It has been stated elsewhere that about 5% of PA's escape and move into recovery. I'm interested in a couple non-scientific questions that I hope will help us understand what we are up against. I would love to tie this poll to the next question which is "How long have you been trying to quit?", but not sure if that's possible, so I'll create that separately
I'm 55, and I bought my first porn magazines when I was a freshman in college (age 19). So I have been using porn 65% of my life.
I noticed that for me, the need for masterbation is tied in with something else: anxiety. It might be helpful to ask yourself the root any issues that might be motivating the addiction.
When I was little, used to try to figure out pieces of the scrambled pay-per-view channel at night while looking out for anyone who may see what I was doing. And that was like early middle school. Before that I had ran up a 1900 number bill on my Moms credit card, calling and listening at night while everyone was asleep. Family had settled on it must have been someone driving up and tapping our phone at night.
Started looking at porn when I was 11. I'll be 33 soon so that means 2/3 of my life has been damaged by porn. Hitting puberty right as the internet went mainstream was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I've been making attempts to quit for the past 8 years or so, but most of my attempts to quit were feeble to be honest.
@Real Life Survivor that's funny. Back before internet was fast enough to watch videos, I would do the same thing with the scrambled TV channels. We had a broken TV that had a non functioning power button. If you pressed it, it would turn the sound off on the TV but the image would stay on. The weird thing is, if you pressed it on a scrambled channel, the scrambling would stop where you pressed it. So I could literally wait for a split second that the image came unscrambled, hit the power button, and voila, unscrambled image in perpetuity. The sound didn't work, but shit, it was the only way to get porn videos at the time. With 56k dial up internet, taking up the entire household's phoneline for hours to download a 20 second video clip wasn't very practical, but waiting for my parents to go to sleep and using this trick seemed like a good solution. It's pretty astounding the amount of old memories coming back to me by revisiting my past and exploring how my life got to where it is with PMO.
I started porn 2 years ago, I've been jerking off to sex scenes ever since I was a boy. I remember one day I was going through my dad's DVD collection and came across a movie called Total Recall which started with a sex scene. That's where this addiction started. Sharon Stone was the chick that started it all. Funny enough, she cheats on the protagonist in the film, just like porn (and other soft-core stuff) cheated me of my childhood.
I worked out that it is less than half of my life (17 years out of 38). This is actually quite a positive thought for me. Unlike many here, mercifully, I did not discover porn until university and even then I only saw the odd scene at friends etc, didn't become a proper user myself until afterwards. However, I did discover masturbation quite young, and I used to enjoy lots of what would now be called porn subs - random pictures in (non porn) magazines, bits of pieces on television (especially music videos). My favourite thing to masturbate to as a teen was my imagination, which seems rather quaint now (not porn memories, of course, but random scenarios, people I knew, imagined situations).
From 16 to 37. Too long. I envy the really young nofappers, because they have discovered this so soon. Anyway it's never too late. I think that to give this power to the youngsters is an impressive contribution that we the older can do.