P.A.W.S. - what are they, cure, duration

In my initial long streaks no, but now yes. It's too tempting to look at p-sub when urges arise, and when your on 90 days+ and starting to feel better, you forget the nightmare of a relapse, and moments of madness arise.

Putting as many barriers between you and the drug are super important, the harder to use, the more concious effort needed to get it

 

@zander13

"Mary" is in the sexual prime of her life. She is very attractive and ticks some personal boxes for me (she's from the hood, think long ass nails and eyelashes). Without being explicit I'll say that she is very giving sexually and she tries to please me. Also she does not make me use condoms as long as I can be trusted to pull out. From a strictly biological perspective I believe without question my time with her has been beneficial to my reboot. Of course this is because I had already left the flatline. If I saw her a year ago I probably wouldn't have gotten it up around her.

Whenever I'm with her my body behaves as that of a normal heterosexual red blooded male being around a hot young girl. Once I had PE with her but I attribute that to being too excited to see her. The good news is I was able to get it up again after some foreplay within 5-10 minutes.

From a spiritual perspective...I believe I manifested her in my life at the perfect moment. But spirituality is something personal so I won't go further into that. What I will say is that I genuinely enjoy my time with her, I think it has helped me along, and I have zero regrets.

I'm still healing although I would say that I'm officially out of the woods. The reason it took so long to respond to your post is partly because I've been interviewing for new jobs but also because my headaches and fatigue came back fierce. My body is still fluctuating although I know in my heart the worst of it is over.

Also I've noticed my back acne has been gone for about a week now as well. There were times over the last several years where it looked like I had broken out into measles on my back. Again I see this as a sign that the body is ultimately healing.

 

I have been experiencing all of those symptoms since ive started my recovery in 2017 and for about 3 or 4 years before that. I started with fatigue and gradually got more symptoms the worse my addiction got, until i found nofap.

When i started to quite, my symptoms got worse. 100% addiction related for me and no other underlying conditions.

 

100% i have found this to be true. At 16 month pmo free i was improving slowly month by month. Sadly it is the only way out.

 

Totally agree. The first 30 days is a fucking nightmare. Sorry you have to deal with this shit aswell i really wouldnt wish this on anyone. We have to have the resolve to quite, otherwise these symptoms will simply never end. I find after 3 months its easier to get on a roll.

Thanks for the info i will check it out. Interestingly, i never had the prefrontal cortex head pressure or weirdness in the first 3 or 4 years of my reboot. It only started happening a while ago which probably indicates my addiction has gotten worse as a result of relapse.

 

Are those relapses you mention P relapses or only MO?

 

Yeah let me know if it explains. Im similiar I got this light head tingling at the beginning of my first streak, and had no idea what it was. But last year relapsign caused the pressure to get 10x worse and thats when I realised it was my sinuses, as they felt like they were going to explode out of my skull, literally, for 2-3 months straight, was pretty scary.

Thankfully sinus pressure is easing off back to lighter pressure. I did 6 week streak, 3 week relapsing, now on week 3 monk mode again. So I am building some streak time.

Hopefully can get to 90 days like you say, would be my longest streak in over a year, good luck brother

 

I think you have to be careful with this type of sexual activity as it seems you aren't 100% healed, but you are a grown man, I wish all the best. You are near the end, so just be careful not to get sucked back in - look at me an ezpz, after long streaks back in the black hole of PAWS

Please do keep posting your updates as you embrace sexuality, we need more information as a community on how people deal with life post PAWS, it's extremely helpful

Wish you all the best

 

Hi Guys,

I have been doing a bit of research and came across an interesting video in relation to brain chemistry during the flatline. I know this is primarily a PAWS thread but I think there might be some benefit to watching the video below.

To outline, the video gives an explanation as to why we experience an emotional drop in our brains after large amounts of stimulation (Porn, Alcohol, Drugs, Sex etc.), and the path to follow to get our brains back to baseline. Its information that I think most of us already know, but it is illustrated well making it easier to understand.

