Question for Men

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Understandable.

This can also contribute to PMO addiction, if all else fails cutting out drugs/alcohol may help.

Sometimes. It all depends on how attractive the woman is for me. Sometimes I dont fantasize even when they are attractive.
Now I got a question for you. How do women get triggered?

 

It seems this triggering thing is more personally different than I would have guessed.

I really liked the food aroma analogy. wheni smell food that smells good, it's gets me hungry. It gets the juices flowing. It may be distracting, like at work when someone warms up something really good in the microwave at 10:30, I get distracted from work thinking about food. I may have to give up and just go eat! It's a limbic thing, not a pfc thing, so it's more of a feeling or sense than rational thoughts.

I tend not to undress in my mind, or imagine sex with that person. It's more that that event got the motor turned on. And from there my thoughts tend toward the sexual.

At risk of offending, can we push the analogy further? would you be offended if your husband came home famished and really wanted to eat your dinner because he walked past a restaurant on the way home that smelled really good and made him hungry for your food? Worth thinking about a bit.

For me personally, and this would not apply to all, I also get sad/mad that the woman I saw was willing to be more sexy with me than my wife. That is obviously not pure truth, but it feels that way and that anger triggers me as well.

Great responses so far.
Hth

 

I get that totally man. It's like if your wife refuses to make you the dinner your craving, but a stranger holds the prepared meal in front of your face and taunts you with it. This food metaphor has been great to build off of.

 

In SA meetings, they go out of the SA book (aka the little white book) obviously, but we also read a lot out of the AA book. This battle is compared largely to alcoholism because it is so addicting and for the sex addict as well as the alcoholic, their habit SOOO much of the time, is all they think about doing. If they're not doing it now, they're thinking of when they can do it next. The SA book compares the alcoholic's addiction the sex addict's mind lusting as "taking a drink" and that is an extremely profound comparison in my opinion. So for me personally, when I experience a trigger, that means that I came across something that I did not purposely seek out, that made me feel a slight (sometimes more) burst of lust that made me want to act out, in whatever way I feel, because of it. Acting out may be wanting to see more of whatever triggered that person, go masturbate or edge, have an affair, visit a prostitute, go online to look for more of the kind of material they were triggered by, go conversate with someone they find physically attractive, or whatever. Personally, when I’m triggered, I just want to go online to look at lustful material whether that is hardcore porn, soft porn, bikinis, stories, or whatever I feel like at the time. Guys are all different, and many guys will say that looking at girls in bikinis online isn’t porn, so its okay. But for me, if I look at a girl in a snowsuit they way I looked at girl in pornography, then it is the same exact thing, regardless of what I was looking at.


I hope that’s kind of what you were looking for. Did I answer your question at all?

 

This is how I perceived it from my SO. He said he would have sexual dreams where I would be doing what he wanted me to do. He’d wake up disappointed and upset that I didn’t love him enough to treat his desires. P talking. Then later when he tried to quit P on his own (before NoFap), he had a dream I was with another woman. He was excited in the dream until he saw my face squinched up, gagging and crying. It woke him up and he felt guilty that 1. Dream him forced me into a situation I didn’t want to be in. 2. His expectations of me were for his benefit not mine.

After NoFap he admitted seeing P and being back to that stage of wishing I was fulfilling his fantasies and feeling unloved and rejected because I didn’t. Sad thing is, if he had shared some of those fantasies with me instead of lying and hiding them I would have engaged. Now that I had to discover it on my own, every time I think of those fantasies my mind is filled with the hundreds of woman I saw saved to his account who don’t look like me who already performed them for him.

 

This is exactly why I just can't work with alot of it.

 

@Kenzi @ItsNeverTooLate
Me too, that’s why it’s nice to get back to the basics and truly learn each other again.

 

Thank you for posting this question @Broken3 I have learned so much from this. I've wondered this too but was too afraid to ask my guy for fear of what I would hear. I actually feel slightly better after reading the responses. So thank you guys too for answering this question!

