Reminder: Porn escalation is real

I've experienced it myself, having abused porn for decades now. Early on it was just vanilla pics of cute babes, then some hardcore sprinkled in, then a slow veering into various fetishes: teens, lesbians, group sex, amateurs, asians, fetish clothing, light bdsm, harder bdsm, and then, most horribly ... crossdressers, transgendered people, femdom ... and finally, the worst and sickest of all ... the dreaded sissy hypno bullshit.

Why am I listing out all these humiliating porn subtypes? Not to feel like more of an idiot than I already do, I assure you. Rather it is to point out how porn viewing really can escalate into more graphic and deviant areas as you progress through time with a porn dependency. The explosion of free content online combined with the endless varieties of fetishes available out there is like a continual downward pathway to darker and more self-destructive PMO addiction.

I mean when I was younger, I had "normal" desires just to be with a cute chick, and have a romantic relationship with her, and appreciate her cute body, etc. It's not like I ever dreamed about having warped experiences with bondage orgies or transvestite mistresses and ridiculous sick shit like that. Those ideas only came later, after colossal volumes of porn consumption, which I believe, on some level, actually started changing how my brain works, like any drug does. The drug in this case is dopamine and it provides a kind of escape that can become dangerously addictive, especially as you build a tolerance to it over time.

Awhile ago I did two 90-day nofap challenges back-to-back. I found that my natural thoughts and desires slowly came back, while those more deviant ideas slowly faded away. In other words the affects of long-term porn started to recede and my true self started to re-emerge. I just wanted a cute girlfriend again, like I did when I was younger, none of that weird fetishistic stuff - and it felt great.

However I relapsed earlier this year, bad. Real bad. And I have since fallen back into the same deep dark hole. Now, if I were to view porn, I can't even for a moment be interested in the softcore/vanilla stuff - I would have to immediately dive into the most graphic and deviant kinds of content - the really awful stuff. Why? Escalation. It happened again. It's not normal, and it's not me. It is reversible, I know this for sure as I've experienced it, and I'm going to try again. But it takes time and effort for your tolerance to ease off as your body, mind, and soul re-calibrate back to a state without a constant flood of unnatural and toxic porn.

Guess I just felt the need to post this, from the heart, as both a serious warning to not end up like me, but also as a hopeful message that there is something we can do even in the later stages of the worst kinds of escalation - we can go totally PMO-free, for weeks, months, years - whatever it takes, so that we can reset back to our true selves, and find one day our normal healthy thoughts and desires return, our self-esteem rebuild, and our sense of hopefulness grow - so that we can let the light back into our lives.

 

I'm not surprised at all. The lure of the next high can corrupt otherwise decent people into ever darker places, even illegal ones. I walked that line a bit with the "barely legal" stuff - scared the hell out of me so at least I did something right and I stopped right there.

It's important to realize we can lose everything as this addiction escalates - our self-respect, our relationships, our jobs, our health, even our freedom. At some point, at least for those of us who've progressed too far down that dark road, we have to just realize it's a binary choice to either continue spiraling downwards, or to fight back with everything we've got and reclaim our lives from this poison.

Thanks for the response friend, and hopefully we can all be comforted we're not alone in this journey.

 

Hey looks like you're doing great with 45 days. The important thing to remember is we all take our own time to heal and recover. Be patient, let the time pass, and just notice the little improvements as they come. My understanding is that fetishes which are acquired through porn escalation will eventually recede with stopping ALL porn viewing (you can't think you can get away with the more 'traditional' stuff, it all just leads back to more escalation).

This is what I experienced when I went long stretches before (like 90+ days), however the fetishes did not completely vanish for me, it was more like they just receded to being almost no there anymore, as long as I didn't 'restart' them up by using porn (which, stupidly, is exactly what I did.)

Anyway good luck and keep at it, friend. I have screwed up but I am not giving up, I'm just going to re-double my nofap efforts so I can return to my more normal self.

 

In my opinion the length of time to reset back to yourself is dependent on both how long you've had a porn dependency and how deviant/extreme the type of porn you've watched has become. In my earlier days I could have a mild fetishistic PMO session and just 'shake it off' the next day. But as my addiction deepened, and the types of porn I watched got more psychologically corrupting, then I found I was having a harder time leaving those preoccupations behind, which would then trigger another round diving even deeper into those dark places.

The good news on this (again my opinion/experience), is that, over time, our brains are quite capable of re-orienting to our default/natural patterns - i.e. the thoughts/desires we truly identify with (before we repeatedly flooded our minds with toxic content.) This recovery back to ourselves is not something which can be rushed. We must be patient, and accept the improvements as them come, on their own schedule. We must keep the big picture in mind that we are trying to heal long-term damage to our minds and hearts and souls, and it doesn't just happen like flicking a light switch.

Part of this is accepting our previous mistakes, forgiving ourselves, and learning to focus on what really matters in our lives rather than just blindly giving in to short-term self-gratification. So basically - keep on a positive porn-free path, be kind to yourself, have patience - and you'll continue to improve over time.