I'm starting to quit porn, please help and advices

[azul222]

Hi, my name is Agustin. I'm 24 years old and i started watching porn when i was 11 years old but it was just curiosity from time to time, it was at the age of 13 when i started to watch porn often. At the beginning it was just only a few minutes (5 or 10). With the pass of the years and in my teenage years i started to watch more porn and for more hours. I was always a lonely guy in fact i still never had a girlfriend so that makes the thing worst i guess. In 2015 i could easily be watching porn for 3 hours straight, i think it was my replacement to the fact that i never had a girlfriend. It wasn't really a problem for me, everything was fine, besides watching porn, i was on highschool and i liked to spend time playing videogames and listening to music (which is one of my passions, i really love music), porn never interfered with my routine. Things were going normal over through the years as usual.

The real thing started in the late 2020, with the pandemic and quarantine, i think these two things triggered my addiction to porn, it was like an escape from the reality and my family problems. In the middle of this year 2021, i became a completely addicted to porn, because i had found a comunity of porn addicts and i throught it was fine to be with people that enjoyed porn like me (oh boy how wrong i was). Day after day it was sharing and talking about porn with this internet comunity, my mind was drowned in this sick shit, but at the time i still throught i was fine.

It was in the last day of June when the nightmare started to me, i was just listening music on the computer and my mother was cooking for dinner, and then suddenly i had a flashback from a porn video i watched, like a intrusive thought that emphasized on the male organ of that video, inmediatly after that my mind closed like a turtle shell. After this event, my life changed, i didn't enjoy music anymore, i couldn't enjoy video games, i felt like i was a completely different person with a cloud over my head. Despite all that, i kept watching porn and masturbating to girls on instagram to see if i could "go back to normal" again but the pleasure was minimal. I got so scared that i left porn for several days, then i relapsed again, and it was like that for the next months. And now i discovered that the porn addiction thing and that traumatic event developed on me a obsessive compulsive disorder for the last 2 weeks of this September month.

Now i been without masturbating a watching porn since Sunday (with a "little" relapses of 20 minutes but without getting to the orgasm). Sometimes i think that watching porn calms this recent obsessive compulsive disorder. This last 2 and !/2 months were such a nightmare, sometimes i cry, sometimes i feel depressed. I just want to be that normal guy again before all this two months shit happened. I want to be again that happy guy that enjoy life, friends, family, and dream about music and to have a pretty good girlfriend. I'm shaking writing all this.

Thanks for reading, and i will keep going with the recovery from porn.

I would appreciate some opinions and advices

 

[brook trout11]

Hang in there. This disease sucks. Maybe try to re-frame how you might (or I do, sometimes, at least) think about this addiction -- as a battle that I have to give up something that has ostensibly and temporarily provided me with an escape and pleasure hit of dopamine.

Instead, I have found it helpful to try to shift my perspective by hating this disease and hating porn. It has led me to do things that I don't want to be--dishonest, with myself and others. Grandiose--where I delusionally think my actions do not affect others--or worse--I don't care. Inconsiderate--when, I think the world is basically one among me--instead of myself as one among many. And frightened/self-seeking--where my overarching desire to escape that nervous feeling in my body--I narrow my options to live my life by largely focusing on what my addiction will do for me by "escaping" those feelings. I know life can be so much bigger than looking at yet another video, or 10, 20, etc. vidoes of...

All of these character defects enable my addiction to convince myself that looking at porn is ok--and no big deal--Even more, in a mutually reinforcing manner--following my addiction's insanity leads me to be the kind of person that I don't want to be--dishonest and doesn't care or think that my porn use has harmed myself and so many others in my life. And, I know that life is much bigger than just reducing my daily life choices to, "Well, I will just look at a few videos, escape, and then, get back to whatever."

In short, it helps me to not think of porn as something that has given me pleasure that I need to white knuckle it alone and try to give up on my own (this does not work) --but, rather--porn sucks--look at what it has done to me and made me harm so many in my life.