Thank you all.

Hey community,

most of you don´t know this, but all of you recently helped me through the hardest time of my life and I want to begin this post with the most sincere Thank You I ever wrote.

Before getting hooked on P I never had a problem with excessive MOing aside from P so my main cause of this journey was and still is to abstain from P. As I already mentioned this forum and the stories posted here helped me to realize that I am not alone in this battle and they allowed me to see new perspectives when I didn´t know how to go on.

With this post I want to try to give some of this back. Without this forum, without all of you participating and sharing your thoughts and ideas I wouldn´t be able to experience my life the way I do now.

Thank you all for helping me save myself.

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My motivation (or better late than never):

In my childhood I always saw myself as to “soft”. I was one of the nerdy kids at school, not very popular, not very talented in sports but with a huge interest in literature and music and first and foremost with the best group of friends I could have wished for. I was shy, not very confident and when I fell in love with a girl I always really meant it. Love for me was something huge and mysterious and I never wanted to chase girls just for meaningless intercourse. As we grew up my friends would often smile at me because of my somehow old-fashioned, romantic perspectives but they accepted and supported me. We grew older and while my friends started to fall in and out of love, had relationships and made their experience; it took me longer to grow out of my shyness. With about 16 or 17 me and my friends all changed to a new school together (lucky coincidence). Starting in a new class with new people turned out to be pretty good for me. Somehow I managed to just be myself whenever and wherever I was and I didn´t even bother to act any other way - and my new classmates not only accepted me, they liked me. It was the first time that I went to school (or any other group activity) with a smile on my face. The next three years should become the best years of my young life. Life was good, small talking with my classmates, dropping stupid jokes with my friends and making plans for the weekend filled me with joy and excitement. I could cope with stress and sorrows in easy, natural and healthy ways without over thinking. Everything was fine.

During this time I also fell in love with one of the girls at school, like really seriously in love. But while I was so amazed with the recent change in my life, so busy with enjoying this joyful and exciting days of feeling fully aware of myself, I still wasn´t confident enough to talk to her. My friends understood more of what was going on and looking back now I have to admit that they were right when they didn´t stop telling me that she liked me also. It must have been really obvious. Still I didn´t see it then, always thinking she was too good, too smart and too beautiful for me anyways and so I spend my days seeing myself as the unlucky romantic nerd.

I mention this because I remember the emotional intensity of those years as the last true and unfiltered feelings I had for the next 7 - 10 years. The fun and enjoyment of the weekends, the feeling of social connectivity with my friends and classmates, the uplifting, pure feeling of being in love and the bittersweet hopelessness of thinking it could never work out - I´ve never felt so alive since then.

Somewhere around that time P came into my life.

Over the last 7 - 10 years my life became increasingly miserable. I´ve always been a very passionate and emotional guy but since my late youth all the things I once loved, all the moments and memories that once reminded me that life was a wonderful and exciting adventure, seemed to lose their magic. Everything I did seemed small, unimportant and meaningless to me. I grew emotionally cold, nearly unable to feel anything positive at all. Most feelings, be it joy or relaxation, empathy or satisfaction and even some negative feelings did just vanish from my perception or got so mixed up with depressed thoughts that I couldn´t identify them anymore. At the same time I started to over think every sorrow, no matter how small and felt overwhelmed quickly even by the easiest tasks. I suffered from insomnia and migraine and I became totally indifferent to my surroundings until I even lost the feeling of connection and affection to my closest friends (although they didn´t). It was like living under a dome of glass - I could see life go on around me, but I just didn´t want to participate and even if I did I couldn´t find a way to push through.

The next part for me is very difficult to describe, as it was very hard for me to understand it… While my inner feelings slowly died away, I was still functioning on the outside. I did my job (with very minimalistic effort but still), reached my career goals (which weren´t very high) and so on and I managed to play my role perfectly since no one seemed to notice that something was wrong with me. So while I managed to keep my life running, I became more and more depressive and hopeless and this finally changed my behavior for the worse. I became arrogant, cynical and cold - quite the exact opposite of my natural personality. As P had always been treated as something between taboo and normality it never occurred to me that consuming it could be any damage. Everyone did it, at least that seemed to be the social consent and as I didn´t experience any big hits like losing my job or anything similar I never realized what I was doing to myself. While I grew older and moved away from my parents’ house, my P consumption increased drastically and soon I was using every day, sometimes multiple times. It still never occurred to me that this could be connected to my growing depressions. I just thought that was how growing up felt like: at some point or the other life would lose it´s magic and you would just have to keep functioning. I carried on, barely pulling myself through every single day.

It was June 2018 when something finally seemed to awake inside my P-numbed synapses. Somehow while doing some researches for my work I stumbled upon a psychological disorder called Depersonalization, which is described as a state of isolation from your own feelings, body and surroundings. Much of what I read about it seemed to explain my misery and I realized that how I felt might just not be normal. My misery now had a name and I always believed that a problem you can name is a problem you can solve. So I started to inform myself about Depersonalization and possible ways of therapy and for a few days just feeling the slightest amount of hope lifted my mood higher than it had been for years.

