P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

OK, you lost me here, this is bullshit. You're crediting knowledge and willpower with something that was accomplished through 3 years of behavioral change. I don't know if it's just a language barrier or what but you come across as being somewhat delusional about your own mental powers. It's like you're saying that we too could be free of PAWS if we just had your intelligence and depth of understanding.

 

Can you please tell your full paws story? When did things star to get better, how did it start to get better, what were your symptoms? Benefits now?

 

Happy to hear that man! Was it 3 years hard mode? Are you on semen retention now or what?

 

Hello lads.

So it's been roughly a year since I last posted on here and was pretty much chased off the forum. Hope you are doing well.

A year ago I said, I guarantee you when I come back in a year or two and not one of you will have gotten better because our misunderstanding of this and what is PAWS is all wrong and largely psychosomatic and a symptom of underlying mental issues that many of you have probably had your whole lives,

I take no pleasure in saying this but from what I can tell by having a quick read, not one of you has gotten better? Please correct me if im wrong.

I feel really sorry for many of you, some of you must be at the 2 and 3 year mark now? I still encourage you all to take a different approach to this.

Over the last year I've had many people messaging me and I log in every now and again to reply, I explained my theory and opinions to many people, the overwhelming majority of them pretty much told me I was full of shit and tried to argue but 3 different people (long termers) listened to me, 2 of them appear to have made a full recovery and I suspect the third one did, he doesn't really post here anymore so I'm honestly not sure.

It's time for a new approach guys, you can't keep going this to yourself for another year.

 

I‘m honestly pretty fucking tired of people coming into this forum and telling me it’s all in my head. It’s not and I know this because it’s my intuitive feeling and I am able to observe myself very well. If it’s all in my head then tell me what to do. I’m meditating 40 mins a day since 2,5 years. I know my mind very well. There are times where my dopamine is flowing, where the anedonia is gone and when I wake up and I’m just feeling fine. And then most of time I feel like I’m feeling right now. There is NO difference in my own behaviour between those two states of mind. There is a process going on and I’m so freaking tired of people making wrong cause and effect assumptions based on their own limited subjective reality.

If it’s all in the mind then please give me a detailed step by step guide on how to change the „it’s all in your mind“ and I will follow it and report back otherwise I would just ask to gtfo of this post. And I’m serious with this if you deliver anything else then the usual stock phrases onto having the right mindset then I WILL listen. I’m not somebody that is biased to anything. I tried so many things in my whole recovery and nothing was the dealbreaker. It’s just time and time and more time. And no there is a lot of progress in this forum. Just read Dons story and how he is back to normal. I’m feeling waaay better then just a year ago. Again your making just assumptions again to promote your idea that it’s all in your mind.

I was sceptical of the „it’s all in your mind“-idea since the first time I read about it on Reddit and when I observed people on certain subreddits. There is a certain degree to what your mind is capable of. You can force things with the mind that are extraordinary but much of it has to do with exceeding your own limits and with suppressing other things.

Present a serious and detailed instruction onto what to do or leave this sub. If it’s all in the mind then why are all those mind jugglers still on noFap? Why are we even abstaining for what reason? I tell you why: because noFap heals your brain and thus your mind to the point of being capable of thinking straight again while being able to direct thoughts and maintain concentration. When you reach this point of healing the egoistic mind comes up with a lot of ideas and solutions why it is healed now. The reason why you feel good again is based on the fact that your brain is no longer addicted to a certain behaviour and thus you being the captain of the ship again. You might maintained a solid recovery routine which helped the process but you (which basically is the egoistic mind for most of the people) only helped with recovery. You yourself didn’t recover the receptors and regulated your neurotransmitter system right again. You just helped your body to heal, the same as you do nothing to recovery when you break a bone. You don’t put force onto the broken bone and you maintain a somehow relaxed lifestyle and the rest is the Body doing it’s wonders.

There is a certain believe nowadays that the rational mind is the highest form of evolution and that we humans are the greatest beings wandering this planet. It’s not. The egoistic mind just likes to listen to himself. In the end the „it’s all in your mind“-idea is just the mind backslapping itself for something that it was only partially involved in.

