage because I want my focus to stay on my own self improvement and the problem I have identified within myself, but I would be more than happy to answer any questions on my marriage and the effects porn has had on it. My wife and I are currently in limbo. My porn addiction and my reluctance to identify it as a problem and correct it have caused years of toxicity in my relationship and that is something that will need to be worked on after I can get my head straight. That is if there is still something there to fix after I fix myself. I am putting my faith in God and I hope to bring a positive report on that to this forum in the future.
When I found that Google was suggesting porn addiction help, I knew suddenly that I wasn't alone. I found Your Brain On Porn and it opened my eyes. I suddenly realized that I'd been missing out on life. On the outside, I appear very normal. I live a regular life. But inside my head I have been a mess. I started watching porn when I was around eleven years old. I remember my brother coming home with a cardboard box full of VHS tapes. He gave me that box and from that day on, I was in love with a screen. I'd spend a lot of time hidden away in my room, when I should have been out in the real world learning about the birds and the bees. At fourteen, I had seen so much porn that I assumed I would be gift for any woman to have in bed. So I was confused when all the boys around me were hooking up with girls and I was on the sidelines. There was one girl when I was fourteen that I dated a few times. I remember getting insanely nervous at the thought of any sexual contact and I ended that relationship before I had to face my fears. By the time I was fourteen I had high speed internet access in my own room. I then got immediately worse. I spent hours searching for the next big scene. I had exhausted all genres available at that time and accidentally clicked onto a shemale video. I was disgusted at first, but then things got going. I shamefully continued to increase the severity of the scenes I watched until I eventually became comfortable watching gay porn and finishing to it. I was very concerned and confused by this, because to my knowledge at that point, I was straight and I wanted to be with a woman. I never really had the desire to go out and experiment with a guy, but the porn drove me nuts. This really scared me and I stopped watching porn for a while, but eventually went back to porn. When I went back to watching porn again, it wasn't gay porn, I was surprised to find that I was once again turned on by women and straight porn. Although it didn't take long before my viewing became more and more disturbing. I became socially awkward and anxious. I always felt like I wasn't normal. I was always nervous that I wasn't being like everyone else. I became obsessed with what others thought of me. A little later, maybe fifteen, there was one other girl that I dated for a bit. Real casual, we made out and it was exciting. I felt her up and become suddenly more nervous than excited. I didn't know what to do next. I was nervous to move forward. I thought I would have known what to do next because I'd seen it done so many times, but it just didn't feel right. It was bad. I was still a virgin at the point when I was around fifteen or sixteen and I had my first opportunity to put to use all the "training" I'd had over the years. I failed miserably. I found this girl very attractive and she was more than willing, but for some reason I couldn't get hard. I was bewildered. I was young and healthy and didn't know what to do. I continued watching porn and a while after my first failed attempt, I was approached by a girl that I wouldn't have necessarily been interested in if I hadn't been so desperate for some form of normality. We dated and began a relationship. She began talking about having sex with me and it was the scariest thing to me at that time because I was nervous about my first experience. The night finally came and it felt so forced and unnatural. I once again failed miserably.
