Working towards an honest intimacy - my reboot log.

I am guessing now but, I am hearing you don't think your wife knows about your addiction, and you are hoping to get on the road to recovery before telling her and you feel it will soften the blow so to speak if you have stopped when you tell her? And this might prevent her divorcing you? And you don't want divorce?
Off course it is possible to hide your addiction from your wife a bit longer- you have been doing it for 40 years so I guess you are a bit of an expert If you feel that PMO is bad for you and your relationship, then its brilliant that you have made the decision to make that change. It is great that you are seeing a therapist. Let us know how you get on.
Have you started a reboot blog? They are a great way to journal about your recovery at the same time as helping others with their recovery.

 

A reboot log is just a thread on the nofap forum where you talk about your recovery journey. People find the writing process very therapeutic.
Can I ask, why does your wife think you are not having sex if she does not know about the PMO?

 

Some lovely closeness yesterday. When I am a bit wired or not focused my default position when being intimate is to be focused on my own body. This is very bad for connection and can end up with me just laying there waiting for attention, or just pleasuring myself against my wife's body. This time I repeated to myself 'stay connected'. And to counter the desire to go into my own body I told myself 'focus on S's body and sensation will come.'
Its only in the last year or so that I have realised that the best way to enhance the pleasure of intimacy is to stay focused on the other person. Not necessarily sexually but definitely mentally and physically. Of course when masturbating there is no other person to connect with, its all about yourself and the sensations you can bring to yourself. Masturbation is so far removed from intimacy and that is something which is never taught. I used to think intimacy should feel like masturbation - a linear journey to ejaculation. It is taking a long time to disassociate that kind of experience with love making.

 

I am surprised at how much my opinion of myself effects how close I want to be with my wife. When I am feel bad about myself whether that is to do with my fitness, what I have been thinking, eating or doing, I tend to feel I don't deserve attention from someone else. The antidote to this is self-compassion. Accepting that suffering as part of the human condition and that the more I suffer, the more I need to take action to relieve that suffering. Saying I am fat because I keep eating chocolate and I should, stop is not helpful. Listening to my body, understanding why I crave the chocolate, (usually due to stress or tiredness) and taking action to resolve the route causes of the triggers to eating that chocolate,
managing time/diet/sleep/stress better is the self compassionate route to supporting myself.

In the context of intimacy I do the same. If I have some kind of relapse, for instance when I find myself looking at someone's body or sexually fantasising- I know it is easy to say I am a failure and a fraud, but this is not helpful.
Reminding myself that I have spent a lifetime automatically looking at other peoples bodies and fantasising, and that the neural pathways to do this are deep and strong and will be difficult not to fall into occasionally, is far more helpful. To think about the context of when these things happened and what led up to them will help me understand why they happened. Checking in with my values to make sure I am still working towards them, questioning why I don't want to do these things in the future is helpful. These actions mean that, even though I may have lapsed, I still have the self worth to connect with my wife.

 

Another wet dream day 103. That is 4 in the last 28 days. Not sure what is going on. Lovely connected love making this morning though. The first conscious ejaculation for 105 days. Conscious in the sense that I was awake, it was not intentional though. It seems the more recent a wet dream has been, the finer the line between arousal and ejaculation and I got too close this morning.
I am not disheartened though. My intention is still to focus on being intimate without the goal of ejaculation.

 

Starting again, again. I wasn't prepared for the run of wet dreams I had. It really threw my resolve. I realise now I cannot totally control my ejaculation triggered hormone rollercoaster so have to ride with the punches so to speak.
Self compassion is key.

 

Loads of intrusive thoughts about sex yesterday morning. I used a free writing technique to help reduce their power and frequency. Its an odd technique because it involves writing stuff down I don't want anyone to hear. I mean really going into what those thoughts are no matter how depraved or 'wrong' I feel they are. After reading them through I then question myself 'Is this what I want?' After some discussion these thoughts were labelled as intrusive and unwanted. Whenever they came back during the day, I just said to myself, there is another intrusive thought.
It is quite triggering writing about this so I might have to go and write some more to get them out !

