After years of recovered from PMO addiction... This is devastating

I'm in the same situation, this is terrible. I sometime have some attraction for women back, but most of the time I don't feel anything and I'm anxious around men. It's like I'm not a man anymore. It killed my motivation to do anything but I still live my life and try to move on other topic (improving my muscle mass, learning this throught books, walking for a long time...).

Be strong dude, you're not alone in this situation.

 

Mate so sorry you’re going through this. I’ve not experienced this myself but if it helps in anyway…

as a gay guy I’ve met many many gay men, none of whom are into trans. I’ve met many straight men, married with kids etc, who are looking for trans. Don’t know what it is but it doesn’t mean you’re gay in my opinion.

I’m new to this forum, after going through major ED issues with someone I’ve started seeing. Think mine is classic porn fucking my brain. I’m into all sorts of stuff when I’m into porn and completely missing this fit rugby player in front of me, I end up with a floppy dick. Doesn’t mean I’m emotionally attracted only to the people I wank to in porn, not attracted to them emotionally at all Tbf - maybe that’s part of problem! Whole thing with ED and my potential porn addled brain damage I don’t get turned on by anything but my most kinky porn and even then at the moment it’s a push. It’s all a psychological head fuck.
I guess what I’m saying is, just cos trans make you spaff doesn’t mean you’re gay or you should try and forge a relationship with a trans person… most men wouldn’t wanna marry the people in the dirtiest videos they love.

the rest of it might just be classic porn addiction fucking your brain up and like me it’s suddenly made it a crisis which is just a vicious circle.

Good luck mate, you’re certainly not alone

 

You posted something similar earlier, I typed a ton in response but deleted most of it. I'm dealing with my own things and have no idea how coherent I am and have little confidence in my own sense of reality, but this is about you. It's not about me. So, for whatever it's worth, I'm just going to vomit my opinion and hope it makes sense and isn't offensive to anyone around here.

I think you are correct. I think early exposure and early escalation into a specific genre during a formative time in your neural development totally screwed up your perceptions of all things sexual. I do think it can be corrected, at least mostly. I do think it's going to take more time and effort to fix it than it did to break it, because of the early timing, as your brain was forming its perceptions and relationship to sex.

I don't think, however, that you are much different from most people. I think you have a more extreme presentation of the same misconceptions about sex that virtually everyone has.

From the evidence I see all around me, I think virtually everyone has an extremely selfish view of sex. Sex is for me. Sex is for my pleasure, and my ego. My body, my choice, nobody gets to decide what I do with it, not politicians, not my partner, not even the person created because of what I chose to do with it. Men use women. Women use men. The only ethic driving who can bone who, or even what, is consent. People feel like they should have the right to have sex, to feel what they want to feel, to trade their bodies for money and their money for bodies. They use nonsense phrases like "free love," and "casual sex." Love is not free, thank God, if it was it'd mean love was worthless. Sex is never casual. Sex was never designed to be casual. If you "know" a person in the Biblical sense without "knowing" them in a personal, psychological sense, and if you break off a sexual relationship, that is psychologically traumatic. Because it's biologically traumatic. When you have sex with a person, chemicals are released into your system that tell you "this is your mate, you can trust your mate, your mate will care for you, you need to care for your mate." When those chemicals disagree with your conscious thoughts, the ones that say "I am going to use this person to make my own body feel good for a few minutes, then throw them out like yesterday's takeout box, and that's totally okay because it's just casual and we consented," your brain is literally fucking confused.

You didn't quite do that, I don't think. A lot of those bonding chemicals get released through eye and skin to skin contact, and you did sexual stimulation without those. You used images. When you developed your own sexual perception it wasn't even in the category of "person," sex is, as far as your current brain is concerned, something you do for yourself using things, not something you do with and for a person.

