Returning to NoFap

Hello all,

I was on NoFap a couple of years ago, completed a reboot of around 120 days and tried unsuccessfully to repeat the experience but just couldn't quite get into the swing of it. I stopped posting here for a number of reasons: the NO EXCUSES BRO! culture that is present in certain areas, I wasn't finding the answers I was looking for (particularly around dating - I now suspect that actually what I wasn't finding was the 'magic solution' I was looking for...), feelings of inferiority around the little to no responses my posts were getting and my progress in comparison to other guys (again, particularly around dating) and basically just feeling really dejected for not being able to re-create my initial success. The latter is certainly a familiar pattern in my life - initially fucking excellent at something, blowing all my energy in succeeding and then ultimately crashing under my own momentum.

Since then things have certainly improved. Rather than masturbating every single day as I was pre-reboot, I masturbate two or three times a week. My life is by no means a mess and I am making good inroads into developing a career, having a crack at trying to work on my dating life and have a good network of friends and loved ones, including a fantastic daughter with whom I have a great relationship. I do yoga, meditate, am in Jungian analysis (which I'm really lucky to get a reduced rate. No fucking a way a dude currently earning £9.00 an hour could afford it otherwise) and generally eat a pretty healthy diet. However...

I am still undoubtedly stuck in the cycle of addiction. In times of distress or when I'm overtired or numbed out I turn to masturbation and sometimes porn as a comfort. I'm sat here today after having masturbated on two consecutive days over the weekend and then again with porn this morning having taken a day off work for feeling 'depressed.' As a result I'm feeling even more numbed out and really reluctant to leave my room despite knowing that my housemates are compassionate people that I trust and that would be more than open to listening to my experience.

I'm 30 years old and haven't been in a relationship for about 8 years and had only fleeting sexual contact in that time. My efforts to get back into the dating world have been emboldening, but painful and, ultimately, fruitless. I struggle with a chronic feeling of loneliness and emptiness and a strong internal desire for ideal, perfect, feminine beauty. When I come close to such beauty I panic and over-invest - I'm not so bad on first meeting where I'm not expecting it and so can more readily be at ease and myself, but immediately after that I get over-excited and start projecting strongly onto them, idealising them etc. Once I've got a number or casually bump into them again I become needy and panicky and terrified of rejection and I'm certain this shows no matter how much I try to hide it as I usually don't hear from them again. The women who do seem attracted to me are usually even needier or messed up than me, which figures, but I'm not prepared to get involved in such a relationship and so I will get out of the situation and feel dejected that that seems to be 'all I can get'. In either situation, masturbation and porn is a fall back that creates the illusion of the ideal temporarily but that is ultimately totally unsatisfying and detrimental to my life.

Although generally against labelling my experience and life processes too much I believe that I was probably subjected to covert or emotional incest when I was a child. Sex addiction, a lack of ability to form intimate relationships and an unstable sense of self are all side-effects. For me, masturbation and porn addiction and by extension my sense of (sexual) identity are all central to my struggle. I have kicked several other addictions, including alcohol, cannabis and caffeine, but am now certain that masturbation and porn has been the core addiction for much of my life, the addiction I have indulged the longest and as a result the one that is the hardest to kick.

I have been exhausted and tired of being in the grip (har-di-har-har...) of this for so long. My therapy is helping me to understand the processes that lead to my behaviour and to heal some of the trauma that is the underlying cause, but I think that, at this point, I also need to work in more concrete terms on the behaviour itself if I want to let go of this tendency once and for all.