Pornography Induced Trauma

(I apologize if this post offends anyone or is in the wrong forum category. It is not my intent to do any harm or to offend. I only want my experience to be shared and to help others.)

Hello everyone, I'm new here and I want to talk about trauma and its correlation to pornographic material.

I've read through a handful of threads selected at random to see if I could relate to anyone's stories. Alas I feel alone thus am compelled to make my own post discussing my TRAUMATIC experience involving pornography. An experience that sent me to the emergency room twice.

I intend to find help for my experience which still haunts me and possibly cast a light into the shadows for those who are too afraid to talk about their own similar experiences.

Even just writing this I can feel my anxiety welling up in my chest. Threatening to make my heart explode. But it must be said-when I first began my journey two or three years ago to abandon pornography I was exposed to imagery of the most profane caliber. I dare not say more out of sheer unmitigated primordial fear, the type of fear you experience when your very life is at stake. Not to say my life is in any kind of danger but it very well could have been back then.

Post-exposure I was sick with anxiety, shame, regret, guilt, and fear. For three days I suffered from this sickness. My whole-body shook, I experienced nonstop cold sweating, the nausea I experienced kept me in the bathroom constantly. Uncontrollable hot flashes made my flesh feel as though it were about to slide off. My whole body was swollen, my blood pressure was dangerously high, and my heart rate was in a range experienced by those who suffer from a heart attack. And I think it goes without saying I was entirely sleepless. Truely this was no anxiety attack I had ever experienced before.

I finally took myself to the emergency room as I became increasingly desperate for relief from my symptoms. After three days of cold sweats, hot flashes, crippling stomach pain, chest pain, heart palpitations, high blood pressure and rapid pulse I was administered a powerful tranquilizer by the emergency room staff in order to bring my vitals back into a stable condition. I slept finally for the first time in three excruciating days.

That was when I realized I had an extremely dangerous addiction to pornography. My identity had also been shattered. The ideals that I held myself up to were now ideals that I could no longer grasp and worse still those ideals allowed me to incriminate myself to further embolden the idea that I had become or even always was a bad person. That I deserved no less than to be punished without care and without an opportunity to become better. My mind began to self-destruct in a spiraling torrent of invasive thoughts and morbid fantasies that could result from what I had seen. I no longer knew myself.

There is so much more I'd like to say, so much more that I felt. But I cannot describe it all here because it would be too long of a forum post. And I don't want to deter any readers with its length.

Needless to say, this absolutely harrowing experience has completely decapitated my sexuality and deeply affected my life. Ever since I've struggled with even the most fleeting and unprovocative sexual images. The simplest image or even a sensation can infest my mind with invasive thoughts, which once instilled are impossible to dissolve. I still feel so much shame for what happened. I still feel that I can never be redeemed.

To end on a positive note, while my addiction to pornography did persist and still does, I was able to somehow pull myself mostly out of the darkness. I'm now more aware than ever of the dangers you can encounter while browsing for pornography and I believe that I live a generally happier life having made all the adjustments I have to make sure I don't fall into that darkness again.