Still urges after 1 year. Any advice?

I'm back again. Just updating and giving my recent thoughts and experiences an outlet.

I had my last huge urge on the beginning of June. Since then I think I've had my longest streak without a serious urge. About 3 months. I do had urges here and there, but they were not near as devastating as they used to be. They lasted maybe one or two days, but I could easily focus my mind on other things and there was practically zero danger of relapsing.
Now somehow a stronger urge has developed during the last few days. Problems with sleeping, no appetite, inability to focus on "low-dopamine" tasks, no real motivation to work on my goals and my brain feels like a sponge.

What is interesting, is that I have discovered that I did the exact same thing with youtube, that I did with porn. The same exact pattern but just with non-porn videos about topics I'm interested in.
The first thing I did when starting my PC was going on youtube and checking out if there's some interesting new video. Then scrolling down and down looking for the next video with life-changing important information in it. Clicking on it, watching just a few seconds "No that's not interesting enough" and again scrolling and clicking, scrolling and clicking.
Always looking for the next self-development type of video that will change my life.
I don't know when I started that youtube habit, but it's for sure a few months ago, maybe a year, but now I'm at the point where it just exhausts and drains me and it is not fun and refreshing anymore, but just another form of addiction.
I always have a feeling of not knowing enough and I constantly seek more and more information about everything. As soon as I hear something about an interesting person on the radio, I pull out my phone to google and do some research. When I hear a song I like, I have to do research about the singer and the meaning of the song. When I watch a movie, I have to do research about the actors and if there's something in the plot I feel like I didn't understand properly, I google it and do research on that. And there are numerous other examples like that.
Somehow it all comes back to one thing. The novelty-seeking.
In some sense Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc is the same as porn, but without the extreme sexual aspect. Just as always looking on the phone if there's a new message or some thing that popped up --> novelty-seeking.

Also with Netflix. We have access to every type of movie or show all the time. Back in the day when I watched TV, there were maybe 10 channels which viewed content I could be interested in. So I zapped through them and remained at what was most appealing to me and enjoyed. Period.
Man I tell you, sometimes they did advertisements and I had to wait for a few minutes until the movie continued. Oh boy, that sucked. Now I wish those times back.
When I start Netflix, I look up to 15 minutes what I could watch. Choose some movie and oftentimes after the first 10 minutes I think it's crap and I look another 15 minutes for a better one. Not seldom I do that a few times and then I think everything is crap and the next thing I do is sitting in front of my computer, going on youtube and doing the same shit here again.

Something has changed in our world. I'm 28, so one of the last generations that still knows life before there even were cellphones. As a kid I felt free and in flow with myself and with the world. I woke up early without even an alarm and couldn't wait to start the day.
I thought maybe that is a feeling only kids can feel, but maybe technology has taken that feeling away and not adulthood.

Social Media was built to bring people together, but in fact it separates us. Netflix, the smartphone, Alexa and whatever else devices and applications were build to make our lives easier and better, but in fact it makes us lazy, dissatisfied and restless.

Maybe if you can control it, it can benefit your life, but I just can't. It all leads into a spiral which eventually make me feel miserable.

I've thrown out my Netflix device, my smartphone and will limit my youtube time to only one day per week, but try to avoid it completely.
My PC has become a tool only for working and tasks I need to do, but not for entertainment.

As I told my mother that I've gone back to an oldschool cellphone and I won't be any longer on Whats App and because of that in our "family-group", she said "Oh no, what has happened? If I'm not in the group anymore she feels like the family is falling apart".
That sentence confirmed my suspicion and my decision to take a step back from the digital world.

Maybe I just can't handle that stuff and others can. I'll stay away from all those things for the rest of the year and will look what happens.

 

Some random thoughts on my journey.

Wet dreams:

I remember a time where I haven't had a wet dream for about 2-3 months, but recently they occur more and more often.
As I started out, when I was in one of my urges and I went to bed, I kinda hoped for a wet dream to release the pressure, but actually there were never wet dreams in an urge state.
I woke up with the same "brain swimming in hot liquid feeling" as I went to bed. Slowly and without realizing it, the urge finally faded away over the days.
Wet dreams occured only in between urges and never had any correlation to the urge itself or caused an urge.

Recently the urges are not lasting for days or even a week anymore, but when I go to bed with an urge, it seems likely that I have a wet dream in that night. Sometimes even two or three times. But nevertheless the wet dream never sets me free from an urge. The urge itself can only fade away with time.

