10 years of addiction.

I began engaging pornographic material around age 11. By the end of high school, I found myself using pornography approximately 3 times a week on a regular basis. This seemed typical among my friends and as a naive adolescent I continued about my hormone-driven youth without concern.

Masturbating to pornography became all the more frequent with the freedom and spare time of college living. From age 18 - 22, I developed a ritualistic engagement of pornography. Every evening, after my roommates went to sleep, I would smoke cannabis in my bathroom and masturbate to images on my laptop. Through these 4 years, I maintained a regular girlfriend and several roommates that were not aware of the extensive marijuana use or pornography.

At age 22, I moved into a 1 bedroom apartment and began the pursuit of a more challenging educational program. The relationship with my girlfriend remained in tact, but strained. My ritual persisted and evolved with the introduction of new stress levels, amphetamines, and faster internet connections. In spite of decreased time available, I managed to masturbate to pornography a couple times each day. Each night contained 2-3 hours of looking at internet porn. The vast novelty provided by the internet was overwhelming and seemed to be more important than the object of affection. Browsing through hundreds of images and videos until finally succumbing. These binging sessions would end with disillusion, numbness, sadness, guilt, and anxiety.

By 24, my girlfriend and I were living together. Our relationship floundered as she was still unaware of my second life with pornography. My ritual adapted to sneaking away in the middle of the night and in a twisted effort to half-heartedly reconcile my prevailing addiction, I began to engage less obvious forms of pornographic material. Lewd youtube videos and images of women in clothing or underwear became my palette of masturbation material. In fact, the novelty of these seemed even more satisfying. Binging sessions and frequency only increased, depleting my time and energy available for sleep, school, relationships, etc.

After still managing to graduate at the top of my class, the compilation of stresses paired with the psychological impact of an unresolved addiction to pornography had taken its toll. I fell into a markedly depressed state. With every one still unaware of my addiction and an unwillingness to admit it to myself, I pointed fingers at all other aspects of my life. My self-awareness was skewed by the way I could present myself to everyone around me and an astounding ability to rationalize and repress most anything. To the world, I seemed highly educated, fit and attractive, great girlfriend, supportive family, etc.

By the time I was 26 I had convinced myself, a therapist, and my doctors that I was suffering not only from depression, but ADHD as well. I started a medication regiment of for a depressive disorder and ADHD, all the while not divulging my dependency on pornography. With a daily dose of amphetamines, I found myself wanting to masturbate even more frequently. 2-3 hours late at night turned into 2-3 at night and 2-3 in the morning. I was essentially spending between 16% and 25% of my life masturbating to pornography.

The satisfaction was highly transient and immediately replaced with anxiety and sorrow following ejaculation. I would even avoid ejaculation to simply remain on the “upswing” or the “better side of the fence.” The only way to escape the psychological torture from the use of pornography was to re-engage it. A vicious cycle materialized. Although it may seem impossible for one to keep this all a secret, I did. I found myself avoiding social engagements and family holidays to ensure an opportunity to masturbate to pornography.

After showing up late for Christmas dinner with my girlfriends’ family because I chose to look at pornography, I realized that my addiction had totally taken hold of my existence. The perception of women was obviously altered. My overall sensibilities were completely non-receptive to the world around me. Depression had evolved into despair and an immense sense of worthlessness. Maintaining my addiction and disguised shell of a life had become incredibly taxing. At age 27, I finally fully admitted to myself that I had developed a severe addiction.

For a year now, I have been trying to tackle my addiction. The longest span of abstention being no more than 26 days. The further into sobriety I get, the more easily I can rationalize looking at porn. My clarity, focus, and cognition seem to improve drastically, while anxiety and self-loathing fade. The magnitude of psychological torment from masturbating to pornography becomes unfamiliar, and so I start back.

I spent 2 hours masturbating to pornography today and I thought that it might be time to reach out to this forum and hold myself accountable. Day 1 begins.

 

I greatly appreciate the supportive feedback from every one. Just passed the 48 hour mark and have already caught myself rationalizing the act of engaging pornography. The sexually related element of the addiction is manageable at this point, but the inability to use PMO as a form of refuge is proving extremely difficult.

My emotional state has worsened as it has in the past when I have initially tried to stop. In spite of the noticeable increase in clarity, the first few days of sobriety always force me to be extremely self-evaluative and ultimately beat myself up a bit for decisions made leading up to this point in my life. Historically, this is when my confidence level is at its lowest. Feelings of regret, guilt, disgust, and self-hate consume me. Having experienced this in the past, I am fully aware of the temporary nature of these feelings. Nonetheless, it is still difficult to detach. Hopefully divulging to all of you will supplement just enough detachment from my own emotions to get through this.

I am not certain any one can relate to the following, but I have always envisioned myself mastering a craft in my lifetime. Essentially becoming superbly fluent or the "best" at some thing that was relevant to the world we live in. Not for fame or fortune, but for the sake of maximizing my contribution and self-satisfaction. This has been something I have striven for since I was a young boy and it is something that highly influenced my educational and career decisions. In this evaluative period, I have realized that my addiction has allowed me to master masturbating to pornography. The vast knowledge of sites, site navigation, keywords and tags, categories, download methods, image/video quality, hiding, clearing history, timing, hand positions, posture, adequate volume levels, and much more. These are all handled with quick and flawless precision. Fucked up? Yes. It is quite difficult to reconcile with the fact that you have become an expert in the simulation of sex without a partner.

Often, I question if humans actually have the capacity to interact with advanced technology like the internet. The most basic of our primitive instincts involves the desire and act of reproduction. Our emotions and cognition are heavily rooted in this principle. The internets' infinite and highly accessible sexual stimuli is certainly beyond a single human's reproductive capacity and so when repeatedly confronted with new pornographic material, the effects are unfavorable....