35 and Older Accountability Group

Clearly! My line of work is divorces so mind jumbled there right away

 

No problem. Mine is an interesting next step to dealing with my addiction. How to engage in a healthy sex life with my wife and not get pulled back into PMO. It was easier to avoid PMO when there was nothing going on physically with the wife. Since active sex life IRL and my PMO habit have been intertwined my entire life I have to figure out the next level of battling my PMO urges now that real life activity is back in play.

 

Congrats John. I too found that other aspects of my life are improving as the no-PMO life becomes more of the norm, and we discover another person inside of us once we are unburdened with the constant thoughts of PMO and the shame, guilt, and other negative emotions associated with that behavior and our addiction. For me, I was able to be more emotionally connected to my wife, and sensing that she came closer and we are sharing intimacy after a long time away from that. Stay on the path John, there are more good things to come.

 

God bless you very much, all my encouragement to move forward to victory!

 

Just checking in for another day free of PMO...nearly at 50 days now

 

Just wanted to share an observation.

So, I recently ended a no PMO streak that went over 100 days. Then, I went 5-6 days mostly on Day Zero. Now I am at 3.5 days no PMO.

I've noticed that with me now, I am like a light switch. There is no gradual progression one way or the other, no spectrum, just off or on.

Apart from the last week of my streak, before that I was feeling pretty good in regards to PMO. I wasn't really thinking about it, not trying to fight it off. If urges came, they were easy to ignore and went away a lot faster than before. It was living a life that didn't demand full attention to the PMO issue.

Then, I relapsed. I went 5-6 days binging out 3-4 times a day, always to porn. There was one period of about 25 hours where I was clean but that was about it. I felt like I had never been on any streak at all. I was deep in the grip of PMO just as before, exactly the same, as if I had been doing it like that the whole time.

Then, one morning I woke up and was just feeling good. It is now 3.5 days later and this entire time I have felt exactly the same as I did when I was on my streak. It is exactly the way I described above. It is as if that week long binge never happened at all.

So I am like a light switch. I am Jedi or I am Sith. No in-between. Hoping I can fly this X-wing like before for the long haul now.

(Sidenote: I just finished watching the Star Wars movies in 'machete order' (thus the above reference). It really offers a new perspective, watching it like that. Basically you watch 4,5, then 2,3 (giving Vader's backstory) and then 6, wrapping the story up. #1 is ignored as are 7-9. To expand on that, I think it would be cool to watch the last 20 minutes of Rogue One at the beginning, going directly into episode 4.)

And welcome back @Timber! Good to see you here again.

 

Thanks for the insights...well done on making it over 100 days and don't be hard on yourself for going back to P...it shows how powerful the lure remains and it's helpful for me to hear....and yes I can imagine if I ended a streak after 100 days then I would undoubtedly binge a LOT on P and feel completely unfulfilled and full of self loathing then get back on the PMO journey......

Perhaps there will never be a day when we are free of the desire? The very fact that we admit to a having an issue makes us stand out from the crowd as the crowd either uses P all their life and never admits it's a problem OR they don't use it at all....personally I think most people probably do

So Jedi warrior get back in the saddle and well done for your achievements and sharing all of this with us

 

This is something that i've been thinking about lately, is there people out there who don't watch porn at all even after porn was introduced to them?, and is there people who can watch porn occasionally without being addicted to it?

 

There are definitely people who are not interested in watching P after having been introduced to it....there are also people in good relationships where they are having good sex and likely don't feel the need to look at any porn...but then there are those in good relationships who still use porn.

I guess yes there are people who can watch it occasionally and not be addicted...but then what is occasionally? I mean I could watch it every 3 weeks and have a binge but I would still see myself as addicted. I never used to watch it for hours on end I just knew that it was a crutch for me when feeling low and it made me feel worse afterwards so I understood that I needed to find better ways of dealing with my negative emotions...and also find myself a real partner who I can have sex with instead of watching other men sticking their dick in women to get off

 

Thanks for the support WTS! I think that just as with so many things, there is a yin and yang to the porn issue. There is the success and the failure, the ease of staying away and the difficulty. And which side you tend to gravitate to will always depend on many circumstances. It's something that will always require attention, and I do not believe there is such a thing as 'being cured'. Being free of the desire entirely is possible, but it comes at the price of cultivating and maintaining the right habits and discipline. Once that stops, the desire will return.

Everyone has their weaknesses, whatever those are. Some people get addicted to gambling, alcohol, smoking, drugs. I have never had any issues with these and have been exposed to them all. For me its sexual things. So yes, I feel that its totally possible that people have 'an immunity' to porn. But they are also probably pretty vulnerable to something else.

