50’s guy, owes you all an apology, wants to become a better me

Dear NoFap friends, I am a new guy on the forum, in the past a long-time lurker, paradoxically whilst surfing for P!. I have what I now know to be PIED and need and really want to address it – for the sake of my wife, family and myself. This is my first post and so if I say anything that I shouldn’t please do let me know and I will learn from it. This may be a bit of a ramble, but I think it will be cathartic for me to to bare my soul.

Before I describe me and my circumstances, issues and aspirations I want to humbly apologise to you all. The reason for this is whilst lurking without joining many months ago, after realising that I had PIED, I arrogantly thought that this would be a simple habit to kick (I now realise its an addiction and not a habit – same as taking drugs, gambling etc.) and wondered why there was a forum dedicated to the subject full of fellas who just needed to get a grip of themselves (figuratively speaking!) and stop looking at P – SPAM REMOVED (spam code #001) - REPORT TO MODERATION!!!. Such hubris – I stopped P for 21 days – cruised it, thought it was really easy, cocky, confident and, as it turns out, full of sh@te. I then relapsed, fell hard and binged on P, stopped again, fell hard, relapsed, binged, felt shame and annoyance with myself for not being able to control the addition, told myself that I could stop if and when I wanted to but just really liked the P and so would stop later etc. etc. etc. It took me some time to recognise that I was kidding myself if I thought that I could do this alone. So, please all accept my apology for being a dick. I have looked inward a lot recently and realised that I need to look inwards in order to look out and truly see me as I am now and as I want to be in the future. I have recently found that it is not an easy thing to be brutally honest with one’s self!!!. To change I now realise that I need the support of good people like yourselves who, for whatever reason, whatever past lives, are on the same journey. Whilst on our journey I will try to encourage, help and support the rest of you and exchange ideas and feelings, and share failures and successes.

OK, about me, I am a married UK guy in his early 50’s. I have a wonderful wife and great children, a home, employment, and lots of really good stuff in my life. However, I have had PIED for about 2 ½ years, which has caused an issue with my wife and, like us all here, I need to get it sorted – actually, I need to sort it out myself and stop pretending that its not caused by P, that its just my age, or is due to low testosterone (more of that later).

I started looking at P back in my early/mid teens in the late 1970’s when growing up – like many guys my age in the UK I guess. These were magazines found in the woods, bins or stashed somewhere, and tended to be softcore (due to UK laws), although the odd very hardcore mag’ sometimes turned up when some lorry driver had been over to europe. Those first images got me hooked early and I M’d a lot and went actively looking for more. Looking for magazines became a big part of my life and I spent (wasted) a lot of time in this pursuit. I would, as a mid-teens boy, cycle miles and miles every few days going on a ‘hunt’ and intuitively got to know where to find magazines. As many inquisitive kids did, I then progressed onto watching grainy VHS tapes of hardcore stuff – whatever I could find, borrow or buy and I would M’d even more. Looking back I can see how those early images, particularly the hardcore ones, influenced my P preferences and tastes much later on.

I started dating girls at about 18 and had a number of sexual partners, loved sex (don’t we all) and had no issues with getting hard, although tended to O quickly. Looking back, I think that I had trained my young brain to O quickly through a poor diet of M and O to magazines and videos, and this played itself out in the real world. However, because I made sure that my partner always O’d too before or afterwards it never appeared to be an issue. I had a healthy sex life into my early 20’s but always considered myself to have a high sex drive. Looking back, I now think that I had simply trained my brain like a chimp/chump to want the dopamine reward that PMO brought rather than for example, playing a sport instead to get that brain ‘fix’, which in the long run would have been a much better outcome!.

I met my wife, who is my soul mate, a lovely caring person, and a fantastic Mum, in the early 1990’s and we married in the mid 90’s and had kids soon after. Our sex life was good at first, and we are compatible in our likes and dislikes in the bedroom, but it soon slowed in part due to work pressures and kids, and I continued using P secretly (I never actually stopped) – because, as I told myself, I had a higher sex drive than my wife. What is true is that I would always have wanted more sex than she did/does – it has never been very important to her, and we connect on a deep spiritual level anyway (even if I could never sleep with her again I would never choose to be without her). I had no issues with PIED at this time, indeed not until many years later. The P still tended to be magazines or videos – this was before the internet appeared. Looking back now, I see this sort of P as being fairly ‘harmless’ and quite innocent compared to what the high-speed internet dished up for me much later. I accept that it wasn’t harmless in that I had spent the preceding 10-15 years training my brain to prefer particular paper and pixel images in order to get hard and then O, but that sort of P seemed to be able to co-exist with my albeit infrequent but nevertheless generally fulfilling sex life. Whilst my wife and I were at opposite ends of the libido spectrum, which was my ‘excuse’ for continuing to PMO in secret, I think now that my ‘high sex drive’ was simply my brain seeking the dopamine rush as a result of my PMO training.

