Need Advice

Here's what I have done...hate it. Hate PMO. Hate everything about it. Hate where it takes you. Hate how it makes you feel. Hate what it does to you. Hate the way it controls you. Hate it. And from hating it learn to love yourself. And then love yourself more than you hate PMO.

Also learn to count your gains, not your losses. List everything that pmo robs from you. Time, passions, relationships, money. List them all out. Then list out what you gain by cutting it out.

Only by internal changes can we beat this. I haven't gotten it perfected. But I'm learning. That's also important.

 

Buy the Alcoholic Anonymous Blue Book and replace Alcohol with Porn and that my friend might help

 

Its true man. Only when you see through the nature of PMOing do you have enough courage to quit it. Make that reason as personal as possible.

 

Without therapy, I'd never have succeeded. That's why getting therapy is my number one recommendation. When you deal with your inner demons, the belief that you need to numb yourself with an addiction goes away; it also makes you stronger.

This is great advice. Once you've done this, read those two lists every morning and every evening.

 

That's a great addition! Thanks for sharing. What do you think was your biggest take away from therapy?

 

One of the biggest things for me was when I saw that strategies and combating always led to me losing the battle. That real-ization came long after my mind could logically have concluded that, it's that my pride did not want to admit that. In most other areas of life if I had tried as many things as many hours to change the pattern and had as many recurrences of the pattern I would have concluded that that pattern was permanent. For instance I made a really stupid car purchase once, poured thousands, equal to the purchase price, into an unsafe, huge piece of crap to get it to run twice. After being stuck on the side of the road half a dozen times, spending hours trying to get it to just turn over a little I figured out I had made a mistake. You can get a new car but you can't necessarily get back the money wasted. That might be party of why we pm+ addicts struggle to admit we can't stop out own pm+ addiction ourselves is because it seems like you can't just get a new self like you can with a car. But I did, and it wasn't through any specialness in fact the opposite it was seeing how worse than useless my old self was, the pain of having to live with me is a big part of what handed be the breakthrough to a new self. Hard to tell it's a new one: same name, SSN and face,t still a pm+ addict but a happily sober one that's how you can tell. I was just sick of being me, which wasn't new I had been feeling that way for a long time. Is it different from depression...I think so but I can't prove it, I think it was recognition that Andrew in active addiction was not worth identifying with and defending. Always one more idea of how I was going to get a handle on this, one more thing to try. That makes sense, we have to do our due diligence. It would be stupid to decide I had no ability to fix this after the first few slips, only if I try things (I tried religion, therapy, getting married, hurting myself for pm+, etc) can I gather the data needed to determine whether I am able to quit on my own or not. I had never thought of this until this moment but most of my plans to stop depended on other people, there's another person involved in marriage and therapy, and many in religion. But I thought of it as my idea my effort I was kind of oblivious to thos other people involved until it didn't work then I would blame them. I was the star of my movie they were supporting actors.
The way I know that admitting my mistakes and inability can work is that I had never been free of pm+ for more than 28 days before giving up, and after trying that process without quiting despite several slips as I practiced stopping fighting (I didn't know I WAS fighting), I found my self kept off of pm+ for periods much longer than my personal best of 28 days. Today is 2537 consecutive days, most of them happy, that Andrew has not had to use any form of P, M or deviant sex. If you want to go beyond posting I would be happy to help, start a conversation. It is simple but not easy and painful but free of suffering, in my experience.

 

Whew, I don't know where to begin to answer that! I have had so many takeaways form therapy, and it has changed my life in several ways.

I had a crappy upbringing, in a war zone, in a school with some abusive teachers, seniors and peers. And then I married an abusive woman. I was really messed up! Therapy has totally revamped my life. If you aren't anywhere as messed up as I was, you will rock after therapy!

Maybe the most important takeaway is that therapy never ends. One therapist-cum-trainer told me, "Anyone who says that they don't have a problem is lying." It's true. No matter how enlightened you are, you are still an imperfect human being in a complex, unpredictable and sometimes difficult and cruel world. Each new step you take leads to new problems, and therapy helps. You can also try life coaching, which isn't a therapy but can feel like it!

Another takeaway is that there are dozens of different types of therapy (I've tried maybe 7 or 8). Each therapy works to a small extent for some people, well for some people, and amazingly for some people. You can't predict which therapy works best for you, because it depends partly on your character, your current beliefs, and your current circumstances (a therapy might work poorly one time yet very well later in life). If done badly, a therapy can actually make things worse, so be careful to choose qualified therapists.

 

Wow @Mordobarn that's amazing insight. Thanks for sharing! As I typed the message asking you to share that I felt that I shouldn't added how difficult it would be to sum up lol

 

Cold showers and meditation have been very helpful to me 100^