How I'm beating HOCD and porn addiction

Hi. My HOCD started at 26 years old because of my porn addiction escalating to gay porn. I've been fighting it for more than a year and now I consider myself around 80% or 90% cured. I still have a few spikes here and there but now I'm able to get rid of them much quicker.
As for pornography, I haven’t watched it for several months, and now I find the idea of doing it weird and repulsive.
So, after a lot of trial and error, some months ago I finally found what really works for me and I started to get better and better since then, and I want to share it with you because no one deserves to go through this, and I hope you'll find it helpful.

First off, start by reading this guide:
https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...fetishes-a-complete-guide-for-freedom.283059/
It was very helpful especially when it talks about dealing with porn urges and some aspects of HOCD. But it didn't completely helped me in all aspects so I went and also developed my own method which I'll share below:

The basics of my method are: knowledge, consistency and patience.
Knowledge: the more you know about HOCD (and OCD in general) and porn addiction, the more you're able to identify and deal with its tricks.
Consistency: stay consistent on the method to cure porn addiction and HOCD quicker. Avoid relapses as you'd avoid putting your hand on the fire.
Patience: be aware that it takes time and improvement is gradual. You'll go through difficult times but it's all part of the process.

The method also consists of two absolutely necessary steps:
•The complete eradication of porn addiction.
•Developing a cold, emotionless, objective and scientific view about HOCD.

Eradicating porn addiction is absolutely necessary because porn not only is extremely bad for your brain in general, it also feeds HOCD.
Developing an objective view about HOCD will gradually decrease the anxiety that strengthens it and will allow you to fully understand how HOCD tricks you and keeps you stuck in a loop of doubts and anxiety, and so starving and weakening it since it won't get the emotionality that keeps it alive in your brain.


PART 1:
Eradicating porn addiction.

To eradicate porn addiction you must have a life-long commitment of never watching porn again nor using porn substitutes such as reading erotic stories and other similar things. Your only method of sexual activity now is having sex with a woman, it's even better if she's a girl you love and want more than just sex with her.
Porn corrupts our view about sexuality making it all about images, videos, body parts, and weirder and weirder fetishes. It completely removes and throws away all the nice feelings a guy and a girl can have for each other. So you need to clean that distorted and corrupted view created by porn.
People say porn is "hot", but porn is actually as cold and lifeless as a corpse. Yes, this was meant to sound disgusting, because this is what porn is and you can see it once you stay away from it for a while.

If you're single and alone, know that monks in the east live their whole life without sexual activity and they're totally fine. Actually they're probably better than most western people, they're always calm and have full control over their minds and emotions. But of course, even if you're alone you may find a nice girl eventually. And you also have wet dreams to deal with a possible excess of semen.
I have a girlfriend and for some time I had to limit sex to once a week or so, because even having sex with her, if I did it too many times in a short period of time that could bring some porn cravings back. So if you have a girlfriend, consider limiting sex frequency for a couple months too, just so your brain can readjust itself better.

To deal with porn/masturbation cravings, again I suggest you read this guide (in case you haven't read it yet), it will help in dealing with urges: https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...fetishes-a-complete-guide-for-freedom.283059/

Now, my method is strongly based on reading and re-reading informations and notes I took from various places, useful quotes from different places or things I have written myself based on my experiences during recovery. Reading it keeps those ideas fresh in the mind, increases knowledge and helps the mind to grow more and more powerful until it can easily beat any type of neurochemical craving created by porn addiction.
You should read them often, especially if you're going through difficult times. This is especially true when fighting an addiction since success is strongly linked to motivation. Most of the points below are aimed at increasing your understanding while a few of them are simply to help with motivation.
You should not just read them like a montra, but try to fully understand each one of them (increase true knowledge), understand them intellectually and eventually this understanding will become intuitive and will become second nature.

