Hey man thanks so much for this serious, down to earth and honest feedback. I have a few questions: 1. Why did you stay away from the forums for so long? Dis you believe the forums were counterproductive to your recovery? What is your advice regarding the use of these nofap forums? Do you think one should abstain from checking in regularly on the forums at some point in time? If so, when do you think spending time on these forums become counter productive? I'm asking because I think I might be using the forums too much and when I don't log in I have cravings to come here and participate. However, this probably keeps me in the PMO obsession loop. 2. How did you approach sex during those 700 days? Did you do a certain number of no PMO days before you allowed yourself to have sex? 3. Did you work on youe childhood trauma on your own or with a therapist? 4. What were your beliefs concerning pornography before your reboot and what is your view and what are your beliefs on pornography now? 5. Where did your shame of sex came from and how did you let it go? 6. Do you still consider yourself as a porn addict? Thanks for your time.
Excellent questions, thanks for asking.. 1. I didn't consciously choose to stop using the forums, I think I just stopped when I didn't find them useful anymore. I do think that getting super involved in the community and going over your problems over and over ad nauseam is a kind of masturbation in its own right.. That said, in the earlier days I found these forums invaluable and could not have made it without them.. They are useful, but up until a point I think.. 2. I had sex when I felt like it, though I mostly didn't for the first year or so as my whole groin felt completely numb and lifeless.. occasionally I'd snap out of it, get ridiculously horny and shoot my load in less than a minute then feel really embarrassed and not feel like having sex again for a while. That was a nasty vicious cycle I got into.. Luckily my partner is very understanding (and I'm good with my hands lol) but I managed to break out of the cycle and now sex feels much healthier and better.. 3. Mainly without.. I saw a therapist for a bit, but I didn't find her particularly useful.. 4. Great question.. I probably had stronger feeling about porn before I stopped, how degrading and damaging it was etc. but I largely lied about the extent of my habit to myself about my habit for years.. Nowadays, I really don't think about it much.. Its a thing that I know a lot of people do, and that I don't, but I really don't have any strong feelings about it either way.. 5. Many places.. I discovered masturbation super early, like 6.. I used to play my Super Nintendo laying on my stomach, there was one character in an old game called 'Killer Instinct' named Maya that got me all excited.. So naturally I started humping the floor.. I didn't know what I was doing, all I knew was that it felt good to think about Maya while I was humping, then it would feel REALLY good, my 'wee-wee' would start throbbing and then I wouldn't feel like doing it anymore.. My parents saw what I was doing, but didn't really talk to me about it, but they tried to shame me into stopping. I don't blame them, but I do think that fucked me up.. Also, I have an older brother who was in a cult for 15 years.. He was very much puritanical and believed that our family had to purify itself, or we would perish in the 2012 mayan apocalypse... and so he would constantly preach about the ills of sex and drugs.. probably because I was predisposed to shame around sex but even though I didn't buy his crap it still burned into my psyche, whether I wanted it to or not I definitely built an association around sex and fear/ guilt.. 6. I really don't know.. I guess I haven't thought about that much.. All I know is that the one time that I nearly relapsed (about 6 months ago) and watched porn for about 60 seconds I felt like I'd been injected with pure adrenaline, it was a rush like I'd never felt in my life.. Somehow I managed to snap out of it in time, but this was not an ordinary response to porn.. So yeah, I think my day to day life is not affected by porn in any way, and I don't 'feel' like a porn addict so the title doesn't really feel right.. But that one experience shows me that the neural pathways relating to my porn habit, while possibly not regularly activated, are still very much still there..
The super powers I seek are just feeling normal so your success is what I’m after. Congratulations on making it this far. I have a few questions if you could answer 1) Did you have any habits like watching tv, playing videogames, too much internet surfing before and during the last 700 days of nofap. 2) What were your withdrawl symptoms between day 1-700. Were they more heavy during certain parts of the streak and lessen at a certain day during the 700 days? 3) How would you compare your 1st year to your 2nd year of abstaining to PMO. What were the good and the bad and how did they compare. 4) Around what day did you achieve mental clarity with less brain fog and a better memory? My first year has been 90% brain fog/memory impairment.
Sure thing! 1) Yeah, I would get stuck in YouTube holes a lot and spend too much time on social media (which I quit, too). 2) my whole groin/ pelvic area was numb and lifeless, heavy brain fog, anxiety, depression, severe lethargy.. To be honest I can't solely attribute these things to nofap though.. I also have ADHD and so these things come part and parcel with my condition.. I'd say they got far worse at varying stages, but I can't draw neat lines around what is a nofap withdrawal and whats an ADHD symptom.. 3) 2nd year was infinitely better.. I had the same problems, but less.. Again, I have the above symptoms to deal with on top of, so I'm never really out of the woods.. 4) Same thing again, but relative to my normal level of brain fog I'd say it got significantly better last year.. I don't think its accurate to think of brain fog as purely a nofap withdrawal though.. In my case, the brain fog lifted as I dealt with trauma.. In my case, brain fog turned out to be due to having a whole lot of undealt with, ignored trauma which kinda backed up.. You know when your computer has no RAM left and you can hear it struggling to process the requests you're making of it? This is precisely how I felt.. I found though, that digging through my hard drive (unconscious) and removing unwanted files (beliefs) freed me up a lot and so my cognition is now much smoother.. Its more like I couldn't have initiated that process without nofap, its not like just doing nofap and waiting to feel awesome was going to work..
