TheFuture1
Member
So I'm committed to starting my recovery again.
I first attempted recovery about 10 years ago, when I was 29 years old but sadly it didn't stick. I had a very good year though. I was doing much better socially, I was looking after my health and I was largely free of porn use. But then the wheels came off. Difficult feelings started to come up, I started to struggle with sexual fantasies and I tried to suppress them. I was going to a 12-step group at the time and I made it into my one source of hope. I think that having a "higher power" felt comforting because, in head, that would mean that I wouldn't need other people as much. I tried to deal with my shame by getting close to another person who seemed as mired in shame as I was. We ended up dragging each other down. I was only just getting a handle on my shame and fear that had been built up through years of acting out. The things that he was sharing with me triggered these feelings of shame and fear in me again and I sank into despair. I gave up on recovery for 6 months. I regained all the weight I had lost. My shame and fear made me feel isolated from people again. I started using porn again as a way of escaping from those feelings. When I tried to start my recovery again, I felt so disheartened by how badly I had trashed it. I never quite managed to get it restarted. I was simply too angry with myself. Whenever I felt a craving, I would go into a spiral of blaming myself and trying to convince myself that it wasn't really happening.
I was so disappointed in myself that I ended up back in denial. I kept telling myself that my real problem was anxiety and depression and not addiction. I told myself that the reason the first attempt at recovery hadn't worked was that I hadn't dealt with my anxiety and depression. While it's true that I do have issues with anxiety and depression that go back to childhood, and it's true that I didn't deal with these issues in my first attempt at recovery, that doesn't mean that I don't also have a porn addiction. I know that there's no way that I can deal with my other mental health issues if I'm constantly over-stimulated sexually and my mind is conditioned to escape into porn and sexual fantasy every time things get difficult.
And those are my key reasons for really committing to recovery again. Having strong cravings to look at porn and to indulge in sexual fantasy are basically really inconvenient. Resisting these cravings is mentally exhausting. I need to learn to manage them and reduce them so that I can free up my mind to to work on my other issues and start living the life that I want to live.
My history
My issues with sex go back a long way, to before I found internet porn. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of sexual shame. I also suffered from depression and anxiety from a young age, had little motivation to do anything and had a really poor self-image. The fact that I was depressed meant that immediate sources of pleasure were the only thing that really excited me - things like eating sugary foods to excess and masturbating. I think that my mental health issues also contributed to my poor impulse control. The sense that sex was something shameful, I think added to my curiosity about it which made me feel even more drawn to it.
On top of all this, I was bullied at school, often in a quite sexual way. For example the experiences in school changing rooms at an all boys school. I felt like my sexuality was a sick joke. I tried to present myself to the world as asexual. The other boys would also try and get me to look at pornographic magazines to make me feel uncomfortable.
While I was going through puberty and started to have sexual responses to women that I saw in TV and films, I would feel perverse. The feelings sometimes upset and scared me. I don't think it helped that I was going to an all boys school and didn't know any girls my own age. All my sexual feelings were about images that I saw on screen or in print.
I started to collect images of women from newspapers, my mother's women's magazines, fashion catalogues etc. Masturbating to them in secret felt very emotionally charged for me. I was angry at being made to feel so ashamed. I sort of embraced the feelings of perversity. Feeling attracted to beautiful, confident women while I was feeling so bad about myself triggered feelings of humiliation. Feeling humiliated started to feel like it was part of my sexuality.
We first got dial up internet at home in the late '90s when I was about 15. I was fearful of using it to look at porn because I knew how my parents would react if they found out. But my curiosity got the better of me. When I knew that my family were going out, I would look forward to sneaking looks at a few images at a time. I was nervous about staying on the internet for too long in case my parents tried to call and found the phone to be engaged and suspected what I was doing.
I discovered pornography that fuelled my humiliation fantasies. I was starting to get hooked. A few years later when I started thinking about going to university, I remember that one of the things I was looking forward to was the ability to look at porn without having to worry about my parents finding out. By this point, I was going to a mixed gender school and there was a young woman that I liked and was attracted to but I found that I couldn't get turned on when I thought of her. This worried me.