I strongly believe sex is not for you. Sex, ultimately, isn't even about your mate. Sex is about children. It's about making children, and it's about bonding two people together so they make the irrational choice to tolerate one another's bullshit long enough to combine resources and raise that child to maturity, so that now-adult can have sex and repeat the cycle. The only reason it feels good, I believe, is because otherwise we wouldn't do it. It makes zero sense to make human babies. Human babies are a massive liability. If you're a hunter-gatherer in the bush, they reduce your chances of survival on a massive degree, especially for the mother, who expends massive calories in building a life support system inside her body to keep it gestating, which severely impairs her mobility and consequently her ability to secure said calories she needs to spend and makes her vulnerable to predators. Then she stands a significant risk of dying in childbirth, and a rock solid guarantee of incredible pain, because human infants' heads are disproportionately enormous. And then she has this thing that does nothing but cry and poop and bite her nipples, and she's still expending calories to nurse the little bastard. That's the environment our reproductive system developed in. And even now, when we've used those disproportionately large brains to make robust protections against the hazards of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the light agricultural lifestyle, and the post-Industrial Revolution lifestyle, and we've made drugs to combat the pain, and we've made baby wipes and teething rings and all kinds of stuff to make it "easier," it remains true that babies and children are a positively gargantuan drain on everyone's resources, and they are better off in every way imaginable when their parents are present and pair-bonded. If you want to keep your money, spend it on good food and conveniences, live in a nice area where the fun stuff is, go to festivals and vacations, if you want the flexibility to impulsively spend a weekend at a B&B in Vermont when the trees are changing color, and have money for retirement so you can do nothing but goof off in your final years after a long and fulfilling career, don't have kids. If you want to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, don't have kids. If you hate money, and peace and quiet, go ahead and have six. But even if you do choose not to have kids, don't expect to have a lot of casual sex and be fully psychologically well-adjusted. Even if you consciously don't want kids, even if one or more of your systems are broken and you can't have kids, sex is still designed to bond you to a partner. You are still better off with a partner. For one thing, it's still a better deal to combine resources with another person. For another, the actual reproduction is just one system, your entire being is still designed to seek satisfaction in, to crave, that pair bonded relationship, even if the ultimate evolutionary goal of reproduction is off the table.

Back to the subject of you, specifically. I am not a psychologist, but even psychologists don't know jack about sex, sexual orientation, etc. More than half of them are claiming you can and should be able to sexually express yourself in whatever way you want, that gender is just a figment of our collective imaginations and again, the only ethic is "consent," whatever the hell that means. And then the other half disagrees, and everyone has their opinions on the nuances. What I mean to say is, all I'm giving you is a hypothesis.

I think you hit puberty, your brain started looking for sex because that's natural, but all you found was selfish, faux sex because real sex is rare and porn is not. Additionally, whatever combination of cultural influences you had, the taboos and the violation of taboos, maybe the combo of developed female breasts with a developed male penis just screamed "more sex so better," I don't know but it all came together to cement this genre as the best thing. This, according to your brain, is what sex is for. It's to make you feel good. And this genre makes you feel the best. You don't get turned on by the sight of female genitalia because one, sex is completely removed from reproduction in your mind, two, sex is completely removed from bonding to a female in your mind, and three, you don't understand it. It doesn't make any intuitive sense to you as a pleasure center. You understand a penis. And since for you, and virtually everyone else, sex is all about you and any other participant is an object you use to stimulate yourself, and since you understand penis pretty well but don't understand vulva, and since you overdeveloped a neural pathway that said "chick with a dick = good," real-world heterosexuality just doesn't excite the parts of your brain that deal with sex.

That's my hypothesis on why you like trans porn and not real women, with extensive background into what I think sex is and have the hubris to say everyone else in the world is wrong about it.

Now, my proposed solution, based in said hubris so take it with as much salt as you like.

Forget about sex. Ditch the entire thing, it's broken for you right now and without something positive to latch onto, it's not going to be fixed. But slow down and read that carefully. You sound like you're in a bad spot right now and I know what it's like to be in a bad spot, I'm there as I type, so I know you're prone to reading "Forget about sex. Ditch the entire thing, it's broken for you because you fucked yourself up so bad you are irredeemable, and you are not going to be fixed." That's not what I said. I said sex is broken for you right now, meaning I believe there is a way for it to be fixed, but without something positive to latch onto, your drive or orientation or whatever you want to call it is not going to be fixed. I think you need to retrain your brain in proper sexuality, but there's a problem. It remains true that sex is not for you, but for family. It's supposed to be about pair bonding with someone else. You don't just go out and pair bond with anyone, because it's about pairs, two people making a mutual choice to be with the other, it's about trust, it's about being worth pairing with. Or perceived as worth pairing with.
Work on yourself. You've been off PMO for years? Without another sexual outlet, and in this cultural climate? My dude, you are already a beast. You are dealing with anxiety, uncertainty, hopelessness, I get that but dude. If you can go for years without giving in to the pressure, if you went through that session with a therapist and came out with the impression that you're permanently screwed and still didn't cave even though you desperately want to, you demonstrate you have the self control to turn yourself into something worthy.
Do not, under any circumstances, use dating apps. Dating apps are bullshit. Dating apps are not designed to match you with a person you can permanently pair bond with, because that would mean you stopped using the app. Apps aren't even designed to help you find hookups. Apps are designed to keep you using the app. I just read an article from The Independent, even the hyper-successful UberChads with massive incomes and Adonis-like physiques are beginning to suspect these apps are fine for hookups, but absolute poison for finding and/or keeping a long term relationship and besides, hooking up isn't as satisfying over the long term as they thought it'd be. Average guys can't even hook up. The women are too busy looking at the UberChads. Don't use apps.
Do talk to people. Learn about people. Get comfortable with starting conversations, get comfortable with being rebuffed from a conversation, get comfortable with continuing conversations. Do not just talk to pretty girls, or average girls, or the type of person you think you want to eventually orient your sexuality towards, because that's still sexualizing and objectifying them. Talk to people. Talk to old people, talk to teenagers, talk to married people, talk to ugly people, but at the same time absolutely do talk to girls because you need to train your brain into seeing people, not objects for your own gratification. You need to learn how fat people are still people, and dumb people are still people, and attractive people, even trans people, are still people and not things to be ignored or used at your own leisure. Some of those people are going to become friends, and maybe one day, not today and not tomorrow but one day, one of those friends will care about you and you will care about them enough to have sex, and it won't be about using one another to pleasure yourselves. It'll be about pleasuring one another, and about strengthening your pair bonded relationship, the way sex was meant to be.

