Hello all. I need your help.

I need to start by getting my history off my chest. If this is something that will be harmful to your own efforts, please don't read further.

I got started with porn when I was about 11. I was looking around in our garage when I noticed an old door bridged across the rafters. I had always been curious what might be up there, so one day I decided to stack some things and climb up. There was a Playboy and a Penthouse, both from 1981. Needless to say, I opened them up and beheld the "wonders" inside. I don't know what my dad ever thought of them disappearing but they quickly found their way under my mattress. I eventually disposed of them by throwing them down a sewer drain nearby a few weeks later, but the terrible seed had already been planted in my young mind.

Since I had no access at that time, I made use of the JCP catalog whenever I was at my grandma's house. About 3 years later a friend of mine showed mey the first hardcore magazine I ever saw. I couldn't believe people would allow pictures to be taken of themselves doing those things and something instinctively told me that this was a bad thing for me to be looking at but I was fascinated.

When I was 18 and old enough to get into the adult book store, I would buy magazines, take them home, have my fun with them for a day or two and then in a shower of guilt, I would throw them into the sewer. Sometimes when the guilt subsided and I didn't have any money for another magazine, I would attempt to find a way to fish the magazines back out of the sewer, but it was never successful. This cycle went on intermittently for 2 or 3 years until I went to college.

I went to a Christian university in Ohio where I met my wife. We bought a computer in 1995 and it didn't take long to find phone numbers to adult BBS to log on to. A few weeks later we got our first internet account and suddenly it was easy to find porn pics everywhere. Over the next decade or so, with faster modems came choppy, low resolution video. With broadband came high resolution video and it just never stopped. It soon moved on to more and more... degenerate forms, I suppose would be the correct term.

Soon, the pics and videos just didn't cut it like it used to. I was taken to a strip club by a co-worker once and then I was hooked on that for a time. Eventually, I went and visited my first escort in 2008. I have seen 7 different ones since that time and have been to 3 different massage parlors. Yeah, that's where I was. I haven't seen an escort for 2 1/2 years now. I have managed to cut that stuff out of my thought process. Originally, it was largely because I knew my wife would notice money missing from our account, but since then I have grown to genuinely have no interest in ever doing that again.

It's that step back from that particular void that has led me to believe that maybe I can get away from the porn altogether with help. On average over the last 30 years, I have been a 1-3 times a day wanker. I think you guys call that PMO? But there have been times I have gone as long as 3 days without, usually when I am unusually busy with something. It has kind of become a ritual of releasing the tension before going to bed to sleep easier.

I'm 45 now and I don't have any problem getting it up or anything like that. But I'm not the person I once was. I used to be very in tune to the beautiful things around me. I used to go for walks and notice how a particular mushroom had an interesting shape to it, or how a vine winds its way up a wrought iron gate and find wonder and majesty in how it was able to climb the bars so gracefully. I was able to express my emotions through poetry and I wrote songs on my guitar. These were some of the things my wife loved about me when we met.

I haven't done those things in 20 years now, and I feel it is primarily because the porn has destroyed (suppressed?) my ability to see and feel those things as I once did. I am depressed often but not always. I think it's because I often feel as though I don't deserve to be happy, even though there's really no reason I shouldn't be. I love my wife and my two kids more than anything, bar none. My son is almost 10 years old now and he's nearing that age where I was exposed to this plague. That's another incentive to cut this cancer out of my life.

I don't hate myself, but I hate what has become of me. I don't know if I can ever recover the parts of me that I seem to have lost over the past 20 years, but I have resolved in my mind that it is worth trying. I suppose I've just become insensitive, emotionally, to the world around me. Has anyone been able to re-gain any of that, if you have experienced the same thing? Because that's what I want more than anything, to be more like the person I once was - to be more like the man my wife fell in love with. I don't think if we met today for the first time that she would fall in love with me. That's not fair to her and I want to reverse the damage as much as I can. If this place and you folks can help me, I will be eternally grateful.

 

Thanks, IWGB1 (I really don't want to type out i_wanna_get_better1, er... wait. My rock bottom is probably lower than my post presents. There was a particularly dark time about 5 years ago when I discovered TOR and that became my hangout for about 2 weeks before the shame of the material on that network became too much to bear and I have never since returned. I don't think I need to say more about that. BUT, my stint with TOR is probably what made me realize this is a bad, bad problem and I have wanted to get away from it all since that time, however, I'm only just now feeling up to the task.

Ironically, I'm by myself right now and I'm feeling more ready than I ever did when at home. I'm a travel nurse and this is my first assignment away from my family. I drive home every 7-9 days but in the mean time, I'm staying in a dormitory a few miles from the hospital where I'm working. On my days off, I am here with my computer, mostly watching Big Bang Theory and movies. I was worried about being here by myself thinking I'd do nothing but watch porn, but I actually have not done so very much. I think I miss my family so much that I feel guilty at the thought of even looking at porn, which is better than feeling guilty about actually looking at porn, I think. So here I am, posting on this forum instead.

It has now been 24 hours since my last PMO, which isn't much, but it's a start. I have 71 days left in my travel assignment and my goal is to be zero PMO/MO until my contract is up. I have serious doubts about being able to do it, which is why I need help. One thing I have learned as an RN is that needing help is NOT a weakness. The weakness lies in needing help and being too prideful to ask for it. That's when mistakes happen and that's when failures arise.

Now how do I get an accountability partner and how does that work?