These are the informations and notes you should read and learn about porn:

•The cycle that keeps porn addiction and fetishes escalation manipulating you:
Chronic overconsumption (acting on the porn urges) → Dopamine → DeltaFosB → Sensitization (stronger urges)
So, the more you consume porn or act on porn mimicking behavior, that creates dopamine and DeltaFosB, which is the "reinforcement" chemical in your brain that establishes a neural pathway, thus making you have stronger and stronger urges, and for weirder and weirder content.
What this means: to break this cycle, stop acting on the urges and overtime urges get weaker and weaker, until they're practically zero.
*Porn mimicking behavior is when you perform some porn induced fetish in real life, in these moments you're trying to mimic what you see in porn. A more technical term for it is 'behavior observation conditioning', a type of conditioning where the person starts to imitate a certain behavior after continuously watching it.
Obviously that should be avoided too in order to recover from all the damage done by porn.

•How to stop porn-escalation and dopamine craving: abstaining from porn/porn mimicking behavior, applying reverse-conditioning.

•Reverse conditioning: whenever porn thoughts arise in the brain, pull some hair on your body, like your beard or on other spots, in a way to create a bit of pain. Over time the brain can start to associate the porn flashbacks with that uncomfortable sensation. Thus creating aversion for that.
Reverse conditioning (or aversion conditioning) is a bit controversial among certain people, but I used it and I think it helped a bit. I'm not saying you should do it, I'm just telling you what I did. If you decide to do it, just don't do anything extreme. As I said, I just pulled my beard or my arm’s hair a bit to create some discomfort.

•Repulsion method: When having urges or porn flashbacks, visualize a decomposing corpse. The smell of rotting flesh would make you vomit.
Alternatively, in your mind’s eye, cut the people in these “mind videos” in half (from the side) and see their entrails, guts, intestines, fecal matter and other wastes, etc.

•The subject of pornography-escalation is very objective: the brain seeks new ways of receiving dopamine as escalation progresses, and that means things that provoke shock, anxiety, etc. It uses strategies such as flashbacks and rationalization.

"Many of these same emotional states (anxiety, shame, shock, surprise) not only elevate dopamine, but each can also boost stress hormones & neurotransmitters (norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol). These stress neurochemicals increase agitation while amplifying dopamine’s effects. Over time a porn user’s brain can mistake feelings of anxiety or fear for feelings of arousal. This helps explain why porn users escalate into ever more shocking or anxiety invoking porn – as they need that extra neurochemical jolt just to reach some level of "arousal".
Keep in mind that when an addict escalates to new genres or logs more hours of use, he is driven by desensitization. His fundamental sexual orientation has not changed."
Source: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/mis...-has-not-prepared-your-brain-for-todays-porn/

•Dopamine craving: like feeling hungry, you can eat healthy food to satiate it (doing healthy activities such as physical exercises), or you can eat rotten meat and feces (using porn/porn-escalation).

•How to beat urges: https://old.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/4u5kxu/urge_surfing_is_really_helping_me_heres_how_to_do/

•Porn/porn-mimicking behavior is like dog food, it's not for me. It should be ignored just like I ignore dog food.

•Consequences of losing this battle: death of dopamine receptors, becoming unable to feel positive emotions. You become dead, not physically but mentally and spiritually. Depression, becoming a souless zombie, hopelessness, suicide. Consuming porn is, in conclusion, an act of self-destruction.

•Don't underestimate the combination of dopamine cravings + rationalization attacks. These attacks can be very strong, so be aware.

•Rationalization:
When, during a porn craving, the addiction starts to create false arguments in an attempt to get you to watch porn or engage in porn mimicking behavior.

•How to deal with rationalization?
To get out of the rationalization mindset, we need cues. The cues can be all the reasons that make us want to quit: what PMO escalation has done to your life; how miserable it is to be a slave and that you want your well deserved freedom; how amazing it feels to be free, the incomparable inner peace you feel; think about some of the amazing years of your life you had before it all started, and think about the fact you can go back to those amazing times as long as you keep not being fooled by porn.

•Time is your ally. You can also beat rationalization by simply waiting it out. In some hours the rationalization thoughts will be much weaker, as long as you're not fooled by them.

•To better deal with rationalization, it's important to be aware of WHEN addiction is creating rationalization. You can make a list of thoughts the addiction creates when rationalizing, so you can easily recognize them later when they appear again during a craving and so you can more easily snap out of it.

•"Yes, porn has a price – and it will cost you everything."

