Porn is harmful and is a supper addictive.

You should know, all of the models in porn have had a very rough life and are abused by the porn producers. They're also forced to take a multitude of drugs (to prevent pregnancy and beat sexual exhaustion) When you watch porn, you support the porn producers who are responsible for this. Imagine the parents of all the porn stars. They would be utterly ashamed of themselves and their children. So not only is porn destroying us, It's destroying the porn stars too.

 

I think most of us here have attention deficit disorder. I wish you wrote it with separate paragraphs, seriously its so hard to read.

 

There are some sites out there that are not exploitative. Myself and my wife used to look at them together - no producers just people sharing real life passion because they want to. The founder, Cindy Gallop, did a TED talk on it. Seems like a healthier way to view it if that works for you.

 

First of all, well done for expressing your thoughts. Total honesty is an important step towards any kind of healing. The reason I quoted the particular sentence above, is that I want to tell you this is how they hook the males of our species. Porn offers the ultimate desire of the male brain which is .... novelty. Something new. Exciting. Different.

Women generally are not like this, preferring stability, and tenderness in their relationships. However, these same models and actresses certainly understand how novelty appeals to the male psyche, and thus they benefit from it, in a sense.

Anyway, the reason I point this out, is that, for the addict, it is important to realize that this search for something new, is a bottomless pit. It NEVER ends. The feeling of being out of control comes from the realization that we can never see all the P which is out there, we can never experience all the virtual females who present themselves, we can never have every possible sexual situation which our fantasies (enabled by P) can visualize.

So, in my opinion, recovery from P addiction starts with realizing the emptiness of this never-ending cycle. It will eat you up, it will exhaust your energy, it will destroy your soul - simply because it has no end to it. Realizing this is power. It means you can transcend it, you can stop it in its tracks, you can say "This is a pointless endeavor. like a cat chasing its own tail, and thus, I'm DONE with it."

 

I am glad my thoughts may be helpful. Let me add one thing, about how this process works to drag us down over time. It is a well-known phenomenon called "escalation". What happens is, as we keep searching for that next new thrill, we slowly get numb to what originally we responded to. It's like a drug you build a tolerance to, so that after awhile you need a higher dose, or a different drug altogether to get the same feeling.

This is why you can start out looking at typical "vanilla" P, and over time, sometimes just in a single night, end up looking at very graphic, deviant, even disturbing kinds of P. Have you ever had the experience, after a binge, where you're asking yourself "What was I just looking at? I was never interested in that before, what am I doing?" This kind of experience is an indication of escalation, because it is clearly an effect of novelty wearing off, and our brains' attempt to regain it by steering us into new, more fetishistic preferences. (Btw this is how there ends up being such ridiculous amounts of strange P varieties out there on the internet.)

This problem make the whole routine even worse, since it's not just a circle, it becomes a spiral downwards. I've certainly experienced this myself, which is how I came to try nofap. I asked myself "What am I looking at, this isn't the real me, how did I get here, where will it stop, how far down must I fall, is there a bottom?" It's troubling to realize that what you thought was a harmless vice, is actually snowballing into a self-reinforcing addiction that is actually changing you, rewiring your brain to seek out ever more extreme content. This can lead to very dark areas, many of us have experienced this.

There is good news though, very good news - this effect is reversible. When we abstain from P, we give our minds a chance to reset back to our natural, core preferences and desires. Alot of those strange preoccupations start to fade as we return to who we really are, what we really want from life, what we really find attractive about women as people (not just pictures), etc. We realize that much of what we were doing, wasn't really "us", it was simply artificial ideas we picked up due to chronic, repeated exposure to P, and when we turn away from it, they start to fall away too. We start walking back "up" the spiral, back to our true selves. Trust me I've experienced this myself and many others have too, and so can you. To be successful we must see with clarity how the process works so we can step outside of it and avoid the traps that got us into trouble in the first place. But it is doable, healing is possible, a brighter future is there if we have the courage and determination to keep walking towards it.

 

This really spoke to me. No sense in traveling down a path with no destination