My name is AtomicTango, and I am a porn addict

A long time ago I made a post similar to this one where I confessed to my porn addiction. Nearly a year on I feel like I need to reiterate it because I'm finding it too easy to forget that I have a serious problem and its leading to me fucking up over and over again. Here I go.

Hello, my name is AtomicTango and I have an addiction to pornography and masturbation. I am a porn addict in the truest sense;

. I struggle to resist the urge to masturbate/watch porn regularly (at its very worst I will masturbate 5 or 6 times a day)

. I masturbate to the point it isn't pleasurable or comfortable anymore.

. I masturbate as a way of self-medicating when emotions or life in general gets on top of me.

. I've masturbated to the point that my real life sexual desire is almost nonexistent and I need porn as a stimulus to become truly aroused.

. While I have managed to go for long stretches of time with no PMO, I always seem to return to it sooner or later.

. I have never had a relationship with a woman or even had any kind of deeper relationship of any kind with a woman.



I'm not just a porn addict. While I do consume the regular, garden variety porn, I am also addicted to fetish porn, the kind that I know harms me on a psychological level but I feel too weak to resist. These forms of porn include;

Spoiler

. Femdom porn, with some elements of submission and occasionally humiliation. Pegging porn is a big one for me and generally the rougher and more demeaning the better.

. Anal porn, with an emphasis on it being painful for the recipient.

. Gay/bisexual porn, and porn that tries to encourage acting upon gay/bisexual fantasy.

. Transgender/crossdressing porn.

. I have also, in the past but not recently, dabbled with hentai, erotic literature, erotic audio, and gender/physical transformation porn.

All of these things make me feel terribly insecure, guilty, embarrassed and at times ashamed. I'm self aware enough to know that porn preys on my insecurities and is for all intents and purposes an insidious force through and through. I know that the porn is twisting my sexuality and has given me fetishes I would never have even heard of if it wasn't for finding it by chance online. I know all of these things and yet I still feel the urge to PMO, hell, I feel it right now as I type these words. For the past 18 months I have been trying to overcome this horrible addiction but I haven't managed to succeed yet.

My name is AtomicTango and I am a porn addict.

But I hope that in the future I will be able to write that I am not an addict anymore.

Thank you for reading, any comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

Random P-subs appearing where you dont expect them is what led to me blocking a whole lot of sites on my laptop, because it just kept happening over and over again and it got to the point I was becoming complicit in it. Facebook was the worst for it, I would be scrolling down my newsfeed, past memes and status updates, only to arrive on a picture of a girl in a bikini or something equally sexually suggestive. Even when I unliked the pages doing it I would still get the same content posted as ads. Its really god damn annoying.

 

Thanks for the kind words and advice, they are appreciated.

One thing you said really stands out to me, the whole idea of "rigorous honesty". I think, if I'm being truly honest with myself, that I haven't really been practicing that as well as I could/should. I skirt around the idea of being truly addicted when its obvious that I am, and have a nasty habit of downplaying how severe the problem actually is. I find it too easy to lie to myself and say that one or two relapses wont hurt me when in reality its been that reasoning thats stopped me from succeeding despite being on NoFap for nearly 18 months.

 

I'm starting to think that perhaps on a subconscious level all I have been doing is repressing the negativity and burying it, hoping it would eventually go away, when its actually just contributing to massive relapses later down the line. Hell, it took me a while to acknowledge sexuality doubts triggered by porn, and allowed myself to believe I was just in denial as an excuse to keep watching content that did nothing but fuck me up and twist my sexual psyche. Its honestly troubling how powerful porn like this can be, but all it does is make me more determined to beat it.

Thanks again for the kind words of encouragement, it makes me feel a lot better knowing that other people on here are rooting for me. I'll be sure to root for you as well!

 

I've tried to limit the websites I go on for this reason, which has had the added positive effect of cutting down the time I spend browsing aimlessly. Its one thing to browse the internet with a clear purpose but doing it out of boredom is a top tier brain rotting activity in my opinion.

 

I'm generally on for a long time as well but I only tend to do it to relax, watch Netflix, talk to people, that sort of thing.

 

Thanks for the kind words and advice, I'll be sure to take all that into account.

 

So I'm on my laptop reading and organizing my emails and the urge to look at porn hits me really hard. I wont lie, I was very close to doing so until it suddenly hit me that I shouldn't, and I tabbed to here and started writing this. Its honestly amazing how quickly the brain "forgets" reality when its trying to pressure you into doing things. The sooner I can overcome this mental wiring the better but as we all know this stuff takes time.

 

I think the best strategy I have found is to actively fight urges as they come, by "talking back to" and disproving the faulty rationale your brain gives you to try and make you relapse. This way of doing things has a legitimate scientific basis as it is essentially a loose form of cognitive behavioral therapy, training the brain to respond to things in a certain way that is healthier and less driven by compulsion.

Having said all that its crucial not to exert too much energy fighting a single bout of urges, do this and you may not have enough willpower remaining to fight the next. This is why a mixture of distraction, pure willpower, and external support (as PMO addict so expertly explained to me in a different thread) needs to be used to keep on top of urges. Just using one of these things and neglecting the others always seems to lead to failure sooner or later.