 

If you mean me, the relapsed i have been through have all been usually PMO edging sessions, which is devastating for your recovery. But i am a fool and like a fool i cannot stop despite the impacts upon my life. If this is not addiction then i wouldnt know what is!

 

I am rooting for you my friend. I spent all of 2021 trying to get a streak going. Longest was 2 months. After i derailed in 2020 i have never been able to get back on the horse. I thought there was no way i would relapse at 16 months but i did.

I am over the hardest part however at 45 days now, i just need to continue. Have been getting morning wood the past few days which is good. My biggest hope is that my medication somehow speeds up recovery. Ill grasp onto what ever hope i can find!

 

Hi Guys,

I recently found an interesting site that provides an elaborate list of all the PAWS symptoms and the neurochemical they relate to. Definitely worth a look through.

The original link is below. I also posted in a separate thread if you want to get a quick look through.

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?t...ymptoms-and-their-causes.328184/#post-3292048
https://www.bravermantest.com/

 

Nope, still not over 450+ streak.

However, torture became really less as compared to before.

 

I found almost all of these symptoms line up with my experience! Thank you for posting this.

Just a small note for anyone interested. I have tried a lot of the natural recommendations listed in that post, none of which helped me. Tyrosine had some small results in the beginning but ultimately didnt help.

One not mentioned in that post which i believe is relevant is ssris. I have found different ssris help with different symptoms, the ssris use seems to correlate with the findings of the study. For example im on bupropion right now which targets dopamine but not all of the other chemicals. It helps me with motivation, energy, general happiness and P cravings i would say about 20%. This is significant in my case. However, all the other symptoms do not go away. Recovery remains exactly the same. It doesn't help with memory or calculation problems and a lot of other symptoms.

 

I'm now 4 days shy on 29 months free from PMO. I had sex early on in the reboot but I don't think it set me back, though it's a useful caveat to add for those who think it does.

I used to consider PAWs to be one long flatline, but recently my paradigm has shifted. I keep a pretty detailed excel spreadsheet when it comes to my PAWs symptoms, and today it has dawned on me that I've been in the midst of a 140 day flatline, and that my entire PAWs journey has been comprised of a bunch of these flatlines mixed in with one another. The time between them has never been that long, but the reprieve periods were always much easier on my spirit. For me, PAWs is a fight, and the times between flatlines were like a cease-fire.

The real reason I say this is because I'm starting to believe that I'm nearing the end of this 4.5 month flatline. My symptoms are mirroring the ones I experienced at the end of the previous 80 day flatline, so it's the logical conclusion to make, though I've been wrong, so many times, about where I'm at that I need to keep a healthy perspective and not get let down if I am incorrect.

In regards to my spreadsheet, lately I haven't been as detailed about what I report. I think this is a testament to where I'm at in recovery. Though I'm still a very much debilitated person, I'm no longer obsessing over every minute recovery detail--a sign that I'm more easily slipping into the present moment, though never fully.

Hard to make sense of all this. 29 months is a long time. You kind of run out of words to say at a certain point. I myself am very much tired of talking about it.

Above all else I hope it ends soon. I try and see PAWs as some kind of grand learning experience--and I have learned a lot, but at a certain point I get fuckin' tired of the lessons. It's time for things to change.

I don't know what being normal feels like. I keep trying to imagine the moments of clarity but I just can't. Porn has clouded my vision for my entire adult life. Never has it not affected things in one way or another. This fact alone makes me very excited for what is to come. And yes, I'm a firm believer in the "Aha" moment. Things are too bad for me not to notice it not being this bad. The transition will not be smooth. I truly believe that for me it will be rather sudden. Maybe not all at once, but sudden nonetheless. That's just the nature of my recovery.

Lately, I've been concluding that my reboot is all about reconnecting with the version of me that was there before porn came around. My dreams are constantly dealing with past scenes from my life. Never (until recently) about the present, and rarely about the future. Only recently have they dealt with more current affairs. High school was a big sticking point. I spent at least a year processing all of the shit from that era that I ignored through porn, which makes sense given the fact that I developed my addiction during that time.

