Crossing the line from immorality to criminality

Hi folks

I'm new to this forum but not new to the practice of Nofap, I've been PMO free for over 2 years now, it's safe to say that porn has lost all of its allure for me now the novelty has gone and the urge is no longer there. This is going to be a long post but I hope you gain something out of it, this isn't for the faint hearted.

I'm your typical porn addict or was for a long time, started when I was young (back in the days of dial up modems when google was a pipe dream) found an endless array of super models to ogle at, sneaked into the living room at night to take a peak on the net when my parents were alseep, got my first PC in my room when I was 16 and started collecting porn, categorising it, sorting it like some kind of immoral stamp collection. Stuff took ages to load, we take it for granted now that we have high speed internet, but back then you would have to wait 20-30 minutes for a 5 minute video to download, streaming didn't exist then either.

My sex education at school was basically 'this is how you put a condom on a cucumber' and 'this is how people reproduce' my parents always neatly avoided the subject of sex, dating and porn, my dad being a staunch Christian was fervently against sex before marriage. I grew up with loving parents, had great friends, did all the usual stuff kids do like going out on adventures in the woods, getting into fights, staying out too late and having crushes on girls at school.

I didn't realise back then that I was nurturing a destructive habit that one day would change my life forever, however, we won't get to that bit yet.

I understand today partly why I found porn to be so comforting at first. When I started looking at cut-outs from the back pages in newspapers it wasn't long after I was sexually abused as a child by an older friend, luckily it never went as far as penetration, but I did experience some very uncomfortable things that I won't go into detail here, he was also the first person to show me hardcore pornography which he found in a magazine dumped somewhere.

I never told anyone about it except one occasion when I tried to tell my mother and she said 'don't be so silly' so I left it at that and kept it secret for many years.

When I started college I had my first girlfriend, and we dated for 5 years. Porn was my other girlfriend and that stayed with me throughout our relationship, until it ended mutually and me and my ex, remained friends for some time after.

I think it was when I was at University when my tastes in porn started to change, as I was able to download longer videos and more of them, I started to become interested in different fetishes far removed from the airbrushed super models of my late teens and developed a thing for lesbian porn... the novelty factor was a big thing for me and I could spend hours and hours searching for just the right video or gallery. Still to this day I couldn't tell you what the exact parameters were for what, on any given day was arousing, it just seemed to be an unpredictable quirkiness.

You're probably not surprised to hear that I barely scraped by with a 2:2 for my degree, at least I passed anyway, but looking back I know I was capable of doing better. I also had a problem with smoking too much weed as well which started back in college.

At this point I wasn't concerned about my habit, either way I was staying within the realms of legality and I reckoned I had a pretty good grip on life at that time, I knew where I wanted to go in life and what I wanted to achieve, after Uni the world felt like my oyster. Until a year after graduating, my mother passed away from breast cancer and it was when she was diagnosed that I got involved in class A drugs, that event turned my world upside down. Cocaine something which I was vehemently against ended up becoming my master. All it took for me to get addicted was one small, tiny little line and then I started to experiment with cocaine and porn together. They compare the high obtained by viewing porn as similar to the one obtained by cocaine, well if you combine the two you get double the impact but double the problems.

My grandfather passed away the year after my mother did, and then my dad left the country to live with another woman so it was me, my job, and my coke and porn habit.

It's strange that I actually went from daily viewing of porn to weekly binges on coke and porn, it got to the point where porn without coke did nothing for me, I had to have the drugs to enjoy it, and I kind of did for a couple of years.

Then I moved on to some of the more darker material online, the stuff you know you shouldn't look at but curiosity got the better of me and the bad stuff became 'just another category' to go along with my long list of finely tuned fetishes and pleasure started to look a lot like fear, anxiety and shame.

Somehow I managed to hold down a job, I had to in order to support my drug habit and pay the bills, but it got to the point where I knew I had to stop somehow and I tried using self will power to no avail, sometimes going 2 or even 3 weeks without using drugs or porn only to relapse time and time again. It got to the point where there actually wasn't any type of porn I hadn't seen, legal or illegal and my moral compass was shot to pieces. I tried reaching out for counselling a couple of times which I paid for privately but to be honest I found it only opened up old wounds.

In one act of desperation, I sat down on my PC and wrote a letter to my deceased mother because I wanted help but I didn't know how to get it, more to the point how do you tell someone you've been looking at the worst kind of stuff?

