Trauma survivor addicted to Dark Web porn since age 9 - finally seeking help

Hello.
Firstly I would like to put a big TRIGGER WARNING on this post due to the dark, disturbing and explicit nature of my story. I really do not wish to upset, trigger or offend someone.
This is the first time I am seeking help in a space like this, and I am very nervous in many ways, thank you for the space here and for taking the time to read if you do so.

So I am going to explain my story - and not in it’s entire detail because it often triggers me into fits of PTSD psychotic episodes, but enough to express the severity of my own addiction.

Also please note I am not sure what I would like out of this community and forum, I am simply begin a journey of admittance and attempt at healing. It’s the first time I have really been calling my behavior an addiction openly and when I began to hear and read from porn addicts their experiences it was shocking to feel how similar my feelings were too. So here we are.

I was abused as a child - my father was an alcoholic, physically and verbally abusive to both my mother and I, and I was always and an extremely sexual child, some of my earliest memories are wondering why I didn’t “have the part” that cis boys do (let me clarify here that I am a transgender man - meaning I was born female with a vagina, but identify and present more male aligning) these feelings were often both sexual in nature and also in feelings of my own dysphoria for my body parts and identity. I would fantasize about and wonder (even before I had seen porn) what an adult person would do to me if I wanted to have sex with them, and I remember literally wishing I could be a child porn star. I have no idea how that thought entered into my brain, unless I had been exposed to/indoctrinated by it at a very very young age.
With trauma and abuse happening at home, I became very enamored in video games, the internet and ‘make believe’. I was always very imaginative and am an artist, so I naturally gravitated towards the internet for escapism.
I started trying to seek answers and information about my own sexuality - I began masturbating at a very young age, which I outwardly thought was very wrong due to it not seeming normal for me to do so.
Back then - as a child, it was much easier to access all sorts of content online, things were much less monitored (I am 24 now) and so I very easily came across porn, ‘mild’ at first, until I actually stumbled about beastiality and underage porn.
My parents eventually found out, my mother was kind and patient, my father punished me severely.
Let me interject for a moment too to mention that I was already in therapy at age 9, I had been told by a few therapists that I was on the spectrum somehow (in terms of mental neurodiversity, but was never diagnosed with autism of any kind) and I was an only child, who had anxiety but also loved meeting and interacting with others.

The porn discovery may have heightened my already very high sex drive (I actually only later as adult discovered my father was also addicted to porn too, and even viewed it with me possibly in the room with him) and even after being punished, banned from the web browser and having protections put on, I still found a way to look at something - wether it was drawings, or erotic writings, etc. I was also a furious masturbator around this time, as much at 17-18 times a day, often using various objects, toys, and playing out elaborate fantasies just with myself. I often found myself doing this out of boredom, loneliness, comfort and excitement. And I think in many ways, due to escape the abuse of my father, and the turmoil of them fighting.

In first grade I met this boy who soon became my best friend, he and I were like siblings and I actually called him my brother. This boy had a very unstable home life with rampant drug abuse in his whole household. Flash forward to me now being 13, this ‘brother’ of mine ended up living with us due to his family no longer being able to care for him.
My mother already treated him as a son, so she then began to try and gain legal custody of him.
As said, he had a lot of mental health issues, he was on multiple medications, went to many different counseling programs etc, was always seen as being ‘a bad kid’.
With my high sexual interest and drive, we eventually became curious with each other, which was fun for me at first until he began abusing me. He increasingly manipulated me and tortured me, both physically and emotionally. I kept all of this very much a secret from my mom, besides the minute verbal and physical abuse he would display around her that could pass as ‘sibling banter’. It finally came to a conclusion with my mom finding me sobbing because I was scared I was pregnant. My mother immediately kicked him out of the house the following day.
During this same time - my grandmother who had lived with us, had dementia and my mother cared for as her job (which allowed her to a stay at home mom for me and homeschool me) had passed away, and my Mother was finally divorcing my abusive father, which led to us also beginning a legal battle for the house. All of this meant that my mother needed to work full time and I now was all alone in our house for most of the time regularly.
I was used to friends being around, my mom helping care for me and be a companion and also going to homeschool cuticular activities - with all of that being removed so suddenly, coupled with all of the abuse not only from my father, but also my brother, I became incredibly mentally ill.