Maybe, who knows? I mean I don't know you, maybe you're 100% right and its just a matter of your brain rewiring, but I would suggest seeing a therapist (if thats possible for you) about the anxiety and explore other options besides nofap.. Or maybe just find some good books about anxiety? It doesn't necessarily have to stem from a hard childhood, and it could be just bad coping strategies you picked up at some point.. Something I've noticed since being back on these forums is that people do seem to have a heavy bias toward porn being the source of all their problems and this kind of "just wait until the flat line is over until you get the super powers" mentality and I think thats potentially dangerous.. I feel pretty uncomfortable playing the armchair psychologist, but I would suggest branching out and trying to solve the problem in other ways..
Its because people are getting these issues after leaving PMO. Like I have never had this social anxiety issue in my entire life. But, after leaving PMO, I cannot even hold a simple conversation with anyone anymore. Like my social skills right now are probably worse from when I was 10 years old. I am not even looking for superpowers after leaving porn. I never started my reboot because of that. I started to save my marriage and cure my PIED which I did cure after 8 months of abstinence. So all I wanted to achieve, I have achieved already. Now I just want my normal self back. I didn't have any anxiety related issues at all while I was PMOing. Actually, I used to be the go to guy in my office to handle any stressful situation. But now, I cannot even manage normal day to day task. I obviously know that leaving any addiction will lead you to your same self at least if not any better. So its obviously withdrawals and your brain trying to find the right balance and homeostasis.
I hear you man, and that sucks.. And I wasn't necessarily saying you were one of the 'superpower' crowd.. More so that the narrative common in these threads tends to skew towards porn being the only cause of our problems and the rewiring process to be the only curative thing.. Like I said I really don't know you so I dunno.. But plenty of previously healthy people suddenly get some kind of mental health problems and don't know where it came from though and its always tempting to attribute singular causes and assume singular cures.. Its not a simple A-B thing.. You've seriously changed your brain chemistry by not giving it the porn hit it craves, it may have unveiled an underlying problem in the process of that change which could have been dormant for some time.. Again, I'm not trying to tell you your wrong, you may be 100% right for all I know.. But if you aren't right about this you could be waiting for this to go away for a really long time.. If you are, and you go to therapy or read some books in the meantime you'll learn some coping strategies while the rewiring takes place.. You really have nothing to lose by at least entertaining that possibility, and by the sounds of things, potentially a lot to lose by ignoring it. I just wanted to lay that out for you, I'm not here to convince anyone of anything.. All the best!
Something I've noticed since being back on these forums is that people do seem to have a heavy bias toward porn being the source of all their problems and this kind of "just wait until the flat line is over until you get the super powers" mentality and I think thats potentially dangerous.. Yea I notice that too. I realize I was 100% like that before. I hated the porn so much and I was blaming my whole life on the PMO. I was hoping I would just need to "wait" until things would start to get better. But not so long ago I started to really become conscious that it doesn't work like that. I was able to become conscious by getting rid foe long enough of the PMO compulsion that was clouding my ability to step back and become aware and grasping the courage to take full responsibilty for my life. So I guess realizing that porn is a symptom (a means for the addict to escape responsibility, reality and its problems and hardships) rather than the core problem is a major breakthrough in recovery. I also think the word recovery shouldn't be narrowly understood as "recovery from PMO addiction" but more generally recovery from whatever your core traumas and mental anguish are. I just wish all those lost guys will finally see the light. The addiction really doesn't help though. It's keeping you down.
You just have to persist and the social anxiety will go away PMO was covering all these problems like a bandaid, now there is no bandaid, so the wounds are exposed. they just need time to heal
So I guess realizing that porn is a symptom (a means for the addict to escape responsibility, reality and its problems and hardships) rather than the core problem is a major breakthrough in recovery. I also think the word recovery shouldn't be narrowly understood as "recovery from PMO addiction" but more generally recovery from whatever your core traumas and mental anguish are. I think thats exactly the problem.. People here treat porn as a disease and not a symptom when I think its the opposite.. The research is quite clear that addictions don't emerge from a vacuum and tend to be masking deeper psychological problems. Healthy people don't become addicts.. As much as I owe to, and love this community, going away for a year and coming back I can see that it is not perfect. I do think that the collective wisdom here is very 'groupthink' like, and spreads idealised, oversimplified and inaccurate assumptions about the recovery process which don't help anybody.. I can very easily see people suffering from real psychological issues which need treatment to be passed off as 'just a withdrawal, just wait until it passes'. Meanwhile, its day 200+ and these people are waiting for the 'reboot' to kick in, and it may be an entirely unrelated problem..
I have never read something so beautiful and realistic as this. Thank you so much for posting this. That will help a lot of people to overcome a lot of confusion that happens in every stage of this journey.
