PresidentCoolidge
Member
Here's the deal. I regret to inform you that I relapsed several times over the past few weeks due to my high-stress job. However, I have been clean of porn and masturbation for the past five days. Due to this experience, I came to the conclusion that I do not want to masturbate ever again and here's why.
I was doing so good with my reboot from October, 2013 to July, 2014. This was nine months of no masturbation and no porn, in addition to some non-consecutive months of no masturbating starting in February, 2013. After those nine months I thought, "hey, I've done so good. I can probably introduce masturbating into my routine." I was wrong. First off, it is true that masturbation is not the problem, it's pornography that causes the addiction-related brain changes that lead us to support forums like these. However, people who have had porn-induced ED do not have the same brains as regular healthy people. We are desensitized. I noticed that as I started masturbating, even after nine months, it was very hard for me to do it without fantasizing about porn. In fact it was nearly impossible. I could try to fantasize about my limited number of sexual encounters, but I would subtly begin thinking about the countless hours of porn scenes I'd watched over the years, in order to get off.
This is a problem for me because watching porn and fantasizing about porn are really the same thing. You're activating the same addiction-related pathways and keeping them active. Porn is a unique type of addiction because it is the only one that can be accessed by our memories alone. So this fact alone is enough for me to realize that masturbation is something that I should probably just cut out altogether. It's as if wiring my brain for porn at such a young age, and for so many years, has made porn and masturbation synonymous.
Secondly, I party blame my masturbation for my sudden relapse. Not that it wasn't a failure of my own willpower, but as I began masturbating, I slowly started to rationalize porn. I thought, "I've been masturbating recently, so what's adding porn into the mix just once gonna do." Or, "masturbating and porn are really the same thing..." Before I knew it, I was starting to binge and I thought, "what the fuck are you doing!?!?! You're erasing progress at this point."
Anyways, my over all conclusion is that it's probably best to just not masturbate at all. Let me know what you think .
I was doing so good with my reboot from October, 2013 to July, 2014. This was nine months of no masturbation and no porn, in addition to some non-consecutive months of no masturbating starting in February, 2013. After those nine months I thought, "hey, I've done so good. I can probably introduce masturbating into my routine." I was wrong. First off, it is true that masturbation is not the problem, it's pornography that causes the addiction-related brain changes that lead us to support forums like these. However, people who have had porn-induced ED do not have the same brains as regular healthy people. We are desensitized. I noticed that as I started masturbating, even after nine months, it was very hard for me to do it without fantasizing about porn. In fact it was nearly impossible. I could try to fantasize about my limited number of sexual encounters, but I would subtly begin thinking about the countless hours of porn scenes I'd watched over the years, in order to get off.
This is a problem for me because watching porn and fantasizing about porn are really the same thing. You're activating the same addiction-related pathways and keeping them active. Porn is a unique type of addiction because it is the only one that can be accessed by our memories alone. So this fact alone is enough for me to realize that masturbation is something that I should probably just cut out altogether. It's as if wiring my brain for porn at such a young age, and for so many years, has made porn and masturbation synonymous.
Secondly, I party blame my masturbation for my sudden relapse. Not that it wasn't a failure of my own willpower, but as I began masturbating, I slowly started to rationalize porn. I thought, "I've been masturbating recently, so what's adding porn into the mix just once gonna do." Or, "masturbating and porn are really the same thing..." Before I knew it, I was starting to binge and I thought, "what the fuck are you doing!?!?! You're erasing progress at this point."
Anyways, my over all conclusion is that it's probably best to just not masturbate at all. Let me know what you think .