Just go back to fapping and watching porn while keeping your mind-mindset. At first it will work but after a certain time you longer will be able to keep up the mindset as your system gets out of control again. Most of the people in here reached a point where the mind is out of control and where true healing is required - everything else is just shifting the problem.

So present your idea and I will listen.

 

Lets hear it then. Want nothing more than to get the truth.

 

1. Don messaged me about 6 or 7 months ago, he listened to what I had to say and agreed with me, shortly after he started feeling better.

2. You accept that this has become an unhealthy hyper obsession on your sex life and you are manifesting a lot of this based on mostly false information given to you by people that are not liable or equipped to understand what is going on. This is not healthy, you are associating your sex life with obsession, stress, anxiety and it is generating a lot of your issues.

3. You get better by accepting that you are fine, you take a step back at the ridiculousness of going on a 2 or 3 year period of abstince, you realise how fucking ridiculous some of the things being stated on this website are. You stay off the forums, you stop obsessing, you get on with your life and put it behind you, and of course don't watch porn or compulsively masturbate to self medicate any negative feelings you may be having.

 

I didn’t know about PAWS until I was about 7-8 months into my recovery. Before I started abstaining from orgasms in general I wasn’t masturbating or watching porn a long time and I still felt so freaking bad. I had sex with my girlfriend on a regular basis and I could tell how bad my symptoms were in relation to the number of orgasms I had. There was a time were I considered orgasms to be no problem and where didn’t put any negative emotion on my sexlife. I just let it be as well as all the other things in my life. I just lived but I still could sense that something was wrong the whole time. I had symptoms but I tend to ignore them and just kept going with it. At some point I wondered why I felt this way and where those symptoms are coming from and this led me to the realisation that to much orgasms are causing my misery. It doesn’t matter if they are self induced or shared with the woman I love.

There is no healthy hyper obsession with my sexuality. I don’t masturbate and watch porn because I find it ridiculous to do so nowadays and I don’t have Sex because that would be a coverup for my negative emotions. I don’t want to share sex with a person that I don’t love and at the moment I’m not feeling that a relationship would be any contribution to my life beside having physical intimacy and that’s the wrong reason to go inside a relationship. So beside that what exactly am I doing different then you suggest. I’m not masking my negative feelings by staying away from arousal as I know I did this in the past. The option to accept the fact that I’m fine is not a possibility. I am not fine and acting like everything is fine is not an option. It’s not like I’m dwelling on my symptoms or reboot 24/7. I accept that I need time to recover, this is a fact then I can acknowledge because it’s true. I can‘t accept things that are not reality because then I would be lying to myself.

It‘s so easy to say that it’s all just in your head and that one person is having the wrong mindset if you personally feel fine and recovered. While you’re in the midst of recovery this seems like a bad joke when someone just comes around the corner and telling you that you just should get your shit right.

PAWS is nothing psychosomatic or illusional. It’s a neurochemical process that takes about two years and there are so many people that recovered around that time mark.

My background involves more then just fapping. I had a lot of substance addictions as well and the last weeks I’m getting a tremendous amount of drug dreams. As stated earlier I use drugs in my sleep so much. There are dreams of me driving around and searching for drugs the whole duration of my dream. I wake up and it feels like I‘ve gone through through a whole relapse process of several weeks. I don’t think about drugs or alcohol a single second the whole time I’m awake. There is nothing I do to provoke this kind of dreams and yet they still happen more then a year into the last time I smoked weed. It’s my brain healing and it’s the same for my sexual arrousal addiction. I get random sexual graphic flashbacks while reading a book and I know it’s just my mind trying everything to get me back into my old behaviour. If you had a porno-like sexlife as I had in my last relationship then there also needs to be abstinence from having sex. Anything else just doesn’t work and would be a lie to myself.

