My Story: Cancer, Chemo, and PMO Addiction.

This is a repost from the "Loneliness" section. I posted it here also because I just realized it probably belongs more in this section.

So this is my "life story" around surviving cancer three times, going through chemo, and my ongoing battle with my PMO addiction. It is very long so heads up.

So I am relatively new in recovery from PMO addiction. It wasn't until really like a year or two ago when I really woke up and started realizing just how much porn fucked with my brain on every level. Right now, I am a 24 year old virgin male. For the past year or two of my life, my virgin status has been the main route of a lot of my depression and other emotional turbulence. Due to how badly I conditioned and desensitized my brain over years of incessant PMO use, it honestly wasn't until this past year or two (at the age of 24) when I finally "woke up" from living inside my PMO fantasy induced "trance" that I realized just how developmentally behind PMO made me.

A little backstory, I discovered porn right after discovering masturbation which I only discovered right after discovering I had a fetish around the age of 9 or 10 and all this came after having cancer/chemotherapy (which I'll talk a little about later). The first time I ever truly felt sexual arousal was when I saw a female friend in kindergarten put her hand over another friends mouth; I don't know how or why but for whatever reason that really turned me on and I wanted her to do that to me. Literally the first ever sexual feeling I ever had was induced by something completely outlandish and fetishistic-- seeing someone put their hand over another person's mouth. Obviously all these things forming at the exact same time all at once was a recipe for disaster-- and disaster it definitely became.

I started obsessively watching/re-watching movies, TV, and looking through magazines/books/etc trying to find ANY scenes and pictures that portrayed someone putting their hand over someone else mouth. When eventually finding them I would constantly pause and rewind the scenes or just sit and look at the picture and fantasize about being dominated by someone doing that to me until I eventually reached orgasm just by the mere mental and visual stimulations. I hadn't even discovered the actual masturbation yet-- I only discovered what an orgasm felt like and how the only way to cause it was by this newfound fetish. Thus, my brain wired itself to: fetish = orgasm = dopamine = rinse and repeat. I wasn't even a teenager nor had I actually discovered physical masturbation yet and it already had a severe physiological impact on my brains natural reward center.

It wasn't much long after that when I got curious as to what would happen if I physically touched myself along with the mental arousal of the fantasy. I remember I was sitting on my bunk bed at night, was thinking about the fetish, and decided to get more "involved" with the fantasy: I put my right hand over my own mouth (fantasizing it was that girls) and used my left hand to kind of prod and fiddle around with my erection. Thats when it happened. Thats when I gave in and first tasted the forbidden fruit. My entire world shook upside down, inside out, because I had NEVER EVER EVER experienced something so euphoric and divine before: my first PMO.

I started doing the exact same routine about 3+ times a day, I would come home from school, look for a movie scene/picture, go in my room, put my hand over my mouth, imagine it was someone else, and use my other hand to physically stimulate what was already very stimulated-- making the dopamine reward hit me three times as much. I would then get tired, take a nap, and do it again and again until I was either completely drained or my erection physically hurt. This vicious cycle went on throughout kindergarten, throughout elementary school, lower school, and all of grade school. While most other kids my age were first discovering how it felt to have a simple "crush" and to get butterflies in your stomach by holding a girls hand or just kissing them on the lips, I had something better, something divine, something that I had all the control over. So i became a hermit, had zero drive nor interest in talking to girls, because only my fetish and fantasy turned me on and thats all I needed.

Eventually the fetish became more and more extreme. After a while I found that just the physical action of someone putting their hand over my mouth wasn't enough to arouse me anymore so I started experimenting with an asphyxiation component and using my hand to cover my nose and mouth so I couldn't breathe; Now this is really where my world crashed and my addiction took an even steeper pummel. My curiosity led to me searching online for videos/porn of being sexually dominated by being choked and "hand-smothered" and unfortunately I found a lot of them, it was literally like gold. The discovery that there was ACTUAL porn relating to this and that I wasn't the only person in the world with this fetish was the WORST thing that EVER happened to me in my life; and I am a survivor of cancer three times and I still say it is far far worse.

I only could get aroused by the physical sensation of masturbating with my hand, and only while I used my other hand to engage in my fetish fantasy of covering my mouth and nose. Sex and penetration didn't turn me on, kissing didn't turn me on, foreplay and cuddling didn't turn me on, blowjobs didn't even turn me on, only and ONLY porn specifically showing someone getting a hand-job while being "hand-smothered" aroused me, nothing else.

Throughout all of my preteen and teen years I became a literal masturbation robot. Its all I cared about. Other people were going on dates with girls, having cute camp "crushes" but none of that interested me at all. As a matter of fact, the very thought about just kissing a girl or experiencing normal intimacy made me cringe.

I didn't really go into it yet in detail because my PMO addiction is what this is all about but its very important-- I had stage 3B Hodgkin's lymphoma when I was around 6, had to go through extensive chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery for a lot of my childhood. I say because I really think the chemotherapy had a huge role in all this with how it physically changed my brain because none of this happened until after chemotherapy. I then had thyroid cancer when I was 17, and then a reoccurrence when I was 18, and had to go through radiation and surgery again.

Anyway, back to the point of the post, throughout all of lower, middle, and high-school, I had never even kissed a girl, went on a date with a girl, never even had a "crush" on one nor felt even aroused by one, it just didn't appeal to me. The only thing that did was my PMO. Around 10th grade was the first time I ever had a "crush" on someone but it wasn't a girl... Now this, coupled with everything else, really took my brain and identity through a whirlwind. I was raised by a old school Italian Roman-Catholic family and so conditioned with internalized homophobia. So you could only imagine how fucking chaotic it was to have feelings for a guy. I obviously was in complete denial over what I was feeling and so completely suppressed all my emotions deep down into my subconscious only to let it fester, grow, and eventually burst. My self-identity was in a state of utter pandemonium. This all led to me becoming an emotional hurricane. I started engaging in self harm, abusing hard drugs, stealing money from my parents, getting into physical fights, threatening and even attempting suicide, etc.

Having absolutely no idea at this time how this was all related and what the fuck was happening to me, I ended up being sent to psyche ward after psyche ward, wilderness therapy and then rehab after. It didn't help at all because I still was in complete denial over EVERYTHING and unable to connect the dots-- it was just pandemonium. At the rehab program I ended up developing feelings for both another guy and then subsequently my first girl. Again, I suppressed my feelings and was in denial over them because none of it made any sense it was just complete lunacy.

I left the rehab and repeated the same shit for another year or two until I FINALLY realized how the fuck this all started, all related, and what the fuck was going on with me: the severe and progressive desensitization and rewiring of my brain due to my fetish induced PMO addiction. I have been in treatment for the past year or so and am proud to say that I finally am working on it and can see just how much a fetish and PMO addiction has effected my brain. I am currently two months sober from porn use and work the steps in SLAA. I have already noticed how my determined abstinence from porn use has already improved me because now I can subtly get normally aroused by seeing a hot girl or guy and wanting to kiss/cuddle with them-- not just by my fetish. So this is my story and how I continue to fight this fight.