Seven years of porn addiction till I finally realized the truth

Soo I never really liked this "cleaining out my closet" kinda thing but after I recently decided to turn my life arround and change my nofap strategy completly and my therapist adviced me to try it so Im here now. I want to start with a my overall addiction history and get this off my shoulders for me so here we go; (so sorry for any grammar or language mistakes Im not a native speaker.)
(Some triggers may be ahead Im not going so much into detail but still stay watchful.)

I had a pretty calm childhood with loving parents as the first child. Even tho I was a pretty emotional, whiny kid its not like I needed to stand much till I was 6. Then my dad lost his job and didnt get a new one for some time. We were in debts my mom was depressed and we had to move when my dad finally found a new job.
My parents didnt feel well and stayed pretty isolated in the new place and this feeling of loneliness and hoplesness definetly passed over to me a bit. But for my sake I had a lot of great friends and my parents tried their best and felt better soon and I got two lil brothers. Overall a good environment at the new place and some pretty good years till I came to middleschool.

To cope with general stress in school and the, sometimes upcoming, feelings of solitude and hoplesness, I started to watch porn when I was 13. in this year I have got my own room and computer. I was a late starter and wasnt even fully developed to get an orgasm in the beginning when I started but had a strange fascination for the light sofcore porn I started with. This strip and normal porn I started with should be the biggest mistake of my life.
I remember that at night in isolation I soon experimented a lot with all kinds of porn from hent*i to BDSM even tried bdsm techniques on myself (like an*l, cbt etc.). It felt like an innocent hobby 2 or 3 times a week. When I look back Im surprised how fast I came from 0 to 100 within a year from innocent softcore porn to truely horrific terrible stuff (rape, hardcore bdsm, weird fetishes). When I have got my first orgasm, when I was almost 14, it was a revelation for me. From this time on, like many guys had here probably, I had a safe apointment after school with my computer and sometimes more than once a day.

It became kind of my double life. At day the nice guy with a lot of friends and at night a creep with weirder and weirder tastes. I surely noticed that my social life my whole life in general went down slowly more and more the more porn I watched and the more extreme the tastes became. But I thought it was super normal bc of puperty and all the hormone stuff. I just thought this is how life is and how I am (I thought I had social anxiety or would be "just a shy guy"). I never made the correlation between porn and my fucked up life (in school they told us that porn would be good and healthy. just a normal thing guys do in adolescens or not?).

Today Im shocked how I could just accepted this life how it was but I truely believed life's like this growing up and leaving childhood. Like the normal process for everybody. I created a bubble arround me. The few relationships I had were over soon bc I wasnt able and too afraid to show real intimacy or love. All I thought and all I subconciously knew about relationships was what I have learned from porn so I used my partners for my sick fantasies but wasnt emotional available for them, which soon dragged them away. Ofc I never told them. I never told anybody. I became a master in hiding and covering my tracks. Ppl noticed I have changed ofc but I was way too ashamed to open up and always pushed this ppl, who wanted to help me, away till they didnt try anymore.

Fortunately for me we moved again when I was 16. The new environment and the fact that I had no friends and didnt get some bc I was a emotional mess made me think that maybe this problems just woundnt go away by themself.
So I tried a lot of stuff to get myself out of this hole I dug for myself. Started to exercise, reading a lot, doing selfhelp, getting a job, got better in school. A lot of positive changes after all.
Funny enough I still continued with watching porn and still didnt realize it was the main problem, even the cause of all my misery. I even knew about nofap but didnt believe in it. Didnt take it seriously and always said to myself: "cmon this cant be the problem. It will go away by itself, wont It?" (How funny is this, that Im here now, writing my story on nofap.com haha).
I discovered femdom porn and this became my heroin. Taking the role of the submissive and watching this stuff truely was the best fix I've ever got. What started with porn soon became a whole network of sexting and sex contacts online and in real. It was never difficult for me to set something up for me sometimes online over chatrooms or in real life. In different roles with different strangers. At some point I discoverd sp which became like my golden shot I liked it wayy too much and got wayy too involved in it and I finally finally realized after a lot of sick shit that happened to me (compulsion, blackmail and abuse) that I had a huge problem. Not with myself but with Porn. I was 19 at this point and a pornaddict.
I changed a lot. Started nofap, started with the teachings and the community and life got better.
Eventually I found a group of really good friends at my new place that opened my eyes. I exprienced after a long time how it can feel to have good and caring ppl arround me and went off porn for about 3 months. I even went out again and met "normal" woman again.
Even tho this was all good and teached me a lot about myself I couldnt get rid of my past so easily. I was sloppy in my recovery, didnt take it as seriously as I should and eventually failed multiple times, in between times gave it up completly again. I thought I could get rid of it easily with distracting a lot, wihtout treating the "hole" inside me, which was still wide open.
After I went to another city to study there I soon had a mental breakdown bc of the addcition and all the new stuff I had to deal with now. It was a stony path but it was worth it. I have got a really good therapist, met new inspiring good friends in uni and got a glimpse of how wonderfull life can be without the addiction lingering constantly. University became my Damascus and it really showed me that I have a choice. That life doesnt need to be a cold depressing place but that It can be wonderful and full of light.
I guess I grew up to the point where I can look back and talk and think about it without shame and accept that I nearly lost a decade to porn but that it also taught me a lot of things about myself. I endured so much pain throughout my downward spiral, took so many blows, that I have got enough resilience to fight back with my full power now and beat this addiction.
Im 3 months sober now. Its tough but its worth it and I feel this every day, even tho there are good and not so good ons. But my commitment reached to a point I dont want to go back where I came from and I realized that life can go better even when u are at a really low point.

(Sorry for the super ass long post but uff I just couldnt stop myself but thank you for reading this till the end , I really appreciate this )

 

Thank you!!

 

The fact that you've been able to make the progress you've had is very encouraging. Thank you for sharing your story!

 

hey dude, thank u very much. I had arround 2 years where I tried to do nofap too but not really successfully,
biggest Problem was that I didnt change my strategy and always ran against the same wall over and over again. Always asked myself why till I realized, that I wasnt involved enough. I basically didnt want to deal with the addiction but wanted it to go away and with this way, when u dont work on yourself, the addiction will stay with you. So basically what helped: I started to read a lot about it, I learned skills to cope, mediation and Therapy (to talk about all the fucked stuff I did not only with porn but in real life).
You really need to dive into it and understand the addiction, why you have that void you try to fill with the addiction and what works for you to clear that void.
hope I could help, lenni

 

Where do you think lies the problems that u dont manage to get 100 days anymore ?