I also had the experience to have kinda control over the wet dream two or three times, but I can't really tell if that's real or not.
This night I had two wet dreams and I can remember one of the actual dreams. I was browsing through a magazine with arousing pictures. I remember seeing a page and then thinking (and I don't know if I "really thought that" and had some kind of control at this point), "Oh no I can't do that, that is a relapse" and then quickly turned over to the next page and was relieved as there were no pictures.
Then I turned over to the next page and suddenly there was the same arousing picture again from before and I thought "How can that be?"
Suddenly I got sucked into the magazine to the woman on the picture. Then I ejaculated and woke up.

What I have also noticed is, that most of the times a wet dream occurs about an hour or so after I fell asleep, or an hour before I would wake up. That could mean that in a deep sleep phase, the brain likely won't produce a wet dream.

Concerning dreams overall. I haven't had a single dream for years while I was PMOing, but since I've started abstaining I have dreams very often. I see that as a good sign of my brain being able to express itself and not being pressured down by porn anymore.


Creative mind

I started NoFap simultaneously with a complete new career path, which makes it in times where I seem to not get further in my career and also having an urge very difficult to find any meaning overall and to not relapse, but on the other hand becoming successful and not going back to PMO is deeply connected in my mind. On some level I know that if I would go back to old, bad habits, that my hunger to succeed, my discipline and my motivation will weaken in the same level as my addiction will get more serious again.

Being it due to NoFap or coming closer to my goal, but I actually start to get a sense for literature and my general interest for the world has become much more.
As a child I loved reading, but as I got older and the cool kids claimed that reading books is for nerds and having good grades in school was a reason for not belonging to them, I started to adapt, became another faceless person in the crowd and became numb in my mind. Just an average guy to not stand out in any way. "People could start to ostracize me for being myself and in order to this showing them their own fear of doing what they really want to do, maybe for the price of standing alone"

I started with tons of self-help books going back into reading, but now I'm at a level where I feel like I start to grow out of all these and start to gravitate towards classic novels from the early 20th century about social constructs and how society works. I start to understand the immense value those books have and I think educating myself in that direction and just occupy my mind with these topics can give me a huge advantage in life. I understand things today, I've just been blind about a few years ago and I don't even know how much there is to come further down the road.


What if I have never gotten into porn

How big is the part that porn played in detaching from my inner self? How would my life has been if I've never gotten into porn?
What if I knew the things I know now ten years ago? Could I be today where I'll be in ten years from now? Is that important? I don't know how old I get, so "what if I get ten years older than I would get"? It won't make any difference.

But if I never got into porn, most likely I wouldn't have developed these problems with women and maybe I would have a child by now, maybe a house and a mortgage to pay. In this case I'm pretty sure I would be so occupied, that I never had the time to think about all the things I've been thinking and would have never had the revealings I've had and I would have never came to an understanding that I have now.
Maybe all the things happen how they should happen and not being able to have a fullfilliing relationship till now was actually the best thing that could have happen to me.


When will I finally be over it?

The urges aren't that serious anymore as they used to be, but they just don't go away completely and as long as my circumstances in life don't change, it doesn't really look like they will go away soon.
The thing I'm most curious about is, that when I actually start to see the first results that I come closer to my career goal and I start to understand for myself that I can accomplish diffcult things with hard work and discipline, and that I can apply that formula to whatever I want to achieve in life, if that will make a difference and maybe defeat the urges once and for all.


Feel free to comment to whatever you think about the topics

 

Coming clean with the past & getting rid of fetish

I want to get rid once and for all from urges and having femdom fantasies.
I want to become the man I want to be and I want to stop dreaming about the life I want to have, I want to pull it into existence.

Being porn, pictures, reading in erotic forums, erotic ads or erotic stories – free for a good amount of time now, especially femdom fantasies occur again and again and I have to tackle them NOW.

Due to Roady and other members here I realize more and more that my fetish fantasies have a deeper root and by writing down everything, I’m going to take the next step to free myself and let the fetish and the burden go.


When I was a kid I always wanted to be liked and loved by my father. I wanted to be strong and become man. But my father was barely at home and when he was, I got hardly any attention and when I did something wrong he was really hard on me, not thinking for a second that I was just a kid and that I didn’t know better.
My mother told me that she also had the feeling that he was envy of me when I was a toddler, because I got more attention from her than he did.