The high-speed internet in the early 2000’s opened Pandora’s Box for me and, because I work from home, with the kids in school and the wife out working, I had as much time as I wanted to search out any content and PMO. At first I think my consumption was at about the same level as before but over the last 10 -15 years it has escalated to the point that I could spend an entire day searching out P instead of working. Sometimes the sessions would span 2 days – and I was there in body but not in mind in the evening in between sessions when I should have been a husband and a father. It was easy to hide this ‘distant’ emotion by lying to my wife and family – work pressures/stress etc. Lost work time was made up in the evening or by compressing work in the time remaining that week, but I became irritable with clients for interrupting my P sessions when they emailed or phoned me. I found that I needed to watch more extreme content to get/stay hard when PMOing, and looking back, I realise that it was just a raw chemical thing in my brain - I could sit there semi hard or even flaccid and yet still had an absolute need to open the next tab/seek the next thrill/up the excitement somehow. I couldn't stop. In the end I rarely O'd, just spent a day chasing the next screen tab to see what the P was and whether it was more of a hit than the last - a weird way to get oneself off really. I now know that in doing this I was further training my brain to get off on the thrill or expectation of getting off/pixels, and not the sight/sound/touch and tastes of a real woman.

My work has undoubtedly suffered – I have delays in getting work done. After a long day of PM, often without O I would be really over-excited, tense, feeling like I was a coiled spring – without release – almost like I had taken a drug of some kind. I also had brain fog – I struggled to concentrate and focus on tasks that I would have breezed through years earlier. Assimilating information and arranging written argument became much harder to do. I have put this in the past tense above (14 days without PMO as of yesterday), but if I relapse then it’ll be the present and I will be back 'in the hole' again.

The first hint of trouble came a couple of years ago, whilst away with the wife. In bed at night, after a lovely day out together, I couldn't get hard for the first time ever. I suggested that it was because I had had a drink or two - I don't really drink and so it was a reasonable excuse. But, deep down I knew it wasn't. I really wanted to but I just couldn't get an erection. My wife was very understanding but when it happened again a few months later she thought it was because I didn't fancy her any more, which broke my heart because I love her and find her incredibly sexy. my body just wouldn't respond. Yet it would respond to 30 tabs open and screen images of stuff that I really didn't want to see but sort of had to - if that makes sense.

I tried to tell myself that the PIED and brain fog was an age thing, and/or low testosterone and type II diabetes. I had a testosterone test and it was genuinely low and so I have been privately prescribed a testosterone cream. I addressed borderline type II diabetes by significant changes to my diet and exercise, and together with the testosterone cream, and supplements to my diet, my testosterone levels went through the roof, I felt great (20 years younger) but, I still had/have ED.

I have always worked out to stay in reasonable shape and latterly to increase my natural testosterone levels through heavy weight training, but this all suffered as I wasted time at the computer PMOing instead of spending it with my wife and children and keeping in shape. I hated the feeling after PMO that I had just burnt x hours with nothing to show for it, and told myself that that was the last time – although it never was.

If I am totally honest, I could continue to PMO and just about balance my work and home life. I have never been caught and was always careful with browsing history etc. However, PIED, the effect on my relationship, and how I perceive women finally made me realise that I needed to change for good. I was also concerned that my preferences have morphed and I started to watch pixels showing really hardcore stuff that I would be horrified if someone knew I was watching. That shame/embarrassment, the feeling of betraying my lovely wife, and the PIED, which was the final straw, has brought me here to you guys today.

So, going forward, I am really, really interested to wonder what I might have been like without the dopamine rush from PMO for all those years – who might I have been instead of the current version of me. What would my personality, achievements and relationships be like without PMO?. I now want to meet that better me, and to be the best that I can be – for my family and for myself. I want to deal with the ED – whilst sex was infrequent before, it was always satisfying and I want to be able to satisfy my wife again. In fact, I want, and intend to be a Viking in the bedroom, and to exercise like a Trojan, and to work like a … well a thing that works really really hard. And so, I have pledged to myself to abstain from PMO – I haven’t set a period of time because I don’t want to achieve that period and then say to myself, “hell I can do this, so a brief flirt with PMO is OK then back on the wagon”. I’m just saying to myself that I need to stop, full stop. PMO just cannot be a part of my life any longer. I have dealt with the diet and I am focusing on exercise, and today is my fifteenth clean day. So far, until today, it has not been too difficult, but triggers and fantasies have really appeared today and I hit 21 days easily before and then fell very badly. I can sense it getting harder to abstain. I have lots of queries and will head on over to the over 40’s section and post there, but shall read as many other posts as I can daily and encourage and contribute wherever I can.

