how not to relapse?

First off, David, thank you for your honesty & sincerity. To address your questions...

I think we are all going through extremely similar experiences here, so there is a great value in interacting with one another, asking questions (like you're doing) and trying to pass on what you've learned and experienced (like what I'm doing). That being said, I have found that the urges never really fully go away... Let me clarify- my sex drive never goes away. My urge to look at pornography has vanished. Once I broke through a substantial amount of time without using porn, my mind started to clear up about the reality of what was taking place. After nearly 6 months PMO free, and after reading about the effects of porn (not just on my mind, but on sex trafficking around the world, women's self esteem, and the shaping of our culture & values), I am disgusted by pornography. Additionally, I realized that if anybody ever looked at my mother, my sisters, or my daughter in the way that I used to view women I would literally want to kill and/or maim them. Woman do not exist so that I can have orgasms while looking at them or interacting with them, and I needed to learn to respect and have compassion towards the people in my life or in the media.

As far as confidence goes, after nearly six months without porn I made the decision that I could handle looking at some pictures here and there, as long as it was artistic and that I wasn't fapping. The result was a 3 day binge, a complete loss of confidence, poor performance at work, a huge blowout with my girlfriend, and all the emotional wreckage of my past flooding back into my mind. Long story short: I couldn't handle it and it wasn't worth it. I feel confident when I am a master of my desires, when I am able to exercise self control, and when I can pour my heart into my relationships instead of hiding away in isolation to pleasure myself. I feel confident knowing that God will help me if I deny my urges and addictions and seek Him, in whatever way I understand that to be. I feel confident when I have something worthwhile to say to others that might be helpful, instead of "whoops, I messed up again." I feel confident knowing that I don't need to sit in the dark in front of images of people having sex whacking off like a sick, demented monkey, but that I can walk with integrity and honesty about what I do with my time and attention.

Lastly, as far as frustrations go just take this journey one day at a time. Life is always gonna be full of frustrations, but try to be grateful & find something positive about your trials instead... If I thought I could never have an orgasm again for the rest of my life I would lose my fucking mind. But I can go one day without an orgasm. And every single day, I remind myself that I am going to get through this day and this day only without trying to escape from reality. I remind myself to pause when agitated or frustrated, to take care of my own needs, especially if I feel tired, hungry, angry or lonely. I ask God to work through me to make the lives of everyone I meet a little better, and I give my all to each endeavor placed before me. Living this way has yielded many good nights of sleep, many satisfying and fulfilling days, and a much more enriching and enjoyable life than I ever would've thought possible for a guy like me. Just take it one day at a time (when the going gets tough just make it through one hour or even one moment at a time, just don't resort to PMO no-matter what).

Other people have done this. You can do it too. You won't die from a lack of orgasms. If you step away from trying to get laid or get off, and take the time to make yourself into a better version of yourself, someday you will meet someone who wants what you've got, and wants to give you what they've got. But you gotta love yourself first brother, because you can't give away something you don't have. Best of luck, peace be with you, adieu mon frere

 

My story is almost the same but I learnt that being calm and alert of your own thoughts when neccessary is thing in place... You have to be aware of your thoughts and let them go... Don't be stressed so much about your feelings because they are natural... You're making a good progress I would say. Just don't jerk off anymore 'cause it's not good for you health... P has to be banned from now on and believe that MO will fall soon... Good luck

 

It takes a strong mindset to reach this level. I applaud you for this.

 

Thank you, @iceman40 , but I disagree with any claims of having a strong mindset. I guess when I stopped feeding into the lies and fantasy of porn for long enough, I woke up to the reality of how messed up porn is, and how messed up I'd become from using it. I think this is something we all know deep down inside, just try to remember how you interacted with other children when you were a kid, while we still had some innocence about us. Somewhere along the way our relationships, our emotions, and our perspective became warped and distorted. Somewhere along the way we started to believe the lies that porn, our addictions, and our insecurities and fears told us. To me this is more than not masturbating or looking at porn, this is about awakening what is inside of us that porn is trying to kill.

 

No worries, I'm not offended at all.. and if you would ask me if I considered myself religious in any way, shape, or form a few years ago I would've told you I'd see you in hell.

My girl and I have been together for about 2 1/2 years. We've never had sex. We've fooled around and done just about everything else, but we're saving sex for marriage. This to me is a miracle in itself. Over the last month I've expressed that I don't want to ruin or postpone the progress of our relationship, and I want to put all physical intimacy on the back burner. I hope to propose by the end of this month. Today I am honest, I have integrity, I am completely faithful to her, even with my eyes & with my thoughts, and I love her more than words can adequately express. She has been infinitely patient with me, and helped me grow so much in the past two and a half years. If she had any idea what she was getting into when she met me she probably would have ran for her life. I tried to warn her, but it was much worse than even I thought.

Every other relationship I've ever had has been the opposite of this. Usually the first thing I would use to determine if someone was worth my time was to sleep with them, after lying about my character and career and anything else I needed to do to get in their pants.. I've never been faithful in any relationship I've ever been in before this one. Last year, I found out I have a 2 year old daughter from an adult escort I used to sleep with unprotected (and probably have other children out in the world somewhere as well). I've probably slept with over 50 different women, with some experiences with multiple partners. Miraculously I have no STD's. I used to visit strip clubs weekly, and have looked at porn since age 10 (in my 30's now). I say this not to glorify myself, I'm actually pretty disgusted with my life. I say this to express how amazing God is and the kinds of things He can do in someone's life, even a dirtbag like me.

