Does the shame and pain ever go away

Yes. Yes it does go away. Just keep fighting hard.
As for you and your wife, it would do both of you a lot of good to seek couple's therapy and counselling. It would be a safe haven for the both of you to be completely and utterly emotionally unrestricted, which would help along with trust building and honesty.

 

Give her some time, she makes her decisions and only thing you can do is beg for forgiveness. And of course, not repeat mistakes of the past

 

thanks thanks, I feel similar. it takes a lot of time just for the physical healing. The hardest is the emotional healing. If you are like me, you need to replace the fear or interaction with women and your wife that drove you to porn with ability to live emotionally and sexually in reality. You maty have some demons you fled into porn about. Now the demons are out there without the porn. You have to think about how you are going to face them. You have to solve not just porn but the messed up things that drove you to porn.

That is hard.

There is NO SHAME. There is an industry of porn and related stuff that spends billions of dollars to sway people's minds. There is all kinds of advertising and movies and tv and stuff online pushign a person to it. We are victims of the way porn erupts across the internet across all sorts of publications all the strip joints, all the pressures on women to dress "sexy" all that stuff.

You should have not shame but pride by trying to fight up against that. Come here if you need help.

Learn to love your wife, learn not to hide away from here,learn to be honest, learn. I am going through that and its hard

 

There is shame. There is nothing but shame. But shame is something we have to learn to heal and live with. Nothing shameful about feeling guilty for the actions that deserve it, that's actually opposite of shame. We are not victims... no. Things happened in a way they did. Only thing we can do is now that we know, fight back.

Shame, there is nothing wrong in that when you have done wrong. We are not psychopaths. It's good to feel guilt. How can you regret if you don't feel guilty?

EDIT: I'm editing my post to be more precise

Also, I'm not saying you should feel overly guilty, just the amount deed you did deserves.

EDIT2: It's guilty, not quilty

 

Spinoza the philosopher had a saying "not the weep but to understand." We are all driven and whirled around by the strong winds and tornados of a society that has no respect for humanity, that harnesses sexuality and antisexuality to greed, we're all sons and daughters of parent bashed and whirled around and limited in giving us a picture of love and acceptance. We're all victims of a world that allows us to use the sexual joy in our bodies only in warped and broken ways.

Shame breeds nothing but lack of self respect, lack of feeling of power, lack of responsibility Shame breeds an ignorance that you are just a week or bad or evil person, the same bad feeling that drives you to do nasty.

Shame leads you to feel you really can do no better but must sneak around'

Shame will get you no where except back to porn and maturbating or worse

Understand you need to get out, Undestand that with the aid of your sisters and brothers you can get out, understand youc an fight the fiends that can harness all this damaging filth to your simple need for love and joy.

The purveyors and profits of this garbage that hurts us and others, they need to feel shame and guilt and worse

 

Actually, guilt by definition is where you feel regret because it has to do with the deed - shame has to do with your identity. Guilt says I did wrong, shame says I AM wrong. BEING wrong leaves you with nothing, you just collapse. This is a huge deal, people have studied this and it isn't a matter of semantics, it's important to make the distinction and it is hugely different, people have no idea of the damage they do with shame vs. guilt.

@Ryman , I suggest checking out this TED talk which went viral - I am embedding the Youtube link but also including the TED link because they have an interactive transcript feature. This is someone that has made a name with her work around shame and vulnerability, literally millions of people have benefitted and raves about her work. In the first one she does touch on addiction at the end too, how we numb.


https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability/transcript


https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame/transcript

 

Seems like you'e well on your way to making things better. 66 days is something to be proud of! Just keep going and I think everything will turn out just fine for you brother. You got this

 

Well if shame causes this, you should change your attitude. For me it's all about learning. I support you thoughts about getting out, but for me rest is false. It's not really a feeling per say, but it causes them, and learning to respond to it is part of our everyday life. That sneaking around is cowardly attitude, it has nothing to do with pmo, and everything to do with you wanting to hide the fact that you use pmo.

Escapism is not right way to go.

You're actually right. Shame per say is not feeling, it causes them. My mistake.

I think my previous answer should cover this up. You should learn to respond to the shame properly, and not shove it under the rug.

