Bigredsfod
Member
What a year 2014 has been... so far this year I have gotten out of the military, finished my MBA, got a job in corporate America, married my wife, bought our first house, and recently had our first child. A bevy of wonderful and amazing life events, but the biggest detractor of all is still porn. I have tried many times this year to break the cycle and it was only after I saw the YBOP series, did I join the forum. I start celebrate recovery at a local church tomorrow night, so these all seem to be steps in the right direction.
I started looking at porn when I was about 10 or 11. It started when a friend of mine had access to his dad's adult magazines and spiraled from that point. When I was 14, I remember my family got our first internet access with AOL. At the time when it was still dial up, it took a while to even load a single explicit image. The computer was in our living room and when my parents would leave the house, I would sneak on to the computer and look at images of playboy playmates listening for the creaky garage door to open. At the time I loved the challenge of trying to look at porn in secret and look at as many images as possible while my parents were away. I had a small RCA TV in my bedroom and at night I would lay awake and watch scrambled porn, just trying to decipher the image of breasts.
My addiction (unknown to me at the time) made me completely awkward around real women especially during high school. I would become extremely nervous and shake around girls I had interest in. I had very few intimate moments with women during that time. I lost my virginity in college to a girl in a double wide which reeked of cat piss. She had told my friends she would help me with my predicament of being a virgin. During sex, I made her orgasm multiple times but never came myself. Little did I know, but what I thought made me a "marathon man", was actually my inability to orgasm with a "real" woman. This led me to the false belief that I was special and started a numbers game to prove my talents. By 21, I was spending nights in strip clubs regularly. I got to know bar staff, managers, and of course the women.
I went on my first combat deployment to Iraq in 2006. I participated in many combat operations leading a platoon of men on helicopter assaults. I was caught in one particularly heavy firefight in a palm grove after my element was ambushed on an early August morning. The man next to me was shot and killed during that engagement and became a heavy burden for me to deal with. I was in charge of my unit and to have one of my own killed, became a series of regrets and "what if's". There were days I wished that it would have been me, survivor's guilt grew strong in me. I returned from that deployment in 2008 and started drinking in excess to include blackouts. My one addiction to porn was now complemented with my substance abuse dependency with Alcohol. I started having high risk sexual adventures over the course of the next several years to include escorts, and many alcohol induced blackouts at strip clubs. I would spend anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to thousand of dollars per visit.
I was stuck in a vicious cycle, my porn addiction fueled my need for intimacy, which was unfulfilled by my inability to form close relationships with women which fueled my necessity to drink to be able to socialize and feel normal. The symptoms of traumatic stress started creeping in, and the more time I spent home here in the States, the more I longed to be back in combat where life was "simple" (i.e. no porn, no sex, no objectification of women).
I moved from conventional units to special operations units where I had the opportunity to get back in the fight much more. I tried doing things harder and faster, living to the extreme because I had cheated death. I traveled all over the globe, to many countries where the only thing I could claim was I went to the best strip clubs in the world. It's truly a shame and I lament at the many opportunities to do much more productive activities. I made it easier on myself to justify the thousands of dollars I was spending on cam sites, escorts, and strippers because I worked hard and earned it. I moved from regular porn to transsexual porn. To this day I have never had the urge to be with a transgendered person, so I know that I have progressed to a point of SOCD.
My addictions climaxed in 2011 after a series of significant life events. I became invincible, drinking even harder, blacking out more, spending money on women like never before. After a long night in august (same date as the ambush mentioned above) I got in my vehicle to drive home. I ended up in a single vehicle rollover, where my car flipped almost 3 times landing up side down. To this day, I am not sure how I escaped injury or death from the mangled mass I pulled myself out from. This was my wake up call, I put myself into alcohol dependency treatment a few weeks later and started receiving counseling for my alcohol dependency. A military assignment to move me back home presented itself and I did so in 2012. Throughout 2012 and 2013, I still looked at porn daily and masturbated whenever I needed some stress relief.
I dealt with a serious round of depression for about 6 months in 2013, but surfaced from it right before I met my future wife. She was unlike any other woman I had encountered, where I tried to harness my addiction because I truly loved her soul. I wanted her to feel valued and wanted to form a deep lasting, close connection. I got to the point where when we had sex, I was able to orgasm every time. She is the woman I needed in my life that had been missing for so long and I want to be the man she deserves so badly.
I have been in cognitive behavioral therapy for almost 2 years since my alcohol dependency ceased. Finally, I started to cope with the underlying cause of my alcohol dependency, which was my porn addiction. Yet the urge remains that when I need some stress relief to look at porn videos or escort ads. The stress has increased lately with a newborn and the lack of sleep has only made the urges worse. I have regressed lately and feel like I have lost ground with my addiction. I installed K9 on all my devices, and still the urge can be strong enough to explore and find sites that make it through the K9 porn blocker. I struggle daily at a desk job to find meaning from what I used to do. The constant adrenaline from jumping out of airplanes, heavy physical workloads, and working on clandestine projects has spoiled my nuerological balance. I have been out of the military for 7 months and have gained weight and lost my motivation. This is the next chapter...
I want to be better for my family and I don't want to see my son go through the same struggles I have had with porn. I want my wife to feel valued and secure with who she is and our relationship. Many things have tried to break me from combat operations to alcohol, to my own selfish gluttony and pride. Porn is the most heavy handed of all these things and has been with me the longest, but I know I have to get rid of it to live a clean and healthy life.
