Hello, Does anyone else struggle with being in public, like the grocery store? It really triggers my urges to act out and fantasize about encounters with strangers. The sheer amount and variety in the bodies there, the clothing making my imagination go crazy, and the potential to catch someone's eye. It all hurts. It's like some invasive thought that I can't seem to suppress. I imagine porn usage started me down this path, but once I started cheating and seeing escorts it really intensified. I'm finding that the longer I manage to go PMO free the more invasive the thoughts get, as do the memories of random encounters. I haven't acted out like that in over a year now, but the memories and desires still haunt me. I want to live with some kind of integrity, but I barely know who I am and what I really want. This journey is even more stressful than when I stopped smoking pot. I started talking to my therapist about my sexual history, and the more I think about it, the more disgusted and upset I am with myself. What I find odd though is how in the moment, I liked feeling dirty and wrong. It feels like I'm beyond help. No amount of exercise or meditation or journaling frees me from these thoughts. If anything, they intensify. I'm not sure what my point is here, but I want to publicly commit to one more day of sobriety.
I can relate to this. It’s like pmo puts me on the perverted radio frequency. I hear my own intrusive thoughts, but I also hear the intrusive thoughts of others. It is a terrible feeling to be honest, I think it’s why so many porn addicts are shut ins.
Yes, I struggled with that a lot. I was the Scope master. Always scoping for women. Always looking, lusting, hoping that they'll check me out in return. Don't anyone try to get me to look without lusting. That ain't going to happen. Me trying to check out all the women without lusting is equivalent to a recovering alcoholic trying to practice drinking without getting drunk. Now, I'm not going to speak for everyone else or anyone else. I'm only going to speak for myself. There's this thing called the 3-second rule. Give myself 3 seconds to appreciate a woman's beauty and then move on. Nope. Can't do it. It doesn't matter how old she is, or how fat she is, or what she is even wearing. I go from zero to pervert in less than half a second. One simple solution has worked for me. I don't look. Period. Not even a glance. And if I do glance, I bounce the eyes. So I personally practice the zero-second rule. How would I even know what she's wearing if I'm not checking her out to begin with? Busted. If I don't look, I'm not going to lust. And if I don't lust, I'm not going to crave. And if I don't crave, I don't cave. Game over. I win. Do I do this perfectly? No. But I'm winning significantly more battles than I'm losing with lust and that's why I'll win this war.
I've experienced this, and it's a difficult thing to overcome. Time eventually heals it, but I won't lie and tell you that it heals it fast. The last time I visited an escort was 7 years ago, and it took until about 5 years free of them to finally have a life where the thoughts aren't so intrusive. Most of the time, they're non-existent; however, if I have a large amount of cash in my hand, the temptation creeps in here and there. It's also still difficult not to ogle, but I'm improving every day. Yep, I know what you mean. Almost like I got pleasure from destroying myself. Personally, I think a lot of this ties into a self-hatred borne from past trauma; a point in my life where I chose to hate myself to my core, so any action which validates that hate, stimulates and arouses me.
Wow this resonated with me SO much. I have started therapy and got to just over a month without paying for escort "services", but then relapsed this last weekend. I had been preventing it by having restrictions on my phone about who I can contact (only my contacts list), but then realised I needed a spare phone for those occasions I have to make a call to an "unknown" number. Well I basically ended up using the emergency phone for escort communications. I put the relapse down to boredom and just "needing some stimulation". For me its an intensity associated with women's feet but moreso the "ew" factor and humiliation that goes alongside liking feet. I guess again its a form of self hatred? I don't know at this point. Its like that kink is my entire sex life. 90% of the time I think about women its about their feet. And the intrusive temptations to act out in public are CRAZY. Like this devil on my shoulder using REASONABLE arguments like "why keep all this stuff in your head? Become comfortable with letting women know you like their feet" and things like that. My mind has made it into such a huge deal, when actually I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't give it too much thought if they knew I liked girls feet. I'm very repressed about it and it leaks out in unhealthy ways, like the sudden compulsions to see escorts at the weekends because I don't have other stimulating/interesting stuff planned with my days. I started acting out with escorts because its more of a safe space than in public. I will experiment with getting escorts to let me touch their feet for free before payment, and then I'd just fuck off. . This turned into a thing for me because I wasn't throwing money away but still getting that "buzz" of humiliating ecstasy from a range and variety of different women. But its a douchebag thing to do as I am wasting their time. So it makes me feel a bit shitty when I think about it. But I am like a desperate addict but one who is addicted to something EXTREMELY NICHE and specific and hard to find. Pleasure in humiliation... I don't know if I'm meant to be trying to get rid of the "kink" or embracing it and going down the dating route with it being a thing I am open about with girls but in more of a balanced and less repressed/weird way.
Spoiler I liked the Steve Harvey video above discussing if it's okay to check out other women while in a relationship. If you can, go to YouTube to read the comments. Many women find this behavior to be completely disrespectful and unacceptable
I used to struggle with it. What helped me was practising mindful mediation. After about 4 or 5 years of mediation, it occurred to me, I could apply to this situation. In mediation, you have something called the noting technique. So when I see a woman I find attractive, I notice her and then gently bring myself back to what I was doing before I saw her. I find when I do this, I don't stare and aren't triggered at all. Another thing that helped was when a few years ago, women began speaking out on social media about how uncomfortable they felt when men took long stares at them. One woman was Julia Shaw, who is an academic I greatly admire for her intellect, spoke about how uncomfortable she felt. I wouldn't want to make any woman, especially a woman I admire, feel uncomfortable. But really woman speaking was just a motivation, it was the noting technique that gave me the ability to stop doing it. You might find this episode of Hidden Brain helpful. In it, they interview a woman who had an extra marital affair, and she talked about how it affected her. It was only when she began practising self-compassion, she was able to stop hating herself.
