I have been reading different posts on here and am wondering if I am alone in this. I don't actually use porn very often, my thing is using chatrooms to find someone to roleplay with. This takes a long time and can be a frustrating business (often ends with me calling a phonesex line to finish off). The problem is the triggers can be nothing, a slight detail that I have included in a roleplay at sometime that sets my brain off and pulls me back to the site. I managed 30 days before Christmas but this holiday period is killing me as I am off work and have much time on my hands. I have started some gardening projects with the kids which have distracted me for a couple of days but I am still struggling. Especially in the mornings when either my wife has got up and i am laying in bed or when I have got up and the kids are watching TV. Maybe I just need some structure to my hoildays, get the surfboard out or go for a run. Sorry my thinking drifted there So does anyone else use these kind of sites or do this sort of thing?
Hi Reningstone, welcome. I have seen similar questions here before. Porn isn't just porn. Porn is seeing porn, it is watching it, it is thinking about it, it is imagining it, it is remembering it, it is thinking about it while MOing even if you are not actually watching it, it is PMOing, it is fantasizing, it is porn substitutes. For me, when I first started quitting, I told myself I was making progress because I moved from very hardcore stuff to Google images, where I searched vanilla nudes. Bikini pics trigger me. Lingerie models trigger me. Hooters girls trigger me. Just girls on the street trigger me if I let them, but I don't. I consciously have decided not to let hypersexualized images linger in my head. Before, I was not making progress, I was still feeding my dopamine fix. You have to avoid your triggers, not flirt with them. Your triggers are not going to be merely the hardcore stuff you are trying to quit watching, they will be much softer stuff than can pop out on you from benign sites like Yahoo, Craigslist, Google. You have know that in advance and plan on avoiding them. You have to get your dopamine levels back down. That will take time (could be 30 days) and requires a total absence of porn in your head. If you are walking down the street in the middle of the day thinking about porn, you are using porn, so find something else to pop in your head if that situation occurs. If you are trying to get PMO free, you have to get whatever triggers you out of your brain. If that is chatrooms and roleplay, they have to go. They would fall in the category of porn substitutes for me. 5 months PMO free here. Good luck in your journey. Thanks for posting, reading posts and replying is a tool I use to stay clean.
Thanks buddy, So you are saying that my actions are just the same, no better no worse (I hate the fact that it takes so long to get the job done and takes up so much of my time ) and I need to follow the advice on here and clean up. i think I need to change certain habits so my aim is now not to use the computer when I first get up in the morning and to put my laptop away somewhere until my wife is up and i have a little control. Has anyone got any suggestions of how to begin my day while watching the kids instead. It seems so long ago that i started the day without checking the soccer results, facebook etc that I am not sure what else to do. - Gee that sounds ridiculous.
Hi Redingstone, I posted a thread about how I got PMO free. It is here is you would like to read my story: http://www.nofap.org/forum/showthread.php?2402-Get-educated-get-tools-and-learn-to-love-withdrawals I know about mornings. At the height of my problem I thought I had to have porn with my coffee just to get awake. 5 months PMO free now. Good luck.