There is a certain point where you just keep carrying around your PAWS trauma but I don’t think I am near this point in any way. Dwelling onto your situation the whole day, putting attention on your symptoms the whole time isn’t right and I also see this behaviour in some guys BUT I have to acknowledge that there is a big wave of symptoms flooding over me at the moment because otherwise my mind would be asking why I feel so awful the whole time. I’m accepting my symptoms and don’t worry about them as I know they are not permanent but anything outside of that would be straight up lying to myself.

 

I'm not saying people on here should go back to fapping and just forget everything, I firmly believe you're all in this predicament because of porn, what I do not believe is that you have to go on the 2, 3 or 4 year crusade of abstinence and Forum browsing to get rid of it while filling your head with doom gloom while also taking information on nofap and rebooting (PAWS) from unaccountable people on the Internet that sell books and make money from advertising on their website.

Do not unestimate what your mental health can do to you, it can fuck you up in ways you cannot even began to imagine.

There are people on here at the 2, 3 and even 4 year mark now and they are still not better. It's ridiculous. You've all arrived at a position where if you are having any issue in you life it can be blamed on porn because somewhere on some website there's an accomadating explanation for what you experiencing and linking it to porn.


Go through my post history, I used to be just like all of you, it went on for fucking years until I realised what was happening here.

You seriously need to ask yourself why no one is getting better.

 

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...is-may-save-your-reboot-my-experience.300214/


I agree with the majority of what this guy is saying. He explains what I'm trying to say in a kind of different way. He's not saying exactly what I'm saying but his emphasis on letting go and changing your nervous system in order to heal is factual. I've done it. And I got there simply by letting go and not caring anymore.

I believe this forum is keeping alot of you sick and stressed.

 

I've done a whole 180 on PAWS and all that withdrawal shit. In my own case it turned out to be hormonal (high estrogen) and now I have been addressing that issue im slowly feeling the best I've even been. Even having a few wanks here and then with no ill effects. I was just a lazy cunt who was overweight & never addressed my hormonal issues and that was the thing that done me. Porn was the easy to blame but it was hormones all along with me.

 

The problem here is that you've personally never experienced the extreme hypofrontality that can result from long-term severe porn addiction. Not all addicts experience it just like all heavy drinkers don't experience alcoholism. Even among alcoholics, severity of symptoms happens on a spectrum from mild to severe. As a result, you have the luxury of holding the ignorant position that were all suffering from an imagined mental construct that can be overcome by changing ones attitude, or redirecting ones thoughts. You don't seem to understand (or believe) that the cognitive deficits are 100% real. Severe addiction causes structural changes that happen within the brain that you can't simply ignore. There is no way to fake that your short-term memory is fine. There is no way to fake that your ability to learn and retain information is normal and fine. There is no way to fake your way through the anhedonia and crippling fatigue. Everyone here is already getting on with their life as best as they can, we all used to be highly functional people.

The more interesting thing to me is what makes someone like you feel the need to come in an try to negate what other people are going through. Does it make you feel superior in some way? I seriously don't understand the point of your post. What do you gain by wagging your finger at a hand full of people supporting each other on a forum. You don't provide any answers other than the most obvious one that is to pretend that everything is fine. Really? You don't think we already do that on our own? There are 24 hrs. in a day. Do you really think we don't already spend our time everyday trying to pretend everything is fine? Does it really bother you that other people are practicing celibacy and encouraging each other to do so? For what possible fucking reason could you possibly care?

Moving on with life meaningfully can only happen when a sufficient level of healing has occurred in the brain so that the addict can function normally again. Don didn't get better because he listened to you, he got better because he stayed the coarse and his attitudes changed accordingly as his prefrontal cortex regained control of his thoughts. Addiction causes damage to the prefrontal cortex and everything that it does for us in our lives. You are not living with that reality, but we are. It is a terrible affliction that makes it so a person can't feel and act like a normal human. You aren't offering any practical way to speed up the healing process. Time, patience, and encouragement is still the best medicine here.

 

You're welcome man. People are more likely to listen to the way you explained it.

Personally I do not believe PAWS in the truest sense of the word can go on for more than 6 month, I believe that anything after 6 months is because your nervous system is in a hyper aroused stressed out state and you are feeding yourself with negativity daily so the brain just gets locked.

