Hi all. This is a pretty big post but this is the first time I've worked up the courage to post here. I am currently depending on how you count it six or nine months into my reboot. After many failed attempts I finally succeeded in March last year but fell back into it, though not the fetish stuff, in July. I'm six months completely clean, I haven't done any of the PMO. Some background first. Six years ago, as a young adolescent male, I followed the path of escalation most of you will be familiar with and ended up conditioning myself into a porn-induced extreme fetish. I had no particular desire for the content itself and was attracted to it because of the format (captions). For the next five years I would continue conditioning myself to it and after I was finished I was always disgusted with it and myself. Then, in the middle of last year, one night I finished PMO and I cracked. Every waking moment I was filled with regret, horror and revulsion at what I had done to myself and what I had conditioned myself into starting at such a young age. I searched about getting rid of a porn-induced fetish but to no avail, all I found were people saying I would never be able to get rid of it. For a month the only thing keeping me from ending my life was the need to prove that I was not what I had PMOed myself into. But eventually I think I would have done it anyway had it gone on much longer. It's not an exaggeration to say that finding Gary Wilson's site saved my life. If I hadn't found it and if I had listened to all the people saying that it was normal and there was no way to undo the damage I would have been dead for over a year now. I had plenty of slip-ups along the way. I should have started there, I wish I had, but I kept saying I would do it starting the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, until I finally began the recovery process for real despite what happened in July last March. It hasn't gone away, but I have hope that it will and I wasn't expecting a standard 90-day reboot to accomplish it given the age I started and how long it continued. I'm ready to continue for years if it means getting rid of this sick parasite I stupidly let into my brain. Unfortunately over the past few months I've also developed weird reactions. I don't know how much of it is real and how much of it is psychosomatic and related to the OCD I have concerning the porn-induced fetish. It started with groinal hyperawareness, fake movements down there which I would check only to find no arousal at all, which went away after a while; then I started involuntarily smiling at the sick intrusive thoughts I would get, which went away and returned a few times; and then at the beginning of September it got worse than ever before. I became hyperaware of my head moving, which was weird. I had started shaking my head earlier in the year when I got the intrusive thoughts and I thought it might be related to that. But that went away when one night I thought I had a positive bodily, non-groinal reaction to the fetish which, if I did, I now realise was the result of conditioning and sensitisation and nothing more than that and it went away during the days I was worrying non-stop about that. That was the first time since last year that I'd felt down in any way for any significant period of time. That itself went away after a month or so, replaced by a hyperawareness of momentary jolts, zaps, things, whatever in my head. It felt like occassionally, usually when I had an intrusive thought (but not always, in both senses, it wasn't just then and it didn't always happen when I did) I would get one of those 'jolts' or 'zaps' or whatever you call them in my head. So I spent another month and a half worrying about that until a new groinal hyperawareness developed. I'd also started doing compulsions, like "count to 10 before X or you are your porn-induced fetish", and those are really awful, especially when I got hard to it. Both that and the jolts went away at the start of the month. I was so glad. And then, a few days ago, I went to the bathroom and felt a funny thing in my head. So I checked. And by the next day the jolts were back. I had previously thought they were related to the porn-induced fetish and related to dopamine or something like that maybe but now I'm pretty sure they're just psychosomatic. Maybe they'll go away if I just stop thinking about them again. Now for the next thing: associating nations. It was only a minor part of the extreme fetish shit but for some reason the 'nationplay' shit stays with me and there are certain ones that, and I know it sounds offensive but it's something automatic, my brain associates with this disgusting stuff, which is obviously really really bad and yes it is offensive but it's not something I do intentionally. I also make connections with my porn-induced fetish that aren't there? I don't know how to put it. Like I'll see completely unrelated things and my brain goes "that's it!" when it's not in any way whatsoever and if I continue regardless knowing that it isn't even related to it sometimes that gets at me. But the jolts are the main thing that bothers me at the moment, especially after how they went away and I was so glad only for them to return. Again I'm pretty sure they're psychosomatic? So yeah that's my story of recovery so far. I haven't really counted my days but it's around 270 since March and about 150 since July.
