when are you no longer an addict?

I will always be an addict even if I don't take part in those activities anymore.

I think recognizing how much a part porn played in your old self, and not wanting to go back there is the best strategy to stay clean.

Because I feel like I COULD relapse if I didnt resist with willpower, I am still an addict.

 

In my experience, you can come to such a state as you describe with your casino experience. In fact, I believe I pretty much have. It took many years though, lots of maturing and a lot of belief changing.

Regarding the main question, I guess it depends on your definition of addiction. There's a pretty good one out there (coming from addiction experts if memory serves) that makes harming one's self-interest despite ones will an integral part of the definition. If we're talking about that kind of definition then I guess addiction stops when you can gamble, drink, use porn, whatever, and be able to stop before it negatively influences your relationships, job, personal obligations, etc.

 

As a member of AA and NA, I have over two years sobriety of all abusive drugs. From experience in going to those groups I learned the saying, "once and addict, always an addict." This isnt meant to bring you down, you can control addictions but they can come back if you somehow lose control. There is no cure because you can easily fall back into the addiction. In essence an addict who has control over himself, this is my opinion/experience.

 

I think I will always be an addict. I never truly understood why a recovering alcoholic wouldn't be able to have just one drink ever again, but now I get it. There are so many times i've told myself, just one video or just 15 minutes, and then having it spiral into a many hours long binge session.

 

Holy crap man! That's some crazy change in chemistry right there!

 

That is excellent question. According to Indian philosophy of celebacy it is written that a sexual urge can never be fully controlled I mean fully controlled throughout life. You can suppress it by going to gym and trying plenty of other methods like that but if you want you never want to get trapped in this cycle you only need to eridate this force completely from your body and mind and that is the Most difficult task And generally spiritual seekers who wants to realise God chose this method.
For a general people like us where we don't want this force to get eliminated from our body completely and neither it is feasible for us to do so in order to live in this physical world we should stretch this time period to such an extent where it can no longer affect our brains negatively. Never say you are never going to fap again for life or watch any video for life because your are just lying yourself. All you can do is just try to control this energy by following some discipline and reduce its frequency at such a point where it is not dangerous for your body and to handle it.

 

I can wrap my head around you being digusted and even around you puking. I mean, after I watched porn after staying away from it for almost a year I literally shaked because of excitement akin to how I imagine a person in shock might shake after some trauma.

But the neurologists response I have a really hard time believing. First of all, I don't see why you experience would be anything else except a very sensitized response (due to long-term abstinance) to an intese stimuli. Similarly like you became sensitized with abstinance you could become desensitized to such imagery with exposure - like I have (second time I watched after the above mentioned experience I didn't shake).

What's even more ununderstandable to me is why a trained neurologist would say something like that. Almost like it's the most common thing for a person to develop a response that includes vomitting and extreme dizzyness due to watching people have sex. I have never read about anything like this happening to anybody (I've been reading NoFap blogs for about 5 years).

I realize I'm asking a lot - but can you provide any evidence for what you said? A doctors diagnosis report with censored out personal information would be awesome for example.

 

It may be important to remember that, while we can reboot and desensitise ourselves to imagery in P, many of us who become addicted to porn (and other behaviours like alcoholism) are more susceptible to addictions than the general population.

So, although we may quit PMO and free ourselves of the urges and issues we had previously, partaking in any addictive behaviours carries the risk of evolving into an addiction disorder- especially when we go through more challenging periods in our lives.

Everyone should feel free to experiment and find what feels most fulfilling for your own lives, but beware of the risks of experimentation.

 

The more you watch P, less interesting it becomes. In extreme cases (I was one of them) you can have ED even with hardcore P.

The opposite is true as well. Meaning, if you stay away from P for longer periods of time, it becomes more intense. If you only got of to hardcore P, after a couple of months of abstinance you might notice softcore P is as exciting to you as the hardcore stuff you used to watch before.

To take this into an extreme: if you stay away from P for a really long time, and then watch the most intense thing you can find, you reaction can be quite extreme (shaking, heart rate increase, feeling of dizzyness, etc.).

 

Sorry, I'm not following. What original question? What do you mean by "over throw your system checmically that you again want more"?

 

I have no urges to watch porn. In fact I’m utterly disgusted with how it’s impacted my life and feel confident for the foreseeable future that I will never watch it again (touch wood). However, one relapse sets me back in withdrawal so I think the addiction is there for life.

 

IMHO, to be "healed" means that you have set up new behaviour.
It is not enough to be just abstinent. you need to setup new lifestyle.

 

Ok. So what exactly did he say? "The test results have shown that porn has caused changes in your brain that made you vomit, dizzy and most likely incapable of watching porn ever again" seems unlikely.