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PMO habits & behaviors

Discussion in 'Porn Addiction' started by Volition, Oct 27, 2013.

  1. Scott1971

    Scott1971 Fapstronaut

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    I CANNOT tell you how helpful it is to discover that I am not the only one who has these same patterns and habits. You feel so alone and isolated in yourself when you do these things and with no one else to relate to about your problem, it just continues to spiral out of control.

    I am a brand new member here. Just signed up last night so I'm just starting on the path. But I think by stepping out into the light, so to speak, and share my habits with a group of like-minded people, it will help to de-sensitize me from the PMO cycle.

    I've spent hours upon hours online searching and surfing for the "perfect" porn. A photo, a video, that exemplifies exactly what I was seeking in my fantasies. And occasionally I would find it. I'd be so excited because I felt it was there especially for me. Someone read my mind and gave me the scene or whatever I was looking for. So of course I'd bookmark or download it and fap to it for a day or two. Then eventually this "perfect" porn would loose it's novelty and i'd be back on the search again. My hard drive is filled with gigabytes of these "perfect" scenes. Many of which I haven't opened again.

    And like many of you, I'd start to feel guilty and dirty. I'd attempt to start anew by deleting my porn folder, closing accounts on my porn sites, thinking if I just made it too inconvenient to go and download it all again, I wouldn't bother. But of course not. The urge would hit, I'd be surfing, searching, saving and signing up to the same sites again, under different usernames because I couldn't use the one I'd cancelled and I'd be right back where I started.

    The thing that really frightened me is how time just evaporates when you're PM'ing, the "O" is the end of the process. HOURS, would just disappear from the time I started. Sometimes I'd wait for my wife to go to bed and I'd go on the computer downstairs at 11pm. By the time I'd hit my "O" it was 3-4am!! I'd feel ashamed and pissed off because I knew I had to be up for work in like 3 hours! I'd spend the day exhausted because I'd been up all night PMO'ing, swearing "I'll NEVER do that again, but of course, I would.

    This whole thing has really screwed up my life in a big way and I need to regain control. I've read too many of your success stories to think this is all just a fluke. I really believe that too much PMO dulls you, slows you down and keeps you down. I need to break this cycle now.
     
  2. DickoryDoc

    DickoryDoc Fapstronaut

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    Yeah, the "PMO haze" is a good illustration of how the chase for PMO fixates attention and pulls us out of reality.
     
  3. oldnintheway

    oldnintheway Fapstronaut

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    OK, so let's talk about this rewiring. I've been a porn user for nearly 45 year. When I was in the Army in the 60's there were magazines about everywhere you went. The advent of video changed things in the early 80's but it was still mainly magazines for me. When the internet thing started I began downloading short clips. When I began to work from home and had more time I figured out ways to download tube site videos and convert them. Over a month ago I deleted nearly a TB of video that was mixed in nature. It hasn't been any big deal to stop PMO'ing or downloading for this time but now I find myself "reviewing" what I had in my head. In some ways I had constructed relationships with some of the women in my mind. It is particularly interesting to me how one in particular walked away from porn rather publicly and how reading some of her writing and seeing interviews made her less appealing sexually but more interesting as a person. Anyway I'm now trying to figure out where to go with this. I had told myself for many years that it was simply no big deal especially compared to some of the horror stories of ruined lives that I read here. When I stopped drugging and drinking 20 years ago I went to a shrink and he said "you are not what we would term and alcoholic but you have some important decisions to make". I stopped after 30 years and never went back. Now I have to decide if PMO is in the same arena, what was it doing to me? If I had not quit drinking there is a good chance I'd be dead. I just am not sure that PMO is the same. Just throwin it out there.
     
  4. Volition

    Volition Fapstronaut

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    Hey there Oldnintheway, I think this is an important distinction you have to make for yourself. I think all of us struggle with this same thing in our own way.

    This thread is helpful because it helps us see the ways out addictions played out in the real world. How we did ridiculous things in a patterned way.

    I think your question here is going a level deeper to what the damage was from the PMO habit.

    Personally, I think the word 'rewiring' is closer to what we are doing than 'rebooting'. It's like you need to uncross the wires in your head that have become almost fused together through years of patterned behavior.

    One good way to help define what PMO was doing to you, is to review this thread, and all the things the guys here have said about what PMO did to damage them.

    Keep asking yourself the same question, and I am sure you will come to a meaningful understanding.
     

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