And so my journal begins, Day 1...
I started looking at porn when I was about 10 or 11. It started when a friend of mine had access to his dad's adult magazines and spiraled from that point. When I was 14, I remember my family got our first internet access with AOL. At the time when it was still dial up, it took a while to even load a single explicit image. The computer was in our living room and when my parents would leave the house, I would sneak on to the computer and look at images of playboy playmates listening for the creaky garage door to open. At the time I loved the challenge of trying to look at porn in secret and look at as many images as possible while my parents were away. I had a small RCA TV in my bedroom and at night I would lay awake and watch scrambled porn, just trying to decipher the image of breasts.
My addiction (unknown to me at the time) made me completely awkward around real women especially during high school. I would become extremely nervous and shake around girls I had interest in. I had very few intimate moments with women during that time. I lost my virginity in college to a girl in a double wide which reeked of cat piss. She had told my friends she would help me with my predicament of being a virgin. During sex, I made her orgasm multiple times but never came myself. Little did I know, but what I thought made me a "marathon man", was actually my inability to orgasm with a "real" woman. This led me to the false belief that I was special and started a numbers game to prove my talents. By 21, I was spending nights in strip clubs regularly. I got to know bar staff, managers, and of course the women.
I went on my first combat deployment to Iraq in 2006. I participated in many combat operations leading a platoon of men on helicopter assaults. I was caught in one particularly heavy firefight in a palm grove after my element was ambushed on an early August morning. The man next to me was shot and killed during that engagement and became a heavy burden for me to deal with. I was in charge of my unit and to have one of my own killed, became a series of regrets and "what if's". There were days I wished that it would have been me, survivor's guilt grew strong in me. I returned from that deployment in 2008 and started drinking in excess to include blackouts. My one addiction to porn was now complemented with my substance abuse dependency with Alcohol. I started having high risk sexual adventures over the course of the next several years to include escorts, and many alcohol induced blackouts at strip clubs. I would spend anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to thousand of dollars per visit.
I was stuck in a vicious cycle, my porn addiction fueled my need for intimacy, which was unfulfilled by my inability to form close relationships with women which fueled my necessity to drink to be able to socialize and feel normal. The symptoms of traumatic stress started creeping in, and the more time I spent home here in the States, the more I longed to be back in combat where life was "simple" (i.e. no porn, no sex, no objectification of women).
I moved from conventional units to special operations units where I had the opportunity to get back in the fight much more. I tried doing things harder and faster, living to the extreme because I had cheated death. I traveled all over the globe, to many countries where the only thing I could claim was I went to the best strip clubs in the world. It's truly a shame and I lament at the many opportunities to do much more productive activities. I made it easier on myself to justify the thousands of dollars I was spending on cam sites, escorts, and strippers because I worked hard and earned it. I moved from regular porn to transsexual porn. To this day I have never had the urge to be with a transgendered person, so I know that I have progressed to a point of SOCD.
My addictions climaxed in 2011 after a series of significant life events. I became invincible, drinking even harder, blacking out more, spending money on women like never before. After a long night in august (same date as the ambush mentioned above) I got in my vehicle to drive home. I ended up in a single vehicle rollover, where my car flipped almost 3 times landing up side down. To this day, I am not sure how I escaped injury or death from the mangled mass I pulled myself out from. This was my wake up call, I put myself into alcohol dependency treatment a few weeks later and started receiving counseling for my alcohol dependency. A military assignment to move me back home presented itself and I did so in 2012. Throughout 2012 and 2013, I still looked at porn daily and masturbated whenever I needed some stress relief.
I dealt with a serious round of depression for about 6 months in 2013, but surfaced from it right before I met my future wife. She was unlike any other woman I had encountered, where I tried to harness my addiction because I truly loved her soul. I wanted her to feel valued and wanted to form a deep lasting, close connection. I got to the point where when we had sex, I was able to orgasm every time. She is the woman I needed in my life that had been missing for so long and I want to be the man she deserves so badly.
I have been in cognitive behavioral therapy for almost 2 years since my alcohol dependency ceased. Finally, I started to cope with the underlying cause of my alcohol dependency, which was my porn addiction. Yet the urge remains that when I need some stress relief to look at porn videos or escort ads. The stress has increased lately with a newborn and the lack of sleep has only made the urges worse. I have regressed lately and feel like I have lost ground with my addiction. I installed K9 on all my devices, and still the urge can be strong enough to explore and find sites that make it through the K9 porn blocker. I struggle daily at a desk job to find meaning from what I used to do. The constant adrenaline from jumping out of airplanes, heavy physical workloads, and working on clandestine projects has spoiled my nuerological balance. I have been out of the military for 7 months and have gained weight and lost my motivation. This is the next chapter...
I want to be better for my family and I don't want to see my son go through the same struggles I have had with porn. I want my wife to feel valued and secure with who she is and our relationship. Many things have tried to break me from combat operations to alcohol, to my own selfish gluttony and pride. Porn is the most heavy handed of all these things and has been with me the longest, but I know I have to get rid of it to live a clean and healthy life.
And so my journal begins, Day 1...
The interesting thing was that after it was over, I didn't feel any less frustrated and I actually became more angry. I noticed that when I went out to dinner with my wife and the in laws that night, I really had no interest in conversing.