There were no other girls until I met my wife at seventeen. The first time my wife and I had sex I failed but we attributed it to the pills and booze we had been partying with that night. Then I had a second chance. We were in my mother's basement with another couple watching a movie and we hid under a blanket. It was exciting I think because we weren't alone and maybe that was the novelty that excited me. I'm not really sure what my porn viewing habits were at that time. I have noticed that my memory has been really faded for a long time. Since I was a kid. Since I started watching porn. I'm hoping my memory will return once I move past this all. We stayed together and had a sexual relationship but it wasn't long before I failed to perform. My wife is an angel and stuck with me. She was confused, but she is the most understanding person on the planet, so she stayed with me. It got to the point where I began blaming her. Things she was doing wrong, other things on my mind. We were both very confused. But we remained. It came and went. Somedays we had awesome sex, others she lay in bed crying afterwards feeling unworthy. I wasn't open about my porn use at this point. Soon she began seeing it in my history and calling me out on it. She was upset because she felt as though I was using porn because she wasn't good enough. We almost broke up a couple times because of it and I think I even remember her asking me at one point if I was addicted to porn. I laughed. The thought sounded ridiculous to me. I lied to myself then and I lied to her. I told her I didn't have a problem and that I'd stopped and I'd never use it again. That stretch went for a while, and then when I relapsed, I was once again surprised at the attraction I had to straight/normal porn. This was a relief to me because I had began to question my sexuality. My wife even questioned my sexuality. She had discovered a search for "gay porn" on my mother's computer and asked me about it. I had told her that I had been curious when I was younger and looked at it a couple of times. The truth was that I had watched gay porn a lot more than that. But I wasn't comfortable telling her that for obvious reasons. I stopped watching porn again after my first son was born. That was the last time my wife would catch me watching porn. She hasn't caught me since. With the invention of smart phones and "Incognito" web browsing, there was no reason for anyone to ever know what I was doing. Then, when wifi had reached public bathrooms it was on. If people didn't need to know about others bathroom habits were, then they didn't need to know that I was masturbating on public toilets sometimes multiple times in a day. Even dirty jobsite porta potties. I was a mess. I felt so compelled to do it once I thought about it, and then I usually felt dirty and unsatisfied. Plus there was always a huge feeling of guilt knowing that I had to lie to my wife about it. We would have sex at times and I wouldn't remain hard and then she would assume it was because I already got off to porn earlier in the day. I would always lie and make up some other excuse, but the majority of the time she was right. I was a sad case. I became so emotionally detached from my wife that when her father passed in the summer of 2013, I couldn't even bring myself to be her shoulder to cry on. I felt so horrible. I can never make up for that. I didn't want to be so cruel and at the time, I didn't even see it, but looking back now, I think that be a mistake that will cost me Meghan's love forever. To make a long story short, all the negative occurrences over the years had brewed a very toxic relationship full of resent, guilt, panic, worry, confusion, depression and all around bad circumstances. There are limitless other gruesome details to our broken relationship and my pornography addiction but I can't type forever. My eyes have opened up and I can now reflect on my past. It isn't pretty.
When I found Your Brain On Porn I was amazed at all the stories. I finally felt a little bit of hope for a normal existence. But I slipped up before I even started my recovery. I realized that there was finally a way to get over this torment so I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I decided to go out with a bang. I pmo'd three or four times a day for about four days after I found Your Brain on Porn. I knew a lot more about the negative effects of porn use and still, I was helpless. I wanted to tell Meghan so bad. I wanted to open up, but I couldn't. We were already on very rocky ground. She had already at this point told me that she was leaving me. The last year has been very, very ugly. I changed my wife as a person and she lost it. She was so desperate for love that she suggested an open relationship. After that blew up in our faces I discovered an affair. I don't want any of you getting the wrong idea. My wife is not the monster here. I am. I drove her to that point and I don't blame her. Nevertheless I had all the typical emotions you get with infidelity. I started seeing a therapist to try and find forgiveness in Meghan but it wasn't working. Meghan had befriended an old high school friend and began acting out. Drinking a lot and basically taking all her years of built up frustration out of me. I was so angry. And I reacted most of the times with crazed yelling and eight million phone calls. I was sickly desperate. That's why I had a hard time opening up to her. I realized that all our problems were a result of my problem and I finally opened up to my therapist about pornography. She didn't have the experience I needed in a therapist so she recommended another person to talk to. But she did tell me that the longer I wait from that point on, the harder it would be to tell her. I wanted to go to marriage counseling and tell her in a controlled environment, but she wouldn't agree. She could tell there was something bothering me and she forced it out of me. She didn't flip out the way I thought she would, but that wasn't a good thing thing. It only meant that she was no longer allowing me to hurt her. She was getting stronger and I was at my weakest. I'm still insanely desperate, although I am starting to back off a little. I know that this is a big pill for her to swallow and I need to give her her space.
