Hello all, I've been struggling with PMO since I was 12, especially P, and it's been a long journey. When I started college, I joined a support group, and I stopped PMO entirely for almost a year. After that, I had several short episodes around every 6 months, until this past February. I started to fall back in, and I talked to my SO about it. She's been very supportive, which I have really appreciated, and I stopped for a few months. Once I moved home for the summer, I started to fall back into PMO. I haven't told my SO yet, and I'm planning on doing that soon. She became my accountability partner, but I've been letting her down by keeping it to myself. Since I started PMO recently, I installed parental controls on my computer, but it hasn't been enough. I'm looking for more ways that I can reach out and actively take control of my addiction. I know it's possible to reboot, because I've done it before, but I hate needing to go through it again.
hi, Welcome to the site. It sounds like you are very aware of the journey and the benefits associated with giving up pmo. It also sounds like you have a very strong primary supportive relationship to help you with this. You have done this before and you can do it again; there is a lot of help here too for you. Don't be afraid to make use of it and engage with the community here.
Parental controls wont work when you are the one holding the keys to it. You already have a SO. I don’t understand why people who have a SO feel the need to revert back to porn. Typically, its people who are single and lonely who feel the need to watch porn. Maybe you two are not right for each other I don’t know but if that is the case and if that is why you are doing the porn then you should move on and find someone else. I would have thought the solution was obvious. This addiction could potentially destroy your relationship in many ways isn’t that fear enough to make you stop right now? What about the thought of ED making it hard for you to satisfy your SO which again could lead to your relationship suffering? The way I see it you are already in a relationship. You might look back one day and hate yourself for the break up and all this over a quick dopamine fix from PMO. Look at the big picture and you will see the light.
A lot of people here - almost all of us - have never achieved even close to a year without a single incidence of masturbation, porn or orgasm. How and why did you choose to go back to it again? Even if you say, well, nobody's perfect and I made a mistake, why return to the addictive behaviours you had before? That needs looking at very carefully for the lessons learnt. As for where you are now, simply repeat what you did previously. It worked wonderfully well and you can give us help with something that you have succeeded at and we just dream about.
Welcome to NoFap where you are amongst friends who are here to encourage you and sometimes challenge you but not judge you. The enemy is here to steal, kill and destroy. What are your current strategies for combating the enemy called PMO?
I think it relates back directly to my home environment and the amount of free time I have while on break from school. My first relapse started to happen when I was home for long periods of time during the summer. The unstructured time and being left alone in my room was what habituated me to porn in the first place, and finding myself in that situation again was seriously detrimental. My best advice to anyone struggling with PMO, especially myself, is to find ways to change your situation. That can be as simple as keeping your door open or moving to another room to study. Changing your situation is part of setting goals. For me, being at college the first time was opening a new chapter in my life, which I didn't want to include porn. I set that goal for myself from the outset, which is another suggestion for improvement. Setting a goal to overcome porn and root it out of my life helped me overcome the addiction which I had found myself in. My current strategy has several aspects. For one, having my SO as an accountability partner is immensely helpful. Secondly, I'm going on a trip which will keep me busy for the next six weeks, which will help me make it most of the way through the first 60 days. Thirdly, I'm determined not to allow porn to enter my marriage. I'm currently engaged, and my SO and I are going to work our hardest to keep porn out of our marriage so that we have a happy and healthy sexual life. She and I have talked about it together, and we share that vision. Lastly, I put in parental controls on my computer to put one more obstacle between myself and PMO. I gave it a long and complicated password so that I have to be conscious about using it. I know that it won't stop me completely, but I want it to be one more tool to help me on the road to recovery. I hope my words are encouraging to you all, and thank you for welcoming me into your community! (Bonus: I'm a Christian, and another major reason why I want to quit PMO is not only for myself and my spouse but for God. Prayer helps me focus on what matters most in my life, and that was a helpful tool for escaping PMO the first time. I have two theme verses for my reboot. They are Romans 12:2 and Philippians 4:8. They center around transforming your mind and thinking about what is good, which are both essential for a reboot.)
I opened the Word today and read a devotional on lust to help me along. Came across a great passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:7 "For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life" ....I really needed that today and I hope it helps you as well.
One thing for me is to recognize and react to the things that put you in the situations that cause the problems. For example, for myself, I can not be trusted with a phone while in a room by myself. Therefore, I set a rule where I don't bring my phone with me to the bathroom. Next I noticed that you are doing a lot of this for yourself and your wife this is good and I think this way as well. However, what I've recently been learning is that this is not about us. Nothing about any of our lives is ultimately about us. It's about God. He created everything and he is inviting us to surrender to him to join in what he is doing. While we are free to decide to sin and make decisions that lead down that road, that's not his goal for us. I'm refocusing who I am and why I'm here and it is changing what I do with myself and my decisions. 1. I am not God and therefore I do not have authority to do things outside of his will. 2. Sin was not the plan for us, but it is being used 3. We are not the focus of history or reality, so trying to make ourselves such only causes pain 4. Once we realign ourselves to God as the focus of it all, then we begin to surrender to his will 5. We need to be broken to allow God's spirit to come out and touch others On that last point I want to say this is my breaking. I hate admitting I'm powerless. But by posting on here I'm ending that and opening up. I want God to break me open to be like that alabaster jar that anointed Jesus' feet.