Today I am celebrating 3 years sobriety from drugs and alcohol. Its been 2 weeks since I've masturbated. Its been around 3 months since I've looked at porn. I'm a part of my daughter's life today. I can be a good man to a great woman and provide a decent life for us. Very gradually, choice by choice and day by day, I'm picking up the pieces of my broken life and putting something together that is better than I could ever imagine. I never expected to live past 25. God had other plans for me. That's the short version.

The good news is that you don't have to wait until your life is a trainwreck to make a change. If you honestly, willingly, and open-mindedly seek God He will meet you right where you are, and you will know without a doubt the right thing for you to do.

The bad news is that if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you got. The truth is that your life will continue to get worse if you don't do some work on yourself. If you don't make changes, if you don't seek spiritual solutions, and if you stay in your addiction it will only get worse.

Try living a different way for 90 days. Take it one day at a time. And if you really can't in spite of your best efforts you might have a serious problem with addiction. And if you can and you're not satisfied you can always go back to your old way of life. But you'll never know what its like until you go through it.

Peace, brother

 

Bro, it ain't about a dude in the sky. Its about me and you. You're a dude. I'm a dude. In spite of whether or not God cares what we do with our lives (which he does), I care about what I do with my life. My focus isn't on going to heaven, who wrote the book, or appeasing God, its knowing He's got my back and His plans for my life here & now are better than my own plans. My focus is on loving the people in my life the way they deserve to be loved, and loving myself enough to know it's worth it to do the best I can each and every day.

But from my experience, when I don't have God in my life, I just use people and self destruct through bad decision after bad decision. Jails, homelessness, unquenchable hunger, winding up with skeezy girls who's names I don't remember. Winding up with classy girls who only wanted a cheap thrill. Winding up in my room jerking off for the 19th time at 3 in the morning. It didn't matter, I got tired of living that way and just prayed for a way out. I know if I want to be a good man today I should follow Christ. It's got nothing to do with the sky, with church, or fear of roasting for eternity. I just want to be a good man, and Jesus was the best there that ever was, so if I wanna be a good dude I should maybe try to learn about Him and do what He did.... And if I happen to end up in heaven, I hope to see you there.

 

Yo, when you obstain from PMO, then you can address your neediness with women.. over time you get free of that too.. just focus instead on your own life and selfcare.. women are attreacted to you when you pmo because you dont need them and are not needy.. keep going and get to the point where you Really dont need them even even for sex and then you can have a true heart connection. What they really want anyway..

 

Hey @Dadoudesbois!
First of all, i'm french too and just in case you don't know: there is a french nofap-like website. I've discovered it few weeks ago. I didn't visit it since i'm happy here.
Second, congratulations for your english. It's far better than mine ;-)

And to try to answer your question I would share you my path.
I took a 90 days challenge on may and completed it. I even went to 104 days. But I am indeed in a relationship... And even if we didn't make love/have sex on an high frequency ( every 15 days on average), it helped a lot. Actually, I'm not sure I would have made it without that.

My opinion: fighting the body is hopeless. We - snooty humans - use to think that we are clever and that we can handle everything with the mind. It can't be further from truth. Reproduction is a natural and cyclic process for man and woman and we both produce tools to reproduce ourselves in about 30 to 40 days. Egg and sperm. But there is a huge difference between men and women. Women have a natural way to expell the egg and produce new one (menstruation). On the contrary, men don't have this process. So after a while, the natural need to expell comes at work. That's natural, physical and hormonal. Nature (or god) made it that way. Every cell of your body and even any cell on earth works this way: the need to breathe, need to eat, need to cleanse, need to reproduce.

What's not natural, physical and hormonal is porn and compulsivity. Porn and compulsivity are a mental disfonctioning in which you forget the body and its basical needs. That's why it is tiring and is lowing your general well being.

I'm not a religious guy, but i think "jesus life" is very inspiring (as well as siddharta Gautama). Especially the desert part where he fought the temptations of the devil during 40 days. Devil is your unconsciousness driven by your mental, God is your consciousness. Your job is to increase consciousness to find happiness

 

Hi, I've had these thoughts over the past months, really your post is very similar to my thoughts. What I advise you to do, is to have clear in your mind that the challenge is 3 full months of no porn and no masturbation, and there is a reason for that. It takes 3 months, not 1, (in most cases), to fully clean from this addiction. Now, just say to yourself that for 3 months, you will, deliberately, have NO interest in girls. You will just not care, and just set a day 3 months from now, that you will be ready to do something with a girl. This will take the frustration away, trust me, because : 1. it is 3 months of PORN FREE, wouldn't you just love that? gf or no gf, it's 3 months porn free. 2. having in mind that you don't currently care about finding a gf and having sex, it will make it easier (as you noted), to find a girl!! So, in the back of your mind, you can have that IF and WHEN an opportunity for sex comes during these months, you MIGHT take advantage of it. some last advise: during these 3 months, focus on something else, and get freaking good at it. I don't know what that would be for you, for me is being a good student at uni lol.

 

Solid advice here! Involuntary celibacy is my other problem. Porn and masturbation have been gross substitutes for a life-long lack of female contact in any form. Dealing with PMO is my first problem. Jan 1, 2017 will be Day 99 for me. Today is Day 20. After completing this reset, I will be ready to take up the challenge of figuring out what to do--or not do--about involuntary celibacy. That will be next year.