From there on it didn´t take long until I made another realization: depersonalization was a symptom but it was not the cause of my misery. An article I read somewhere along the web listed possible causes of depersonalization - one of it being P addiction. As I read the words I immediately knew that I had found the cause of my suffering. It was as if an illusion faded away. I saw myself confronted with the frightening truth about my misery. I was an addict.

The Fight (insert Rocky-Theme here):

As soon as I started to inform myself about my addiction, I began to write a new diary. In my youth writing always helped me to structure the complexity of my thoughts and feelings and I hoped that I would be able to use this resource again. It took a while until I was able to enjoy it - writing requires concentration and I wasn´t used to concentrate on anything for longer than a few minutes anymore - but as I decided to just be absolutely, brutally honest with myself without holding anything back, the words just started to flow. I wrote every day, sometimes only half a page, sometimes up to eight or even ten pages and I didn´t even read most of it until today. Just writing it down helped me to structure my inner processes and often brought me to further realizations when I felt confused and overwhelmed. Writing helped me to learn to listen to myself again - not only to my thoughts but even more important to my emotions. It became my daily routine, a protocol of my daily thoughts and experiences in this fight. Until today I must have written about 150 pages.

Even with writing as a reliable tool I was still alone with my addiction. I knew too little about the nature of my problem and the term itself scared me - “addiction”. So I started to research. I wanted to understand how the addiction worked and how it affected me. I needed this knowledge to be able to design a plan to fight back. That´s when I found this forum.

I started my first try of 90 days without P end of June 2018 and I remember how I felt at that time: I understood that P damaged my brain and I understood that I needed a reboot - but I still told myself that after a successful reboot I could come back and use P, only without the negative effects. P was so deeply stuck in my brain, connected and associated with seemingly positive feelings and arousal, that I couldn´t imagine to spend a lifetime without it. It will not surprise you that in my first 2 or 3 months of trying my streaks were accordingly short. I wasn´t able to stay away from P for longer than 5 days and I felt like shit after every single relapse.

But even with all the frustration I was in the mood for setting goals anyway and I decided to lose some weight too. I started to go to the gym again and promised myself that by the end of 2018 I would have lost about 40 pounds. The first few weeks of going to the gym were terrible, I hated it. I always looked for reasons not go, made up excuses… I was a pitiful lazy idiot.

The more time I spend reading in this forum and writing in my diary, confronting myself and reflecting my own behavior, the better I understood how insidious this addiction really is. For as long as you keep any door or window of your mind even the slightest bit open, the addiction won´t hesitate to break through again with all it´s horrible force. It will lie to you, it will lead you to make up excuses, it will feed you illusions and it will at times make you think that you didn´t even feel that bad before and that you could go back to your old behavior without danger.

Someday I´ve finally had enough. Enough of my lame-ass excuses for not going to the gym, enough of not being able to look into my own eyes in the mirror, enough of everything. The few times I actually had gone to the gym were wasted effort because I did not lose the slightest bit of weight due to the irregularity. I was angry and this anger led me to a pretty radical decision: I wanted results and I wanted them immediately. I needed to feel something changing because otherwise I would just lose my mind. The next day I started to go to the gym 5 days a week no matter what. No excuses, no laziness. I told myself to shut up and show some discipline and suddenly I did. It still was difficult; I still had to force myself with all the willpower I could bring up. But it didn´t take long until the first results appeared. I started to lose weight, my endurance improved, my body changed - and with it so did my self-esteem. Slowly two things happened in my brain: First I realized that the proud feeling of successfully forcing myself to do something that requires an effort worked indeed as a source of satisfaction (and due to that helped me to reprogram the reward pathways of my brain). And secondly I started to believe that if I could make progress in the gym, I could also make progress with getting rid of my addiction and started to transfer my newfound confidence into this challenge as well.

It was about the same time, when I also managed my first longer streak of abstinence. I fought 45 days against heavy urges, going through my first flat line and phases of heavy depression and anxiety. I was unbelievably happy at times because in those weeks of abstinence I started to feel minimal moments of pure, immediate emotions now and then. The dome of glass seemed to shatter slowly. I just couldn´t believe it. Suddenly the memories of my “good old days” didn´t feel like a dream anymore. They seemed realistic and reachable and I longed to always feel that way. I was proud, something I didn´t feel for a long, long time and I began to respect myself again.

And then, when my mood started to get better and better and I started to feel relatively safe - I relapsed.

It was due to a heavy workload at the job, stress and being alone without plans for a weekend and it was due to lowering my guard. I never felt so sad and disappointed. I hated myself and still I couldn´t stop. I spent the next three days consuming P over and over again, feeling absolutely devastated, before I finally managed to regain a minimum of will to retry the 90-day-challenge. But the chaser effect got it´s grip on me and the following months were a constant rollercoaster ride of try and error. My mood was bad, I was depressed and somewhere deep inside my mind there was a calm and cold voice whispering that I would never make it out of this misery and that this addiction would finally kill me. And the most terrible part was, that death didn´t even sound that scary after all.