As far as me, when it comes to abstaining from PMO, I'm doing surprisingly well. I haven't thought much about porn because my focus has been on Meghan and our relationship. What she's doing? Who's she with? Are we getting divorced? What about the kids? What about the house? What about the dogs? Child support? Court? Restraining orders? My head is in a whirlwind. Not the healthiest way to get my mind off porn, but effective none the less. I also in a very depressed lull a few weeks back starting smoking cigarettes again after having quit years ago. I wasn't sure if it was in spite of my wife or just true desperation, but it has actually helped me a bit. I haven't thought about porn much but the few times I was walking around work with nothing to do and began thinking about it, I found it has helped to go outside and smoke a cigarette to get my mind off it. Again, not healthy, but effective. I've gone nineteen days so far with no PMO. It feels good to say. Definitely not feeling noticeable improvements in my outlook, but I think improvements will be hard to judge with me and my current situation. I have been extremely up and down. I'm not much of a writer and I apologize if I confused you all. I'm hoping this journal helps set up a support system for me. Please, comment, question. It can only help.
19 Days No PMO
Currently seeing a therapist
Psychiatrist appt set for next week
SLAA meeting to attend Sunday evening
Currently reading "The Porn Trap"
Reading countless success stories on here and Your Brain On Porn
The problem is is that I'm about to lose all of that. And I have my insane porn addiction to thank for that. Things have gotten so bad for me that I have often pondered the thought of suicide. I never really considered myself suicidal, but nevertheless, the thoughts were there. I've been really depressed. My realization came when I was at work one night recently and I was typing in my web browser on my phone and google suggested "porn addiction help" before I could finish typing what I was going for. Seeing that on my screen hit me like a brick wall. For 13 years, thru all my adolescent and teen years into my adult years I told myself that I was just wrong in the head and that there was no help for me. I lived inside my own head all this time and I never talked to anybody about my problems(or what I saw then as my "habits") I shouldn't necessarily say that I hadn't talked to anybody about it, because porn was a big problem in my wife and I's relationship from day one and we had talked about it. But it was always confrontational and I didn't take the conversations seriously because I told myself that it wasn't a problem. It got to the point where I had hurt my wife so many times from watching porn and leaving her disappointed that I finally tried to stop. I'm not sure how long I went, but I remember telling her I was all done. Then I relapsed and felt so much shame and disappointment in myself that I slipped into a hole filled with self hate and shame. I lied to my wife from that point on. The porn addiction and my masturbating habits had gotten so bad that I couldn't even admit it to myself. What made it even more difficult to open up to my wife about all this was the weird porn genres I had been turned on by. At this point I was watching mostly gay porn. I had been so confused by this, being straight, and if I couldn't understand it myself, how would she ever? I don't want to go too far into the details of my marriage because I want my focus to stay on my own self improvement and the problem I have identified within myself, but I would be more than happy to answer any questions on my marriage and the effects porn has had on it. My wife and I are currently in limbo. My porn addiction and my reluctance to identify it as a problem and correct it have caused years of toxicity in my relationship and that is something that will need to be worked on after I can get my head straight. That is if there is still something there to fix after I fix myself. I am putting my faith in God and I hope to bring a positive report on that to this forum in the future.
