P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

I try, the thing that bothers me is that I have no desire for women and porn for years, I masturbate if my penis is limp, even porn stopped exciting me and I still continued because I had urges to orgasm

 

Don't know if people in a situation like mine can recover

 

I have been 9 months without porn, masturbation and orgasm, sometimes weak morning erections have returned, but other than that there is no further improvement

 

• I want to know if you've made any progress, mentally, emotionally, after nine months

 

I think so yesterday I bought shoes and I felt happy and had a little fun

 

If I was addicted to porn, I wouldn't enjoy things

 

Yep, I think the positive stuff has always been there, but it is often pushed out of my awareness by insane amounts of anxiety. But when things are OK and calm, I do feel positive emotions. In fact I would say that given how bad things actually are, I am surprisingly positive. But, famous last words - I'm just taking things a day at a time.

 

In my opinion, if you are struggling with emotional numbness or feeling no pleasure, your recovery can no longer be about just abstaining. You have to address those feelings of emotional numbness. It seems like people who experience emotional numbness, do so because they have not been able to come face to face with all the negative feelings lying beneath the addiction. Instead they have used addictions like PMO, social media, dating apps or the internet to numb out to them.

For example, as soon as I beat my PMO addiction, it was quickly replaced with a social media addiction, then a YouTube addiction, then an Internet addiction. The addiction was not the problem, it was the negative emotions that I was trying to numb myself from. You can't feel anything if you are too busy gaming, or watching a 9 hour TV series right?

In short, you can recover but you have to start facing that emotional numbness to understand what is hiding behind it. There has to be a level of courage to just accept it and see where it leads you. All the "positive good shit" is hiding behind the anhedonia which exists because of your PMO addiction. PMO acts as a defense mechanism that protects you from the negative feelings.

Finally I have been recovering for exactly 57 months today. 4 Years, 9 months. It absolutely does not need to take this long to recover, I unfortunately spent a lot of time running from the emotional numbness, hence why I am advising you to face it sooner rather than later.

 

I don't know if I suffer from anhedonia

 

Doesn't severe porn addiction cause irreversible damage to the brain or nervous system

 

No one knows this, everyone has their own degree of damage caused by addiction.
It depends on many factors.
Age, degree of dependence, time of dependence, edging, individual factors.
There is no clear recovery time.
I have been recovering for about 5 years and 2 of them in hard mode.
I can say that I have recovered by 80%.
Sometimes I get small flatlines - once every 2-3 months.
I used to live in flatline for 10 years.

 

Let's say it does. Now what? The best we can do is never return back to pmo

 

But does it cause damage that is irreversible?

 

Can you tell me how bad your case was in addiction

 

What are your symptoms??

 

12 years of addiction several times a day every day, escalating to extreme porn and disgusting and distorted fetishes for most of the years masturbating if the penis is limp because even the porn stopped feeling a flat line years before I even started abstinence

 

Can you have sex, do you have pied? A lot of people take two or three years to recover or more, I think I'm a serious patient, so I have to be prepared

 

• Do you mean that you have been pmo for ten years before you did not abstain from sex, causing yourself to be in flatline for a long time? I think I am so, even in flatline, I do not know, I want to learn from you, (your flatline is also low libido, depression, ed?)

 

• I don't feel motivated to do anything, I've lost interest in my old hobbies, and my brain doesn't feel happy doing anything，how i treat that，I don't even expect a reward. I think it's anhedonia

 

and that is absolutely ok. It is absolutely ok to not want to do anything and to lose interest in your old hobbies. It is simply a period that you go through, it will all come back shortly and with a vengeance.