Get educated, get tools, and learn to love withdrawals

Hello everyone, thank you for the kind words.

@ Stuart115, rather than answer first directly I want to quote a forum member Pgregory, who said this today:


3 weeks and clawing the walls !

Week 1 was really easy to no PMO.

Week 2 was still easy but the urges started getting worse.

Week 3 is killing me and I feel like there's a fap monster sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear "Go ahead, surf some porn.....you'll be fine."

I'm still PMO free but its killing me !!!!!

What's working is not letting myself get bored, don't drink booze, let myself fap once a week without porn and being stubborn about keeping strong.

Stuart, you indicate you have gone one week without relapse, but really, you need to get weeks or months out to get past the worst of the withdrawals, or many report. There is the possibility too you are not addicted, meaning you won't experience withdrawals. Not everyone who watches porn, even regularly, is addicted.

But, if you did not experience withdrawals, why relapse, why go back? Withdrawals--or eliminating the feelings that come with them--is the biggest reason guys quitting porn fail. I think if I were you the question I would asking myself is: if I did not feel withdrawals, and therefore withdrawals--or eliminating the feelings that come with them--are not the reason I relapsed then,...why did I relapse? Translation, if you have no problem quitting, why keep using porn? And if you do have a problem quitting other than withdrawals, then, what is it?

Only you can know that.

Either way, anyway, I want to see you achieve whatever goals in life and in this forum you attempt. A lot of times, Stuart, people think that winning is just the result of fate or how we are built, individually. However, winning is a learned skill, you can study how to do it, you can be taught how to do it, but I promise you, you can do it. Whatever "it" is.

Peace.

 

Ten months free. Ten months clean. Ten months, no porn, no PMO, no MO.

The truth is, I know that on the 18th of the month, another month has passed, but I had to scroll back to remember how many months free I had been. My counter is off, I quit counting a long time ago. I still have challenging moments, but I know now I will never go back. I can still trigger, but triggering will never cause a relapse now. Still, if I see porn I get a dopamine high, and you you know what they say, what goes up, must come down, so I can still suffer a withdrawal. Knowing what that was, was huge in helping me quit.

My life porn-free is relatively easy. I saw a post by Xander today. He is struggling. I hate that for him. I have been there. I was there once, going moment to moment, day to day, with the only thought in my mind being "don't go back, don't go back, don't do it, don't do it", over and over again. It sucks. In the midst of the addiction it was simply a porn lifestyle. It was part of my daily ritual. I don't have that struggle anymore, I know I am never going back. Over coming porn addiction, aka dopamine addiction, takes a bit of humility that proud people--myself included--find difficult to swallow. We have to admit we don't control porn, but that it controls us. Only then can we do the one thing--the only thing--that can be done to beat the addiction: totally eliminate porn from our lives. If porn is the button you are pushing to get a dopamine fix, then you have to eliminate the button.

For those of you hoping for a long term solution, I can report that at 10 months, nothing will trigger me to relapse. Nothing. It will not happen. I don't guess that it won't, I don't hope that it won't; I know it will not happen. I don't go looking for trouble, I don't seek out porn, but I am in control now, and I could experience it without fear of relapse. Sure, I can get a dopamine spike, and a withdrawal punch in the nuts (rhetorically speaking), but I recognize what they are, and I avoid them. Porn no longer controls me. I don't control it--this is where the humility comes in--I know I just can't handle it, so I don't even try. I simply have nothing to do with it.

Thank you Human A and Eldarion for your your kind posts. Reading post and replying are part of my recovery, so thank you.

@ Xander, brother, if you read this, you are going the right direction with the blockers. Anyone trying to get clean needs to put obstacles between themselves and the problem. They will not prevent you from getting to porn if you are determined to do so, but they will slow you down, and in that moment of pause you have a choice. Ultimately, being free--as opposed to a slave--is not about eliminating the choice, but, given the chance, making the right choice. (Shout out to Morrow and his Andrew Ryan quote). That moment of pause is your moment to make the right choice.

I have peaceful days, many of them, back to back, without even a thought of the problem. Will quitting porn give you superpowers? No. You already have them. Porn is just your Kryptonite. You will never achieve your full capacity as a human being on this rock while you are putting that poison in your head. I encourage each and everyone one of you to take off your chains.

Good luck on your journey.

 

Hello to all. Thanks for all the kind and encouraging posts. I really appreciate it. You are showing others this problem has a solution, and the people who come here need to know that, so thank you.

