The Process-Orientated Approach

Hey @Buzz Lightyear, good to see you back on here - right in the success section! It's great that this alternative approach has been working out for you. This might inspire others.

Trying to live your life without this site now and then is something I can relate to as well.

A few months ago I was desperate because I couldn't bring up any perseverance in cold turkey abstinence anymore myself. So I tried casual M without P and kept it up for ~70 days. I wasn't proud of it, but at least I didn't watch any P. I relapsed like 15 times, though, when I came back to my home country (into a different environment). Finally, I decided to do actual hard mode again, and right now I have 50 days on my counter, which is my 2nd best streak ever (best one: 240 days, still far away). It's hard to tell whether my alternative approach has helped me or not. I guess everyone needs to find out for himself. However, if you've been really long on the site as the two of us are (soon it will be three years for me, too), it is certainly a good idea to try around a little.

May you never relapse (and if you do, do not give in to the chaser effect).

 

I agree that trying to brute force your way to 90 days and beyond tends not to work, and honestly its pretty unrealistic a method to begin with, unless you already have the willpower of a saint or Shaolin monk, which if you did, you wouldn't be a PMO addict. Instead I try to base my recovery process on three equally important pillars; willpower, distractions, and support.

Starting with willpower, of course to succeed at anything you need some level of willpower, otherwise you will inevitably fail, but the trick for me is to balance it out with the other two. If you can successfully distract yourself from urges and PMO, then you wont need to use your willpower the whole time, only to start the distraction. This ensures that when the urges get so bad that distractions dont work, you arent already mentally exhausted from trying to fight back against lots of smaller episodes and have a better chance of resisting the big ones. Support works in a similar way; when urges hit, dont always look to distract, instead talk to you AP, post a thread, or even just leave a few comments for others on the site, reinforce belief by getting and giving support.

I'm only at day 14 so cant say with certainty that this method works, but its worked so far and might be worth trying.

 

As you can see, I am just at the beginning. So if I understand your approach correctly you were not going for absolute abstinence to Orgasm.

Even though I just decided on the white knuckle approach, I don't know how long this will continue. Not watching porn is compared to fighting natural urges relatively easy, but it seems that for some of us 'giving in' equals 'you are weak' so why not be the weak person I have been before?

 

Progress not perfection.

 

That's more or less what I am intending to do. I know that I am not mr. Perfect.