More reflections on what I'm going through at the moment and what has been my situation for many years under the shadow of a porn addiction...
I have unfortunately been single and mostly celibate for most of my adult life. Poor mental health led me to a porn addiction - what I really needed was to improve my life, make new friends, find a better job, and have meaningful relationships with women.
Any addiction comes down to bad behaviour that gives you some kind of rush and numbs the pain or distress you are feeling in life. Porn provided me with a dopamine rush and a sense that I was in control. The porn girls on my computer screen would never say no, were always there when I wanted them, and all they wanted to do was make me happy. When I give my head a shake, I understand how disturbing and grotesque this was. The sex wasn't real, the girls weren't real. In reality, I was someone dealing with depression fapping in front of my computer every night.
The porn addiction did so much damage to my libido and sexuality. While I have had partners over the years, and sex with them could be fun, my general experience for many years was depression + porn & masturbation = relief. And so instead of having a healthy libido - the desire to have sex, be sexual, have some naked fun with someone - my libido was rendered false. All of my so-called sexual urges were really about me being upset about something in life.
It gets weirder. If I equated porn and masturbation and the sexual fantasies that accompanied those acts with "feeling better" or "solving my problems", what has that done to my libido and sexuality? Instead of sex being something fun and positive, it's strange and twisted inside my head. Suppose I had an actual partner - would my desire to have sex with them really be about depression? "I want you to make me feel better. I'm going to make you perform sexual acts on me to prove that I'm smart, I can solve my problems, the people who disagree with me are wrong, and a hundred other things that are making me sad." Certainly, that was all in my subconscious every time I jerked off to porn and indulged in sleazy fantasies - because, hey, that's what those girls are there for.
These thoughts are awful. This is why I really want to rebuild my libido. In the real world, I like to think I have never lost my perspective on women. I don't see women as mere sexual objects, and yet what was I doing every night with the girls on the screen? How do I reconcile respecting women and treating them decently with what was going through my mind while watching porn?
So I sense that it's going to be a long road for me to get back to a space where sexual desires are genuine and expressing my sexuality (either through masturbation or sex with a partner) is a good thing instead of something perverse. I really thought this was starting to happen earlier in the reboot when I had a few positive and fun MO experiences. Now I've gone back to thinking I have to stay in monk mode until I can untangle all of this and find some clarity.
Day 107 (no PMO), day 4 (no MO).