How I overcame a lifelong porn addiction - my story, tips, benefits

Hello Fellow Fapstronauts,

I have never posted on this site or any related site before, however I just recovered from a lifelong porn and masturbation addiction and I would like to share my story and advice. I know that reading these helped me recover and beat urges (no pun intended). This may be a long post and I will go into relative depth regarding my journey and cover some of the gory details, as I believe that they are the best to learn from. That being said, I will try to stay concise and I will include potential triggers here, so read at your
own risk.

I will break this down into the following sections:
1. My story
2. The benefits
3. How I recovered/My tips and tricks
Feel free to scroll to a relevant section, however I recommend reading all of this as learning the details helped me the most. If you're on this site, I know you have free time - use it to read this instead of fap.

My Story
Currently 19 years old - I started masturbating when I was perhaps three years old. I somehow figured out that if I rubbed my private parts on the floor or in my hands, it felt really good, and after a minute of that, it felt REALLY good. This continued on to until I got my own phone and connection to the internet. As we all eventually figure out, I discovered internet porn through Google Images. These started out relatively normal. I first got off to images of cute or hot girls, then girls with big boobs or butts, then girls wearing almost nothing, then GIFs of girls touching their boobs or bodies. For some reason, I never went to mainstream porn sites, however I escalated in other ways. Normal sized boobs quickly weren't enough for me which led me down the road to some extreme fetishes. Plastic surgery was the only way to create the size that my brain craved. And as I became desensitized to normal stimuli and as my brain started to associated some messed-up things with arousal, I quickly developed some weird fetishes. Extreme trigger warnings ahead.

Looking for more extreme stimuli, I gravitated to girls who had gone down the road of plastic surgery. This meant I was looking for girls with massive boobs and abnormal curves. This led me down a bimbofication and bimbo fetish. Huge lips, tags of "transformed herself" and "plastic barbie/plastic bimbo" were the only things I could get myself off to. This led to a body modification fetish, where I got hard so easily finding images of literal girls who had undergone extreme body mods. Yes, this is messed up. Subdermal implants, fang implants, extreme tattoos, etc.. got me off more than anything ever could. I would struggle with this fetish for years. Normal girls and normal boobs and normal images or videos just couldn't arouse me anymore.

When I was 17, I got my first girlfriend and started having sex. Let's just say that it was disappointing. I could barely get hard with her, and when I could, I could never finish inside her. She could never finish me with a handjob or oral either. I would have to pull out, take the condom off, and beat furiously with the hardest deathgrip ever while imaging my fetishes and I still could barely finish. I figured out that this was probably due to the way I masturbated - prone. If you masturbate lying down, rubbing your parts on something, stop immediately. This provides way too much stimulation that is not normal and doesn't even require you to get hard for an orgasm. There are a lot of great resources online if you just google "prone masturbation" that helped me get onto normal masturbation within a week. Even after stopping that, my sex life didn't improve much.

There were even times when I would have a literal, real life girl waiting for me, but couldn't wait to go home and fap and watch porn. Now that is pathetic.

Needless to say, that relationship didn't go far and I was left alone to figure out how to improve this. About this time, I did discover nofap. I quickly got onto it. I was always awkward and scared of girls in highschool and a lot of people thought I was homosexual (which I am not and have never felt). I was socially awkward and always waited for the end of the day to get off maybe three or four times a day.

The recovery process was hard. I could often make it a few weeks and then I would end up in a few days of a binge session before feeling awful and restarting. More on this later...

Then I entered college, and by about October, I was on about a six month streak. This is also when I met a beautiful girl who quickly became my girlfriend. She was easily one of the hottest girls I had ever talked to and quite the catch. Pre-nofap me would've been terrified of her, but post-nofap me was able to end up dating her. We ended up having sex every day, sometimes 2-3 times a day. And God, it feels incredible every single time. It feels so much better than masturbation ever could've.

My Benefits:
During a school break, I was overcome by curiosity to see how masturbation felt again, which leads me to write all of this.

