Introducing myself

Hi everyone,

I started my abstainance about 20 days ago, and I decided to make an account to connect with some folks here in this community. I've been visiting the forums often and have found that there is a lot of great information and stories from a lot of folks, who have been very candid and forthcoming, which is awesome. I'm opting to do the same, for the purposes of exposing my shame, and in so doing, I am hoping to dissolve some of its power.

My masturbation history begins somewhere around age 12/13, and I can still perfectly recall my first orgasm. It was purely mechanically induced, and I simultaneously felt worry that I broke something in my body and an oddly intense pleasure from that same physical sensation. After that point I was hooked. Shortly after that first orgasm, though, many events and circumstances occurred that would create a dynamic of shame and compulsivity. An insidious undercurrent of pain would underlie what I thought to be a free and limitless source of pleasure.

First thing to get out of the way: I am homosexual. This is something that I struggled with immensely, to the point where I was suicidal when my emotions around it were the most extreme. I felt that it immediately placed me across the line into "less than" territory as compared to other males (I realize now as an adult that I placed myself into this box, but my childhood mind didn't see it that way, of course). I simply believed that it was a very bad thing to be, and the feeling carried over into adulthood as a sense of being emasculated. This factored into my masturbatory practices (beyond the fact that I was simply aroused by the male form), but I can't discuss that effect without conjoining it with another foundational moment in my sexual history...

When I was about 11 or 12 years old, maybe younger, a childhood friend of mine suggested that we get naked. During this, he assessed my physical self and declared, of my penis, "Oh my god, it's so small!", and then he proceeded to laugh hysterically. I remember feeling like the whole of my being had been hollowed out, and I lay there frozen in humiliation and shame. From that moment on, I became incredibly self-conscious about my penis. (As an adult, I have since referenced statistics on penile size and have discovered that I'm slightly above average, but this intellectual realization has had absolutely zero effect on the emotional disruption that occurred decades ago.) Now, remember what I said above about feeling emasculated because of my homosexuality? Compound that with the episode of me having had my anatomical self-worth eviscerated by my best friend, and the whole of my sexuality is that I just don't feel like a man. I'm not attracted to women, and even if I was, I don't have the vital equipment to satisfy one, so I'm basically worth nothing. This fundamental and indelible part of my being, my sexulaity, has been completely devastated.

Enter masturbation (and here's where it gets ugly). The first pornography I ever discovered was a Playgirl magazine that my mom got for her 50th birthday as a joke. Here are some "real men", and I definitely don't look like them. Then I found a magazine in my brother's room that showed men and women having full-on sex. A guy with a huge dick, having sex with a woman, so another piece of media implicitly broadcasting my inferiority. But what's happening when I'm looking at these images? Am I making myself aware of the negative feelings induced by them and confiding in a trusted friend or family member to have them help me healthily process my emotions? Nope. I am getting off to them. Getting off feels good. Actually, it feels fucking great. It feels better than the shame and inferiority that I'm constantly dragging around. It feels better than listening to my rageful, alcoholic father scream his face into a bulging, contorted mess for hours on end. It's an escape, and I can't get enough of it. But what's happening when I'm escaping? Am I partaking in a positive, adaptive behavior that fosters self-esteem? No, I am not. I am, paradoxically, deriving pleasure from feeling inferior. The escape that was "freeing" me from my problems was also the thing that was sustaining and reinforcing them. And it became quite the nasty feedback mechanism: Feel ashamed, seek an escape from that feeling through masturbation, masturbate to arousal states linked to shame (however unconsciously linked at the time), have post-climactic realization of self (now exacerbated), [repeat].

So now I find myself in a place that many of you here are in and that many of you have transcended. I am in a place where my arousal is wedded to a state of shame. But NoFap has helped me fully believe something that I've suspected all along, if in a very deep part of my soul that's buried in self-doubt: This shame is not who we are. It is not something inherent to us. There was a cause that initiated it and there is behavior that sustains it, and that behavior is masturbation. There is no doubt in my mind about this. In fact, upon the realization of this, the retrospective of my skepticism regarding this has me looking self-defeating and arrogant: "This must be who I am, just accept it," "You're worthless, just take your place and move on," "If this feels so good, it can't be wrong," ad nauseam. Not coincidentally, these are statements of addiction, ones that reinforce the addition's power. I now see how I was addicted to this carousel of creation and release and rebirth of shame. And I, too, am going to transcend this, as we all are.

I didn't realize the shame-cycle aspect of masturbation until very recently, and fucking hell do I wish I realized it sooner. But since even allowing myself the possibility that I am not defined by this shame, that it might not be an inextricable part of myself, that's it's not who I am, I have felt immense relief and hope. And that hope is fueled greatly by the community of us all that have come here to bare our souls in solidarity, and I thank you all for your bravery and your honesty. I am here to contribute the same, and in so doing I believe I too can provide some hope for others out there.

I am glad to join you all!

 

Thank you so much for the kind words. You have provided great encouragement. The journey definitely has ups and downs, man.

Stay strong yourself! We can all fight this together.