2 years and 2 months...in peace

I really relate to your story. I am a Catholic too, and your story is eerily similar to mine. I'm a college student, 22, with one year of school left until I graduate. My hope (as it has been every summer) is to go at least 90 days free of PMO BEFORE I go back to school, so I'll be off to a good start.

There's a couple girls I would like to ask out (never had a girlfriend), but I just keep thinking "PMO will sabotage me." Whether it's various scientific studies cited by NoFap, even if I'm not ACTUALLY experiencing the detriments of PMO (brain-fog, social anxiety, etc.) I'm ANTICIPATING that I'll suffer them, so I'm feeling them anyway, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I feel I cannot ask a girl out or really have a deep relationship as long as I'm addicted to PMO.

So I would like to ask you, if you could go back and talk to yourself the summer before your last year of college, what would you tell him? Because I am essentially at that point and I wish I could be where you're at.

 

I remember in college I met a holy attractive catholic girl that told me she didnt like it that guys lusted over her. that conversation changed my life for that year and I didnt MO for about 18 months. i always kept in touch with her and was fighting for her in my mind to be chaste. she was my motivation. after graduation, she and I stopped talking with each other and she became interested in other holy catholic men. That led to me asking my question in stressful times "why be pure?" for the past 3 years I have MOed every week. I cant break free. do you still keep in touch with the girl that you were talking to who motivated you to be pure? if not, where have you found your motivation to be pure in stressful, tempting occasions/moments? (ps love your jp2 qoute, jason evert mentions that all the time in his chastity talks)

 

I would like to add something to that if I may.
How we think and believe creates our internal reality and that in turn gets reflected in our outside world. This is the faith concept. We attract what we are or how we think.
So let's illustrate it on an example.

You see a girl so clean and pure and beutiful so you stop PMOing for her or in order to get her. This can never make you get that girl because your believe in yourself has not changed. Even though you stoped PMO, inside of yourself you do not believe you are pure and PMO free for ever. You are just pretending for a while so u can get that girl. But true purity attracts true purity.

So let's say you then decide to stop PMO for yourself.... In this instance you stop PMO and you start believing you are now PMO free and pure for ever and you do infact become clean and pure for ever. When that happens you will attract somebody clean and pure into your life becaues you are it yourself. We have to become ourself what we want in life.

If you want love, you have to become loving, if you want clean and trustworthly spouse you have to become clean and trustworthy yourself.

Now imagine u want a clean and pure and beutiful girl but u yourself are PMO img like crazy and sleeping around and not respecting your body and thinking that you are worth shit and that nobody loves you....then even if by some miracle way that girl came to your life .... She would leave you even faster.....But most likely you will attract another self masturbating, self hating individual in your life. You see that happening all around us. People end up with people who reflects their internal world. Drugs users hang up with drug users, Prostitutrs with prostitutes, poor with poor, criminals with criminals.

So if you truly become yourself what you wish other people were, then like attracts like.

And one more think, it is important to also evaluate and correct your self believes here. Do you believe you are worthly of that girl or deeply inside you see yourself as a looser, less of a human, scared of failure, scared to ask her for a date incase she rejects you.
Those beliefs also manifest themselves in our reality. So if you do become PMO free waking purity but at the same time you believe that nobody can love you ... ... do u get the idea?

You have to do the whole lot. Become yourself who you want to attract, and believe you are worthly of love and hapiness and that girl and it will happen. This is what true faith is all about. It is believing things in your heart, mind, soul and body and behaving as we already have what we want and are who we want to become.

 

This is beautiful. literally brought chills to my spine. thanks and a congratulations. Your story is inspiring.

Whenever I went into bad cycles of masturbation/porn.I literally stop praying (normally the first thing I do in the morning) and I realized I was literally turning away from God. Very simply when I pray, attend church, read scripture and really engage spiritually the desires for porn are not there. Its like having a clean suit on you don't want to roll around in filth.

 

@Chastity is joyful

Hello Mate,

Last things first. Thank you for that awesome quote from John Paul II.

I just want to say. When you close your laptop and start to spend more time offline, things definitely start to change...

I am trying now to be more offline than online and it works miracles with the anxiety.

Good Luck and God Bless!

 

Hello friend and thank you for sharing your story, it is very inspiring and helping, I will copy this part to my journal because you just got the point of my situation. Goodluck!

 

Been there done that, good luck bro you need all the luck for that long journey ^^

 

Yes. and re-enforce your reasons for quitting when you feel strong even if you feel you 'dont have to' - then you'll have the strength to fight when you're 'weak'

 

It is not about fighting our desires. Our desires are us so we can never win. Imagine hating your leg and desperately trying to get rid of if to the point of cutting it off.... This can never succed in making us happy but all it does it makes us suffer, be in constant misery because we are stuck with that leg. We spend years fighting with it and feeling exhausted .... and it never goes away. Eventualty we take a desperate attemp and decide to cut it off.....only to learn we are now .....disabled.

This is what happens to people on the emotional lever too. When you get a desire to PMO you need to understand that it is there to protect you from feeling your feelings. You are wounded inside and those shadow desires: MOing, PMOing or drinking .... are our coping mechanisms stoping us from feeling our emotions. People do not know it as long as they engage in those acts. It is only by removing our distruction that we learn this.

But then we also learn that we can not win a war against our leg or against our own feelings and desires as all those things are us! All we can do is to accept them as ours without acting out on them. All we can do is show them love and understanding. This is what is called integration. This is how we heal and learn to be self loving. When we accept and love who we are right now, paradox will happen... those things would disappear and stop causing us trouble. And we become wholesome and complete and integrated. The internal turmoil we created inside of us... the internal war .... will be no more there. All we will be left with is peace, and tranquility.

So it is not about fighting any part of us, those who do that continue to struggle with their addictions for years and are still fighting their desires while they are abstaining. It is all about learning self acceptance and self love. Those who learn how to love all parts of who they are... recover.

 

Yes, guarding your eyes is a must. Your eyes are the window to your soul and without guarding what goes in to your soul one can not succed. We are what we eat and we become what we see and engage in.

 

The whole post spoke to me actually, but the example you gave here really spoke to me. Being at ease with myself and my thoughts, realising that whilst I have them I don't have to act on them and knowing that one can handle temptations as they come along is the key to this IMO.

 

This is a beautiful journey! Reading it spoke and resonated volumes with me.

I have been obsessed about abstaining and regressing my thoughts and feelings and trying to suppress my urges for the past 3 years to defeat this addiction. Every time i reach some sort of level of success that i measure by day count i just end up falling backwards into pmo. I relapse and start all over again.

Every time i feel like its going to be the last time, 'this is it' and in the back of my mind i tell myself 'no, this isn't it... lets fall back to my vices'..

I have been stuck on a loop all this time because I've been avoiding making any real significant changes to my life to address my problems, concerns, fears and desires. For years i felt unworthy, unattractive, uninteresting, useless as an introvert person that's filled with anxiety, no real friends, and no real people that consider me their friend. Each time i set out on beating out specific habits that have negative impact on my life, i end up relapsing.. I feel like i am losing my time here on this planet and prolonging this journey more than i need to.. i lie to myself all the time..