As mentioned earlier, I did definitely come out of my social anxiety shell a lot. I never used to be able to talk to girls. However, after about 6 months, and into college, I pulled an incredibly hot girl and my social skills went through the roof. I had multiple girls hit on me at a time (never used to happen) and got into exclusive parties for making connections so easily.

Sex became so much better. Sex is incredible compared to masturbation. There is no comparison once you re-wire your brain. It gives you such a satisfying, intimate orgasm. There is no shame afterwards. And the feeling is so much more intense. Besides that, the idea of sharing it with someone you love is spiritually enlightening.

I lost all of my weird fetishes too. When I masturbated again, I went to some of the most extreme body modification fetishes that used to be my life and I actually got turned off and soft from them. This was huge for me. It meant I was re-wired to normal sex. Even normal porn didn't arouse me as much as touching and kissing my girlfriend ever did.

Porn is a crutch that we rely on too much, allowing our natural desires and lust for sex and women to atrophy. Why chase real women when you can just look at hotter ones online? Sounds good to me. Only you lack the life, vitality, love, connection, feeling of a real person. You lack what it means to be alive and in love. There will always be haters out there who say that masturbation is good and that porn is good or at least not harmful. Yeah they're right, but if you lose your lust for life over it, then you need to stop forever.

Fapping now seems hollow and empty. It was hard, but now, I cannot imagine anything other than real sex or real touching.

How I recovered/My Tips and Tricks
1. Most importantly - understand that your brain will bullshit you. The primal parts of your brain are quite literally addicted to porn and your subconscious will surface and tell you everything you want to hear to try to relapse. Some of them I faced are:
- You should test to see if you're not addicted now
- You should get off to something more vanilla to wire yourself away from your fetishes
- You're angry at your girlfriend, do it out of spite
- It feels good, once won't hurt
- The endorphins and dopamine released are healthy
Learn to recognize when you try to justify it to yourself. Recognizing it can help you stop it.

2. It's okay to not be okay. Acceptance is the first part of quitting. Don't try to push it away and pretend you're not a porn addict. Don't try to ignore it. It helped me so much more when I told myself "okay, yes, I am addicted. I get aroused by these disturbing fetishes. I have a problem. But that's okay, because I am going to stop." Trying to guilt yourself out of it will make things worse, believe me. I just spilled my darkest secrets ever, a secret that only my girlfriend knew about before. At least be honest with yourself.

3. Reach closure. This may be controversial, but the only way I was able to stop was by reaching closure with my last fap. I said I would quit after just three more faps: one each to an erotic model that I like. I said that if I could do this and avoid my fetishes and just finish to these three, I would be done forever. After that, I had a sense of ending to it. I wrote all of my thoughts down on a piece of paper and burnt it. Every time I tried to go cold turkey, I always managed to convince myself to do it one more time.

4. Read everything about nofap you can. I love the website YourBrainOnPorn too. If you truly understand the benefits and the science behind it, you will be able to take over and stop.

5. Every time you relapse, meditate. Write down all of your thoughts after a relapse and then delete/burn it. This is cathartic and allows your brain's higher-level functions to start to take over the primal functions.

6. For fetishes: The best way that I beat my fetishes was to accept and embrace them (alluded to earlier). I would open images of them and allow myself to get turned on, without touching myself. Then, at the peak of arousal, I took a few deep breaths and followed a few techniques to help myself realize how disgusting it was:
- meditation for a minute, to connect with my true, innate desires
- imagining my girlfriend or mom walking in on me getting aroused by these often disgusted me
- imagining a big red X being painted over the images in as much detail as possible. This one works for when you can't stop imagining something either

These allowed me to completely eradicate my fetishes and return to being aroused by normal sex more than anything else.

Closing Remarks:
I hope this was able to help or inspire you in some way. As I outlined above, I was very deep into an addiction. I started about as young as possible and escalated to some of the most extreme fetishes possible. If I can stop, anyone can. It's hard work, it's very hard work. But you can do it.