I Have a Question

Long term recovery for addictions/alcohol is considered more than 5 years. Personally, I wouldn’t consider any pmo addict “ recovered”, I consider them clean and working recovery. Mainly because this addiction is a little different and more challenging to stay clean. This is more like a food addiction, you can’t just give up food much like most married men can’t just give up sex.

 

In my view, a successful recovery should involve streaks of months and ideally years as the norm. Relapses should be non-habitual and shouldn't take you back to square one. If you masturbate once and suddenly have to do it again every day, you may have been abstinent but you've not properly 'recovered'. Effectively, you're still an addict.

As someone else said, I believe all the NoFap 'tools' are quite useless. There's no substitute for desire and willpower and you need both - the desire to stop and the willpower to make good on that decision. Only you'll know if your SO has enough of either, or whether you've got the desire and willpower to tolerate failures on either count.

 

Nofap.com seems to anecdotal evidence easy to get here with searches you see thousands of relapses and hundreds of people that haven't been on in years who wrote "I'm in this for the long haul I want to x y z for my whole life"

I had already found something else that works for me before I ever heard about this site, after trying a lot of things that didn't work for me. one time a medical professional came to try what I've been doing and asked this same question. But he wasn't as open minded as you, he wanted hard evidence like he would get in a clinical study. It's really smart that you recognize we'll only get non scientific data here yet still willing to take that as the only data were likely to get. When I was younger I saw some supposedly hard data but I had participated in the survey it was based on and had not been very honest and heard my friends talking about being very dishonest about it so it's not trustworthy.

Anyways for me Ive been kept sober long term, by which I mean I haven't had to use any form of pm+ for years and been happier than when I did do those things.

If by "nofap" we mean are there people who do not use pm for years that's different, there are many. Excluding the ones who don't seem to have ever been sex addicts I know many who are yet have not had to act out at all for years, many of them for more than a decade, not from this site people I met in the real world

 

I havent read the whole thread, but i can tell you my story.

I was PMO’ing once or twice a day for six years. One day, I decided I should try to quit. I went 12 days. After that 12 days, I found NoFap. My next streak was 535 days. So, to answer a question you asked pretty early, I think NoFap certainly helps as opposed to going it alone. Talking about addiction takes away a lot of its power, and this is a safe place to talk about it. During that streak, I genuinely believed I was never going back.

unfortunately, some stresses did bring me back. I have had a few year long+ streaks. Every once in awhile, something stressful (like when I was almost sued, or the start of the pandemic) brings me back to it for a single PMO, but it’s never been as bad as was during those prior 6 years.

for six years, I was PMO’ing once or twice a day. For the last 8 years, 99% of my days have no porn. I believe that is a success.