An unorthodox strategy

I've joined just under a week ago, and I have noticed a frequent recovery symptom that most people seem to have that I lack. Most people seem to be dealing with urges to look at anything that remotely resembles porn - youtube, advertisements, people walking down the street. I have urges to PMO, mostly MO, but I'm not suffering the above issue. I seem to have enough self control to look away when it's involuntarily presented to me, and enough not to want to look for it. Below is a possible difference. WARNING: could be triggering.

Please let me know what you think.

I started trying to break out of PMO about a year ago. This started because I decided to join a religion that identifies all of it as a bad sin. My original plan was to stop all visual porn immediately and use stories only to help wean me off (kind of like a nicotine patch). In a year, I only had 2 slips with visual porn (hentai). I never visited a picture or video porn site of real people again.

As for the stories, each month, I reduced the number of days each week I was able to read the stories (days of the week specifically). The theory was to take about 7-8 months and slowly reduce the shock. This part didn't work because I didn't replace this with a more healthy stress reduction activity. I did not masturbate without the stories. In my mind, the use of some kind of stimulation was necessary. When M with no P, I found myself having to fantasize, and it would always be with real people, either in porn I'd seen previously or real people (usually previous sexual encounters). I did not want to objectify women at all, and so the stories allowed me to use imaginary characters.

On the other hand, I did notice the changes above. I no longer objectify women, I can look away from images, and I do have control over fantasizing thoughts. This helps me focus on trying to stop the MO now. It also helped me establish for myself that porn was having a negative effect on me, as well as establishing that any type of use was still bad. Mainly, I still felt tempted to return to visual porn.

I definitely don't think this will work in all cases, but perhaps for the person who has failed numerous times and simply can't handle cold turkey? Again, I want to emphasize that by itself it did not succeed, but I do feel that symptoms are less severe.

For background data, I had been using porn for about 20 years and masturbating for about 22-23.