I started to act out the humiliation fantasies on myself, eventually to the point where I injured myself in an embarrassing way. It was nothing too extreme in the big scheme of things but it scared me a lot due to my naivety and shame. I didn't know where to turn for support. I fell into a serious depression about it. I couldn't believe that I had done this to myself. I found it distressing that the same sexual fantasies kept going round in my head even though they had led me to harm myself. I started to ruminate over all the times I had been humiliated while I was growing up. I was looking for something or someone to blame for how I had become so messed up. It was the only way that I could think of to stop blaming myself.
I kept going as best I could. At university, I tried to resist using the internet connection in my room to look at porn. Again, I gave into temptation. I was initially worried about getting into trouble with the university about it. When it seemed like there would be no consequences, I started looking more and more frequently, for more extended period of time. I knew that something was wrong but I didn't know how to stop. When I wasn't acting out, I simply tried to not think about it.
After I left university and started to look for jobs, I resolved to quit looking at porn. I still masturbated to fantasies based on what I had seen in porn though. I didn't feel equipped for the world outside of university. I channelled my frustration into my sexual fantasies. Shortly after I was offered my first job and was waiting for all the referencing to be done so that they could offer me a contract, I started to worry that the employers might somehow find out about my porn habits. I hadn't exactly been discreet about it and had used an email address containing my real name to sign up to pornographic newsgroups. I thought the employers would find it so extreme that they would have second thoughts about employing me. This feeling escalated into the concern that someone could find out about my excessive porn use and I would be exposed as a pervert and my life would fall apart. This wasn't based on anything in reality. It was just a lifetime of sexual shame and compulsivity talking. One some level, I knew this but that didn't stop me sinking into unmanageable levels of despair. The despair that I felt put immense strain on my relationship with my family. I still didn't know where to turn to. I didn't even know that my behaviours could be thought of as an addiction so I just felt sick with myself. My porn habit continued. I continued looking back to my childhood for something to or someone to blame. It was still the only thing I could think of to try and stop hating myself and feel human again.
It was another six years before I found sought out sex/porn addiction treatment and by that time, my head was a complete mess. I'll write more about my first attempt at recovery in my next post.
I first attempted recovery about 10 years ago, when I was 29 years old but sadly it didn't stick. I had a very good year though. I was doing much better socially, I was looking after my health and I was largely free of porn use. But then the wheels came off. Difficult feelings started to come up, I started to struggle with sexual fantasies and I tried to suppress them. I was going to a 12-step group at the time and I made it into my one source of hope. I think that having a "higher power" felt comforting because, in head, that would mean that I wouldn't need other people as much. I tried to deal with my shame by getting close to another person who seemed as mired in shame as I was. We ended up dragging each other down. I was only just getting a handle on my shame and fear that had been built up through years of acting out. The things that he was sharing with me triggered these feelings of shame and fear in me again and I sank into despair. I gave up on recovery for 6 months. I regained all the weight I had lost. My shame and fear made me feel isolated from people again. I started using porn again as a way of escaping from those feelings. When I tried to start my recovery again, I felt so disheartened by how badly I had trashed it. I never quite managed to get it restarted. I was simply too angry with myself. Whenever I felt a craving, I would go into a spiral of blaming myself and trying to convince myself that it wasn't really happening.
I was so disappointed in myself that I ended up back in denial. I kept telling myself that my real problem was anxiety and depression and not addiction. I told myself that the reason the first attempt at recovery hadn't worked was that I hadn't dealt with my anxiety and depression. While it's true that I do have issues with anxiety and depression that go back to childhood, and it's true that I didn't deal with these issues in my first attempt at recovery, that doesn't mean that I don't also have a porn addiction. I know that there's no way that I can deal with my other mental health issues if I'm constantly over-stimulated sexually and my mind is conditioned to escape into porn and sexual fantasy every time things get difficult.
And those are my key reasons for really committing to recovery again. Having strong cravings to look at porn and to indulge in sexual fantasy are basically really inconvenient. Resisting these cravings is mentally exhausting. I need to learn to manage them and reduce them so that I can free up my mind to to work on my other issues and start living the life that I want to live.