Seems to me that it's impossible to slag off emotions. They have to be processed, one way or another, before we get to truly move on. At least that's how it seems to be going for me. I can only speak to my own experience.

I'll know things are truly looking up when I can read fiction again. At the moment, it's a fool's errand, which signifies an inability to fully access my emotions and/or subconscious/imagination. Reading, when I was a child, was my favorite activity, and recapturing the ability to get lost in a novel will mean, to me, that I've made it back to who I truly was before all of this shit happened. I crave that feeling very, very deeply. I have a treasure trove of unread books sitting downstairs.

I still don't have enough perspective to analyze why this happened. I think it was a clash of personality and family. My parents did a lot right, but now that I can observe them as an adult I see all of the places that they went wrong. Insecurity is never a healthy place to operate from.

Whatever. What's done is done. I no longer spend as much time being resentful of them. I'm now in the process of trying to figure out how to be as close as I can with them moving forward.

Speaking of moving forward, in a month's time I'll be in a new city, hundreds of miles away from my hometown. I've lived there before, so it won't be too much of a shock, but it's still a big deal. Since PAWs has essentially stripped me of all of my old "possessions" (friends I used to party with, money I accumulated from my old job, ways of thinking, etc. etc.), I'm starting from absolute scratch. It's hard to envision what it'll be like because I still don't know what recovery feels like. I think, for the beginning, it'll be a guy with debilitating PAWs living in a new apartment.

I want to begin dating soon. I'm going to avoid online dating as strongly as I can because it seems to be too similar to porn, but we'll see. The plan is to figure out my non-PAWs interests and then do those things with other people in hopes that I'll find like-minded people. I have noticed that I find most women beautiful these days, and I want to explore this concept thoroughly.

This isn't my last report. I'm hoping I have a couple more celebratory ones on the horizon. Sikreodds is still my ultimate source of inspiration, along with that one 27 month guy, and the reason they (their reports) remain special to me is because the reports talked about what it was like to be truly free from this nonsense. I'll, without question, try and do the same, if I ever get there. I could still relapse at any moment. Until I'm out of this mess my brain will continue to crave porn. I can feel that constant hum in the background--that subtle desire to give this all up and return to the depths.

At the end of the day, who the fuck knows what's going on. This shit is so god damned baffling that I can't even begin to try and wrap my head around it. It deals almost completely in unknowns. It thrives off of question marks. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it.

 

Interestingly enough whenever I get on the streak I have dreams around high school and old friends I'm no longer in contact with. Had them last night

Currently on day 38 monkmode, and still going strong. Starting to feel a little better after the hell of the first few weeks.

This week marks 3 year (36 months) since I first started a proper streak, and around 3.5 years since I found nofap - its completely insane that it's taken this long. I echo alot of @zander13 comments. Incredible how you have been so long - 29 months with no sex or relapse and still in PAWS, for the past 12 months of my journey 50% of the time Ive been having sexual activity

Hopefully this can be the year to beat the addiction once and for all. My intuition tells me I'd need to go the full year 0 relapses at all to get to a good point in my journey, so lets see how it pans out

 

I feel your same pain my friend. This year marks my 7th year dealing with this shit. What a nightmare. If it helps back when i was on a longer streak i noticed that i would be in a flatline for about 3 or 4 weeks then have a good period. Each month did mark smaller improvements in my good periods, so keep a look out for that on your journey.

 

Congrats on your streak! I just hit 70 days today which is my longest streak in over a year. Finally some of the intense craving are getting a little easier to manage. For the first 2 months i was totally obsessed with P.

A long way to go but we all have to start somewhere

 

hi EXPZ, I have similar symptoms as you described..
How often do you PMO? Once a month? Once a week?

 

Before i knew i was an addict it would be once a day for about 15 minutes.

My last relapse was 70 days ago