•Porn is basically a drug that enters your brain through your vision instead of your veins or nose. And just like those other drugs, it also destroys the brains and the lives of its users.

•So this combination of anxiety, dopamine craving and groinal response is what constitutes cravings related to extremely disturbing porn.

—

Mind control and abstinence from sex/masturbation from an eastern view, useful to stay away from porn:

•Ascend above thoughts and physical emotions/reactions, ascend above the mind and the body. Thus is the path of the wise monks.

•From the bramacharya books:
"The basis of one's evolution is self-control. The basis of self-control is being wise, avoiding all that is adverse to self-control."
"So, the right way of solving this situation is to rise above it, by developing great love for God, great love for an ideal, developing passion for a pure life, an ethical life, an ideal life and for attaining liberation. If these ambitions are there, then all other things recede into the background. They become less important until they disappear. So, if you want to attain victory, you must grow within yourself a great fire of higher aspiration. Then, you focus so much in these positive ambitions that you have no time for other things."

•The mind is a projector and the thoughts that arise in the mind are like a film which plays continuously. Don’t let the thoughts control you as they’re just images and words.

•More useful links:
https://www.dadabhagwan.org/path-to...standing/role-of-mind-in-practicing-celibacy/
https://www.dadabhagwan.org/path-to-happiness/self-help/how-to-take-control-of-your-mind/
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.020.soma.html

•Depornographize, purify your gaze and mind. Look at life without the porn goggles.

—

•Very detailed explanation on Classical conditioning (which is mostly what creates fetishes):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470326/
Other types of conditionings: Behavior Observational conditioning (what makes you act out on some fetishes)

•Porn images lose strength over time: https://old.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1i2cut/will_the_memories_about_porn_ever_go_away/

•"After you relapse is when you fully realise you are watching/doing something while a slave to the addiction, not because you really want to do it. You actually really feel like you're doing it only because of an obligation imposed by the addiction."

•Let your brain rationalize all it wants to. Just don't act on it. Sit quiet and understand that this is not the sane you right now.
“Just sit and calmly observe yourself getting tortured lol. The whole point is giving the addicted brain a hard time. Give it a real hard time. And after you have beat the urge, just remind yourself why you chose to and why porn is bad for you.”

•Until then you only realized the mistake you made after falling into the lie of addiction.
Don't be dumb anymore. Now you know that addiction only lies. It doesn't bring happiness, only emptiness, depression and hopelessness. So don't fall for that lie again.

•"Trust me you will feel better. When you get the compulsions to look up stuff or get any weird urges think of your brain as if its healing when its doing that."

•“Sadly, distorted perception born of neurochemical dysregulation can make a person extremely resistant to understanding what’s really driving him or what would ease his misery. His limbic brain has him firmly convinced that only the drug of choice will restore his good feelings. The truth is that it will only makes him worse.”

•Periods of low self-esteem can increase the strength of cravings. Watch out for this.

•Every time you relapse you regret it later. This is your true self and mind telling you that this is not what should be happening. So DON'T be deceived by the addiction!

•The culture of degrading pornography and the old tobacco culture:
We live in an age that encourages pornography and the degradation it can bring. Likewise, there was a time when cigarette smoking was promoted as an act of independence, rebellion, self-confidence, etc.
Decades later it is discovered that cigarettes are bad, and the establishment does not even apologize to all those who fell ill and died for having fallen for this lie.
Likewise, pornography is encouraged today as “being modern and being open-minded.” Certainly the impacts of pornography will become more and more mainstream as the social impact of this problem becomes so great that the establishment can no longer ignore it.
And then they won't even have the decency to apologize to those who are now suffering physically, mentally and spiritually. Some even going so far as to consider committing suicide because of it.
The real act of independence is not believing the mainstream speech on sexuality. The suffering you and many others are going through is proof that they're wrong.

•Pornography is empty and depressing. And it makes those who watch it feel the same way.

•"The person addicted to pornography looks for material that is increasingly degrading and deteriorating."

•You have to disassociate pornography use from sexual arousal, sexual practice, and orgasm. So much that the brain will find weird the mere idea of watching that crap.

