Because yuri_sing said: "Sanitizing the brain? Haha." Prepare your sponges.

yuri_sing wanted me to post a response I made for Anonymity on a separate thread. Anonymity relapsed recently and asked for tips from the community.
This is for the newbies:

You could always do what others have suggested and put block these sites right from your router, or install something like K9, adjust the settings and then write gibberish for the password so you can't change it.
What are your reasons ( other than sexual gratification) for watching porn? Do you do it when you want to avoid certain emotions? If so, which ones?

As loneliness and avoidance are key factors for why addictions continue or even begin, it is not uncommon to relapse when you haven't acknowledged those issues and started integrating with the emotional self. Another thing with pornography, it is very obviously used for an escape. Escape from what? Generally loneliness, stress, sadness or other hard emotions and situations. However, the act of consuming porn often propagates the exact emotions, situations or things that one is trying to to escape. Pornography can remind one of the utter lacking in their lives and it reinforces the thought: " I am bad, unlovable, going to be alone, disgusting etc". The thing is that those emotions are often repressed or completely overridden because of a twisting of the sexual mind. That's why there is a such thing as masturbation guilt. And what have many people usually heard about masturbation guilt? That's it is normal and to ignore it/repress it. If you ever had that, even once, that is your emotional self telling you that what you did is not kosher. What starts happening is that you start making a connection between a feeling of low self-worth/bad emotion with sexual pleasure. Then, it spreads. From one unpleasant emotion to another, it becomes an unhealthy outlet for moments in your life that you needed to experience. And that is where the addiction, desensitization and objectification truly starts. These emotions that you feel are often things that you project onto others. Couple that with the meaning of pornography, where physical appearance is all that truly matters. At that point, you may think a woman is disgusting, inadequate or unlovable because her chest is not quite the way you've seen in pornography. Now you may have performance anxiety because you've reinforced and learned that sex is all a show when it is viewed pornographically. Now, you can't get it up to real women and share a true intimate relationship because you have raped yourself of compassion, sensitivity and love. And the inability to have an intimate relationship with another is a reflection of your inability to have an intimate relationship with yourself.

Why do you need to experience emotions, especially uncomfortable ones? Because pain or discomfort is transformative. Painful emotions can be the door that unlocks the reason why you feel these things, do the things you do and think the way you think. Repression will only cause those emotions to take time to fester into oozing sores. Once the vices are gone, the struggle is whatever it had left in its wake. So, one thing that you can do when you feel those urges to watch porn is to check in with your emotions. Start a journal with what is happening internally. What are you projecting? What are you trying to escape from? Are you wanting to escape? What is a way that you could self-soothe, productively?

More questions/statement that help you open up the conversation of emotions are:
What bad thing will happen if I feel?
What is my hidden intention for not feeling?
I feel (insert emotion) because (insert reason)..

Another thing you can do, right now, is self-soothe. This will open up the door to not just trying to avoid the urges, but to work through the urges and understand them. This will allow you to deconstruct what porn is for you and what it means to you. If you are doing this while dealing with an urge, try to look past the sexual, physical sensations and into what your feelings truly are.
Step 1:
What negative thing happened?
What negative thoughts did it cause me to think?
How did it make me feel?

Step 2:
What did this experience cause me to know that I want?
What did this experience cause me to know that I want to think?
What did this experience cause me to know that I want to feel?

Step 3:
Begin by expressing. If you have any pent up emotions, write it out. This step is to close the gap between step 1 and 2-- what happened and what you truly want. Then, continue forward by letting yourself know that it is okay to make mistakes. Remind yourself that it is okay to feel emotions too, even if they are painful. Affirm yourself in a way that allows you to feel better and better.

This is a foundation of acceptance and self-love that you can build on. Every time you have an urge, a persistent thought that you question or you've relapsed, you can do this to pick back up better and better each time.

And then, when/if you have strong emotions that you consistently associate with porn or you want to avoid, sit down with it. Sit outside or in a place where you cannot give in to the urge to watch porn. Close your eyes and meditate. Become curious about it. If it is too difficult to do without your mind wandering, try a mantra such as:" I am here with you now." or "It's okay to feel this."
Sometimes, all you need to do is simply be present with these emotions and deny any urge to avoid. Any time your mind wanders, open your eyes for a moment, take in your surroundings and then pick up where you left off.


Furthermore, sexual energy is creative energy. So when you're ready, create something that has absolutely nothing to do with pornography. Train yourself to not crave porn, but instead crave drawing, painting, writing, making music or whatever it may be. Porn inhibits expression, while creativity transforms expression into a palpable, beautiful thing.