Is porn the really issue in your life?

Dear NoFap community

I am writing this message to give you some insight into my relationship with porn in the past 3 years. If you want to know more about my story you can check out the threads I've posted in the past.

I want to start off saying that I'm a 20 y.o male; sporty and healthy. I last commented on this forum on July 2018 to share my success story. Back then I had reached the 90 day milestone and I was beyond excited to let other fapstronauts that there was hope. The excitement kept my momentum going and I stayed clean for the following months. When I relapsed to porn in September 2018 I had been "sober" for 5 months. Long story short: after that relapse I was never able to stick into a "streak" consistently. I would go for 7 to 10 day streaks and then I would relapse. In July 2019 I told myself that it was the perfect moment to leave porn for good. I was starting my semester abroad in August and I thought it was the ideal time to get a streak going: new country, new environment, new people. Time to start clean.

Truth is my idea materialized. I stayed clean for 109 days until I relapsed to porn on October 26th. Since then I haven't been able to build momentum to maintain a consistent streak. I mainly go on 3 days off then relapse cycles.


Before I get into my personal reflections and the conclusions I've reached, I want to share the benefits I noticed during my 90+ days streaks:

1) I started feeling again. Porn has always been a numbing mechanism for me and letting it aside allowed me to feel emotions again.

2) I became more present to the moment.

3) I recovered from mild-pied in both occasions.

There are many more benefits that I have enjoyed but my purpose is not to list them all. What I'm trying to say is that I knew how life without porn was but I still kept going back to it.

**Personal reflections**

After years of heavy porn use I believe I've come to uncover what lies under my addiction. I started using porn regularly when I was 12. I was bullied in school for almost a decade, well into my high school years. I suffered a lot and my self-esteem was pretty low throughout the years. In my last year of high school I discovered meditation and spirituality after I read the book Siddharta -Herman Hesse-. My life has completely changed since. I started doing positive affirmations and meditating daily. I've make it not a habit, but a life philosophy. It brings me inner peace and allows me to connect with my higher self. For a long time I believed I had gotten over all the suffering I experienced, I thought that the suffering that had defined my life had made the strong individual I thought I was -I still do, we're all strong in our own way-. Nevertheless, even if discovering meditation and spirituality was the tool I found to grow as an individual, I hadn't gotten rid of the coping mechanism I used when I was bullied.

That's the role it has played in my life. Plain and simple. A coping mechanism for pain and suffering. Porn has always been the resource I've used to cope with pain and negative emotions, my loyal and trustworthy fallback. When I was a child I didn't have the mechanisms to address my emotions in a constructive way. I felt pain and I wanted to get rid of it. Subconsciously, I used porn to take that pain away. At the time everybody did it and I thought it was normal. Nonetheless, since it was my pain erasing magic, I have developed an addiction. That's the answer I've found. This past 3 years, even if I have taken on this spiritual journey, I have still been addicted to porn because I haven't known any other way. In the past year I started identifying the moments in which I relapsed to porn. How was I feeling? The vast majority of the times I was feeling negative emotions. Porn has been my escape route to any kind of uncomfortable situation. Instead of facing my emotions, I just rely on porn to get instant gratification and take the pain away. When I face the root cause, - a lack of emotional strength or an inability to handle negative emotions- I believe porn will lose its power, it will have no reason of being. Obviously, apart of the coping mechanism role, I have also developed an addiction, so I gotta work on both things. 1) Dealing with my emotions -good or bad- instead of numbing myself and 2) identify my triggers -I've found one- and put all my will to avoid watching porn.

I hope that this post can serve you of some inspiration. I strongly believe we gotta look deep inside and ask ourselves what is the real root of the problem. Then deal with it. I am sure porn is not the only reflection of your root problem. Let's take the word streak out of our dictionary and let's think in bigger and broader terms.

Porn has specially affected me in the past months. Whenever I relapse I suddenly lose all motivation and I feel angry and depressed. Indeed, crazy thoughts come to my mind and I find it hard to stay calm. Whenever I do I'm distant to my girlfriend, I don't feel like being around anyone nor talking -I feel ashamed-. I've had sex with 4 woman and only one time I didn't have erection problems.

I am changing for myself and for the people I love. Porn is keeping and is keeping us all for becoming the person we want to become. Let's all fight for discovering the best version of ourselves.

TODAY, 04/15/2020 marks the start of my new me. I will keep a diary for myself and i I intend to come back in 5 months to tell you about the progress I've made. I encourage you all who are reading this to join me on this inner healing journey. We can and we will.

Love,

JBogart.