Do porn fantasies go away with recovery?

I believe with all my heart: YES!
But such healing processes take time. Relapses are most likely to occur. The important thing is to never lose courage and to get up again and again. You can certainly help your friend there!

 

After 24 plus years , I am not sure- esp when he gets turned on thinking about me being with someone else.

 

I just asked my husband, he said as he gets further away from it that the thoughts/fantasy is less and less but he still has to fight it..... my point of view is no, they don’t ever go away completely. You can’t unsee something. You can however choose not to dwell in the thought or feed it. That’s recovery.

 

Let me start by saying I think it is possible, but it's a lot of work. And no, I don't believe it automatically comes with a lot of time not being exposed to porn. That is more likely just to render it dormant but not absent.

FWIW I think this is why most people will only claim being "in recovery" in the present tense or implying in the process somehow, rather than recovered and that the process is completed.

Not to be negative, but to be frank I think in reality though a lot of people in addiction recovery doesn't have a clear idea of what that complete picture is. What they are really talking about and consider as possible is perpetual relapse prevention. The word recovery sounds better, and by keeping it in the present tense and keeping it process oriented they can be honest - but I don't think they really know where they're going.

In other words, the behavior changes, the mind does not - at least not at a very deep level.

With this community, when people throw the word "rewire" around it is at best a passive process, it is probably more accurate to say 'dewire' or something. The existing wiring just becomes weaker and fades with no PMO, but the fact that you can almost hear crickets chirping when it's suggested you do other stuff along with abstinence on here (on the whole, obviously there are people doing other stuff) tells us something.

So in general I think a better question is what it takes to really recover. I do think it takes an active effort to rewire, and on the most general level you need to be interested in the truth - truth about yourself, your relationships, PMO and its place in the world and peoples lives, everything. It seems to me thinking of it as just a problem or "bad" doesn't go far enough. People who have just identified it as bad may not be interested enough in the truth of the matter, just how it feels - when they're not caught up in the heat of course.

Relapse prevention is like having built up a dam. Rewiring, to me is actually having rerouted that large body of water so it actually flows somewhere else. In that case there wouldn't be a question of whether the dam might break.

By the way I think this is also a limit of social accountability, certainly the broader form of being in a group where there are certain assumptions of what helps and what is possible. The general attitude of recovery fellowships seem to be you need to go to a ton of meetings perpetually and rely on that indefinitely, again it basically points to the underlying assumption that there is no full recovery possible. Not only might there be a lack of interest let alone knowledge as to how to make some progress in the reverse direction rather than just stopping, you might pick up these unspoken assumptions like relapse prevention is as good as it gets, but we'll call it "in recovery." I'm not saying don't go to groups, but they have their limits and issues.

Basically, to be able to say recovered might be such a huge change that you hardly know it's even the same person. And of course there's value in just figuring out how not to relapse. But since we're talking about fantasies, it has to do with the persons own mind and not just stopping the viewing of porn - those thoughts are already in there. The person has to actually be interested in mentally disciplining themselves instead of just limiting what they see.

 

Agree so much with this. At a year and a half clean, my husband is a completely different man. We talk about it in wonder almost every day. Because he has had physical changes as well as mental changes. I’d say he’s just now beginning recovery though, he has had to learn how to handle stress, how to handle emotions, how to be present. His group meetings have been instrumental in that aspect. He, however is a very, very different man. This ironically has made some things more difficult for me! I have had to adjust to the “ new him”. Lol. He has had to learn how to control his thoughts, not just about porn or women but the thoughts about himself that got him to be an addict in the first place.

 

It's a process of letting your old self die. Metaphorically killing yourself for the sake of what is right (or as I see it, for the sake of God's pleasure). That approach to nofap probably bears different fruit than simply abstaining because your undergoing a sort of metamorphosis or reincarnation so to speak.


Otherwise, dormant fantasies vs vanished fantasies... Like an egg that can break vs an egg that will never break.