I do want to say thanks to all of you that post. I was a lurker for many months and reading your posts has encouraged me to join and beat this addiction. The success section has given me real hope that I can cure PIED and the honesty and frankness of you all is humbling and very encouraging. Thanks for reading this and for your support and solidarity.

 

Well you are in the right place. You are young mate, you have time to deal with this before your marriage and to start married life clean and with a shiny halo!. I dearly wish that I had the opportunity that you have before you right now - today, Day 1 - 4-5 months before your wedding (congratulations by the way). Please don't be like me, 52, married, and here to deal with PIED and related issues at home. Be 52 and still be here on this great forum but helping others because you sorted yourself out years before and have valuable advice to give.

Don't beat yourself up over a relapse, its pointless and self-destructive I think. Try to figure out what triggered it, learn from it, pick yourself up, start the clock again again and avoid whatever tripped you up in the first place. I relapsed so many times before I joined - I need to do it this time and so have just said "no PMO, full stop". I'll get back to o with the wife when I am healed but until then, I'm a monk!. Best of luck mate..

 

Thank you for the encouragement. It really helps me to know that people out there are rooting for me.

If I can help anyone with my own pitiful experiences then I'm happy to. We are all here on the same journey and it staggers me that others, particularly the wives of guys here, have such compassion, courage and and decency to help strange men through the very thing that could have destroyed their marriage or relationship and at the very least caused deep hurt. That takes a special kind of person.

Then hold onto this dream in the dark times, when you get urges to view P, remember why you are here on this forum. My reason is to be a better me for my wife and family. Yours is for you to decide, but not having PIED and being addicted to PMO on your wedding night is a bloody good place to start!

I respect everyone's individual beliefs and so please don't think that I am preaching - I am not. But, it is my own unshakeable belief that there is no greater earthly thing for a man than the love of a good woman (or partner) and to hold your children in your arms when they first come into this world. My wife has given me/us four healthy, happy, healthy wonderful children and even if I am 'called home' tomorrow I think that I have been blessed by having found a soul mate to journey through life with and children to love. Your dream of you wife and future children is powerful, so use it as a motivation when you are at low ebb/at risk of relapse.

I was brought up C of E, but have always felt the presence of a higher authority. I call Him 'the man upstairs' because as I have gotten older I am not convinced that any on the branches of Church have a monopoly on t. Here in the UK we would all still be catholic had ol' Henry VIII not wanted to divorce his latest flame and the Pope said no. So he started his own church. Still, a few of them lost their heads - not very MeToo! (I shouldn't joke - sorry) . My point is that our God is the same I think and I have a chat with Him fairly often. As someone famous who's name eludes me said, "we shall arrive in the same room but by different doors". I admire you for the abstinence vow. That is a wonderful commitment to each other. So, make sure that you are in good shape to end that vow when the time is right. Stick to your path, stay motivated and maybe we can encourage each other. Put yesterday behind you or else it will eat you up. Its gone, done, today you have recommitted to the task. As you say, by God's grace.

 

Thanks Moonesque. Best of luck on your journey today. Head op high and one foot in front of the other brother.

 

@G0ReadAB00k . Thank you for asking. I am in a really good place. I am on day 30 and feel so much better about everything. PIED brought me here and I am seeing the first glimmer of improvement there, But I have had an awakening really about the other benefits of no PMO. My journal is a rambling incoherent record of my journey - a place that I use to set down my daily thoughts so that if I relapse I can find encouragement that I can be better again. I have found this writing down of my innermost feelings to be really helpful. It has forced me to confront who I was. I don't want to be that man again.

How are you doing my friend?. Are you still on the waggon?. Participating as much as you can here helps greatly. I dont have much to offer really in terms of sage advice to people but I want to support everyone and just propping in and asking people how they are doing is lovely so thanks for doing that to me. Let me know how you are getting on please.

 

Thank you for your support. Blimey, you are at 600+ days, that is awesome. You must have seen some huge changes in your well being, outlook and physical self. What change has been most noticeable and what brought you to nofap in the first place PaulPaul?