When I found that Google was suggesting porn addiction help, I knew suddenly that I wasn't alone. I found Your Brain On Porn and it opened my eyes. I suddenly realized that I'd been missing out on life. On the outside, I appear very normal. I live a regular life. But inside my head I have been a mess. I started watching porn when I was around eleven years old. I remember my brother coming home with a cardboard box full of VHS tapes. He gave me that box and from that day on, I was in love with a screen. I'd spend a lot of time hidden away in my room, when I should have been out in the real world learning about the birds and the bees. At fourteen, I had seen so much porn that I assumed I would be gift for any woman to have in bed. So I was confused when all the boys around me were hooking up with girls and I was on the sidelines. There was one girl when I was fourteen that I dated a few times. I remember getting insanely nervous at the thought of any sexual contact and I ended that relationship before I had to face my fears. By the time I was fourteen I had high speed internet access in my own room. I then got immediately worse. I spent hours searching for the next big scene. I had exhausted all genres available at that time and accidentally clicked onto a shemale video. I was disgusted at first, but then things got going. I shamefully continued to increase the severity of the scenes I watched until I eventually became comfortable watching gay porn and finishing to it. I was very concerned and confused by this, because to my knowledge at that point, I was straight and I wanted to be with a woman. I never really had the desire to go out and experiment with a guy, but the porn drove me nuts. This really scared me and I stopped watching porn for a while, but eventually went back to porn. When I went back to watching porn again, it wasn't gay porn, I was surprised to find that I was once again turned on by women and straight porn. Although it didn't take long before my viewing became more and more disturbing. I became socially awkward and anxious. I always felt like I wasn't normal. I was always nervous that I wasn't being like everyone else. I became obsessed with what others thought of me. A little later, maybe fifteen, there was one other girl that I dated for a bit. Real casual, we made out and it was exciting. I felt her up and become suddenly more nervous than excited. I didn't know what to do next. I was nervous to move forward. I thought I would have known what to do next because I'd seen it done so many times, but it just didn't feel right. It was bad. I was still a virgin at the point when I was around fifteen or sixteen and I had my first opportunity to put to use all the "training" I'd had over the years. I failed miserably. I found this girl very attractive and she was more than willing, but for some reason I couldn't get hard. I was bewildered. I was young and healthy and didn't know what to do. I continued watching porn and a while after my first failed attempt, I was approached by a girl that I wouldn't have necessarily been interested in if I hadn't been so desperate for some form of normality. We dated and began a relationship. She began talking about having sex with me and it was the scariest thing to me at that time because I was nervous about my first experience. The night finally came and it felt so forced and unnatural. I once again failed miserably.
There were no other girls until I met my wife at seventeen. The first time my wife and I had sex I failed but we attributed it to the pills and booze we had been partying with that night. Then I had a second chance. We were in my mother's basement with another couple watching a movie and we hid under a blanket. It was exciting I think because we weren't alone and maybe that was the novelty that excited me. I'm not really sure what my porn viewing habits were at that time. I have noticed that my memory has been really faded for a long time. Since I was a kid. Since I started watching porn. I'm hoping my memory will return once I move past this all. We stayed together and had a sexual relationship but it wasn't long before I failed to perform. My wife is an angel and stuck with me. She was confused, but she is the most understanding person on the planet, so she stayed with me. It got to the point where I began blaming her. Things she was doing wrong, other things on my mind. We were both very confused. But we remained. It came and went. Somedays we had awesome sex, others she lay in bed crying afterwards feeling unworthy. I wasn't open about my porn use at this point. Soon she began seeing it in my history and calling me out on it. She was upset because she felt as though I was using porn because she wasn't good enough. We almost broke up a couple times because of it and I think I even remember her asking me at one point if I was addicted to porn. I laughed. The thought sounded ridiculous to me. I lied to myself then and I lied to her. I told her I didn't have a problem and that I'd stopped and I'd never use it again. That stretch went for a while, and then when I relapsed, I was once again surprised at the attraction I had to straight/normal porn. This was a relief to me because I had began to question my sexuality. My wife even questioned my sexuality. She had discovered a search for "gay porn" on my mother's computer and asked me about it. I had told her that I had been curious when I was younger and looked at it a couple of times. The truth was that I had watched gay porn a lot more than that. But I wasn't comfortable telling her that for obvious reasons. I stopped watching porn again after my first son was born. That was the last time my wife would catch me watching porn. She hasn't caught me since. With the invention of smart phones and "Incognito" web browsing, there was no reason for anyone to ever know what I was doing. Then, when wifi had reached public bathrooms it was on. If people didn't need to know about others bathroom habits were, then they didn't need to know that I was masturbating on public toilets sometimes multiple times in a day. Even dirty jobsite porta potties. I was a mess. I felt so compelled to do it once I thought about it, and then I usually felt dirty and unsatisfied. Plus there was always a huge feeling of guilt knowing that I had to lie to my wife about it. We would have sex at times and I wouldn't remain hard and then she would assume it was because I already got off to porn earlier in the day. I would always lie and make up some other excuse, but the majority of the time she was right. I was a sad case. I became so emotionally detached from my wife that when her father passed in the summer of 2013, I couldn't even bring myself to be her shoulder to cry on. I felt so horrible. I can never make up for that. I didn't want to be so cruel and at the time, I didn't even see it, but looking back now, I think that be a mistake that will cost me Meghan's love forever. To make a long story short, all the negative occurrences over the years had brewed a very toxic relationship full of resent, guilt, panic, worry, confusion, depression and all around bad circumstances. There are limitless other gruesome details to our broken relationship and my pornography addiction but I can't type forever. My eyes have opened up and I can now reflect on my past. It isn't pretty.