 

I'm not a video game guy, but I know in some video games the character you play will be walking around in a digital environment, doing his thing fighting bad guys or zombies or whatever. Occasionally during his wanderings, the character will come across a glowing object, an apple or a bow-and-arrow or a coin or something. The glow of the object is how the gamer knows that they need it, even if they don't know how to get it or what to do with it or why they need it.

That's what being triggered is (was?) like for me. It's coming across something in my environment that is glowing brightly for reasons unknown to me.

I think there might be a little bit of a conundrum for the SOs. You want to be the glowing object for your partner. However, when you dissect it, the objects only glow for the PA because they represent an escape from or a substitute for the intimacy that we fear, and nobody wants to be used as an escape or a substitute. All of the various sex addictions, including PMO addiction, are rooted in intimacy fears. So the PA is unknowingly applying the glow to objects that offer the fantasy of sex or sexual-like encounter without the risk of intimacy. The more overtly skanky the "object" (notice how women are reduced to objects in the PA brain), the higher chance of sexual encounter without the risk of exposing whatever vulnerable flaw we believe we possess that is fatal for us as PAs.

The good news is that when you break the cycle of addiction, you begin to dissolve this habit of objectifying women. With internet porn addiction, the user is in a constant state of scanning, scanning, scanning for dopamine flooding content. That scanning behavior continues on in public in order to minimize withdrawal and now because of habit. When you break away from using porn, this scanning (objectifying) behavior naturally begins to fade and eventually vanish. It can take quite awhile, especially in older or heavy users, but I believe full recovery is completely possible. The more the PA can address any intimacy fears, the faster and stronger the recovery will be.

That's my take on it at the moment. You want to be the sole object of desire, but you don't want to be objectified. This is reasonable and understandable and even probable assuming your SO is putting in the work. I wish you continued patience while your garden grows. You're doing excellent work here in this community!

 

Wow, I really like this explanation, thank you.

 

Now that I am much farther along with the recovery process, I have seen these triggers much like what @Kenzi would call ogling. It’s not entirely that, but it is part of it. At the beginning of the journey, I didn’t quite understand what a trigger was and considered it synonymous with urges. While urges can be a voice telling you to use, or situation that leads you to use, or a pattern or behavior or routine in action or thought that all has to do with satisfying the PMO addiction. It wasn’t until recently and even going through this that helped clarify it for me, so thank you all for sharing.

For me I now realize the triggers are that dopamine drip. The little squirt of chemical, that then leads to more of the “gotta get it”. It leads to the oogling. It is preceded by scanning. It is that shimmering interactable object in the video game. The wait what was that thing. Oh look shiny thing. Once it sets in, it becomes hard to look away. A self perpetuating cycle. A chance to engage in riskier behavior. To do something taboo. Or to sock away some material or fantasy for later. It is the objectification of women. It is the sexualizing of innocent teens. It is putting everything else second in its pursuit. It is the thing you are not supposed to do, but do anyway.

My addiction was so profound it proliferated my life. The world was a trigger. Anyone was a trigger. Anyone and anything became a trigger, so much that I couldn’t even see it as such. Now I see them as the addiction loses hold, and can avoid them or correct them. It certainly beats the alternative of normalizing or accepting them and continuing a disconnect from reality through delusion and distortion.

 

I can't speak for everyone else, I read and spoke to few guys here and they have different "triggers." For me looking at the women on the street or in the store was never a trigger to M. It is disrespectful to my wife, now looking back and talking to her just realizing how bad and unwanted I made her feel. I was doing PM for so long and can't remember what was the trigger, I was so consumed with it was sick. Before last D-Fay foe me trigger was M, I enjoyed it too much, so I need to go and find P to stimulate me more to finish.

I do not remember myself to fantasize about any woman that I checked out while I did M. To me it was fantasizing, if I wasn't watching P, about the stuff that I saw in P, but there was never a specific woman I saw.

I did fantasized about my wife, but because of my addiction I always turned to P in the end.