Reclaiming my agency - rediscovery of self through overcoming my porn addiction

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Impression

Active Member
Day 65
Hey @Blondie, thanks for those good words. Yes, absolutely agree that the value argument cuts through the noise made by the things that we try and replace our porn addiction with.

I suppose I am trying to find ways to make my values front and centre all the time. When I feel stressed, angry or sad (or other negative emotions), often my values get buried in a mire or doubt, shame and pity, and I pull up YouTube or some other distraction to pull me away from those feelings, and I forget about my values.

I am not someone who sets goals often though, and perhaps that is where I am missing out 🤔. I think that goals are probably easier to remember and to keep in the front of my mind than a complex value set. If my goals are firmly embedded and set from within my value system, then I am even more likely to attain those goals, and still be in alignment with values. Hmmmm.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 72
This has been a really good week. I’ve found a really nice rhythm to my days, I’ve moved my body every day, done some sort of reflective practice everyday, gone to sleep early, woken up easily, eaten well. I feel really good.

However, I am nervous about next week. I am traveling for work for the week which means that my routine often goes out the window in a new space and a new context. I have also often relapsed on trips like this.

I’d like to set myself the goal of not relapsing next week. I want to get to 100 days guys! I really do! And I’ll have to wait at least another 100 days if I relapse next week.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 74
Tomorrow I leave on my trip. Tomorrow I am thrust out of my safe place and into the world, where I have historically been much less in control of my urges to watch porn. This week will be a real test for me to see if the streak I’ve been on recently is actually real, or whether I’ve been distracting myself from the real issues which are more embedded than I’d like to think.

All the best out there 🤍 you matter.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 0
I got to Day 98 and relapsed today while at work. Day 98 guys. I can’t believe it.

I’ve been feeling a build up of stress and anxiety over the last week and it came to a head today. I wasn’t planning on it or anything. It just happened.

I’ll reflect on this more in another post.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 0
Ahhhhh guys. I can’t believe it.

Although I actually can believe it. Knowing how insidious and how embedded porn is in my system, I am not that surprised that I cracked on Tuesday. It doesn’t make me feel good. It feels like I had started building an identity and a moral landscape around my journey of getting over my addiction to porn. I’d started talking about it to more people and sharing my progress, which also felt super inspiring and good. The shame I feel when I say that I’ve relapsed and am back at day 0 is horrible.

Most of all I feel like I have betrayed myself. Betrayed the part of myself that needs to get over this thing. Betrayed my values and my mission to be a better human. Betrayed my morality around the denigrating nature of some porn and parts of the porn industry.

Damn.

Tomorrow, we try again.
 
Blondie

Blondie

Respected Member
Hey, @Impression, I get this. When we relapse, there's great feelings of shame, that somehow we have to "start over" again. On one hand this is true, in that, yes we have to start our counters again, if counting's your thing. However, and I think this is really important, we're not starting over again completely, because now we have all this knowledge of what we've hopefully learned over the course of our journey. You said you were stressing and had anxiety, great, now you know what to work on in your future streak. This is great news. Increase your self-knowledge of your anxiety and stressors, and what you can do to help ease them.

Feeling shame about this can only lead to more shame and shameful actions. You're not a bad person.

Best
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 0
Relapsed again today. But not feeling too terrible about it, and not feeling too shook.

Thanks for the encouragement @Blondie, I really like what you have said about shame here and shame in your own journal. Indeed, shame is a fairly useless thing to feel unless in can be used as motivation for positive change. However, as you’ve pointed out, it does often lead to more shameful actions.

Also, I am not really a day counting kind of person (even though I was really keen to get to day 100). And you are right, I am a different person to who I was 100 days ago and I have new insight into what it might take to untangle porn from my brain.

Tomorrow, I will not look at porn!
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 6
I’ve been too busy to watch porn this week. It feels good to be this way. I am proud of myself because it has been a stressful week, and I have felt anxious at times, and I have wanted to look at porn while experiencing those difficult feelings. But I chose not to and that felt empowering and positive.