When I found Your Brain On Porn I was amazed at all the stories. I finally felt a little bit of hope for a normal existence. But I slipped up before I even started my recovery. I realized that there was finally a way to get over this torment so I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I decided to go out with a bang. I pmo'd three or four times a day for about four days after I found Your Brain on Porn. I knew a lot more about the negative effects of porn use and still, I was helpless. I wanted to tell Meghan so bad. I wanted to open up, but I couldn't. We were already on very rocky ground. She had already at this point told me that she was leaving me. The last year has been very, very ugly. I changed my wife as a person and she lost it. She was so desperate for love that she suggested an open relationship. After that blew up in our faces I discovered an affair. I don't want any of you getting the wrong idea. My wife is not the monster here. I am. I drove her to that point and I don't blame her. Nevertheless I had all the typical emotions you get with infidelity. I started seeing a therapist to try and find forgiveness in Meghan but it wasn't working. Meghan had befriended an old high school friend and began acting out. Drinking a lot and basically taking all her years of built up frustration out of me. I was so angry. And I reacted most of the times with crazed yelling and eight million phone calls. I was sickly desperate. That's why I had a hard time opening up to her. I realized that all our problems were a result of my problem and I finally opened up to my therapist about pornography. She didn't have the experience I needed in a therapist so she recommended another person to talk to. But she did tell me that the longer I wait from that point on, the harder it would be to tell her. I wanted to go to marriage counseling and tell her in a controlled environment, but she wouldn't agree. She could tell there was something bothering me and she forced it out of me. She didn't flip out the way I thought she would, but that wasn't a good thing thing. It only meant that she was no longer allowing me to hurt her. She was getting stronger and I was at my weakest. I'm still insanely desperate, although I am starting to back off a little. I know that this is a big pill for her to swallow and I need to give her her space.
As far as me, when it comes to abstaining from PMO, I'm doing surprisingly well. I haven't thought much about porn because my focus has been on Meghan and our relationship. What she's doing? Who's she with? Are we getting divorced? What about the kids? What about the house? What about the dogs? Child support? Court? Restraining orders? My head is in a whirlwind. Not the healthiest way to get my mind off porn, but effective none the less. I also in a very depressed lull a few weeks back starting smoking cigarettes again after having quit years ago. I wasn't sure if it was in spite of my wife or just true desperation, but it has actually helped me a bit. I haven't thought about porn much but the few times I was walking around work with nothing to do and began thinking about it, I found it has helped to go outside and smoke a cigarette to get my mind off it. Again, not healthy, but effective. I've gone nineteen days so far with no PMO. It feels good to say. Definitely not feeling noticeable improvements in my outlook, but I think improvements will be hard to judge with me and my current situation. I have been extremely up and down. I'm not much of a writer and I apologize if I confused you all. I'm hoping this journal helps set up a support system for me. Please, comment, question. It can only help.
19 Days No PMO
Currently seeing a therapist
Psychiatrist appt set for next week
SLAA meeting to attend Sunday evening
Currently reading "The Porn Trap"
Reading countless success stories on here and Your Brain On Porn
