45 days PM clean, a porn and sex addict

Hi all,

I'm now 45 days away from watching porn and masturbating. I have touched my penis a few times. Naturally after watching porn for 15 years, the cravings are still there and I've been hard many times during the days. But I have done no masturbation. As I'm in a healthy sexual relationship, I'm abstaining from PM.

After about three weeks from quitting, my brains were stuffed with more feelings and snapshots related to porn and sexual fantasies than before. Still today, I get these feelings and images daily, but they are not so strong anymore. Porn seems to have lost its hold on me. I won't even get turned on if I think about some of the porn acts that used to make me hard and help me to get an orgasm, again and again. Some porn fantasies have become totally uninteresting because of what I have recently learned of healthy sex in a relationship. I now see that real intimacy has been difficult for me in the past and still is, mainly because of porn and the horrible stuff that follows from it.

The main "cure" for me has been to write down my feelings. I might post them later in a blog I'm planning to write. I also participate in a few support groups: a weekly live group, a biweekly phone group and biweekly therapy sessions. Without these groups and of course the NoFap forum, abstaining would be much much harder for me.

After quitting porn I've had a lot more time for work and friends. I feel like there is innate calmness in me which is getting stronger day by day. It will take time to release the excessive tension I'm having, and have probably had for years, mainly because of porn addiction, crazy amount of work and the daily presence of highly competitive people. Because of the stressful nature of my work, I've been seriously thinking about switching careers, a plan I'm going to execute in the next 2-4 years.

The reason I quit porn is that my addiction evolved into a sex addiction and I cheated on my spouse a couple of times. I hurt her so much without even realizing that I have a sexual addiction, a disease that lead me toward compulsive sexual behaviors. This demands attention and my recovery has started, with good results so far. I'm clean and I want to be, not only for my spouse, but for my own health.

A couple of weeks ago I found a key ingredient missing in my life. As well as some porn-related misconceptions about sex that I have, this dates back to my youth and is probably going to be a major offensive in my battle against the addictions. Since high school, I've enjoyed sports every day, preferably in the morning, and start working after that. But in the past few years, "I've been busy" and not exercising regularly, in the mornings or later during the day.

I want to relearn the exercising habit since I find that I'm not a very nice person to others or myself unless I have done physical exercise. This also contributes to the distress that I now experience daily. When feel like I haven't done what I should have done, and this accumulates with time, I feel bad about myself. This never leads to anything good, for me or people close to me.

So, doing sports again and enjoying life after porn and sex addiction, recovering day by day and going towards the 90+ days rebooting. I'm also studying the SAA 12 steps and a few other similar materials. This is all new to me. I never paid much attention to understand my feelings throughly before. I feel like I'm on a journey to be a better person.