Challenging the inner critic voice.

good call.

Well done realizing that your inner critic (brain) is only trying to have you believe it so it can get the reward its craving!

By the way, 99.9% of the time, these voices belonged to one or more people when you were disciplined as a child. The sooner you realize that these voices are only other people talking, not absolute truths, the easier you'll dismiss the thoughts and regard them as irrelevant or stupid.

 

I was thinking about this in relation to my own porn addiction recently. It seems the porn-related material that I've spent the most time on has been chatrooms (where I could pretend to be someone I'm not to gain approval of other chat users) and forums (where I could post links to videos and so on to gain the approval of other forum members). When it came to downloading images or videos I didn't spend a lot of time doing it purely for myself, it was just finding things that would hopefully impress other people to share on message boards. For me that was a common denominator, and when I see this thread and think about my "inner critic", I realise that all this showing off and trying to share material was simply an attempt to make myself feel like I'm really "okay" after the inner critic tore me a new one.

This is why all those "I relapsed, I'm such a piece of shit" posts don't help.

Having identified the inner critic, the next step is to start to challenge some of those views. I suppose one thing I could try is journalling on "three things I did right today" at the end of each day. Along with "three things I'm grateful for". Even if I relapse, I could focus on the fact that I have successfully given up other sexual vices such as escorts and dodgy massage parlours. I'm sure there are things you did right, too.