Introduction

Hello all,

Just joined this sight for much needed help in recovering from my pmo addiction. Here's a bit of my story.

I'm 24 years old and have been addicted to porn and masturbation for about 10 years. The first 5 years, it was not something I felt compelled to rid from my life. I am quite introverted and did not have any really close friendships during my high school years and my siblings are quite spread out from me - one is 30 and the other is 15. So during that time, a lot of my free time I spent alone watching YouTube or playing videos games and of course looking at porn and masturbating. It was my source of security and comfort and I would go to it every few days if not daily.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college, I was reached out to some guys in a Christian Fellowship on campus and studied the Bible with them and ultimately made Jesus Lord of my life. I knew I needed to cut off my use of pmo as it was hurting God and kept me down and enslaved.

The next couple of years I continued to watch porn and masturbate, but I mostly kept it hidden. I might get open here and there with a friend in a shallow way, but for the most part I kept it hidden and didn't talk about it. I bought into the lie that if I know what I need to do, and I can fight this on my own. Obviously that didn't work and I continued to be enslaved to the sin with it actually started to become worse and affecting my life more.

However, luckily God shook me up and showed me that I needed to do something different and couldn't keep my sin in the dark and expect to become free. It's a long story how, but basically God created a situation where I had to get open with my sin or feel like the biggest liar and hypocrite in the world. I then confessed and got open about my sin to everyone I had lied to. I broke up with my girlfriend to just focus on me and God for a bit and that really hurt her as we had been dating for almost a year at that point and she didn't see it coming.

But after that I started to see some real healing. I started to go to a purity group again and this time I was completely open about my life and this group felt much more like a group of brothers in the fight together and I actually really joined our times meeting up, we would have a lot of fun and laughs but also be real and help each other. After I graduated college, I worked part-time and served in the campus ministry I was a part of and started co-leading the purity group myself which was not something normal for me, but it really helped me to be able to share what I was learning about fighting impurity and lust and help others.

It took some time, but I started to have longer and longer times between relapsing. For about a year, other than a few slip ups during breaks and in between jobs, I was mostly good. I was started to feel strong genuine emotions again and felt closer to God than I ever had before. I felt like I was in a really good place. Serving God and helping others come to know Him and grow in their walks with Him in campus ministry, working part-time to support myself, and continuing to grow and heal from my porn addiction. And then a bit later, God blessed me by allowing me to get back together with my ex-girlfriend.

So things were going well until last Fall where I started the living Hell that is law school. I went to a law school near my undergrad and near my family, but it was still a new school environment, a new learning environment, and lots of lots of stress. I didn't do well making new friends in law school to start off and I felt very isolated. That along with the stress, anxiety, and lack of sleep from school created a strong pull to go back to the porn/masturbation that I used in the past to medicate. And that is what I did. And I quickly became readdicted to all the old stuff, and being more isolated, I wasn't getting open about it with others. I was still a part of the same church as undergrad, but I was now in the Singles ministry and had to form almost all new relationships. There also isn't a men's purity group that I know of either, so I started to try to fight my addiction on my own again.

I mean I would still talk about it here and there with some friends, but I felt like they wouldn't really get it. I mean I'm sure they would try to help the best they knew how, but they all didn't struggle with porn and masturbation anymore. It was something they cut off pretty quickly in high school or in college after becoming Christians. So I continued living in the cycle of falling, feeling shame, vowing to never do it again, maybe try to enact a few defensive measures thinking they would stop me from doing it again, but then inevitably finding a way to act out again and the cycle repeating.

That leads me to where I'm at today. I'm in a new city for an internship this summer and didn't have a real plan for how I would stay pure. I have a roommate, but I have my own room, and with my introverted tendencies, have tended to stay alone in my room for large quantities of time when I'm not at work. It should come as no shock that with no plan and lots of time isolated in my room, I have fallen many times thus far.

So that's where I am now. I feel like I'm at the lowest point in my porn addiction in a few years. I desperately want to cut it off for good and get back to that place of closeness to God and true joy I had a year ago. I am hopeful connecting with others in this group and working out a recovery plan will help me break free from this addiction for good.