Thanks for sticking with me this long, now go out and be awesome.

 

This is a crazy post, but really good. Dude, it's so inspiring. I felt what you wanted to say. It's like we've screwed our ability to love and bond to someone. That's exaclty what I feel right now. I broke with my ex (8y relationship) because of that fear and my inability to feel love (because of that stupid fetish, I thought "I can't marry her if I turn gay" or stuff like that).

Thanks dude

 

For how long you have been practicing nofap? for different people it would take different time to recover ranging from 3 months to 2 years as reported many times on these forums before as well. have you lasted more than 1 year on nofap? do not give up yet.
Also for all the people suffering from fetishes(including me), we have to stay away from the triggers during nofap so that our brain can completely eliminate it from memory. Even watching a youtube short/insta reel clip or reading some sexual word can trigger fetishes in our brain, thus making the whole process of rewiring longer.
I am currently practicing nofap and many a times it happens that I am scrolling through youtube short videos (which is basically soft porn) and some standup comedy or pathetic so called "funny" clip will come which will trigger my fetish and I wont be able to get it out of my brain for 3 to 4 days till I give up and relapse. Imagine I hear some sexual words related to my kink and my brain starts fighting the urge to relapse and it is constantly fighting for 36 to 48 hours till I actually give up and break my streak. Even though it took me 3 to 4 days to relapse but my brain is so addicted that just by hearing few words or watching a 30 sec clip triggered it so bad that it keeps wanting to fulfill that fetish via PMO continuously for next 4 days. This is not helpful in rewiring the brain at all. The brain needs to stop thinking about the fetish to really recover. It is just like trying to remember the name of an old friend from your childhood. Just because your brain has not thought about him for many years, his name and his face has almost vanished from your memory and despite of trying hard to remember, the brain simply cant.
So if you are constantly thinking about your fetish despite doing very long streaks of months, that means you are still being exposed to something (most probably social media) which keeps triggering it

 

Great post. Meshuga's writing is always impeccable... almost poetic.

Although we could argue that there are psychological benefits to raising children besides reproductive pressure (from the same evolutionary perspective), the analysis, reasoning and suggestions here are extremely insightful.

 

Thanks, I appreciate your encouragement.

I agree, it was too far to say "It makes zero sense to make human babies." There is the biological pressure, as you say, and there are psychological and social benefits as well. I'll stand by my initial assessment, though, that reproduction is a long term life choice with a high cost, much higher than most people estimate. I think there's a reason our most horny and fertile years occur before our brains have developed a true appreciation for long term planning.

I've been at this for a long time. I can't even take credit for most of these ideas. Much of it is from The Basics, the parts about how our natural bodies get fooled by porn.

I don't think there is a "real," or at least natural, sexual orientation toward trans women. People who strongly, chronically feel that the gender they appear to be is not their true gender are rare enough that there probably isn't a specialized orientation for them, let alone the specific one where it is a presenting male feeling they should be a woman. There are enough effeminate men to suggest a rare but existing orientation toward that group, but the genre I understand your fetish to be is made possible only through extensive surgery. This is a fetish that has been made possible only recently, and is a purely psychological addiction facilitated by porn.

I think you can be okay, but it requires time and work to undo what porn has done, and requires time and work to get back on track. You've been developmentally delayed but you can get there. It's unfortunate that porn delayed you for so long, and knocked you off the track you want to be on now, but today you can choose to grow toward the person you want to be.

And I did want to emphasize, for those like @Uk39 who are not having reproductive sex, whether by choice or not, that sex is still okay. I say it's for reproduction and for families, but it is also for pair bonding and the benefits of that are strong and many. Furthermore, I am aware of the argument for promiscuity as a natural evolutionary strategy. I am aware our desire for impulsive sex is natural, but the data clearly shows the most successful, happiest people on average come from bonded, two parent families. We have big brains with the capacity to choose, and I personally believe it is highly unethical to have promiscuous reproductive sex. So if heterosexual promiscuity is the direction you want to take, for all our sake, put a condom on it.

