What's the most important thing you can do when trying to recover from porn addiction and cure PIED?

I think regularly engaging in healthy activities and more healthy rewarding things is a good thing to do, but not if you don't completely stop all porn and artificial sexual stimulation. Also, in addiction to stopping everything completely, another (in my opinion) vital step is to get accountability!

 

For me the number one thing, and I will even go to the extreme and say it’s impossible if you don’t do it, is find an accountability partner that you can trust. One who will listen, encourage, check you on things you said you would do, and never condemn. One who knows exactly what you’re going through.

Takes time to find a person like that. I finally found a person through SAA. I was having longer and longer stretches of not acting out but finally I had enough and went the next step and took on a once a week accountability partner. He’s someone who goes to the same meeting I do and I’ve known him for over two years and trust him.

Best wishes to you. Don’t give up!

 

I know you already acknowledged they are all important, but I think looking at it in terms of important stuff is not really the way to see it.

It's like if you're building a computer and ask which components are important. They are all needed. You can't really have a PC without a motherboard, memory, processor, storage and so on.

So if we say it's all needed but which one is more important, it depends on what you're doing with the computer. It's even possible to not have storage if you just do everything online and use the cloud, or have a removable solution maybe.

Going back to this question, it might be what the most important thing you can do depends on the person and their goals. If you had said what the most important thing you can do for the sake of recovering specifically it's a little bit more specific, but also what does recovering mean? When someone has been PMO'ing since they are a little kid you don't recover the state of being a little kid, you want an adult life that isn't influenced by that but you don't recover in the sense of returning to the exact same state. You gotta sort out what to keep and what to let go of, even aside from PMO.

I'd say #4 about healthy things is the closest but it's still very general. I would say that needs a social dimension, but not exactly in the way a lot (even most?) people use recovery support groups.

First of all, it doesn't have to be a ton of people - at a certain point more people may even work against going deeper. If you think about someone doing monk mode and meditates a lot, even if he's all isolated he still didn't invent meditation, even if he becomes an actual monk he has the whole society of people who does that practice even if he's in some part of the world where nobody does that stuff.

Second, I don't think it's just kind of a support club and while there is value in confessional communication I think that in itself is limited. You need to work on yourself in a broad and deep way. When you get into a group you can be in an echo chamber where everyone sees things in a particular way, there's actually less chance of that happening with the solitary monk guy funny enough, because he may not really understand some of the stuff he reads and without an authority he would have to rely on direct experience and practice and just see what happens. But if you just have one other person that really gets into it those two can really help each other, but a huge forum of most people posting casually may stay exactly at that level.

Actually I guess we can put it in a very simple way: Why is it important? Whether it's the most important thing or the kind of supportive stuff on the side, if you really understand that thoroughly then you're in a good place with it.

Here's an adaptation of a Buddhist joke:

Three guys are doing monk mode and debating what is most important. The first one says "You just have to control yourself physically. You use your hand for fapping, so don't touch."
The second one says "Eyes are fapping. If you don't view porn you won't have a problem."
The third guy says "Mind does the fapping. If you don't think about it and have discipline over your mind, neither of those will matter."
Noticing these guys going at it an actual practicing monk that hasn't PMO'd in a long time says "Mouths are flapping. This is just talk if we don't put the understanding into practice in everyday life."

 

Like I said it depends on your goals. You can say high speed internet is the problem the same way someone into meditation can say the mind is the problem, though of course there are just different levels to it. Even if we don't say M is an issue, you wouldn't hear people say "just change to slow internet" or "well just view offline porn saved on your hard drive but no internet" or no video but pictures are okay or stories without pictures, I mean not really right?

In a way masturbation is just a recursive mental function, except of course there is porn most of the time. Just as surfing the internet could be an addictive issue in itself but without the sexual stigma of PMO that kind of thinking can also be an issue, it's just some form of being closed minded. But realistically people are closed minded on different topics all the time, which I think is why some kind of social network is needed in recovery. But when all the people in the group just kind of agrees and never questions anything that ultimately defeats the purpose, and it follows that recursive pattern to use a strictly logical discripter.

 

I don’t think it has to be SAA necessarily. SAA isn’t for everyone. Some are very much against the AA model that SAA is based on. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Different people handle the same problems in different ways.

But, and I’m speaking for myself, I’ve observed that other methods of addiction recovery include some sort of accountability with one or more people. I do believe we need the help of another person or people.

 

Yeah, I think every addict needs some sort of external help to quit. That's kind of what addiction means: you can't quit all on your own. So you could argue that's the most important thing in recovery: asking others for help. That said, I think different people need different degrees of help in different ways.

As for AA groups, I tried 12-step for a little bit and while I really liked some aspects of it (the meetings were a great emotional outlet especially) I never really stuck with it. A lot of the steps didn't really gel with me. I didn't have a massive problem with the whole spirituality thing, but admitting that I was completely powerless over my addiction felt very wrong to me.