Failure and addiction. Confusing relationship between the 2... I spent years unwinding the habit of viewing porn and rewiring my mind, to find a place where I felt honest and out of the clutches of my sex drive. I still have strong desire, I still wish to be wanted and attractive, I still feel attraction. I no longer lie to myself or others, or try to "control" my sexuality by mindlessly viewing others have sex. I will always have to do the work to keep my mind and sexuality healthy. But I "failed" a lot getting here. Failure is not the problem... our relationship to failure is. If we go a certain amount of time and then reset/relapse, is it failure? Or just part of the journey as we let go of old habits, patterns, unconscious compulsion? If you default to old behavior, but it helps you learn more about the behavior, or you realize how much you loved being free of the shame and secrecy of porn use... did you fail? Or did you experience setback and dissapointment? In order to truly succeed, we have fail along the way. If you find yourself resolved to "really quit using porn forever this time", hold that resolve firmly in your heart and soul. If you don't live up to this expectation, turn back to your resolve, study what happened in the situation, in your thoughts, in your emotions, Learn from what happened and continue on your journey. Seek help in the accountability section, find someone you can turn to and share. Get out of secrecy and accept that you are human. And humans fail. We can take "failure" and make it part of our success, if we are only willing to look deep into it, forgive ourselves for not living up to our expectations, and tell yourself over and over again that you can live the life you want. Free of porn and shame and lies. You can be the person you want to be, and when you fail to meet those expectations, regroup and start again.
Failure isn't failure until you give up. If you learn from it and grow and do better, that's success. So never give up.
It is in direct relationship to the goal, which can be arbitrary. If someone could do a week long streak first, then 2, a month etc then they are more likely to succeed than fail with gradual incremental goals like that. If they only shoot for 90+ from the beginning then the chance of failure is much higher. Aside from the numbers there is the psychology. Believing you just need a ton of motivation and feeling a certain way and thinking things are irredeemable once you fail based on that belief is just because that assumption wasn't true in the first place. It's not even necessarily bad if you fail at a streak if you discover deeper issues that needs to be worked on.
Exactly. This is why smaller goals are so important. A bunch of tiny goals over time add up to a big goal. And achieving smaller goals over time is good for motivation. On top of that, this is a big learning experience of self-discovery. We see that we have a problem, but we don't know the gravitas of that problem until we try to give it up. And for some of us, we've spent a lifetime battling this issue, so it's not something that can be tackled overnight.
Great points! It all comes down to, Are you willing to do the work and persevere? Do you have a structured plan to get there? Everything along the way is part of the learning curve, and can be used to get along further in growth. Thanks for contributing