Becoming a teenager I always was the shortest kid in school and when my father left us, I thought it was because I was too small and weak. I started to eat a lot in hope of growing and becoming stronger, but only became chubby. That not being enough, I became shortsighted and had to start wearing glasses. Now I was the exact opposite of what I wanted to be and what I thought my father considers a good son.
After I got a half-brother, my wanting to be liked by him started to shift more towards hate.

When my father left us I had to do all the man-work in the house from a young age on.
I behaved how I thought a “man” would in this situation and so I did all the work that was expected from me, but in fact everything I did was that I pleased just everybody and did everything to make my depressed mother's life easier and did everything to be liked by everybody and to be a good boy.

Becoming older and thinking that I’m over it I developed a “normal” relationship with my father. Saw him every few months for a birthday or some holiday but I didn’t realize that I’m still in denial.
Whenever I told him something I’m proud of, he didn’t even listen and changed the topic immediately and I did as if that’s okay and we talked about what he wanted to talk about.
Everytime I met him I started to feel worse and worse when I was back home. He is that kind of a person I would never waste a minute to talk to if I met him somewhere under different circumstances.

After reading a few books, especially “No more Mr Nice Guy”, it blew my mind and I started to understand what is happening here.
At the same time I was about to fail miserably with my first business and my femdom-porn consumption started to get out of control.
I called my father, said him everything that I thought about him and that I never wanted to see him again.
He cried on the phone and that was the last thing I have heard from him.
About a year later I sent him a last letter, wrote down my feelings, but also insulted him deeply.
Some half-ass letter came back which I immediately tore up after I read it.

I try to forget this man, but I just can’t. Today being an adult and stronger than him I sometimes imagine that we fight and I punch him in the face, he is bleeding and looking at me and I just don’t give a damn.

I work hard and am self-employed again after my first failure and I’m determined to make it big and to become wealthy and to be a winner in life, but I also know that part of the reason for that is that I just want to be better than my father. Even if I reach my goals, I know he won’t give a shit, but I just want to become a better man than he is.

The other reason is that I want to found my own family, take responsibility and create the family I never had. I want to have a wife who knows she can always count on me and I want to have kids that know they can talk about everything with me. I want to have integrity.
But in order to do that, I know that I have to be in a position where I can always maintain my values and don’t have to sell them for money I need to feed my family.

When my father left I developed an unhealthy relationship to my mother. I wasn’t her child anymore, I was that part of a husband that mows the lawn, fixes things in the house and listens to her when she wanted to talk to someone.
I got pressed into this role and not wanting to do more harm to my mother than was already done through my father, I took it over.
Also have I developed my picture of what a man that women desire should look like, by hearing my mother and my older sister talking about men.
So I started to shape myself after that, which I know today is complete BS, but in some part of my brain that likely still exists.
In a situation of a men-women conflict, I always was alone and my mother and sister were together, so most of the time I yielded, which made me value their and women’s opinions more than my own.

So in order to get a woman’s love I have to do what she wants me to do. And letting myself being humiliated and dominated by a woman is the only and highest way to get her love.
THAT’S WRONG! I know better today and I have to let that assumption go.

I somehow gotta get clean with all that shit….
I have grown, have a good, firm stature, have gotten rid from most of my shortsightedness, have a beard, have a goal, learn to stand my ground better and better and if I have seen my now-self with the age of 12, I likely would have idolized that kind of man and wished that I can be like him when I’m grown up.

I need no father figure anymore, I am an adult, have a lot of knowledge and the only man I need is myself.

I have to let go of my past and all the resentment. I don’t have to proof anything to anybody. I’m here to be happy, be loved and to leave this earth a better place than I have found it.

 

Thanks for your encouraging words. I really appreciate that!

 

It's frightening how much the behaviour of parents and how they treat it can make or break a kid and determine a huge part of what its life will become one day.

It's definitely a new era today. In our societey men don't have to go to war if they don't want to and women are mostly independent and don't have to rely on a man anymore.
In this sense everything must be perfect for everybody, but because of not understanding how to handle all the technological possibilities, we mess up our lifes just in another way today.
People have to start to question things more and have to realize that nothing on this world is for free. Everybody pays his price, no matter if he knows it or not.