•This difficult period will pass. Give your brain time to recover and return to its natural state. If you relapse you will reinforce the brain changes that were being healed. Hang in there and brain plasticity will do its healing work.

•Neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to be retrained through healthier responses to triggers that have previously led to acting out in addictions.
The goal is to create new thoughts, coping behaviors and patterns that reroute and override previously addictive rituals.

•If addictive thoughts are troubling you, remember the time of misery, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts you had the last time you were tricked by these same thoughts that are now troubling you again.
Don't make the mistake of letting yourself be fooled by them again and then going back to that misery and despair of the soul again.


PART 2:
Developing a cold, emotionless, objective and scientific view about HOCD.

OCD feeds from emotionality and anxiety, you need to see it as a disease or virus just like you see having a cold. It doesn't mean anything about you, it's just a virus, glitch or bug affecting your brain (like a computer virus affects a computer).
A common issue is people with HOCD mistaking the anxiety it creates as "feelings that prove something about you". They're just anxiety. You're feeling nothing but anxiety about what HOCD is producing in your brain. And HOCD is creating these thoughts precisely because it wants you to feel anxious, because anxiety is what feeds it. The thoughts don't mean anything about you, they're artificially created by HOCD to produce anxiety.

Repeating some things I wrote on the part about beating porn addiction:
My method is strongly based on learning informations I took from various places, useful quotes from different places or things I have written myself based on my experiences during recovery. Reading it increases knowledge and helps the mind to grow more and more powerful until it can easily beat any type of anxiety spike.
When you fully understand what HOCD is (or any other type of OCD), then you become a lot more powerful against it.

In the notes below I write mostly OCD instead of HOCD. HOCD is just a type of OCD and what is written about it also works for all the other types.
POCD, ROCD, etc, all share the same mechanisms, they just change topics (with questions like "am I a pedofile? am I a criminal? etc").

These are the informations and notes you should read and learn about HOCD:

•On the OCD: this is a brain glitch that provokes anxiety and intrusive thoughts, based on vague fears of an unwanted thing becoming reality (the thing it fears is not true). The anxiety is produced automatically when some image or thought are in the field of perception, these images or thoughts are automatic triggers which produces anxiety (in this case, the triggers can consist of images of men, homosexual acts and pornographic thoughts).
When OCD produces anxiety provoking thoughts which are sexual/pornographic, the pornographic nature of such thoughts or the anxiety itself can produce groinal responses (a movement or heavyness on the genitals while having intrusive thoughts), since any kind of pornography can cause physical reactions (the ancient/lizard part of the brain hasn’t evolved enough to classify types of pornography, and anxiety shares certain chemicals also responsive for such type of response in the body).

•OCD + porn escalation: here the OCD produces such pornographic thoughts, then porn escalation comes in an starts using it's strategies of rationalization and dopamine craving. So watch out for those attacks: you start having OCD thoughts and they transition to porn craving and rationalization. Get rid of porn craving first (using the techniques above) and then deep breath and wait until the anxiety from OCD decreases.

•A groinal response is to OCD what a sneeze is to a flu.

•When an OCD thought pops up in your mind, some useful things to remember:
1.Label it (as an OCD thought)
2.Depersonalize it (it doesn’t mean anything about you)
3.Don't check (don’t keep watching porn or looking at things to “test yourself”, that just fuels anxiety)

In details:

1.Label it as an ‘OCD Thought’
Instead of focusing on the content of the thought, such as “I’m having intrusive thoughts about this or that” focus on it being a thought that produces anxiety. This will move you away from the emotional content of the thought. Say, “It’s just an anxiety provoking thought created by OCD.”
Focusing on the disturbing content of the thought keeps you spinning round and around on it (ruminating). Labeling the thought as an “Anxiety provoking thought” allows you to step off of the spinning circle.

2.Depersonalize it
Tell yourself, “It’s not me producing these thoughts, it’s the OCD.”
Many people with horrible intrusive thoughts feel worried about having the thoughts and then feel defective, “What is wrong with me? Am I this or that?”
The opposite is actually true. The more you’re not something, the more these thoughts will be disturbing and horrible to you. OCD makes you have more of the thoughts that you personally find most uncomfortable. That’s the way anxiety works. It tricks you and lies to you.

