Story of my porn addiction - sex abuse and mental illness

It's very brave of you to share this background. I was just getting ready to make a similar thread, but more broadly a topic about what our underlying psychological ailments may be that lead us to porn addiction. I am from a similarly dysfunctional family, but I'm still picking up the pieces of how it all fits together. Incest pornography and homosexual pornography have been pasttimes of mine, likely related to my abusive childhood. I don't remember much of it because I was taken by social services at 10 years old. I've also had a few homosexual experiences. I've also spent a lot of time bragging about all my heterosexual experiences to show straight I am. I once punched a man I had previously had sex with for being gay. I also hit him on the head with a rolled up newspaper and said "No! Bad! Don't be gay!" as if he were a dog. I found that really funny. So yeah, not a pretty picture here, but I've gotten better.

But I was just reading this article:
http://www.fathersforlife.org/dale/childhood_of_homosexual_men_3.htm

It says, in short, that 70% of gay men were "sissified" by their mothers, through covert incest. A lot of the things described there happened between me and my mother. There have also been whispers of some kind of covert incest between my father and sister, but I don't remember any of that. One caveat, though, is that I think we each have to take responsibility for our own actions. The media is poisoning us with constant images of glorified sexual violence, and the whole of society is slipping into moral decay. But we make our decisions and we live with the consequences of our decisions. Watching porn does have consequences. Your slime sticks to you all day and everyone you encounter thinks "eww I bet that guy was just watching incest porn." So quitting is a good start, but I also think it's important to probe into our psychologies to find out what caused this problem for us in the first place.

The basic view of the medical community is that we're born blank states and we learn our sexuality growing up. The early experiences of our lives become the most deeply ingrained. If you weren't raised in a normal home, you don't have a normal life. When parents reach out to their children to fill emotional gaps that should be between them and their spouse, they screw their kids up. This kind of abuse can happen with only innocent physical contact, but it's still reflective of a sexual interest. Covert incest is a rather common phenomena, so don't feel alone, because most people's parents messed them up in some way or another.

Another issue I had was that apparently I was autistic my entire life, and no one bothered to tell me until I ran into people experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. The root of autism is being unable to tell how other people feel, and so whatever you do you can't connect with other people emotionally. Anybody who thinks that their porn habits are secret is wrong: other people can get a feeling about you that you're a porn addict. You have no secrets. Taking ecstasy will "cure" autism, but it's a bumpy ride, and I made it eventually. I'm not recommending it. If anyone had just told me I was autistic, I would have sought conventional therapy, but instead everyone was just sneaking around with their sly suggestive speech that was incomprehensible to me. I kinda loathe the people who gave me those drugs, without explaining what they were for, and left me stranded emotionally, having no idea what was going on. I guess I'm glad to be able to form emotional connections now, though. Scholars say that autistic people are drawn to pornography because the computer world is one that can be controlled easily. The computer doesn't talk back. Autistic people get upset in social situations because they don't know what they're supposed to be doing, and get confused and angry when people act rudely towards them, for reasons beyond their understanding. The first few dates I had after I learned how to experience human emotions were awful. I got punched on a few of them. A lot of screaming and fighting. But you get better at it, the more you try.

The psychonauts, the people experimenting with hallucinogens, hold that all of the hallucinations you experience are unresolved psychological problems bubbling to the surface. So the other reason I left my group of friends is that all my inner darkness was constantly bursting into our circles. They're all like "hey man come back we forgive you it's for healing bro" and I just don't even want to bother. It's humiliating. Because I'd spent my life trying to be a good guy despite having been abused, but it's something that sticks with you whatever you do.

I have broken out of the cycle of shame and addiction, by just working through the issue really hard. What really needs to sink in is why incest and abuse are so wrong, and how fantasizing about them glorifies what is really wrong. It's like when you're a with a woman and you're getting "naughty" because it's fun to break away from proper decorum. You had to sit through that whole date kissing her hand and telling her she's beautiful, and now's your chance to be a little rude to her. But incest is wrong-wrong, not fun-wrong, and you don't have to look any further than the shattered lives of the victims to see that. I've spent a lot of time talking to strippers, hugging them, and apologizing for what their dads and uncles did to them. (Yet also getting lap dances. :/) It's very common among sex workers to have been abused. Even just living in a household where abuse is present is enough to scar you for life. So you have to let that sink far in that it's deeply morally wrong, so that you really feel that there's nothing appealing about it at all. Hurting other people is not fun. Polluting the world is not fun.

Feeling like a creep, like you're some social "other," the enemy in the world, that women would not want to marry you because you'll bring your evil creepness into their lives, and listening to mainstream psychology all paint a portrait to you that you're broken and you can't change. It's not true. There's nothing binding you to a life stuck in front of a computer crying. We're just the next generation of people who are trapped in a cycle of violence that's been running between men and women since the very beginning.