 

Interesting that writing didn't help as much yesterday however acceptance did. I accepted that my hormones are all over the place, I have spent the first 75 days of this year in a really good place because I have been living my sexual life in accordance with my values, and that the thing that has changed is my prolactin, testosterone and dopamine levels because of all the recent wet dreams.
I decided to revisit the thoughts in a couple of weeks to see if they still had power.

 

5 years of researching the evidence on post ejaculation endocrine response is the smart answer but actually I don't know for sure. But it is a great way to explain the up and down libido and mood I experience post ejaculation which I have been measuring for several years in various different ways.
Yesterday I felt so down. I didn't want any affection or even to be touched by my wife. I was happy to talk but not be physically intimate. And I know this could flip to wanting extreme intimacy but I also know that that intimacy would be more about trying to get back the 'buzz'(the buzz lost through lack of dopamine sensitivity?) than about trying to connect with my wife, which is why in the past I have been more likely to relapse in the 2 weeks post ejaculation, than when I am a few weeks into semen retention. After a few weeks of non ejaculation I get so much fulfillment from very minimal physical contact - a hug, a kiss.
I lose all that post ejaculation for a few days. Its horrible.
To qualify I have ejaculated 5 times in the last 4 weeks, three of those very close together and this appears to have a distinctly larger affect than the occasional ejaculation every few weeks/months.
Your brain on Porn is a good place to look for evidence of post ejaculation response if you are interested. Loads of studies cited.

 

Had a good talk with my wife about the feelings of physical repulsion brought on by ejaculation. It was good to talk about them in the context of historical intimacy. In the past neither of us knew what was happening. She didn't know why I would seemingly flip from being very affectionate, to rejecting her affection, and I didn't understand why my desires could make such a u turn. The lack of consciousness about these issues caused all sorts of conflict and conflicting feelings. I would project onto S thinking she had done something wrong. She would start to look at herself thinking she had done something wrong too.
I appologised yesterday for these instances when I was just totally unaware of being so hormonally influenced.

 

Starting to feel better today. A bit of a mind shift yesterday. Starting to feel optimistic about the future. I remembered I have a unique sexuality which my wife accepts. It feels vulnerable to share it but intimacy is all about vulnerability isn't it?

 

Such lovely intimacy this morning. I feel so much more able to connect when my wife touches parts of my body other than my penis. When she is touching my penis it triggers a desire for more, a craving to get to a plateau of pleasure. But when she is touching below my penis, my thighs and chest the pleasure is immediate, so I can stay connected with her rather than my mind going off on some quest for more sensation.
Its difficult to communicate this verbally during intimacy but hopefully through my body language and moans ,(lol) she gets the message. I will also write about it in our love journal tonight. Being less penis-centric, I find, really helps disconnecting from goal orientated intimacy and improves connection.

 

A good day yesterday. Lots of affection. I wrote about non penis-centric physical contact in our love journal. S understood the connection between craving more and the association of the penis stimulation with sex and PMO and agreed she would try not to focus on it when touching me. We spent most of the night embracing which we haven't done for a while. The oxytocin must be flowing

 

Really enjoying getting closer again to S after a few months of reboot. I feel in a different place to where I was before Christmas. Things had gone back to 'ejaculate once a week and not be interested in intimacy between then' mode. Now I feel excited again about building an intimacy that we both want. One of my issues was PE. It distracted me continually from being connected. I would be worrying from the start about how soon I would ejaculate. Because my body is so sensitive there is no need for penile contact, I can get tons of pleasure other ways, and S prefers other means of stimulation than PIV. I am really looking forward to building an intimacy that means we can stay connected and pleasure each other without fear of causing pain or abrupt hormone change(ejaculation). I can and do have hands free ejaculations but these are harder to achieve and take longer, bringing me more in line with how my wife orgasms.

 

I was really brave last night and wrote in our love journal about how I want to be intimate in the future. S was so nice about it and so glad I felt comfortable being able to tell her how I felt. She didn't think it weird at all. I told her that sometimes just talking about it will be enough for me. I am not sure how it will work out and am not sure if this is the right place to journal about it.

 

Enjoying making our relationship stronger, turning towards instead of away, and trying to be as honest as possible. Considering my wife's feelings is a really important step for me. Sounds stupid, but before I express my needs I think it is important to prioritize whose needs might be more pressing at the time. Expressing my need for more intimacy when my wife is really stressed out is probably not a good idea!