Post published by hillmountain

I'm a Catholic guy, with a former severe addiction(like hours upon hours daily, and inability to quit even for a single day), who has successfully ditched this pmo trash for 3+ months now.... The things that helped me the most were....
1. Becoming serious about my faith, trying to place God as the top priority in my life, cultivating correct thoughts about sex, women etc..
2. Going to confession, regular mass, saying the rosary daily with my family, etc
3. Posting in this forum... Initially, this forum served as a good crutch to divert my thoughts whenever I was tempted, and to refocus that I am meant to avoid pmo, not move toward it...
4. The great mercy and Love of God towards me, his sinful child..
5. Some non religious things..

Today, I saw a triggering image (vanilla one) while surfing the net, and was interested in it... I looked further, and then stopped after reminding myself that this is not how God (the Creator of sex) meant for me to use my sexual desire....

The good thing was that almost instantly the temptation died out.... In my starting days (when I had just quit pmo for about 3 or 5 days etc) temptation would be nearly unbearable, last for hours even if I resisted the temptation, and it would result in a full blown relapse, and probably days of a binge.... Now, it's extremely small...

As a man, God created me to be attracted to the female form.... This is a good thing only if we use it in the way God meant for it to be used... These sexual thoughts are meant to strengthen the unbreakable bond between spouses even closer and also to give them the gift of becoming parents also... Porn and related things, which is a base perversion of our God given sex drive, just misleads us sexually, emotionally and spiritually and restricts us from becoming true and holy men of God...

So everyone will have to be prepared to say no to temptation...... Even if I don't become tempted to watch porn at all in future (which is very likely, consideringthat now I hardly think of porn and today's small temptation was an anomaly in the past few months), there may be temptation in some other form.... I may be tempted towards anger, pride, laziness, lust towards a real woman (who is not my wife) etc.... Better to focus on becoming pure and resisting evil, because we are weak humans who are strong with God's help....



Another important point to overcoming pmo (and any other addiction) in the long term, is to also overcome any side addictions you might have, like excessive online gaming or browsing the net excessively, or bingeing on non sexual movies.... Such things can be actually helpful in the early stages of quitting porn, as they can divert the mind from wanting to pmo, but as you become stronger against pmo, and put months behind you, such things must be greatly reduced, in order to remove minor tendencies towards addiction...


Minor addictions, like excessive gaming etc.. in the long term, can actually retard you from becoming fully free of porn and extremely happy... So while you can use them in the short term, ditch them in the long term....