So are you a gay? Let's stop attaching labels to ourselves and to others. Nobody is inherently anything. There are a lot of things that cause men to choose the gay life, and I believe it's their right to choose that life. But I don't believe in the sexual orientation model from psychology. The DSM is just a long list of labels to attach to "weird" people in an attempt to make them less weird. Anything that happens between two or more consenting adults is fine. This even includes acting out incest fantasies, though not actual incest. Just because you have gay experiences doesn't mean that's who you are. We're all growing and changing all the time. Tomorrow, you might be more gay, the next day less gay.

I used to feel really guilty about the kinds of things I would do to women when I was with them, like I was a monster, even though they were like "no babe it's fine" because I couldn't see in what sense what I was doing to them was an expression of love. But I think such things have a healing effect, and I think they allowed it because they loved me. I'm not haunted by demons any more. It took a long time, and there's a lot of people out there who still remember me as a weird creep, but for the rest of my life, I'll be promoting good things. I'm only sweet with my fiancee, and I don't want to do anything else any more. Darkness doesn't have a hold on me, and I'm not going to let it, because when I have kids, I want to raise them to be healthy and happy. Now that I'm a normal, I'll even publicly shun the weirdos with the rest of them, to avoid letting their weirdness infest my life. So don't wait around for a forgiving utopia to solve your problems for you. While there's a sense that we're victims, it's still up to us as individuals to find our way out.

 

There's something else we have in common. I had a difficult time getting physical with my fiancee for a while, but it's primarily because of trust issues. A few of the women in my life messed with my head so much that I have a hard time cutting loose. Like you're saying with the OCD, whenever I was out on the dating scene, everything a woman said to me I was thinking "is this some sort of trick you're trying to play on me..." Something to that effect. One former girlfriend just completely gas-lighted me into oblivion a few years ago, and I was already beat before I met her. But eventually, my lady gained my trust, and I can cut loose and enjoy my time with her. She's incredibly sensitive towards my needs, and it's so great to be with her, because so many other women I met were offended by thought that I should have emotional needs. Some of them called me gay or said that I act like a woman, even. It was more that I'd realized by then if a woman wasn't going to care about me, I wasn't going to waste time on her, because my head had already been screwed with enough. So these ladies would start playing some emotional game with me, and I'd just walk away, which is infuriating to them. But I'm glad I held my ground, because I finally found a woman who really cares about me, doesn't stress me out and annoy me on purpose, and da da da. The other great thing about my lady is that she doesn't stress me when I fail. She's a little condescending, like "well, now, that was a good try. You get an 'A' for effort. Now let's think of sexy things we can do that are actually sexy." But it's all in good fun.

 

Interesting. Unfortunately I have also experiences with personality disorders, though not so extreme.

Keep up the good work!

An extreme from of meditation, rewiring your brain at a very deep level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg

A book by a top psychologist - what you can change and what you cannot:

http://www.amazon.com/What-You-Change-Cant-Self-Improvement/dp/1400078407

My view: you can change almost anything but sometimes the tools must be extreme.

 

Hey Guys

I just want to say how helpful reading this was for me. I got stuck on incest erotica when I was 14. The guilt this caused sent me into a deep depression that lasted until I was 19. At 16 I blocked out the erotica, but the guilt stuck around. Until today I honestly thought I was the only one on this website with that sort of experience. What brought me here to this website is that I recently relapsed into the incest stuff again, and I realised it would be best to quit porn altogether.

My sister was also sexually abused (but not by anyone in our family). My parents are both loving and kind. So I really don't understand where this fetish came from. Also I have noraml sexual fantasies too. It just seems that this is something that haunts me.

 

Some of the people here had really extreme experienced but by hard work and God's grace they got out of it. One story seen from two sides I find most fascinating:

http://www.nofap.org/forum/showthread.php?21350-My-Journey-My-Success
http://www.nofap.org/forum/showthread.php?21354-Seen-From-the-Other-Side

 

these posts helped me a lot. I thought I was the only one with deep issues. my parents were divorced when I was a year old which isn't a huge deal but . when I was 11 or 12 I had homosexual encounters with my step brother b4 I could actually ejaculate. there were other homosexual experiences in my life too. one with my younger cousin that made me feel borderline suicidal after that. I stopped doing that and moved on. but the porn always controlled me. my dad was addicted to porn and I always had access to it so I always watched it. my dad recently passed away died from fibrosis of the lungs scarring of the tissue. while gathering all his porn I found a bottle which I discovered to be poppers. for those who don't know poppers are inhalants used to create euphoria among other things and once hooked on them its hard to kick the habbit. poppers are pretty much nail polish remover it literally says that on the bottle. and that damages your lungs. My dad's birthday was 5/28 and in Mathew 5:28 it says" but I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" that really hit home for me that god knew and I wasn't alone. I've watched just about every type of porn out there. then I started dating and becoming sexually active and the ED started. my ex girlfriend never really knew the extent of the issue but I didn't feel like she was worth the shame of explaining everything. my girlfriend now I've told everything . she and I are Christians her being much longer committed than I. but without god and friends/this website i'd be way less aware of the severity of this issue. I want to have kids someday and be able to give them a nice solid pure home life so they don't become corrupt like I was. thank you everyone on here !!
also my parents were divorced when I was a year old .