I had previously engaged in forms of self harm, in many various ways, but this turned more vicious after the sexual abuse from my brother.
I now had total unadulterated access to the internet and to porn, and so this is when it became really severe for me.
I began specifically searching for the most terrible, disturbing things I could. Everything on the dark web from child porn, to zoophilia, to snuff and gore, anything I could subject myself to in order to further torture myself (and in some very sick way, satisfy this addiction I already had) I was dissociative most of the time (something that I, due to my natural mental state, had experienced my entire life) and tricked myself into thinking what I had been seeing wasn’t real, I would often black out, hallucinate and hear voices, have horrible reoccurring nightmares that prevented me from sleeping, attempt to destroy things in my home and overall harm myself in any way I possibly could.

I was 14 the year I attempter suicide 8 times. I was in and out of mental hospitals, on medicines, seeing therapists and in out patient, etc. I had then been diagnosed with many things that included paranoid schizophrenia, severe anxiety, manic depression, dissociative identity disorder, OCD, gender identity disorder and others.
This was the darkest time of my life because even though many around me knew about the condition of my mental health, no one, therapists included knew about my addiction to the dark web porn. I was utterly terrified of judgement, of being separated from my mother, and being punished so severely that I could never live a full life. I started to not trust myself - I wouldn’t even watch the content in means of getting off, it was often for shock value, like a drug high, and as stated - a way of self harming.
But I was so ill and lost I started thinking maybe I was a monster, and maybe I will just become what my own abusers were, and that maybe that is what I deserved after all. This secret addiction just furthered my own mental illness and sequestered me even more from others, since I internally felt I was a horrible person for the things I had myself see.

But I made a huge mistake during this time as well - I used the internet to also try and be truthful about certain things. I already had a large following online, a lot of people thought I was “a very pretty young girl” and so followed me mostly for my eccentric cool style. I secretly online was opening up about sexual fetishes I had, then admitting to and even somewhat glorifying the things I had seen. I think to some degree this was me crying out for help, and also seeking some sense of acceptance or recognition.

Eventually we sold our house, and moved to a new state. It took me years to finally recenter myself enough to where I could go outside and function somewhat around people, to not feel like someone was going to hurt me in sone way. I began to accept and express my gender identity too, which fortunately was well received by my mother, not well received by a lot of other people. I struggled very deeply with intense loathing towards my own body parts - in part because I identified as male, and was seen female and in part because I blamed my own sexual drive and feelings on driving me to view such malicious things. I even at one point attempted self genital mutilation (which I thankfully did not become harmed by) but I was still hurting very severely from my childhood and my inner conflicts. I had to drastically get off medication, which led me to relapse horribly mentally. I had been dating a person long term during this time, and found myself still going to view dark porn even after being with them. I even started to collect dark content and trade it with other people, I became so deeply suffocated by this, it felt like it was slowly eating me alive, and yet I still feared talking about it and that fragmented me a lot.
My partner eventually knew, but not to what extent, same with my mother. I was about 16 when I finally found a therapist that specializes in sexual trauma, transgender identities and autistic people.
This was a safe person and so I started to tell her about my struggles.

Things became better for me for a good amount of time, I was able to work, and really pursue my art, my own self love and expression and was slowly moving away from self harm. Things were not perfect and I still had a very high sexual drive, one that often caused pervasive distracting thoughts and other mental struggles, but I could actually function and I was learning to trust and see the love and the beauty in the world again.

Now we get to myself right now as an adult - this is the last bit of my story as of now, but I really have made leaps and bounds within the past 3 years, I have reconnected with my spirituality, I have a lot of close connections, I was traveling a lot and experiencing a lot of things, going out of my comfort zone, taking care of myself physically and really felt loved, confident and in control of my world. I didn’t look at porn very often, and if I did, it was in a moderates way, I didn’t even desire to and couldn’t look at dark content, it was like after desensitizing myself so much for so many years, I was finally becoming very sensitive again as is my nature. I was working with my therapist very closely and she was helping me put in place very helpful coping tools, accepting my mistakes and my own sexuality and fostering self care and love. She began to help me see that I wasn’t a horrible person, or a pedophile like I feared, I was severely traumatized and dysfunctional, dealing an addictive personality and fragmented self.

