40+ Days Hard Mode

Guys,

It is my pleasure to inform you that I continue to break new ground, extending my new record of 43 days hard mode with every second that ticks by. Although I still consider myself a beginner in my abstinence, I can honesty say that I am sitting here typing this to you having made a sometimes-impossible dream come true.

It can come true for you, too. The more difficult it has been to quit for you, the more easily you can revel in the wonders of life when you've finally quit.

I am 43 years old, have masturbated compulsively on a daily basis to increasingly kinky fetishes even before I got hooked on internet porn. I have walked around with shame and alienation, shy and defensive, edgy, creepy and irritable, for a long, long time. With internet porn the fetishes continued, fueled all the more by the vast amount of material to fuel my fantasies. I could click from picture to picture even after I had an orgasm, hiding from the world deep past the "witching hour" and burning the monitor glow into my retinas with the rest of the lights off and the curtains drawn. Fortunately it helped me to stop spying on women in real life or stealing porno magazines I was too ashamed to buy at stores since I could get an easier, usually free and more private high online. But I couldn't orgasm with my girlfriends without generating some of these extremely kinky fantasies or imaging some other woman while I was coming since I was so addicted to the variety and novelty. If she asked me what I was thinking about during sex, answering honestly would be torture.

I am so glad that finally there is a movement happening that I can relate to in Nofap. I live a secular life and believe very strongly in the power of positive thinking and creative visualization. I've seen people who complain a lot tend to end up with even more to complain about. I've seen people with a enthusiastic vision and sense of purpose achieve that vision and fulfill that purpose. I believe in the super powers that are talked about in these forums not in some comic book sense, but in the sense that there is really no limit to the ways in which we can improve ourselves or how wonderful our lives can be.

I plan to make Success Stories into my home, because I am changing my life and my identity from Ashamed Masturbator into Success Story. I wish the same life and identity for all of you. We are all Success-Stories-in-the-making.

Today I feel great, vivid, resourceful. Recently I talked by phone with a woman I've loved unilaterally for over 15 years and she laughed harder and squealed with more delight at my jokes and impassioned narratives than I'd ever heard. It was almost orgasmic. I feel on the ball, on point, clear-headed, unafraid.

Today I suggested to a habitually complaining friend that I would do phone-session therapy for a certain fee since his therapist retired. It was the most creative and self-empowering response I'd ever come up with. And it came from genuine faith in my therapeutic abilities. Many people have been using me as a free therapist for years and for the first time today I finally asserted myself calmly and put some of my needs first. He may be offended by my directness. I am not worried. I am learning and implementing my priorities.

I have been practicing lots of positive thinking as you can see in my journal linked below. Just as porn engaged my senses along with fantasy, I am engaging all of my senses in the new life I imagine - even taste. How will food taste after a year of Nofap? Will it be more flavorful? Let's keep it up and see, being drawn along by saporific curiosity. I am "feeding the right wolf." I am building fantasies that I can believe in - that I am willing to back up with action and broadcast publicly. I used to back up my kinky negative fantasies with the action of hiding from the world, accessing websites, paying the occasional subscription or download fee, and playing with myself. These newer, bigger, better fantasies I am backing up with the action of going out into the world like that brave man I am deep down, expanding my pleasures instead of narrowing them. I am smiling and saying hello to people on the street. I am offering kindness and encouragement to people here on this site. I am working out every single day in enjoyable growing doses. I whisper, chant, shout affirmations to myself in the mirror. I am singing and playing songs that inspire me. I am saving money on food by making and freezing big delicious soups. I am writing out how things are and then writing how I would like them to be.

I don't have to figure out how I'm going to overcome this addiction once and for all right now, but if I can imagine how things will be for me once it is overcome, inhabit that fiction as I would a good book or movie or dream, the solution tends to come on its own. The solution comes from the powerful depths, like an orgasm seems to come on its own when we've enjoyed the autopilot compulsion within the oneiric state of PMO.

In my experience there are infinite solutions to our problems. There is no reason to get stuck on just one. If I could surf the web in search of porn, why can't I surf the infinite number of solutions to overcoming porn, such as mindfulness, cold showers, playing the "hands off" game, journalling, drawing pictures of how I'd like to be, photographing something that reminds me of how I'd like to be, meditating, doing The Sedona Method, praying, getting out of the house, talking to my accountability partner, reading an inspiring biography, using a counter, blocker or exercising..?

Try them all! See what works for you just like you found that right picture in porn that put the eight ball in your corner pocket.

I don't have to throw myself hard into any of these activities. I can surf them, sample them the same way I sampled images for porn. The result is the same. Just as a deftly sampled accumulation of images and playing with myself could bring me to orgasm, so can a sampling of recovery bring my life to an even more powerful new climax of success and happiness. Samples are everywhere - in self-help books, spiritual books, watching behavior-changing shows like The Dog Whisperer who encourages us that if ingrained habits can be changed in dogs - who don't even speak our language - they certainly can be changed in people...

The power of having a porn addiction is that it shows us how we have been motivated all these years. How has porn motivated us? With the promise of deep relaxation? By saying, in effect, "Just check out that website for just 5 seconds!"? With beautiful imagery? With the comfort of solitude? It has done for me all these things. So I've used those motivators in my recovery. Thus:

"Just one push-up."

BAM! You do ten, twenty, thirty, driven along by sheer inertia just as five minutes turned to six hours with porn.

"Just turn the shower knob to cold for two seconds and then you can go back to as warm as you like."

BAM! You end up taking a full cold shower because it's a thrill. A frisson!

"What if you just logged into Nofap and see if there's anything interesting?"

BAM! You end up reading a heartbreaking, inspiring, eye-opening post by somebody that renews your commitment to the challenge.

I pester, invite, beguile myself into the luxuries of betterment in the light teasing way that porn used to pester, invite and beguile me into its corrupted riches. And it works better than anything else I've tried.

I am building habits that demonstrate my confidence, courage, prowess and my ethical sensibility.

Esteemed reader, I know you can do the same and better!