 

No, it is also an emotion. This has been thoroughly studied. You are combining the behaviour with the feeling, but clearly there is a feeling part to shame even if there is also outward behavior.

You can't be brave (sneaking around) and feel ashamed at the same time. By the time you feel non-cowardly you have moved away from shame. Your response doesn't address guilt so I am not sure you understand the point, you can feel guilty and respond, shame by its nature doesn't respond but is just shut down. When someone feels guilty they want to right the wrong they did, when someone feels shame they get depressed and don't leave the house.

Shame doesn't have to be the focus in the first place. Instead of saying "properly respond" why shame people to make it hard for them to respond in the first place? But this will only make sense if you can stop for a moment and distinguish the difference between guilt and shame.

Saying you should change your attitude is like saying to anyone with any difficult emotion they should change their attitude, what the emotion is in the first place matters. It just about completely ignores what the particular feeling is in the first place and you might as well say whatever that is negative, just change your attitude. If things were that simple everyone would do it.

 

You can always be brave, you can always choose what you do. It might mean hard time, but you're lying yourself big time if you say you just can't be brave because of some feeling.

Because being a brave means choosing and that is always hard to do. I'm not saying here this is easy. Quite the opposite. No loopholes in this marathon. Much like in real life.

Agreed, once the learning has been done one should get over it.

 

The point is at the moment someone is immersed in shame, they are not feeling bravery. Brave and shame are not states that exist simultaneously, even if we are optimistic and have every intention to move into bravery - which is going to be a future point in time. We have to be clear about what the emotions are before we can talk about moving to a better one, and saying we can also doesn't explain how to go from one to the other.

 

wonderful wise post, I amcopying it in my notebook

 

You can feel that you're coward or brave, and it's up to you to decide if you feel guilty thus are shameful according to local standards about being coward/being brave. You can be shameful because of being too brave, too. In a sense champion stepping out of the line is shameful act, because he violated the overall plan thus risking his friends (which in some cultures is okay).

Shame is counterpart of honor, and they are all about society and the bond people have in there. They are the moral standard. So you can be brave, while still doing the wrong deed. In fact, it might even tell that you're really brave, doing something really out of the line.

Which is why I say you can be brave, at any time.

Again, bravery is felt in moment. It's not thing of the future: you're brave now or you're never brave. Optimistic or pessimistic, it doesn't matter; bravery is about doing things now that might be risky and cause discomfort. You might have been brave in the past, but the question remains: will you be today?

Hmm, somehow I agree. we need to be more clear. But it's not that easy, I think we have disagreement of what the shame represents. I think, that it's the deepest expression of your consciousness. It makes you understand that you're bad/shitty/evil in some way. As a such, you can react to it in a way you can, and that reaction tells us who you really are. Changing that reaction is hard. If not entirely impossible.

Which, leads me to believe that we cannot change even the reaction that happens, but what we CAN do is to avoid things going wrong way in the first place When things are totally fucked up, they remain totally fucked up.

So, this doesn't mean we cannot stop pmo, it just means to stop it we need to have a plan, and a good one at that

 

This is how I feel! I want to be able to get my wife back. I am so happy to read all these stories abd encouragement about people who can abstain. I want o be able to do this

 

You are able to do this.
You are a human being
You were not born being into porn or masturbation or anything.
You can stop.
It is not easy
It is not automatic
But at the bottom, it is you that has to stop. Nobody else can do it, but you can
It takes a long while to just not do it for it to wear off. months
It wont help if you do not try to change your whole life, change what drove you into porn or masturbating or other bad stuff'
It wont help if you blame someone or circumstances or whatever.
Get help, but stop.
If you do not get help stop
Do not explain it, stop

I have been off 44 days and type this, but know that if I went off it would be delicious for a second or a minute, and then back bad

Do not center it on getting your old wife back. She may have gone somewhere else in life. When you really get yourself where you need to be, she might not be in the picture

Center yourself on getting yourself straight. Realize that you do not even know what to think or want as long as you are not completely off.

Get help not just from people here, but a shrink or a friend, or anyone who wants to help you change
BUT CHANGE
right me back by PM is you need support or want to unwind, we need to help each other