Greetings Fapstronauts

I guess I'll start like this... I'm a 43 year old male, married with two kids (8 and 11). I've probably been using some form of pornography since I was 17. I actually joined this site back in April of this year and started a re-boot (actually, I was about a month into a 're-boot' before joining), but I never posted anything, and ended up relapsing the very day I joined.. What happened, you ask?

Well after joining I read that NoFap Getting Started guide and in there it talks about testing to see if you suffer from PIED and even-though the guide explicitly states not to use this PIED test to re-lapse, I guess I already had my 'out' and 2 clicks later it was done.

Anyways, that's neither here or there.. I've been battling porn addiction for years and I've had many failures along the way, but also significant successes. The biggest success that I've had where I was able to abstain from 'P' for close to 6 months. I achieved this by creating a special hosts file that blocked 99% porn sites from the computers that I use along with enabling content restrictions on my iPhone. I then created a hard-to-remember password that one would need to change any of these settings, wrote the password down on a sheet a paper and locked it in my office drawer. This system really worked for me and although it didn't completely get rid of porn addiction, it gave me hope that I actually 'could' break the addiction. It also led me to this website where I became 'conscious' of what was actually happening on the inside physiologically every time I succumbed to pornography. What this means is before I visit that porn site, I now ask myself is it really worth it to go back down that road again, being fully aware that if I do I'll have go through the process of quitting all over again.. dealing with the withdrawals and other hassles that come with re-lapse. And guess what?, 98% of the time when I ask myself these questions, I conclude that it's not worth it and I don't do it (I don't even have the content restrictions enabled anymore on my electronic devices!). In fact now, I'm basically No-PM'ing it since along my journey I realized that when I masturbated without porn, my brain was still using saved images from porn sites I'd visited in the past so there really isn't a difference (at least for me). Of course I did say 98% of the time as I did re-lapse a few weeks ago while on a business trip. It was a 5 day trip and I had made it all the way through the trip without doing anything, but then on the last night of my trip, I gave in. So my battle continues, but I feel like I'm really close to defeating this monster for good. Anyways, sorry for the stream of consciousness, and for anyone that made it this far in my post thanks so much for taking the time to read. I'll have to leave it there for now as I need to attend a school function for my kids. I'm happy to be a member of this site and look forward to learning from everyone on how I can kick this 'evil' habit for good. I'll also try and share more of my story and progress as well. ~cheers

 

Thanks for the information. Glad to be here.

 

Thanks for taking time to read my post and best of luck to you as well.