There's also many people on here that I'm pretty certain have ridiculously tight pelvic floors from stress, years of fappi g and constantly keeling which is causing sexual dysfunction and problems with there posture. Unfortunately while you are in a hyper stressed state the pelvic floor will not relax so again it's all the same shit.

 

Sorry but how the fuck would you know if I have experienced hypofrontality or not? I used class A drugs from the age of 13 right up until my early 20s and fapped to porn upto 10 times a day from the age of 13 right up until I was 29. You have no idea what I did or didn't have. I'd argue that I was in a much worse state than the majority of you.

You only have to look through my post history on here and reddit to see how bad I was, I was fapping so many times a day that my hair was falling out but regrew after a 4 month streak.

PMO addiction is not crack cocaine addiction, when i read people on here saying that porn PAWS is worse than heroin withdrawal I cannot take them seriously. I'll say the same thing I said a year ago, if people do not take a different approach then I guarantee one year from now none of you will be better.

I am not saying the cognitive deficits are not real, I am not saying anyone is imagining it. I'm saying that there is a stress and placebo fact involved in this and unless you educate yourself on it then someone like me is just going to sound like a dipshit hippy.

 

Yeah I agree. I used to look at Chinese medicine like it was alot of spiritual jibberish but really its just a different way of explaining things that we already know. And I think alot of it comes from a different period in time which further adds to the mysticism which puts people off.

 

Hey dude

Yeah I'm still abstinent in terms of porn. I've seen a couple of girls on and off but nothing long term, This year has been shit but no worse than anyone else I guess. Definitely felt a little bit depressed but nothing that's not just a normal reaction to what's happening.

What about you? How are you doing? Been a while.

 

What would you recommend for me? I was addicted for 3 years and hit a flatline on day 59 and have been in one ever since. I had a few short flatlines of a few days before that but then this long one hit me. Am I doing something wrong?

 

No you're not doing anything wrong. You need to stop waiting for a magical day to come where you wake up and everything is back to how it once was because its not going to come. You are done with porn, you know it fucks up aspects of your life and health so just move on, put it behind you and that includes putting the forum behind you. You do not have voluntary control over your libido or erections, they will come when they come and the more you focus on them and worry and forum browse endlessly putting poison into your mind by people that have been here for years the more you are setting yourself back.

How long have you been on a streak for?

Just get your mind off of nofap, change things in your life that you know might be making you feel bad.

 

I just read through several (older) posts as you suggested to do so and you are making so many assumptions about this and that. I understand the core of what you are trying to say and believe it or not - I'm not too far off that but one thing keeps standing out for me: you're projecting your very own experience onto everyone else. With all respect - you can't do that mate. You can't just walk around and act like you know it all. In several posts you talk about how you understand more about neuroscience, the brains plasticy and the way addiction and withdrawal works as everyone else. A person that would know about all those things wouldn't walk around telling everyone he knows it all. This is a place where people come by in order to be understood and where they seek comfort. We all in here to help each other and we come back to this forum on a regular basis to support each other and value each others progress. You just ASSUME that this forum causes a lot of stress for everyone but thats not true. You're speaking in absolutes the whole god damn time and this is very dangerous.

You constantly condemn "bro-science" but all I hear from you is coming from your very own experience and most of that has nothing to do with science. Where is the "non-bro-science"-evidence that P.A.W.S isn't lasting longer then 6 months and everything after that is just you hanging on onto it?! Where is this fact coming from? I tell you, it's made up from your very own mind.

You constantly tell people to get off the forum as it's igniting the stress again like people in chronic pain forums etc...we all in here find the cause for our extreme form and duration of symptoms and support each other on the long journey through writing down diary post and exchanging informations about certain patterns. All you do is to come to a forum and act like everyone is making things up. You are ignorant to so many people, at this moment and to what I read has happened in the past. There is a pretty fine line between helping people and presenting knowledge to them OR just coming to a forum and promoting ideas that your mind has come up with but lack of evidence even more as all the judged "bro-science". It seems like your motivation to come to this forum has a lot to do with being right and telling others that they are wrong beside that I can't sense any other motivation.