My history
My issues with sex go back a long way, to before I found internet porn. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of sexual shame. I also suffered from depression and anxiety from a young age, had little motivation to do anything and had a really poor self-image. The fact that I was depressed meant that immediate sources of pleasure were the only thing that really excited me - things like eating sugary foods to excess and masturbating. I think that my mental health issues also contributed to my poor impulse control. The sense that sex was something shameful, I think added to my curiosity about it which made me feel even more drawn to it.
On top of all this, I was bullied at school, often in a quite sexual way. For example the experiences in school changing rooms at an all boys school. I felt like my sexuality was a sick joke. I tried to present myself to the world as asexual. The other boys would also try and get me to look at pornographic magazines to make me feel uncomfortable.
While I was going through puberty and started to have sexual responses to women that I saw in TV and films, I would feel perverse. The feelings sometimes upset and scared me. I don't think it helped that I was going to an all boys school and didn't know any girls my own age. All my sexual feelings were about images that I saw on screen or in print.
I started to collect images of women from newspapers, my mother's women's magazines, fashion catalogues etc. Masturbating to them in secret felt very emotionally charged for me. I was angry at being made to feel so ashamed. I sort of embraced the feelings of perversity. Feeling attracted to beautiful, confident women while I was feeling so bad about myself triggered feelings of humiliation. Feeling humiliated started to feel like it was part of my sexuality.
We first got dial up internet at home in the late '90s when I was about 15. I was fearful of using it to look at porn because I knew how my parents would react if they found out. But my curiosity got the better of me. When I knew that my family were going out, I would look forward to sneaking looks at a few images at a time. I was nervous about staying on the internet for too long in case my parents tried to call and found the phone to be engaged and suspected what I was doing.
I discovered pornography that fuelled my humiliation fantasies. I was starting to get hooked. A few years later when I started thinking about going to university, I remember that one of the things I was looking forward to was the ability to look at porn without having to worry about my parents finding out. By this point, I was going to a mixed gender school and there was a young woman that I liked and was attracted to but I found that I couldn't get turned on when I thought of her. This worried me.
I started to act out the humiliation fantasies on myself, eventually to the point where I injured myself in an embarrassing way. It was nothing too extreme in the big scheme of things but it scared me a lot due to my naivety and shame. I didn't know where to turn for support. I fell into a serious depression about it. I couldn't believe that I had done this to myself. I found it distressing that the same sexual fantasies kept going round in my head even though they had led me to harm myself. I started to ruminate over all the times I had been humiliated while I was growing up. I was looking for something or someone to blame for how I had become so messed up. It was the only way that I could think of to stop blaming myself.
I kept going as best I could. At university, I tried to resist using the internet connection in my room to look at porn. Again, I gave into temptation. I was initially worried about getting into trouble with the university about it. When it seemed like there would be no consequences, I started looking more and more frequently, for more extended period of time. I knew that something was wrong but I didn't know how to stop. When I wasn't acting out, I simply tried to not think about it.
After I left university and started to look for jobs, I resolved to quit looking at porn. I still masturbated to fantasies based on what I had seen in porn though. I didn't feel equipped for the world outside of university. I channelled my frustration into my sexual fantasies. Shortly after I was offered my first job and was waiting for all the referencing to be done so that they could offer me a contract, I started to worry that the employers might somehow find out about my porn habits. I hadn't exactly been discreet about it and had used an email address containing my real name to sign up to pornographic newsgroups. I thought the employers would find it so extreme that they would have second thoughts about employing me. This feeling escalated into the concern that someone could find out about my excessive porn use and I would be exposed as a pervert and my life would fall apart. This wasn't based on anything in reality. It was just a lifetime of sexual shame and compulsivity talking. One some level, I knew this but that didn't stop me sinking into unmanageable levels of despair. The despair that I felt put immense strain on my relationship with my family. I still didn't know where to turn to. I didn't even know that my behaviours could be thought of as an addiction so I just felt sick with myself. My porn habit continued. I continued looking back to my childhood for something to or someone to blame. It was still the only thing I could think of to try and stop hating myself and feel human again.
It was another six years before I found sought out sex/porn addiction treatment and by that time, my head was a complete mess. I'll write more about my first attempt at recovery in my next post.
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