P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

Depression and anxiety is normal to happen if you do not get pleasure from other sources. Do you do sports? Social life? Activities? Work? Study? Self-improvement? Eating and sleeping? During a flatline it is normal to feel down because you are not hitting those pleasurable feelings and sensations anymore by masturbating or watching porn. A key part in any addiction recovery is to substitute the addiction with healthy alternatives. Do not expect quitting to be the magic pill, that is just the first step. Withdrawals can be very strong when fighting an addiction.

Within the all the days you are managing to have PMO, you brain is healing itself. You are already recovering and you have. What if you are already resetted? Now your brain is looking for stimulation but is not getting it -> you get sad and anxious.

Maybe your expectations are too high? You have decided not to do anything ever again. When you relapse after a very long streak, it ruins everything for many people. It just cannot work like that. Relapses can slow down a bit yes, but it comes to how often they happen.

My point is, if you are months free from PMO at a time, relapsing very very rarely, a one relapse in three months or so does not change anything. After one relapse your brain does not go to where it started, that is just not possible.

If you are at 7-8 months, it sounds odd to me that it could be withdrawal symptoms anymore.

 

Well I was trying to highlight the fact that it is very individual process depending on the intensity and duration of addiction.

 

I appreciate that your post is well intended but you obviously don't know what PAWS is, what relapse does, or the expected 6-24 mo. recovery timeline. Exercise, diet, and positive attitude doesn't speed up the course. Many have tried. The only thing that cures it is time. We are here to support each other, not to tell each other that it's not real or that relapsing every 3 months or so is a good idea. Everyone doesn't experience protracted withdrawal, obviously you haven't. If you read the first 85 pages you'll have some context for our comments.

 

Every now and then an individual stumbles into this forum acting like they know everything about addiction recovery. At this point it even feels like a part of the whole thread already

 

To begin, because my PAWs are so bad right now, I'm not in a very good mood.

You're about the 10th person to come in here, without having read any of the other 80 or so pages of this thread, saying that the withdrawals should be over by now for a particular person or for us as a whole. The title of this thread starts with the acronym PAWs (POST-acute-withdrawals) my good sir. If you did a rudimentary google search you'd understand that these symptoms can last up to 24 months, maybe even longer.

It's downright impolite to define the experiences of others. And please, my dear friend, read some of the pages of this thread before you make the same mistake many others have already made.

I don't understand your motivation. Perhaps you are afraid of admitting that 7-8 months isn't enough for your own recovery, or you're just here to prove people wrong or whatever. But yeah, you gotta do some research. There is something about this new generation and their inability to learn about something before making these robust statements that supposedly capture everyone else's experiences. Maybe you're not a young person, but I believe the ethos of a time and place can seep its way into everybody's pores if they aren't careful enough.

Finally, preaching that relapses are okay with enough time in between was just talked about a couple pages ago, and most of us have determined, through experience, that the only way out of this dungeon is without any sort of relapse whatsoever. In fact, there is a phenomena known as kindling, which explains that long periods of abstinence followed by intense binges are even more detrimental than the opposite. This process encapsulates my experience, and explains why I feel so god damn shitty right now.

 

Easy killer!!! You're starting to sound like me

 

I am quite well aware do not worry. I am not obligated to tell you anything personal. You cannot simply know when his recovery started. It could be 5 years ago when his journey started. In my opinion it is silly thinking that after a relapse everything starts all over again, that's just not true.
I am quite sure that every well read health professional would disagree that there is nothing you can do to help. (even simple as omega 3 vitamins can help to reduce cognitive symptoms). I did not say that they speed up the process, I do not have any studies to show to support that. What I said is that other healthy alternative activities are very much recommended because they can make your life better and at the same time teaches your brain to look for substitute alternatives. I also did not say that relapsing every 3 months is a good idea. I said that people beat up themselves after one relapse and sometimes our expectations can be changed.

 

We should ignore people who start derailing the thread. Just ignore and move on.

 

Reread your post and pretend you're talking to an alcoholic. Say it out loud as you do it. Realize that you're talking about real addiction and not just a bad habit. I'm sorry but addiction doesn't work the way you think it does. It just doesn't. Everyone here has done the things you suggested. Thanks for your input.

 

I'm game. Last time this happened I used the ignore feature in their profile link and it worked.

 

Hello, I hope I found a correct thread for this. Has anyone experienced withdrawals in which you feel like electric spikes from your brain down your body and face? Kind of like body shakes. These last from 1 to 5 seconds at a time during which I bite my teeth very hardly together, close my eyes, do a weird involuntary body movement/swinging. Like, 50% feels like that my body is doing it automatically but the other 50% feels like I am doing it on purpose. Usually few times a day and they are much more frequent the closer my relapse was. These jigs started appearing recently and I think it is because I am able to be PM absent for longer and longer now. I have noticed that I do not get them when other people are around. Weirdly enough they also seem to get triggered if I think about something negative or embarrassing rather than positive.
I hope this did not sound very creepy I have read about tremors in other addiction withdrawals but I don't know if it's quite that. Experiences?

 

Hi Jimmy. Are you on antidepressants?

 

No sir. But I have been many years ago. Why?

 

I had brain zaps during AD withdrawal and myoclonic jerks on high dose Zoloft. Porn induced PAWS does have some physical neurological symptoms but the way you said it made me think of ADs. If you're sure that you have porn induced PAWS and no drugs are involved then, yes it's possible that you're having those symptoms.