And with all respect: I never ever was stressed out by this whole thread and it always felt like a place of comfort and motivation but you managed to even make this last place on earth where I feel comfortable and understood a place of stress, disharmony and agressiveness. Not on a single page before did anyone use words like "fuck" or something like that. Things in here always held be civil and respectful even if one disagrees with another persons opinion. The only reason I didn't have ignored you already is the fact that I want to leave hints for other people reading your shit and not thinking that all their progress is worth nothing. If you really wanted to help and if you really would know all those things that you decorate with then you also would have a certain amount of empathy where you would know that you are crossing certain borders.

You don't seem to care about those borders. You talk about the fact that we know nothing about you and what things you have gone through. You also have no clue what everyone else here went through. The universe is so god damn complex and so is the recovery process of everyone else.

Just on a side note: I'm actively relaxing my pelvic floor since about 2 months on a daily basis, I read David R. Hawkins "Healing and Recovery" where you both guys seem to get your knowledge from, I'm deeply involved into my spiritual journey and I try my best to not judge anyone and to be respectful, to be open-minded, to distance myself from my thoughts and my emotions. I wrote many posts that you shouldn't get to involved with your own thoughts and concepts while being on this journey because everything is created by brain which is the midst of a pretty excessive healing process. I'm critically reflecting my own thoughts and what reactions other people cause in me and from all my experience and intuitive feeling I sense that there are certain things that seem to be fishy about you. I also know that my current mood and resistance to bullshit is pretty low at the moment and that I might be shooting over the top with certain things but I'm 100% sure about this whole P.A.W.S process being real and not just me/us dwelling onto a past that gone for the better. You have as much information about PMO/sexual arrousal withdrawal as everyone else in here. You can't know whether opiate-withdrawal is 10x worse then PMO withdrawal. Taking opiates isn't something that our brain needs as primal need. Sex and thus PMO is one of our primal needs as it keeps the species going, messing up this system can lead to unknown fundamental problems that are not discovered yet because most science isn't even slightly interested in going this way.

There is so much we don't know and you act like you know everything and that's why I call bullshit on you and that's why people called bullshit onto you in the past. A person that would really be compassionate, understanding and who had gone through the same symptoms and personal hell wouldn't act up like you do because they know the pain and they know the struggle. There are things where I agree with you but the way you present things and the way you talk in absolutes just makes things ridiculous.

If you answer to my post then please make sure to answer my questions as you mastered to evade questions from what I read in the past.

 

I am not basing what I am saying off just my experience, many people have come to the same conclusions and have gotten better.

When I told you to read my older posts I was referring to when I was in the thick of my nofap/pmo journey, not the posts I made a year ago before i disappeared.

I am not trying to claim I know it all and if I came off that way a year ago it was because I was really struggling to explain to a couple of people that were extremely hostile towards me and accusing me of essentially making it all up.

Yes I can tell you without unquestionable doubt that opiod withdrawal is another level of hell and is more than 10x worse than anything nofap Paws can produce. I have been addicted to opiates many times in my life, I know what I'm talking about.

Not once have I said anyone is making things up, please stop accusing me of this. You are clearly not paying attention to what I'm saying.

It's very difficult to reply to everything you are saying when you write a really long response filled with questions and statements, please could you try and write smaller responses so I can address your points fully without it all getting lost, I'm not being rude here, it's just easier, and please could you go back and read what I have said again so you don't keep accusing me of things I'm not saying.

If you keep putting PMO addiction up on this pedestal as this absolute beast of a mental Disorder that has fucked up your biology then that is exactly how it will be, you are spouting talking points from unaccountable websites with people masquerading as experts.

I'm trying to understand what you actually believe here... Do you honestly believe that someone who has been on a 2 or 3 year streak, no relapses and is still not better is eventually going to wake up one day and be back on the path to "normal", this is insanity and so many people are wasting there lives here. Its fucking evil.

Nofap has become like a religious cult where people just abstain for years hoping one day the enlightenment will come, but I can promise you that it never does.