Three words were the beginning for me in quitting porn addiction: "I am addicted."

The thing about this site is, a lot of guys (and a number of women too) sort of stumble in here not understanding their problem. Those three words can be terribly frightening. Almost everyone who comes here understands on some level they have a problem. But admitting what the problem is...that is quite difficult. It was for me too. On some level I think I knew I had this problem before I decided to quit, but it was only after I owned the problem that I could quit. The solution to the problem, for me, was acknowledging the problem: I am addicted. Ironically, once I acknowledged the problem quitting became doable. I will not say it was easy--I will say it was quite hard--but at least I knew what I was fighting against. Before I admitted my problem, I could never beat it.

For those of you new here, take some time to study the problem. Open your eyes and your mind and understand biologically, chemically, sexually, what porn does to the brain. Understand your problem is in the brain, above the belt, and not below it. That is the first thing you need to understand. You don't have a PMO problem, you don't have a MO problem, you don't have a sex problem; you have a brain problem. Everything you perceive and experience, whether you experience it as "good" or "bad" or "pleasurable" or "interesting" or "uninteresting" is filtered through the brain, and the reason you perceive things as good or bad is because the brain rewards it or doesn't.

You have to understand that our brains have not evolved to distinguish porn from sex. We get a dopamine high either way, but porn is sex on steroids, and porn addicts love dopamine. You have to understand about that to quit, in my opinion. At least it helps. Dopamine is the high, and quitting means you come down. Those feelings of anxiety, of stress, what might even be called terror and depression--those can be caused by dopamine withdrawals. I don't feel those things anymore. But in the beginning I did, and when I tried to quit--before I said those three words to myself--I always failed. I failed because I did not understand what was going on with me. I failed because, not knowing I was withdrawing, on some level I believed that the terror and depression I felt would be a permanent, every day, experience, for the rest of my life, and the only way to push it back was with porn. I did not understand I was just going though dopamine withdrawals or that in "pushing it back" I was just giving myself a dopamine high. That is the cycle porn addicts have to break, but they cannot break it if they do not understand it.

I am 10 months free now and I am here to tell you all that I feel none of that now, none of it. I don't use porn to get high anymore, and I no longer feel the pangs of withdrawal. It is not that quitting porn will, in and of itself, make your life better. It won't. But it will free you to make your life as good as it can be. At its worst I planned on porn daily, it was a lifestyle. There were things I could not do if it meant I was not able to be alone on the internet for more than a day. There are thousands of great things to do in this world that make it impossible to be away from the internet for more than a day. I can do those now, without anxiety. You can too. Porn is a crutch, but most of us are not lame; we just limp through the world because of if.

I know a lot of newbies hit this thread because they see the number of views it has. They skip to the end, hoping for an easy fix. There is no easy fix. I won't say quitting porn is a four minute mile because only a few of us can make that mark. I will say it is a 6:50 mile. It is difficult, but it is doable, and once you are clean you are ....clean. All your problems will not be solved, but you will be in a much better position to solve them. Because newbies do often jump to the end, I am going to re-link the Gary Wilson TED talk here. It is the first link in this chain, and if you have jumped here, I suggest you go back to page one and digest the chain in its entirety.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_RIm9ZMN1I

Sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. First you have to know it. After that, I invite you to walk it.

Peace.

 

Thanks for all the kind posts and thoughts. It helps. Reading posts and replying are a tool I use in my recovery, so thank you all.

Markguy posted here two posts ahead of this one. He has essentially distilled my method of quitting down to two sentences. If you do what he says, you will get clean. I'll distill it even further: Don't watch porn.

james1985 posted this today:


The tool that has helped me the most, image blocking

Hi,
I thought I would share the tool that has helped me the most, image blocking. On google chrome you go to settings, advanced settings, content settings then click do not show any images. I have to say it's kind of a bold step, the internet does look quite bare without images, but it means you won't relapse because of all the random triggery images. On google chrome, the good thing is that you can make exceptions for certain sites, because images are essential for filling in some forms for example. For those with firefox there is an image block plugin. This tool isn't going to be for everyone, but I found that a lot of sites had triggery images and it has really helped me.



I thought it was so helpful I would repost it here. James is absolutely right, unless you are reading erotica, you probably can't trigger just reading words. Last time I checked no one here triggered reading the nightly news. So, if the porn blockers are not working for you, and you are truly serious, block all images from the net.

Peace.