Road to recovery.

Time really flies. It was almost a month ago when I made my first thread here. In that one month the best I was able to do was an 8 day streak that started on the first, but yesterday and today the relapses hit me hard. It was strange because I thought that i would be constantly feeling urges but i wasn't. but then out of nowhere urges hit me like a freaking truck.

Even though I haven't been able to get a good streak going, I am looking at the positive side of things, and between when i started recording in a journal on the 6th of September all the way to now. I have gone 26 days (not consecutive) without pmo with a 8 being my second greatest streak since my first streak of 11 days a few months back before i started recording it. So just in case anyone may think it is impossible, I did too, I'm a porn addict of 10+ years and if you would have told me a year, no 6 months ago that giving up porn and masturbation was possible, I would have laughed and not believed you.

As much as I don't want to make wall of text thread. I am willing to tell my little story if it means it will help me, or even better help someone else as well.

I dont know how it got to this point. porn and fapping every night for over a decade. Until only recently I have never been depressed and my home life has always been great. even though i was always porning and fapping, i was able to get my schoolwork done and pass with good grades so it was never a hindrance, so I never thought it was an issue. "Oh it feels good and aint hurting nobody so why stop?"

Last year at my job I developed romantic feelings for my co-worker. I was never really planing on looking for love, i just wanted this little job to give me experience to find a better one and that's it. I thought it was just a silly crush and it would end soon. She has been with her BF for 10 years so I knew there was no hope for us being couple, yet at the same time, it caused me to be depressed. Fast forward to March of this year and the shop we worked in closed but we still remained friends. In June during a session of nightly pmo, the porn just wasn't doing it for me, but the moment I fantasized about doing it with my friend, instant orgasm. I did not feel good as I usually did. I felt so bad that for a small moment, the friend who has been so kind and sweet to me I thought of as nothing more than a sex object. After this, I knew I had to quit.

Since then, I told her how I felt about her (not the lusting) and she has been really cool and treats it as if I never told her anything and we are still friends, we have been hanging out and seeing her as a friend and not a love interest really helps. But I admit it is still difficult. Just the other night I went and watched some porn and ruined my 8 day streak because the feeling of unrequited love got to me hard and i needed way to escape. Because she is Asian i believe it made me develop an Asian porn fetish and I'm probably using that as a way to fill the void of something I know i can never have.

With all of this. I do believe that one day this porn addiction will be over, one day I will see her as the wonderful friend she is and not a love interest. I know it is possible, but I suppose all the years of instant gratification has left me impatient.

 

I've heard it before but I do believe it is the most important piece of advice, urges come and they go.

I have not learned everything yet but after a lot of time on this forum looking at stuff and on youtube I have learned this. I hope this can also help others.

Urges may come and go but it is the triggers that makes the urges appear. Identifying triggers is very important. For me my most noticeable triggers have been thinking about unrequited love and boredom. If an urge does come, you really have to find something immediately to do to get your mind off of it, for me it is video games and chores. Also sometimes just being on the computer can sometimes make me think... "well youtube is fun, but inst pornhub better" and if that happens just try and get away from is as fast as possible. I do not believe this is a really big trigger for me but ever since I've been unemployed I have been finding it difficult to find a good job. On one occasion i did get depressed over it which lead to a relapse.

While it is not technically porn, because of a newly acquired fetish for Asian chicks, I liked God knows how many pages on facebook that post pics of cute girls all the time, and although it wont be as much as porn I found out that it does release some dopamine which will probably end up me wanting me to get a bigger fix with full on pornography. i unfollowed them and if anyone has stuff on social media that can act as triggers, consider doing that too. (biggest mistake I made was following a pornstar on instagram hahaha)

Now I know there is all this talk about nofap super powers which admittedly kinda drew me into it more with some talk about nofap makes getting girls easier. I will admit that i get social anxiety around anyone who isn't my friend or an acquaintance, but i do not know if that is my personality or just a side effect of years of pmo. While I am skeptical about these, a friend of mine mentioned that I seemed much more focused than I usually am and this was on the 7th day of abstaining from pmo.

 

I would make an edit but I believe this warrants its own post. I discovered that I have the most trouble dealing with night or early morning urges. While I can go to sleep fine for the most part, I have found that on a few occasions I have been waking up early in the AM hours with massive pmo urges, and those are when I give in. Now even though i have ways to distract myself when urges come, these are the most troubling because I am in bed and i seem to have just enough energy to fap but not enough to get up and find a way to distract myself. If anyone else knows of a good way to combat this, I would love to hear them.

 

Goals? hard to say. The thing is because porn never really hindered me, I dont have really have a reason like you to get myself motivated.

I do feel bad that pmo caused me to view my friend as a sex object but to be honest im just curious, I have never known a life without pmo. I really want to see how I will be as a person if im not spending all my nights on pornhub and fapping myself to sleep. It is starting to bother me that this addiction has some control over me.

As for goals in life, at the moment I just want to land a good entry-level paralegal, legal assistant, legal aide job and work my way up, but finding one has been difficult and the few interviews I had were not fruitful. I'm curious if the nofap thing can really help improve people's confidence.