Somehow I got back up. I don´t know how but I managed to keep up my routine of writing diary and reading in this forum everyday and I even kept going to the gym. I told myself to trust the process, to shut out every other thought and only focus on the two aims I had set for myself. I repeated this over and over and over again and I wanted to erase every other thought in my head because I was scared of where they might lead me. Trust the process, trust the process, trust the process. Somehow this was my parachute. It kept me from breaking apart, from losing all hope and I managed to gather the strength to try again. Trust the process became a mantra for me in those days and as I had experienced the lows of a P relapse so often now I had finally understood that to reach a happy, enjoyable life, P could never be a part of it again. In November 2018 I started my current streak, which hits Day 90 exactly today (and until today I have lost 42 pounds of weight by the way). I did face all the symptoms of withdrawal again and still do but due to my routines and the precious, upright and helpful advices from this community (this one goes out to you @Todor!) I did not break again.

The retrospective (Objects in the Mirror are closer then they appear):

I intentionally tried to keep my story in a somewhat readable length. This might evoke the impression that this fight was straight forward and the downs and relapses were only short moments of weakness. That´s wrong. Although I referred to willpower and discipline in my description, these alone would not have brought me here. Every addiction has to be treated as a serious and often fatal disease. We are not weak, we infected ourselves just as one would infect himself with a cold in winter. Suffering from this addiction is not your fault alone and you don´t have to make it out of it without help. There are wonderful people in this forum that can help you, there are articles and books about it in the web and there are professional therapists who can aid you. Yes, you are addicted. No, this is not the end of anything. If you can name your problem, you can solve it.

It took me about half a year to identify my problem, to realize its dimensions and to collect the knowledge and motivation to start the fight. The addiction tricked me with illusions of safety, hit me with heavy, brutal urges and dismantled my self-esteem and confidence until I nearly lost every hope. I went through flat lines, through terrible depressive downs, through clinging, tormenting anxiety and through moments, days, weeks and months of deepest disappointment in myself, of anger, self-hate and sadness. Not to mention the last ten years of a terribly numb and cold emotional emptiness that would most probably have led me into an even more dangerous mindset soon.
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Here are the major benefits I experienced (and look forward to amplify further):

- Increased self-esteem and confidence, self-respect and trust in my own capabilities.
This is absolutely true. Not only did I feel how the addiction kept my self-esteem low and how the nagging voice inside me did stop to feed me thoughts of self-doubt, I could feel my respect for myself grow with every day I continued to fight the urges. Maintaining eye-contact is much easier now, almost normal and when I meet a girl I can talk and joke without ulterior motives. Conversations seem to be more interesting; Smalltalk is no longer scaring me and socializing with strangers even feels relaxing at times.



- Freedom of Thoughts / No More F*cking Brain Fog.

Before my 90 days I would rarely spent more than two minutes without sexual thoughts, without thinking about or imagining P. Though I would still rationally know that women are equal human beings I would often imagine them as pure objects of sexuality. While talking to a female I would not be able to focus on anything but imagining P scenes with her. Now all this is gone. I rarely think about M or P throughout the day, being able to stop those thoughts whenever they appear. My head feels lighter, clearer and the Brain Fog that choked me for the last decade of my life is gone. My memory is also better and I seem to be cognitively much more efficient.



- True Emotions.
It´s often in the smallest moments where I happen to feel this the most and sometimes I am not far from breaking out in tears of luck when I realize it. Talking and joking with friends or socializing with strangers feels interesting and positive, reading books tends to fascinate me again as it did when I was a child, listening to my favorite music gives me shivers. The magic and excitement of life itself seems to come back, emotions feel immediate, intense and natural. The periods of emptiness and depression that dominated my life become rarer and feel much less heavy. I feel alive again.
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From my experience I can say that it is indeed possible to experience life in its natural intensity again and that the “superpowers” that are often mentioned in this forum are real although I see them more as a recovery of my normal state of existence, the state I had before the addiction got its grip on me.

Still I want to highlight that the 90-day-challenge is nothing more than the beginning, the first step-stone of a lifetime without P. Those 90-days helped me to understand the addiction and to experience the highs and lows of fighting it. I for myself know that this fight is not over and I will continue to count my days of abstinence so I can celebrate when I reach my next aim, a full year without P.

An addiction is like a severe wound. It might heal but it will always leave a scar and if you scratch the bruised spot you will easily tear it open again.

 

Thank you. I am aware that I´ve still got a way to go, but reading that some part of my experience did help you go further definitely pushes my motivation.

Thank you for your kind words and the reminder to stay humble. You are absolutely right and I will not let my euphoria and pride distract me from the fact that 90 days without were just the beginning.

I can relate to that, I´ve been there for far too long too. For me it always felt like a massive weight holding my motivation and energy down. It took me long until I realized that the only way out of depressive procrastination is just to start and do the things that lead us in the direction we want to go. This sounds oddly contradictory but it is my experience and I am sure you will also make it! Stay strong, brother.

Thanks, mate. During my initial journey the succes stories of others were a big support and gave me hope. It felt mandatory to try and give some of it back and I´m glad if I were able to do so.

I appreciate it, thank you very much.

Thank you for the kind words. Keeps up my mood and motivation to go on. Wishing you all the best for your own goals too!

Thanks, brother!