 

Hey everyone, this is an amazing read.
I printed out Meshuga's post and am currently going over it with a highlighter.
I can't think unless I have something printed out on paper I can hold in my hands, highlight it or write notes on it.
This is why I LOVE this community and fellowship. Sharing our stores and listening to others is VERY powerful and healing.
Story telling has been around from the beginning of humanity for this reason. Use it mercilessly to your advantage.
Gentlemen, we can't do this alone.
Thank you Meshuga.
A6659

 

Today isn’t good in fact it’s pretty bad, it’s as if I’ve accepted it. When it comes to thinking about having sex with a women it’s like fear that I won’t like it, or that I won’t preform. I’m reading that some people who are secretly gay use hocd as a coping mechanism, I’m worried that is me, I’m scared I hate even sleeping cause I’m worried that I’ll have a homosexual dream. Even when I engage in pmo it’s constantly like what am I attracted to? Do I wanna be the male or the female? So far a bad day in total. I can’t eat on the right side of my mouth with out the fear it would cause me to be gay or that something bad will happen. I have all these desires when it comes to women but it’s like do u like her? And if u meet her would u like her or wanna have sex with her? And asking those questions makes me feel like I won’t and makes it worse. It just feel like denial. And they say denial is the fear of not being accepted but I don’t care if I am or not but it’s trying to convince me that I am when ik I’m not. But it’s like do I really know or have I just been living a lie and using hocd as a coping mechanism to avoid the fact that I am gay… can a gay person have sexual desire for a women but not get up at the thought of being with a man? When it started I was also scared to talk to women but now I am constantly talking to girls like it’s nothing and I’m worried that it’s because I’m gay? I feel like my brain is just seeking dopamine because it’s like I’ll get the feeling of Arousal to odd things and I go back to questioning myself. I feel like I’m losing my self and it’s scary, this feeling is becoming more and more normal and I hate it. Someone please shed some light on my situation!!!

 

A great post. Worth reading from time to time.
I would just like to add/point out at one thing that do not equate having children = end of fun life. Just like you mentioned that sex is not just for yourself, it is about bonding and reproduction, similarly our lives are not supposed to be about ourselves only. This so called "modern world" has screwed our definitions of "life", "sex" and "fun" and made us believe anything which takes away this modern fun should be avoided. The reason these new defintions are crap is the same: they are against our nature and biological needs. This is built-in in our nature to take care for others and sacrifice for them and when you take out that from the equation of your life and focus only on yourself then you are again going against your nature and hence you will always be feeling void within your sepf. Just like changing partners on daily/weekly basis is against our biologicial nature, similarly spending a life fully focused around yourself will keep you emoty from inside. I read a great concept that you destroy yourself by thinking all the time about "me, me, me, me" all day long, You need to direct your energies towards other, which is easiest when it is about your spouse, parents, kids and siblings as with them you have the strongest sense of belonging.
People who go about having 5,6 or more kids could had stopped after 1 or 2, after seeing how hard it is to raise them, but they continue despite all the challenges because they are also experiencing the happiness they are getting from raising a new life form, which is again built-in in our nature.
Now I am not saying that just keep producing kids and everything will be fine. Kids expose you to tremendous challenges, and the whole project can fail if they dont turn out good humans but without kids you are always in an extreme comfort zone and the extreme comfort zone will again create a void in you, bringing you existential crisis.
1. Too much trouble, responsibilities and challenges bring you to depression.
2. Too much comfort zone brings you to existential crsis, causing again the depression.
The people who survive without kids and still have a good life without depression are mostly those who have dedicated themselves for a bigger cause (building a hospital, working non-stop for charity organizations, actually going to people on ground and working tirelessly for them etc.), hence again directing their energies towards others.

In short, we need to get out of the messed up definitions of sex, fun and life. Follow your nature in all matters, take a midway. Do not overburden yourself neither keep your self in extreme comfort zone. Keep your energies directed to yourself as well as others everyday. Do not center your life only about yourself.

 

Hey saddist_adult, despite the fact that you haven't PMOed in a long time, some of the last few things you reinforced sexually were the fetish porn. So it makes total sense that you're in this situation.
Recovery helped you remove a lot of the effects of porn, but now that you've done NoFap your objective should be to rewire - through sex.

 

Hell yea, epic post.

 

insightful post!

I like what you mention about sex not being all about you. Because that's really what porn is all about. We get to choose the genre. And eventually that genre becomes what is the most novel and adrenaline inducing type of porn - which is probably going to be something unnatural. Awareness and mindfulness are key in my opinion to recover, keeping a close watch on ourselves. observing our habits and triggers and making the decision to be better.