It started when I was 6 years old. Now I am 31. This is my story.

[Already posted this on in the ReBoot Section, but I figured it makes more sense here.]

Hey,

glad you're all here. I want to share my story. I am a man, 31 years old. Some of it may seem a bit off or hard to grasp, but it's all true. I discovered that only the full truth will set me free, so I included some things that I have never told anybody. Here it is.

I did my best to avoid triggers - be careful nontheless.

It all started when I was 6 years old. No joke, I remember it well, because the initial fantasy I had was about my first teacher. Back then, my body didn't even produce sperm, so it was kind of a dry affair. So that was the start: Good feelings, a "world of my own", nobody knew, of course.

Some day, I guess I must have been 7 or 8 years old, I told my cousin and sort of promoted that thing to him. He told his mother a few weeks later. I won't forget how she went with me to the bathroom, confronting me with what I had told her son. SHe said it wasn't good and I should stop that. I was ashamed to the bone, it felt horrible. But I just nodded and that was that.

At this stage, I hadn't even discovered that you could use hands, it was all just dry humping the bed, basically. A few years later, my cousin must have been about 8 years old, I visited him and found him laying on the table, belly down. He had a chewing gum in his mouth that kept dropping out on the surface of the table. I immediately knew that I had done that and it was too late now to stop him. It had become "his thing" as well. It felt strange.

Fast forward a few years into the future. I was 9 when my parents split up. My father left us, because he had been rekindling things with his teenage love. I'll never forget how my mother came to me one morning, telling me that I should come down into the living room. My immediate thought was: "My parents are gonna split up" although I had NEVER even thought about that before. Not a sign of it, either. Well, maybe it was subconscious. When my dad told me: "I can't live with your mother any longer" it ripped my heart out. I cried "Nooooo!" and ran into my fathers arms. My world was torn apart that day.

From now on, I lived alone with my mother. She had a hard time dealing with the break up as well. Over the years, she (not consciously, of course) tried to manipulate me into replacing my father somehow. At the same time, she gave me a bad conscience whenever I said something positive about my father or his new family. One time, when I came back home from visiting my father, she asked me: "How was it?" and I replied: "It was fun!" She said: "Ah well, if it was such fun, why don't you just go live with your father then?!" I was 9 years old. I had no means of defending myself against that kind of pychological violence yet. SO here's what I did instead: I forced myself to take her perspective. I bagan lying to myself. From now on, everytime she asked me how it had been, I just replied: "Ah, you know, it was ok. No big deal". At some point, I said things like "You know that you are my REAL family, don't you?". I felt terrible, but in some way actually believed those things myself.

The trust in myself, that I just started to develop, had gotten its first big cracks. As had my soul. My refuge for coping with those things that a 9 year old can't possibly cope with, was doing "my thing". From now on, I noticed that I could use it to make myself feel better, to reward myself for being or saying what others expected of me. At the same time, it was the only time when I was being true to myself. Still, nobody knew.

Over the years I started to experiment. I discovered that I could use my hands. I discovered that I could use nude pictures in medical encyclopaedias or certain photographs to create a certain effect. This was before the internet and even before I had a computer. My imagination still played a vital role.

Fast forward. Many Years later, I discovered illegal downloads on the web. Games, Music, that sort of stuff. This was the time of sharing platforms like Kazaa and eMule. It wasn't before long that I started to look for images and movie files showing "you know what". This was mega exciting, it combined the rush of doing something forbidden with the sensation of seeing something that I had never seen before. I want to say though that I almost never looked for any material that had a man playing a role or something. I didn't like it, I was interested in femininity and nothing else. Around that time, I started to imagine what it would be like to BE a woman and having those sensation that I saw in those videos. I created a new fantasy.

At that time I had already peeked through the keyhole of my mothers bathroom a few times, which was a big deal to me because this was "real". I developed a preference to voyeurism that has never left me since. It expanded to pressing my ear against walls or floors when I heard something suspicious or looking at the windows of the building opposite our house. I never saw or heard anything, but the anticipation was there and gave me a thrill.

Over the following years, I experimented with all kinds of stuff. Edging, using no hands, tickling myself, all kinds of stuff really. "My thing" had become more important than ever. This was also the case because having lived with my mother for quite some time now, I more often than ever before needed a refuge that she couldn't enter. Borders that she couldn't possibly cross because she didn't even knew they existed. Downside was that I never learned to properly distance or define myself. I was instead constantly hiding my true feelings. I didn't even know all those things then.

When I was 18, I met a girl in school. She became my first girlfriend - that was, of course, huge for me. She was the first person that I told about the problems I had with my mother. For the first time in my life, I felt free of that internal slavery which I never thought I could escape. I felt like I had made it. Also, one of my first thoughts when we started having sex was that I would never have to do "my thing" again. It felt like I had finally grown up.