Unlearning.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 9
Haven’t had any thoughts of porn the last three days. I just haven’t desired it and it feels great. However, I am going on another trip tomorrow, which is where I often have problems.

When I am away from home and from my routine, it is so much easier to slip into old habits that used to bring me so much comfort when I wasn’t trying to quit. So, I am going to be away for over a week and I know that I will need to fortify myself against the feeling of upheaval that comes with travel. Luckily it is to an international country that I have never been to, so I am hoping that in between the work, I will be exploring more than I will be thinking about porn.

I’d also like to post each night in this journal to help fortify my awareness of the non-necessity and the destructive nature of going into a porn watching phase. It really helps me.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 39
I’m feeling quite inspired by all of you on here at the moment, fighting this fight, trying to figure out how to reclaim some sort of agency over our psychological addiction.

I will speak for myself, but perhaps this is relevant to some: I think that in facing my addiction to porn, I’ve realised that it is a deeply psychological addiction, embedded in my psyche.

This is different to the physical addictions that I’ve had. I’ve ‘overcome’ addiction to cannabis, which I think was mainly physical, and I can now use cannabis in a measured way that is actually beneficial to me. I can keep it in my house without feeling the need to use it unless I choose to. I came to understand that I was using cannabis to mitigate my anxiety and regulate my nervous system, and that as I found other ways to regulate those things, my desire for cannabis disappeared. I found better and healthier replacements.

My addiction to porn absolutely has some physical elements to it (also mitigating some anxiety - so have I really fixed the cannabis problem, or just transferred it?), but it feels that when I identify what those physical triggers are, and I work on finding replacements for them, porn shows up to mitigate some other feeling or lack of feeling in my life. It feels like porn has put deep roots down into the farthest reaches of my psyche, and disentangling them may take a lifetime. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I started watching porn when I was 12 or 13 years old, and my brain, my identity, and my psyche were still developing then. I don’t know.

I think that I have often attributed my porn addiction to an easy dopamine release (ie a physical addiction), but replacing it with other easy dopamine releasing activities (like scrolling social media) does not fully replace the experience of watching porn.

@Blondie, your recent posts and books you’ve been reading have been super inspirational and helpful, thank you for posting summaries and sharing your thoughts on them. They’ve been very useful thought provokers!
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 42
I’ve had a strange experience these last two days of almost zooming out of my body when I feel a craving or an itch to watch porn come on. Almost like my psyche wanted to escape the inevitable trashy feeling that I get after watching porn. It’s helped a lot to mitigate my cravings and urges.

I’ve also started a daily call routine with a friend who is currently doing a 90 day alcohol free thing. We’ve been speaking about addiction and our experience of it and it’s been really helpful to have another continuous perspective as I navigate this (again).

There is an avoidance element to my addiction. My cravings come on hardest when I feel like I want to avoid doing or feeling something. It is often something that requires some deep thought or some emotional response. I had a good example today when a colleague of mine confronted me about something I’d done and my internal reaction was a craving to watch porn and to avoid dealing with the message I’d received from my colleague. This was an obvious one, but I wonder what subtle things I am avoiding.
 
I

Impression

Active Member
Day 43
I’m proud of myself for not watching porn today. There was ample opportunity for me to, and I had frequent cravings to. But instead I kept asking myself what the most aligned and in-tune version of myself would do, and every time the answer was “he wouldn’t watch porn”. I think there is credence to the idea that in order to implement change of this nature, I have to continue to make small contrary decisions.

What do I mean by contrary decisions?

I mean decisions that are contrary to what a habitually identified version of myself would do. A habitually identified version of myself would watch porn when he’s feeling uncomfortable or like he wants to avoid feeling something. A contrary action would be to do 10 pushups instead, for example.

These contrary actions may seem small at first, but the more I train the contrary muscle, the easier it will be to use it when I catch myself in autopilot mode, moving towards something that I ultimately don’t want to do.
 
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