Rewiring in a relationship

Hello dear reader,

I am mainly looking for advice and hoping that somebody with more experience shares his views with me. If this is not the correct subforum, please contact me, I will gladly go to the appropriate place.

This post will probably contain triggers, so please be careful and present-minded when reading it.
Also, this post has turned out to be pretty long, so it is structured into four parts:
1. Background
2. Situation right now
3. Actual question
4. My views on that matter (optional)

1. "Short" background story on me, to allow more understanding:
First serious contact with pornography started somewhere around age of 14, with looking at pictures of women without any clothes on. Over the period of 6 to 7 years the material got more and more intense until I found myself, at 21, to like pornography with anal sex - something which I considered quite gross at age 18 still. At that point I realized that something was off. I involved myself more with different kinds of martial arts and found Qi Gong and Yoga as an effective method for self-improvement. After my relationship of that time ended (age around 23), my consumption of pornography reduced more and more (due to general change of lifestyle).
From 23 to 26 years old, I lived through a kind of hard mode of nofap without actually knowing it as such (I consciously learned about pornography as being addictive only later): I practised a lot of Qi Gong and Yoga back then and, most importantly, did not have a partner. This made sexual encounters very rare for me. I did not count the days, because I did not care. I simply did not feel the desire for either sex or orgasms that much. I suppose that I went as far as 100 days, give or take.
Then my current partner and I started our relationship, which led to more regular sex. I found myself having desires for all that pornographic material from years ago coming back (now I know that this was the chaser effect in some form), and I relapsed.
Around one year into our relationship I read about nofap and yourbrainonporn and actually understood what was going on. Since then it was, luckily, a constantly improving battle against my addiction to pornography.
After I understood what pornography can do to the human brain, I intuitively started rewiring my neuronal pathways using orgasms when having sex with my girlfriend, while at the same time reducing consumption of pornography. After all, an orgasm is something that the brain remembers quite well - that's how most of us ended up being porn addicts. So why not use this mechanism as a tool? Over time my attention shifted from having orgasms with my girlfriend only, to actually focusing on intimacy and the actual bonding with my girlfriend.

2. Situation right now:
Recently, we both have finished our college education and are in a transitional state of our lives: While I still mainly stay at our old place, my girlfriend has already moved to our new place in a different city, so we meet at the weekends only (only a bit more than a month go to - yay!).
This situation creates some loneliness and I am having more time to actually observe my behaviours and reflect on them. For instance, I had to reset today :-/
Anyway, I do not feel that it is neccessary for me go through a hard nofap mode (although, most likely it would speed up things a bit). I love my girlfriend and I love the intimacy with her, and sometimes it becomces sex, which occasionally (doing something comparable to Karezza) ends with an orgasm for me. That's ok. I still experience the chaser effect and sometimes I have to reset. The way I see it, this will persist for a while still (considering that I had almost a decade to get used to watching pornography), but it will lessen with every positive experience of interaction in our relationship.

3. Coming to my question(s):
I am starting to see and understand more and more that relationships with other people are essential to being a human (reflecting on that: It's quite strange/portraying for our time that a so basical insight can be so hard to achieve). And I want to go deeper into that.
I don't want to get my life free of pornography (to be cynical, I do not think that this is quite possible, with all the sexualized advertisments around us), I want to be not aroused by pornography when being confronted with it. I want to see my closest friends and family (and all the stuff one can do together) as the excitement in life, i.e. rewire myself.


What are your views and suggestions on this goal? How would you approach something like that? What methods would you create for yourself?


4. My views on that matter:
I think in terms of dopamine and the rewarding system in the brain: One does something that releases dopamine, a neuronal pathway is created/strenghtened to get the experience again. There are different ways to achieve dopamine release. In respect to that, I consider an orgasm to be really heavy machinery. Something more subtle would be to actually recognise a situation as being nice and fulfilling, and then concentrating on that thought, which turns the thought into subjective pleasure.
I hope that makes sense... :-D

I am excited to read every opinion and/or advice on this topic! (Including personal conversations on that matter.)

Amendos

 

Thank you guys for your opinions and experiences!

I guess it sounds more impressive than it ocassionaly feels. The struggle is real still. But there is a definite difference between consuming pornography and actual intimacy

Outside, you wrote about early signs of arousal. What are these signs for you?
I notice that my breathing gets heavier when I become aroused. Also, I have noticed a change in the thinking/perceiving process in the mind itself. The thinking becomes more arrowlike - straight at the goal. But this I cannot recognise everytime.
Then some muscular tension in the hips follows.

Love2LongBoard, your post contains several points with food for thoughts. Thank you for that.

To choose pornography to be appalling is exactly what I meant when I wrote "I do not want to be aroused by it". I am sure that one can learn this and train the mind for this (I also am pretty sure that this is something that will take many years to learn, and that, even after that, there still will be some room for improvement). The way I see it, is that one has to make a behaviour out of it. At first it is something that requires much effort, because one has to stay conscious about it all the time. With every success it should become easier, though.
There seems to be a mechanism behind that - If you have about 1 hour of time, get yourself some tea/coffee and look for an interview of Bruce Lipton led by Ian McNay. It is called "The Power of Consciousness". There are a couple of situations with Lipton going a bit beyond the casual stuff. All in all, I consider that one can get some basic understanding about how the mind operates, though.
Love2LongBoard, could you please elaborate a bit more on how you would decouple intimacy from having an orgasm? I get the general idea; one basically gets some kind of reward from intimacy and does not have an orgasm. But how do you focus on that (biological) reward? On what do you concentrate? What do you put your attention on?
I realize this question sounds very scientific, but there is a real emotional level to it.
And I am especially curious on how that dissolves the chaser effect after having an orgasm.

And on (de-)humanization: In the text on objectification&dehumanization linked by Love2LongBoard, it is written that one dehumanizes a woman when one fantasizes. How far does that go, in your opinion?
Is it ok to fantasize about a very thrilling experience with your partner because you miss her/him and you two will not see each other for a week? Or is that already a dealbreaker? I think that women also tend to fantasize about one or another experience. Where is the line?
I remember the time after losing my virginity: I was not new to orgasms and not new to my body, yet I simply did not want to masturbate, i.e. pleasure myself. That included fantasizing about the experience as well. I did not want to think about it or anything, I just yearned to be with the girl. I figure this was a kind of purity - is that what one should aim for, when trying to avoid dehumanization?

Best regards,
Amendos