Hello...I need help

Welcome and you are in the right place. This is a great community and everyone is helpful. At the bottom of this post are some links for those just starting their reboot. Education is a good start along with a journal to keep track of progress, feelings, thoughts and such. This addiction is difficult to overcome. Take one day at a time and learn from any relapses. Analyze those feelings and thoughts and make a plan for when you get triggered. Make some goals for yourself. Set some guidelines on what counts as a reset and what doesn't. I believe you will be successful and your relationship with your wife will get even better. Remember anything worthwhile takes time, so be patient.

Stay strong!!

 

Welcome to the forum. Your story is very similar to many married men who are part of this community. I too was a long time user of porn. It was my stress reliever, anxiety reducer, means of escape, reward system, and entertainment. Porn eroded me as a person and destroyed my 17 years of marriage. My wife had had enough and threatened to leave unless I changed. I too had many physical symptoms but blamed it on getting older. Even though I am 10 months clean and my marriage has improved, my wife is resentful for all the years I selfishly wasted using porn. I was emotionally unavailable and neglectful. I made her look elsewhere for what I should have been giving her all along. You are right... you can never get those years back.

Many of us in our generation used porn as an educational tool. We used it as a substitute for real life interaction with people. We thought we could keep it in a secret corner of our brain and not have it affect anything else in our lives. These are the lies we were told... they are the lies we told ourselves... these are the lies we believed were true. But this is an addiction that does not go away or stay static... it only grows and gets worse.

The good news is that recovery for yourself and your relationship. The keys will be to take ownership of the problem, communicate your determination to fix this to your wife, and start taking concrete steps towards recovery. I still have problems with my marriage but things haven't been this good in a long time. Here are some things you can do to get started:

Read this about addiction: https://www.NoFap.com/porn-addiction/
Read this about rebooting: https://www.NoFap.com/rebooting/
Watch this about porn addiction: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU
Educate yourself about addiction at www.yourbrainonporn.com
Find an accountability partner who fits your needs in the Accountability Partner folder.
Start a paper or online journal in the folder appropriate to your age. Vent, muse, document your journey, ask questions.
Identify your physical and emotional triggers and find ways to address them in healthy ways.
Post questions in the 'Rebooting in a Relationship' folder and ask others in a relationship what they did to help restore their marriage.
My favorite book: The Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior by Craig Nakken
Another good book: The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography by Wendy Maltz.
Another good book on trust and betrayal: I Love You but I Don't Trust You by Mira Kirshenbaum.

Understand that this is going to be a many month process and you will likely need to work on this your entire life. You get as much out of this as you put into it. The good news is that you finally recognize you have a problem and if you follow the path many of us have walked then you will have success as well.

 

Welcome to the forums. I hope the negatives that you highlighted in your post will turn out to be the motivations to recover from addiction. I'm sorry you had to experience the damage porn wreaks on lives and the destructive wake it leaves behind, especially with those we care most about. If you want to reboot your relationship with your wife, if you want to make things right again, you have only one path to follow, and that's recovery. Focus on recovering from porn addiction, make that your #1 priority, and eventually everything else will fall into place. It sounds as if your wife is hurting and taking steps to heal on her own, but something you may want to consider is telling her about these forums and having her join. She will also find tremendous support here, and there's even a significant others (SO) group she can join for spouses and partners who are in relationships with porn addicts. If she's willing it can go a long way towards healing your relationship, but if she's not - you recover. If things get worse in your marriage before they get better - you recover. No matter what happens in your life, focus on releasing yourself from the chains of addiction.

Congratulations on identifying the problem and taking initial steps to resolve it. That's truly half the battle. You'd be surprised how many are in denial and are unwilling to admit they're porn addicts or that porn is a serious issue that needs to be eradicated from their lives. You've already identified the tremendous positive in your story - your wife has not given up on you. I can quite definitively tell you how to repair your connection with her - you recover. Addiction is the fog in our lives, and in order for us to see clearly in order to repair what else is broken, the fog must be lifted first, otherwise we're walking around in the blind. Education and journaling have been critical for me, so I as well encourage you to do the same. It's a relatively easy first step. I've come to view recovery as getting a degree. Don't expect to know everything tomorrow, next week, or next month, but the more you work it, the more you will come to know yourself and your addiction, and that knowledge will become a weapon you'll employ. Eventually you'll become an expert on your weaknesses, your triggers, how to control your urges, and how to finally start living. Good luck on your journey.

 

I'm a lot like you. 40 and married for 14 yrs, a virgin before marriage, but have been using PMO since I was a teen. MO since before I knew what either word meant.

You've come to the right place. I'm more confident that I can kick PMO than I have been for years.

You can do this.