3.Don't do checkings. Watch:


•Every OCD thought is designed to cause discomfort and anxiety. OCD is a state where the brain is always looking for anxiety.

•Don't fear it. Conquering a certain level of self-confidence helps fighting OCD. Say: "OCD, go eat shit."

•Cycle of OCD: While porn is fueled by dopamine/DeltaFosB, OCD is fueled by anxiety.
Fear of having an OCD thought produces the thought (like trying not to think of a pink elephant makes you think of a pink elephant) → You wrongly think the thought produced means something about you, which creates discomfort/anxiety → This creates the fear of the thought happening again, which creates the thought again, and the cycle repeats.
So the key to end the cycle is to end the fear/anxiety. To do this, you must understand the meaninglessness of these thoughts, that they are just OCD's creations and don't mean anything about you.

•Just as in childhood you feared that a monster might appear at night and cut you into pieces, and as you grew older you lost that fear by realizing the impossibility of that happening, getting rid of OCD involves achieving this realization that those scenarios are absurd and irrational. By reaching a deep level of this awareness, one can even heal automatic triggers, but this takes time.

•OCD is all about anxiety and just that. Everything else (the words, images, scenarios, adjectives, situations) are all OCD creations to generate anxiety and/or are created from the anxiety. Isolating anxiety from the rest will give you the opportunity to see it more clearly, without the cloud of additional content generated by OCD. And when anxiety is gone, the thoughts go away with it.

—

•Manual filter: People who don’t suffer with OCD have a filter in their brain which works automatically and throws away garbage thoughts. It works so efficiently that most of the time the person doesn't even notice the thought ever existed.
People with OCD don't have this automatic filter in their brain, but this filtering process can be done manually. First, think of who you were before the OCD (and its triggering events) started and have this image of you at the time in your mind. Then, whenever a weird, anxiety producing thought arises, do the filtering process manually by comparing this thought with that image of who you were before it all started.
Over time you'll become more and more used to doing this process until it becomes practically automatic.

•OCD emulates a false mind with false (synthetic) thoughts. This false mind is always the opposite of who you are, and the goal is to create anxiety.
"Obsessions(OCD thoughts) are biochemically generated mental events that seem to resemble one’s own real thoughts, but aren’t. One of my patients used to refer to them as “synthetic thoughts.” They are as counterfeit bills are to real ones, or as wax fruit is to real fruit."
Source: https://beyondocd.org/expert-perspectives/articles/ten-things-you-need-to-know-to-overcome-ocd

•OCD must be faced with objectivity and coldness, not with fear and emotionality.

•OCD tries to grow stronger when your spirit is down.

•Fixation over an image or person which creates anxiety is a work of OCD, it’s not attraction or anything similar.

•When having intrusive thoughts, don't give them attention.
When the thoughts pops up, use these two phrases:
>'Wait it out': this reminds you that, no matter what the OCD is creating at the moment (an image, words, a situation, etc), it's temporary and will go away after a while.
>'Move on!': just move on with whatever you were doing when the thoughts appeared, instead of giving them importance and ruminating on them. This signals to the brain that those thoughts have no importance and thus weakens them.

•The main characteristics of OCD are: distorted/twisted thoughts, worry/anxiety and checking.

•Be aware: the doubts/questionings of "what if it's not OCD and these are my real thoughts?" ARE the OCD itself as well. So not only OCD creates the intrusive thoughts, it also creates the doubts about them.

•Aiming to have a more positive mindset can help, as negativity can make OCD worse. Try to see every little progress you make and think that things will keep improving, even if slowly. Also think of all the positive things in your life. Think of positive things from the past and positive things you can achieve in the future as well.

•"The function of the mind is to think. It will think even if you tell it not to. You ask the mind ‘Why are you thinking like this?’ It will say, ‘No, I want to think this way.’ Just as you can remain separate from the mother-in-law because you don’t want to clash with her because she is a disagreeable person, you remain separate from the mind too. You can tell the mind, ‘You can keep shouting by yourself.’"
https://www.dadabhagwan.org/path-to...ake-control-of-your-mind/thought-suppression/