New to NoFap journey - Making my honest confession: Instagram

Hi everybody, I am new here and ready to begin taking the NoFap journey seriously. I fell that I need to make my confession somewhere in order to begin my recovery journey and I hope this is a safe place to say some things. I don't feel like I have anybody in my life yet with whom I am can be honest to the extent that I need to be, so I am grateful for this anonymous community. This is my full, unaltered truth sparing no details or feelings.

I am 21 years old college student in engineering, and have an exciting career lined up. I have been a follower of Jesus Christ my whole life, he is my Lord and Savior. But as you may have guessed, I am also a PMO addict and this addiction weighs heavily on me and threatens my education, career, mental and physical health, happiness, and relationships.

I am straight, but my entire life I have felt uncomfortable around girls. I have been uncomfortable with somebody knowing me deeply or "being myself", and always fail miserably when trying to project a personality that I think girls would like. Around 12-14 years old I started to deal with my lack of fulfillment in relationships with real girls by turning to the internet. I use porn and masturbation, but in my case what was and is even worse is Instagram.

For the better part of a decade, I have followed the same ritual daily, sometimes multiple times per day, always believing I want to quit, with probably 7-10 days of "sobriety" achieved at a maximum.

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My ritual is to go on Instagram and start to flip through the profile of a girl, and almost always the profile of a girl I have some real-world connection to such as somebody I went to high school with or briefly encountered. I will spend sometimes an hour screenshotting all of their "thirsty" pictures as far back as they go, and frantically search for other pictures of them on other social media sites. I will even edit the pictures. Then I will often watch porn to get aroused and masturbate and orgasm while switching between porn and my collection of screenshots. I subsequently delete all the pictures (sometimes 40 or 50) in shame so other people don't see them later if I pass them my phone to show something.

These girls are all ones I know from real life, which is some way I further entrench my shame. Often I will start this ritual with their Instagram profile immediately after meeting them.

I have never had a girlfriend in my life, and I always believe that having a girlfriend would help take away the void I am trying to fill with PMO. However, I have had plenty of opportunities to date a girl, which were all lost opportunities due to my secret addiction.

I was popular and well known in high school for being one of the smartest and most creative guys in a large and affluent suburb, and considered to be pretty athletic and handsome. As such, there were several (maybe ~5-10) girls throughout junior high and high school that proactively took the initiative to flirt with me. Each relationship followed a similar trajectory.

Usually with the first encounter, first text message, I am on her Instagram looking for things to beat off to. Sometimes if I considered her to be a respectable girl I would try to promise myself not to engage in this behavior due to some wild fantasy I was dreaming up of getting married and being abstinent until marriage. In all cases, this never lasted long and I was back to my old habits.

Eventually I would flirt back (over text) long enough to set up a date. For most of these girls, they only knew me superficially and primarily knew of the reputation I established at school as a creative and successful guy. This date would be the first time they got to know me as a person 1-on-1, and I think they subsequently felt disconnected from me and like I had nothing to offer them as a boyfriend. Then things fizzled out and I kept masturbating to their Instagram pictures. I guess I already had a sexual relationship with their Instagram profile, so I entirely lacked the confidence to build one with the real girl.

I am ashamed to admit that some of these girls who expressed an interest in me are still the ones whose profiles I seek out, up to 5 years later. Although I am in college, I still mostly thirst after girls from high school because I have had comparably little social success in college and simply don't know many girls who go to my school. The reputation I had in my hometown which I was using as a crutch for social purposes disappeared when I came to college, and I haven't put in the effort to rebuild my social circle.

Here is another example of the extreme emptiness of this lifestyle of mine. There's a girl who I thought was attractive since we were about 15, meaning for at least 6 years I have been intensely following her Instagram (engaging in my PMO habit). She goes to the same college now, and I recently encountered her in an elevator. I know everything about her that she posts online going back years, am attracted to her, and I know she knows me. While in the elevator, I did not have anything to say to her, did not even acknowledge her, and wasn't turned on by her at all. If she was just a random girl I was meeting the first time, I would not have thought she was cute. I couldn't handle the awkwardness. I ended up storming off the elevator at the wrong floor (she could tell) not even having said "hi", which must have come off as passive-aggressive.

Later that night I screenshotted her Instagram pictures and jerked off.

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I said I never had a girlfriend but that isn't quite true. I have had an ill-defined, friends-with-benefits type of relationship with a girl for quite a while. I met this girl on my family's summer vacation in Montana, she was a family friend. She was my first kiss, I lost my virginity to her, I have been hooking up with her on and off for years now, and she remains the only person I have had sex with. In non-sexual ways, we also get along great, have a lot of fun together, and complement each other well when we are together.

Here is the problem: I don't speak about my relationship with her. I have kept the sexual part of it a secret from everybody, but my family strongly suspects that I have some kind of relationship with her, I just don't talk about it because the relationship between her and them deteriorated a long time ago.

As a consequence of the secrecy, other problems emerge. Almost immediately after we kissed the first time, she went back and hooked up with her old boyfriend. I was devastated, but did not have the confidence to recognize this relationship wasn't good for me. Over the years she has had many more "real" (meaning public) boyfriends while still hooking up with me, and I hooked up with her several times, across several different real boyfriends of hers, with full knowledge that I was enabling her cheating. We sometimes say we are meant for each other and will eventually get married, and always enjoy time spent time spent together although we frequently spend long stretches apart or unhappy with each other. It's as if we are both trying to quit this relationship but neither have the strength and are bound by the sex and secrecy which enables us to keep going.

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I could go on, but those are enough examples of how PMO has negatively affected just about every aspect of my life. The sin and shame is driving me further from God and from fulfilling relationships. I am here for recovery, and this is my rock-bottom story.

Thank you for reading my story.

What resources would you suggest for me to get started? Do any of you relate to my struggle with PMO as it relates to Instagram being the primary trigger?

 

Thank you for your reply, and I am also reassured that others struggle with this as well.

Social media absolutely drags me into PMO behavior and somehow I don't see that discussed much. There are plenty of reasons i might go to social media like keeping up with news or updates from people I am interested in. But the combination of harmless content with sexualized content acts as sort of a bait and switch for me. That takes me down a rabbit hole and eventually to watching porn.

I am pretty sure the most mature way to think about this isn't by trying to make some social commentary about what people should be posting it is just to say that I am powerless over my addictions and simply cannot handle consuming social media. The engineers at Facebook are working day and night to figure out how to make their product as addictive as possible, and this is a battle I should not try to fight. My goal is to quit Instagram entirely.