Needless to say, I didn't know shit at that time. Of course I came back to my thing very quickly. What bigger trigger is there than the "real thing".. Being able to even talk about that to my girlfriend soon made things easier for me though. I accepted that it was normal.

However, there was another thing that I didn't even notice back then. Over the years, starting in primary school already, I had developed a serious procrastination problem. One day when I was in high school, I had missed the deadline for handing in a short homework in geography class. In the break just before class, I went to the toilet, did my homework in a hurry and literally ran into my teacher on the way to class. I handed her my homework, which I had just written in about 15 minutes on the toilet. She gave me an A+. That day, my subcionscious started that process of learning that putting things off does no harm because I can always get away with it.

The procrastination habit grew bigger and bigger. I didn't do homework any longer, I did them in class. I didn't even learn for tests and exams any longer, I quickly went through my notes just minutes before the test. I started to prepar myself the night before a big exam. It became harder and harder, but I couldn't stop it. When the pressure just began to get to me, I numbed it all by doing my old "thing". That was always there for me.

By he time I went to university, I had started to realize that on somedays, my "thing" was in fact the ONLY thing that I had left. When I first realized that it was quite a shock. I didn't even see all the connections back then.

Finally, after 2 psychotherapies and some serious inner crisis, I graduated from university. I wrote about 20 percent of my thesis just the night before I had to hand it in. Which was already a deadline that had been postponed 3 times. Actually, it was a day after the third final deadline. During that time, I also did "my thing" - at this point, I had already accepted that I behaved like an addict and I used my "drug" when I felt I had to.

After having graduated from university, I realized that I was stuck in life. I had several jobs that I had started as a student, which payed the bills but didn't make me happy. At this point, I had been living together with my girlfriend (still the same woman, still my first girlfriend) for 8 years. My habit had already began to influence me and our relationship in ways that I didn't unterstand back then.

Fast forward to the present. After 12 years, we broke up almost exactly one year ago. The reasons for that are complex and not important. At first, I was devastated, but slowly started to build a new life for myself. However, the "thing" that stuck with me for 25 years, it was still a part of my life. It wasn't about how often I did it, which really wasn't that often at all, sometimes just a few times a month, sometimes there were binge-phases, but all in all I didn't have a daily problem. But far more important, it was about the whole mechanisms which were at play. "It" had become a means to cope. In general. In fact, it had become almost the only mechanism I had for coping with emotional turmoil. It served as the center for my gratification, it was the ultimate and hand become the only reward. My dopamine-system was in ruins. I know that now.

Also, the internet and instant-gratification had been able to really set in now for years. I had forgotten that I ever had something like an imagination of my own. I wasn't even fun anymore. I thad become mechanical. Like pushing the needle.

Through the years, I have tried NoFap many times, although I never even knew the term. I just realized some day that I wanted to know if I was even capable of controlling myself, or if I had already become a puppet. I think the longest I ever managed was 2-3 months. It was amazing, but that was 10 years ago. I slowly forgot how amazing it was. You know the mechanisms, I forgot why I had even started everytime I tried a new run.

Last week, I kind of had a mental break down. I experienced the worst procrastination "fit" of my entire life. I don't wanna go into much detail, because it was kind of traumatic, but let me just say that I had to correct some papers (I am working as a part time teacher right now) and that I couldn't even correct one sentence without having to gratify myself instantly, this time by watching random youtube videos for hours. Then onto the next sentence. It was hell. Really, hell. And I wasn't even fapping once, I feel that would have literally killed me.

It was because of that experience that something happened inside of me. I realized something very deeply. I realized, that my time on earth is limited. I realized, that not something, but everything had to change. I had not only been putting of doing the dishes, grading papers, paying bills - by now I realize that I have been putting of LIVING.

This is my chance. My only chance. I want to live again. I want to be able to smell again, to be able to see full colours, fo feel the sensation of the wind on my skin, the warm air of summer. I want to rip the curtain apart that keeps me from experiencing the beauty of our life.

I started meditating. I signed up for the gym. I entered an Aikido-Dojo. I did all that months ago. Now, the time has come to fully live all those things. There are no excuses anymore. They vanished. I want to embrace the emptiness that is there now, because I know that out of that emptiness, beautiful things will arise.

I installed a NoFap Counter on my smartphone. Today, it says "8 days so far". Chapter one in the book of my life has been going on for 25 years. I finally started writing on chapter 2. I am excited of what will happen. It's gonna be anadventure, that's for sure.

This is where my story begins.

 

Thanks for the kind welcome!

By the way, I really like your progress bar in the signature, and all the counters there. How can I get those things?

 

Yep, that worked pretty well. Thanks