Exercises to break free.

Hello everyone.

For years, my attempts to overcome this addiction rarely lasted more than a week. It would usually only take three days before the urges appeared as a major, invincible force. When I saw recovery stories of people saying they just didn't felt like watching P anymore, my only explanation was that they had never been so hooked in the first place...

Well, now I totally understand them. I'm connected to the real thing and urges to relapse are tiny, even when I stumble over a P image. It all started with this simple realization:


We people are responsible for our actions, not for our feelings.


On my case, urges mostly appeared when experimenting uncomfortable things like stress, solitude, etc... I wouldn't accept those, and my escape was P.
Now, it's necessary to make a distinction: There's permanent and short-term acceptation.

Not accepting solitude is a positive thing as it serves as a motivation to meet people. If you'll accept to feel lonely for the rest of your life, that would be a permanent acceptation. The one I reccomend is the short-term one. That's when you accept that, on that moment you're about to relapse, you're feeling lonely.
And more than being ok with that fact, what you have to accept are all the unpleasent sensations that arise from it.

But resisting an urge implies accepting not just facts or feels...


Exercise 1: Do nothing.

If you're on this site, chances are that addiction occupies a huge space on your reality. When you try to remove it, you'll feel an equally big void on your life. Until you build something else on that space, choosing not to relapse means accepting to stay on a reality that feels empty. And emptiness is more scary than it seems, there was a revealing experiment that shows how much:

It was conducted by Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia. Subjects were regular people. They were asked to stay silent sitted on a chair, alone with their thoughts. They had the choice to proportionate themselves small but still painful electrical shocks, or to remain totally inactive.
Do you know which option most men chose?

The electrical one, that's how terrifying emptiness is.

And in our case as addicts, when we are confronted by an urge,
emptiness feels even more empty because it appears in contrast to the super-exciting option of PMO. To our brains, choosing not to relapse must feel similar to choosing suicide.
In order to beat this addicition, one has to start developing new routines and hobbies, I think that is something already accepted on this boards. That way urges will appear less frequently.
But when they do appear, the next exercise may help you build resistance against them:



Sit or lay on a comfortable place.
Then start doing... absolutely nothing.
When a feel or a thought comes, no matter how unpleasent it is, don't run from it and don't fight it, because that ways you would feed it.
Don't be impressed to whatever thing your mind throws at you. Remember that it prefers electric shocks to silence, so it may play dirty just to be active.

The thing is that whatever feel or thought comes, sooner or later will go away.
Then just feel the silence and the emptiness of that moment and, knowing they're temporal, accept them.

The objective is to try to be as more comfortable as possible in a zero exciting situation, so next time urges come, the unexciting option of not relapse becomes increasingly bearable. Then, at least on my experience, rejecting urges will become easier.
I guess it's pretty similar to meditation or mindfulness. I don't know if the effects are the same, but It's fair to mention it.


Exercise 2: Jump.

Other exercise is just asking yourself a question, a very simple one. It has a surprising power and can help in a bunch of situations, on this context is for when you're about to relapse. This question is:

"Allright, and after that... what will happen?"

I don't know about yours, but my relapses always followed the same path. And the destination wasn't happiness...


On every one of them, my mind and body hadn't said it with words but I understood they agreed on something: The promise that by succumbing to PMO, not just I would get rid of any unpleasent thing I was feeling... also would make me reach a state of pure bliss!. Who can resist to that?

Then, after hours of edging, it turned out that the state of pure bliss wasn't there. I might still enjoy a bit that first session after some days without P, but if the relapse did not stop there, the pleasure of the following sessions would become non-existent.

Apart from PMO being something inherently lacking, I guess that absensce of pleasure has to do with the fact that, knowing what I know about the addiction and its effects, I can't succumb to it blindly as I used to do. Like there's always a part of me that refuses to take part.
It may also be because it's like a drug:

You keep doing it because unconsciously you want to experience again that amazing first time you tried it. But the more you do it, the further you're from it.



Anyway, I would end every relapse feeling empty and deceptionated, asking myself if I really couldn't have put more effort to avoid setting the counter to zero. Remembering with nostalgia the number of days that attempt had lasted, and wishing I still were on that time-line.

So being that my response to the mentioned question, being conscious how things always developped when I took that path... relapses lost appeal.
The question seems to dissolve tension of the fight with the urges, putting things into perspective.
If you're ever about to fall again, try it. Just visualize the whole process of your typical relapse:

Does it led you to happiness?. Or after some hours, days, or weeks... you ended feeling totally convinced of quitting PMO forever?.
If so, save yourself the relapses. Jump them.



Exercise 3: Laugh.

For every action there's a reaction. The more drama you put into the goal of getting away from the addiction... the more amazing it will feel relapsing. Like all that energy devoted to opression translates into excitement.
I think the final nail in the coffin of my addiction was this:

I started to lose respect for it. I stopped mythologizing it and thinking it was the end of the world if I relapsed. Shame, guilt, despair...these were powerful additional feelings that the addiction counted on, making it seem more terrible and thrilling.
The change began one day when I told a person about my addiction, and gave me this counsel:


- Enjoy it. Deep down you are doing it because you want to, because it offers you something. Don't feel guilty about it, there's nothing wrong with doing it once in a while. It doesn't make you a bad person.

At first I though she didn't realized how powerful this addicition is, and how many problems it causes. But I tried to look at it through her glasses. And some time later, you know what feeling I had after my last relapses?

Like laughing, really. I couldn' believe I had fall for that again. It was funny not in a sarcastical or self-deprecating way, just felt comical. After the laughter, the feeling was one of optimism, like: "Ok, here we start again. It looks like I'm getting there".





Each day that passed with this attitude gained through the three exercises, the addiction began to feel less and less powerful. It lost the appeal of the forbidden. It became a parody of itself.

Today, the addiction has lost so much mass that I feel disconnected from it, as if there is no more space to plug in.


Well, that's all for now. Sorry if there are spelling mistakes, english is not my native tongue.

I'm aware that each case is unique and that some of the exercises may seem counterproductive in the short term, so take this with caution.

 

Thanks Warfman!
That emptiness is so scary because I guess our mind perceives it as death. If "I think, therefore I am", that means that when our mind doesn't move it thinks we are gone....
Anyway, it's funny how it perceives the void as a threat, so much so, that it pushes us into actually harmful activities to avoid it.

 

Thanks for your kind words @Icewarrior, glad you enjoyed it

 

Thank you so much @Casserole

Yes, it is very beneficial to keep in mind that a brief relapse doesn't send you back to the beginning of the journey. There may be a part of us that wants to believe it's really that bad because that justifies the relapse lasting several days or weeks. That's called the "chasing effect", right?