Haven't seen RotJ since the 80's? Dang lol. Well as for Princess Leia, yes she can definitely be triggering in that one outfit, but luckily there is very little actual screen time of her like that. I would say it is about one combined minute. And its probably spread over maybe a half hour in the beginning of the movie at Jabba's palace. It would be easy to just skip over with your remote. And yes, I thought Rogue One was excellent as well, as is The Mandalorian. They help balance out the hack job Disney did on 7-9. I actually liked Episode 1 as well. In fact I just rewatched it after watching the machete order. If you forget about the rest of the series and treat it like a kids movie that adults can enjoy (like Toy Story, Shrek etc.) it actually is good. It's just that having the original 4-6 series as its reference point and such high expectations destroyed it for most people.

 

Just checking in 35 days now, in my wildest dreams i never thought i could make it so far, and i'm still counting day by day, stay strong everyone.

 

Thanks @discovery

I can relate to feeing like an on/off switch... still trying to find my off button!

interesting point about porn and sex/relationships. I don’t think they are entirely connected. I can PMO after having sex... PMO has nothing to do with the give-and-take you have in sex. It’s selfish and it’s fuelled by something else for the most part.

 

I just can't get any traction. Constantly resetting. Tomorrow is another day to be the person I hope that I am.

 

Hey everybody! After 2 weeks of vacation with very little time at the computer, it's back to working from home, 8+ hours every day alone in a room with everything the internet has to offer just a few keywords away. Plus, I'm at a 24 day streak, so there's the additional danger of getting overconfident and thinking that just watching some stuff should be okay now since I'm 'cured'.... So, back to work means back to mindfulness and diligence!

One clear sign that I'm far from being cured is that I had a very shameful case of ED again the other day. Sex with my girlfriend has basically ground to a halt for some time already for various reasons. When I try to initiate sex, she refuses 99% of the time. Then, very infrequently, she will initiate sex herself, usually at a time that to me feels like coming out of nowhere. After getting over the surprise I usually start slowly getting into it, but then I sort of panic, I get afraid of losing my erection, and that thought then becomes the cause for exactly that to happen.

I'm not so sure if just quitting PMO will be enough to fix this, since I've had a lot of 30 day streaks already and it never really did much in that apartment... but that might be very different when I finally get to 90. Does anyone have experience with his kind of thing?

 

I recognise what you're saying about the on/off. For me as well, I either go through a period of just relapse after relapse and seemingly being unable to get out of it, to suddenly not feeling the need for PMO at all and making a 30 day streak without a lot of effort. And then when I least expect it, I'm back into a period where I'm relapsing every single day for a whole week or longer.

However, I've been thinking a lot about this and I think we are much more in charge than we think, and it's actually slow and not always perceptible mental preparation that causes the switch to go from on to off or the other way around.

I think, for me, that the moment that I stop feeling the need to do PMO doesn't really come out of nowhere, but I've been preparing for it. Going through all these relapses is my brain constantly going back and forth, desiring for something and then when he gets it getting the feedback that this thing that we wanted is actually now causing us to feel miserable. That feedback doesn't compute, because addiction is still telling my brain that PMO is what we want. So we go back, it makes us feel miserable again, we try one more time because it's supposed to be good, miserable again, etc., time and time again. Until finally the message got through that PMO is actually misery, the internal struggle is over, and suddenly I wake up not wanting to do PMO anymore.

And then the relapse is just as much a long time in coming. It's always a slow descend, which usually starts with me getting confident and thinking I'm never gonna do PMO again, combined with a slow increase of watching pictures of beautiful women on Instagram or whatever, because you know, 'that's totally different than PMO, right?'-type of thinking. So I'm slowly allowing the thought back in that watching pictures and fantasising is actually a source of pleasure, while at the same time I'm not getting the feedback anymore that PMO is a source of misery, because I'm not engaging in it for the moment and I'm not thinking of it as a threat anymore, since I'm 'free' of that threat. And then I can easily walk around with all these thoughts building up for several weeks, with seemingly everything being okay, until suddenly I'm in 'switch on'-mode again.

Maybe this helps you avoiding a next relapse, just like I hope I will be able to avoid it this time around.

(Also, I've been wanting to do the machete-order for a while now, haha...good that you reminded me of it.
I have to say, though, my opinion of the ones that everybody hates is a little more nuanced.. I really liked Liam Neeson in The Phantom Menace and even didn't mind Jar Jar Binks so much - I still hope they'll develop the 'Jar Jar Binks was actually a Sith Lord'-theory one day And there were really a lot of things I like about 7-9, like disillusioned Luke and the conflicted bad guy. Though ultimately they felt like missed opportunities to me, lacking a clear vision of where they wanted to go, and constantly shifting between the desire to tell a new story and give the fans what they want. I would actually have preferred if they radically ignored the fans and went all the way with a new story. But well, money.)

 

Good morning all, checking in. I hope to have a better week than the last three!