Well eventually I was arrested, despite my own efforts I had to reach rock bottom. I'll never forget that knock on the door at 8am by 4 police officers wanting to ask questions about the things you've been looking at. I've never felt fear or terror like it, being in that prison cell one fears the worst, but I had to be arrested because I needed that wake up call.

That was about 2 and a half years ago now. Shortly after that arrest, I had to tell my friends about what had happened, it was tough, they didn't even know I used cocaine or even porn so I tried as best as I could to explain. Some listened, some tried to be supportive and others well, others kept their distance.

One of them suggested I get support for my drug addiction, so I ended up joining a 12 step program, the single most important thing I could have ever done, I still go today. Shortly after my court appearance and reporting of my sentence in the local newspaper I had threats of violence, made two vain suicide attempts and had two friends try to convince me to commit suicide. I also had some random person stop in their car whilst I was out shopping to film me and shout obscenities at me then post it all over social networks. It was a shit storm like you wouldn't believe, but I stayed sober through all of that because of the support I was getting from my fellow recovering addicts.

I can't undo the past as much as I would like to, it will be something that will come back to haunt me again and again and when you get sober you get your emotions back, the difficult ones and the good ones, but it's the difficult ones which are the hardest like empathy, remorse, guilt and fear.

I have to attend a treatment course with other offenders, pretty much all of them regular people you wouldn't take a second glance at if you walked past them in the street, but we all have one thing in common...porn and addiction but we are the ones who overstepped the mark and crossed that line.

Today I am over 2 years free from PMO, Cocaine abuse, cannabis and alcohol I'm a boring teetotaler but I've learned a hell of a lot about myself in these two years of sobriety. Probably the most important thing is that I found a human being inside me and his name is Alex and he cares about people and wants to help them by sharing his experience so others don't make the same mistakes he did, this is how he makes his amends for the harm he caused to others.

If you're struggling with your own porn addiction then I want to tell you it is possible to overcome it and you don't have to go to the extremes I did, it's possible for you to stop before you even begin to get to where I ended up and experience a real and fulfilling life. My life is better than it was but my opportunities are severely limited now by the stigma associated with being a 'sex offender' something I will have to learn to live with for the rest of my life but if I can stop just one person from making the same mistakes I did then I'll be happy with that

 

Thanks everyone for your kind words of encouragement. I want to clear a couple of things up since a small debate has started.

When it comes to my parents, I never went hungry, always had a roof over my head and despite my fathers' religious views he still worked very hard to provide for us, so I don't blame him because he was only doing what he thought was right and that's different for every parent. I used to use his shortcomings as a person as a basis of wholesale condemnation of all religion, however over the last two years he has been one of my key pillars of support and paradoxically it's the way of faith that has given me my personal strength because I am now accountable to a power greater than myself. That's my own choice and it's kept me going, that is the 12 steps way and the version of spirituality I had impressed on me growing up is different to the one I practice with my fellow recovering addicts yet it brings us closer together.

I don't blame my mother either because unfortunately the response of 'don't be silly' is all too common, based on my research on survivors of abuse. Children are not able to properly articulate themselves, understand their own emotions and naturally have less of a vocabulary to be able to describe stuff so they often are not taken as seriously. It's also a self defense mechanism for a parent to want to avoid discussing something as deeply damaging as abuse. Remember this was a long time ago back in the early 1990's and attitudes and public knowledge or exposure about childhood abuse was very limited except for maybe some of the most evil and vile news stories about child murderers. A lot more is understood today about all forms of abuse and/or exploitation and I hope parents are being better informed.

I think with any problem, parenting obviously has a big impact on a child's development but counter to that, so does the other environments they find themselves in and the messages they see in all forms of media and that is why I think the issue of online pornography is a real and genuine public health crisis today more so than ever. Youngsters today are starting out looking at the stuff it took me a long time to find or desensitise to, the stuff available today as 'mainstream pornography' back in the early naughties was 'niche' and experimental. It makes me sad to think about all of those people growing up today believing the lies peddled to them by the porn industry and when they digest the abusive narratives on those websites I think a lot of people don't realise just how much it shapes their view of the world around them, there is a sense of foolish naivety on the consumers part because what they are looking at is so powerful and intoxicating that they don't stop to take a critical analysis of the content, rather they use it as opposed to make a critical judgement from a point of ethics or morality.