The Top 3 FATAL MISTAKES Rebooters Make

The Top 3 FATAL MISTAKES Rebooters Make

This is a great post by Underdog - same guy who did The Underdogs Thoughts on Rebooting on Your Brain Rebalanced. Maybe it is because I lean heavily towards Buddhism, but to me the first point speaks volumes to me and in essence explains relapses as this,

Recovering from addiction is a painful process if you hate the process. If you hate the process then you are emotionally attached to the process and when the process pushes back at you you interpret that as pain. It is a painful blow against your will. And when you experience that pain it triggers fear, resentment, sadness or distress. Your fear of the process and your refusal to accept the hard work turns the struggle into pain.

When we experience pain our natural reaction is to soothe it better. We soothe it better with pleasure. And as addicts our immediate choice of pleasure is to PMO. PMO promises us to soothe the pain and remove the battle.

If, instead, you detach yourself from the experience of abstaining, if you recognise the struggle that is involved, but don't hate the struggle then the struggle becomes a process that you can look upon and not feel injured by it. Don't take the addiction and the struggle personally. Don't take the struggle as a punishment. Don't take the struggle as an ordeal or as a mountain to climb. Be apart from the struggle. Do what is required to abstain but don't FEEL it. Then the pain from the struggle won't need to be soothed and relapsing is avoided.

Now I think about it I believe this is how I approached my current streak. And this is just his first point.

As for his third point, I would go one step further. He says

I would also add

If you're thinking about your penis, you're thinking about your addiction to porn. As long as your penis is in your mind, you will have a lot of trouble letting it go.

Stop thinking about your "performance", the length of it, the strength of it, the amount it produces, what it produces and when it does it. Forget about it completely. It won't go way - it will just go back to normal.

If you have relapsed over the weekend then the link above is definitely worth a consideration. This is a process we all have to go through to reach recovery. It isn't a bad process. It isn't a horrible process. It is just a challenging one. We are all capable of succeeding.

Good luck!