Physical symptoms I can think of right now:
Any muscle tension and non-visible tremor can definitely be attributed to PAWS.
I have sensations that feel like electricity frequently in my trunk and limbs.
Bruxism (clenching teeth) - definitely 100% yes.
I get very tight muscles in face and around eyes.
Phantom tooth pain every once and a while
Sometimes when I'm in an extreme fatigue spell my hands feel numb even when they aren't. It's very difficult to describe.

I know there's more but that's what is coming to mind. Anything you're feeling should also be accompanied with intense emotional and cognitive distress if it's PAWS related. At least that's my experience.

 

I once read a story of a woman with protracted dopamine agonist withdrawal syndrome. It took her 10 years to feel better.

 

Im sure thats not the case. I exercise, meditate, and eat a clean diet. And still all i feel is pure depression. No emotions, cant feel love. Extreme social anxiety. Even during my days where i PMO'ed 5 times i felt better.

 

Hey,

Not a rant at all - a lot of thoughts there that I've had myself over the years. TBH, I find this fascinating.

I think a lot about the hidden societal cost of excessive PMO / sex (in all its forms), where people are affected up to a point but not enough for it to be obvious that they have a specific problem relating to PMO / sex etc; and also cases similar to mine where people were badly addicted and just didn't see it because of ignorance of the idea.

I'm sure that there will have been suicides because of this that no-one saw for what they were - whether due to anhedonia, as you suggest, or because their quality of life was so appalling that they lost all hope - for reasons they didn't understand, or mis-attributed to something else. I can well relate to that because if I didn't have 99% certainty that I am suffering because of PMO / PAWS, I'd be thinking about it at this stage. As it is I have hope, and that makes a massive difference.

Talking of the less badly affected, I know people who have a PMO problem IRL who seem to be permanently bad tempered, depressed and lurching from one crisis to the next. Some I've tried tentatively to talking to about it (for their benefit more than mine), with others I'm not going there with a barge-pole. If you do whack off regularly, but not quite up to a certain threshold, I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who may be on the lower boundary of what we are referring to as Functional addiction (sub-clinical?), who are un-knowingly affected, but put their symptoms or erratic behaviour down to depression / anxiety / messed up childhood etc - see Marnia Robinsons "Cupid's Poison Arrow". Those factors could all come in to play to some extent anyway, but they are mostly things that people can see quite easily, and talk about without too much fear of breaking a taboo or embarrassing themselves. But the porn / sex side of things is something that gets ignored.

Why? Ignorance has been fostered because of fear of breaking taboos, fear of looking stupid, or being seen to be too religious or moralistic - as you say, "uptight mothers and evangelicals"; I'm with them on this (I am a massive atheist BTW). There is a collective, wilful denial about porn in our culture, and the biggest deniers there are seem to be psychologists, psychotherapists and journalists. There are people who (understandably) object to porn on moral and religious grounds, and especially the exploitation of women and children, and get listened to. Those are real concerns. But no-one in the mainstream considers how porn might effect the user.

There is greater awareness of the addictive power of technology overall, and people are starting to discuss that - check out the podcast "Your Undivided Attention". There are real parallels between porn and gambling, which seems to have broken in to the mainstream consciousness, although I'm sure that won't surprise many people here - but precious little in the mainstream about the harmful effects of porn on users. In-fact there seems to be a concerted effort by some to put Nofap in the category of "Alt-right", neatly dismissing the one group of people who could offer help with an issue that is becoming a mental health plague. Not going to try and offer an explanation for that here, simply because I'm going on for longer than I intended already...

As mentioned above (sorry, can't find the exact quote, whoever wrote it!) the ability of people to resist the toxic lure of porn is likely to become a factor in evolutionary selection. As Tristan Harris puts it, every time you go on YouTube, you're doing battle with someone who has a super-computer pointed at your head, and most people are going to loose. It's effects are / will be profound on individuals, and society. I don't want to put ideas in people's heads, so to speak, but things are only going to get worse in terms of the addictive powers of technology as hardware, software, AI etc become more powerful and sophisticated (VR porn anyone? Haptic feedback suits? Neuralink?). Fore-warned is fore-armed.

At the end of the day for me it comes back to the "if only I'd known" fantasy. My life would have been different - perhaps not perfect, but much better than it has been. I'm pushing 50, and I bloody feel older than that. At least at this point I have the consolation of knowing what I'm dealing with, I know that I have to deal with it, and I know I am committed to dealing with it for good. Hopefully we will all come out the other side, and actually be better off for it, assuming there aren't long-term health consequences that no-one's figured out yet. If we hadn't experienced what we have, then most of us would be sleepwalking along with the masses in to a state of porn-induced hell, completely clueless and unprepared, rather than looking at a better, happier future.

Ha, another short reply that turned in to an essay!

 

Couldn't have put it better myself.

 

I agree with everything you said. Getting the western establishment to vilify porn would be like getting them to vilify coffee. Never gonna happen. They're only looking for ways to prove it's healthy because they love it. You're more likely to see an article "new study shows that daily masturbation may lower LDL by 20%". People only want to live in information bubbles where everything they already think and do gets validated.
This could turn into a rant so I'm done. Nice post Dave!

 

I do not take any medication or drugs. Last time was 5 years ago when I was using SSRI's.

Zaps is the correct word I was looking for. Can definitely relate to some of those. You seem to have experienced more intense symptoms.

I read some of the posts here and I was thinking that how do you know if all of your symptoms are from PMO related issues? Many people seem to have a history of drugs or medications or other mental health problems. No offense.