Then earlier this year something happened.
Essentially somebody online found these old comments I made as a teenager, thought they would make an entire call out post about me and spread it like crazy. As mentioned I was semi famous online as a young teen and had a large following still as an adult, so when this started to circulate, it completely exploded out of control.
These people doxxed my information - medical records, therapists, current and old work information, IP address, home address, anything they could. I received hundreds upon hundreds of death threats from all angles - my art pages were flooded with spam, people spammed my phone, left voicemails describing in detail how they wanted to torture and kill me, spread photos of my face around with different negative phrases as a meme, they called my work, they filed police reports (which they ended up coming to my mom and my home and speaking with me, which thankfully went very calmly), many groups of people in my city declared I was not allowed into certain places or I would be harmed in some way, etc, it ended in me essentially being very very fearful again of everything, I almost lost my job. A google search of my full legal name or the username I had online would pull up these call outs pretty easily. This is why I must stay anonymous.
I did not and could leave my home and lost many friends (thankfully the people who knew me during that time stayed, and others who understood I was not an abusive dangerous person).
And all of this caused me to really reflect and actually remember things from my abuse I had totally shoved down, and I took this time to go back to that time and try and love and forgive that kid who subjected themselves to those things. I made a lot of therapeutic and emotional progress during this time period, totally removing myself from social media which was incredibly helpful overall for my mental health. Then I began to relapse horribly earlier this year, and was trying to view dark content again.
Thankfully it is much more difficult to find that kind of imagery now a days (unlike when I was a child) but there is still very abusive content that is easily accessible.

I am currently struggling with this, and it makes it so hard for me to admit, because it had been literal years since I looked at dark content, to then be triggered by the event of being called out to then trigger me into the exact thing people are accusing me of, seems convoluted, but I am trying to be honest in my situation.

I am still seeing the same therapist (in the quantity I can with money and the lockdown happening) and she has been very helpful. However I don’t think I have fully expressed to her how much I am struggling with this addiction again - and this is the first year I have actually started calling it this - media addiction, porn addiction, etc. If I had access to drugs or alcohol as a kid I would become hooked on that, but I didn’t, it became something much more abstract to discuss.
But I am trying, I am starting somewhere, with sharing my truth, being vulnerable and being as strong as I can be and to try and find strength and hope from others. It begins with admitting the problem, and then addressing to change it. I know I can.

I know I deserve and want love and to heal and just feel released from this huge suffocation of the addiction, which seems like it’s been there my entire life. It seems like my whole life has been pain, abuse, manipulation, suffering and defeat.
But I have repeatedly proven that I can make better decisions, that I am a good worthy person, that people do love me and in turn I can trust them (which I am still recently trying to process from the online targeting - feeling I cannot trust people) I have been doing better - but my thoughts often switch viciously to sexual and perverse, which then become increasingly persistent until I watch something. It’s baby steps I know, but I am really trying to take care of myself, especially at this age, before this becomes my life like it had felt as a teenager.

At this point it isn’t possible for me not to fap (believe me, this is not helpful at this time) but what I look for is advice, support, hopefully open arms, which is all I really am searching for, instead of being ostracized, demonized, attacked, abused, tortured and targeted for my own complex childhood and self harm.

Also I am in no way condoning my own actions, or those of abusers. I want to make that very clear. I do have a very strong moral compass, I do know that when it comes to my own self, that moral compass is extremely low which I actively work on. I have never and would never harm someone else. Every single day I sit with the poison of what I had shown my own child self and how I harmed not only me, but others with my consumption of porn.

Thank you for the time you’ve taken to read this. I love you, and I hope that we can be friends. We all deserve a brighter and lighter future.

 

Hello waya ^^
I just went through your story- and what a story it is! You've been through so much and emerged right on top in the end! That definitely deserves recognition.

Perhaps the most shocking part of your post was the part where you were subject to doxxing. The internet can be a really disgusting place, but rest assured- if you encounter any hostility on the nofap forums, report these posts without hesitation. The moderation team will deal with it.

I have also viewed a LOT of dark content on the deep web, but not for sexual gratification; I completely understand what you mean by "shock value". There really is some sick stuff out there that words just cannot do justice. I'm glad my curious phase of Tor exploration is over. That's not a life I want to go back to. So yes, I can understand a lot of what you meant in this regard.

If you ever want someone to talk to, feel free to send me a message.

Keep heading towards a better life!

 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart ❤️ for this kind, relatable and inclusive comment to be the first response I see on this thread is very kind. I feel a lot of love and emotion just reading what you had to say, and I realize that I have been so poised and used to people targeting hate and negativity towards me online, even after I try and state my own story, that it comes as a breath of fresh air to be met with kindness and solidarity in this kind of community.
It’s very relieving to know more people have struggled with the things I have, and that they have recovered and that does not make them an evil person.
Just knowing I am not alone gives me a lot of hope.
Thank you again, I already feel I am making the right choices.

All For One!

 

Hi there...


I feel so much sadness and pain upon simply reading your experience, I can't even fathom the depths of suffering you have been put through.

You'll find the members here do not care to break anyone's anonymity (and if someone did, you will find that staff and moderators will have your back and will help you out).

Good luck to you, and may you find peace and blessings with the help of our community.