Veterans: why did you relapse after a long period and what did you learn?

Thanks for tagging me, my friend.

Relapse for me is usually complicated. Not just one thing contributes to a relapse, but many things. My biggest relapse (the one after 278 days) included the following:
I hadn't been active on the forum,
I had a bad habit of fantasizing,
That day I witnessed a man and a woman getting it on in the bushes,
And I think I was also sick.

The biggest tip of the iceberg is definitely inactivity and fantasizing. Once you lose the support here, relapse is almost unavoidable. For me at least.

-Squeaky Soul

 

Hi @galaxim and @Squeaky Soul
First of all congratulations for your "seniority", I am still far from there, although I am trying
I agree that sticking to this site is one of the tools that has helped me to stay "grounded". We trend to forget to easily how hard was the beginning and how much sacrifice we went through to get clean in the first time, we get comfortable and relaxed with the new "clean status" so we lower the guard, and ZACK! This is when the porn addict part of our brain comes back in full force and takes us by surprise. Mark Queppet from NoFap Academy calls it "the Gremlin" , if you watched this movie you know what that creature looks like: it looks adorable until gets wet and transforms itself to a monster.
We will always have the Gremlin inside, and we need to shield him so he does not gets awake.
Coming back almost every day to this site, reading posts, helping newbies, chatting with my AP...al this has helped me up today to stay awake, so as soon as the gremlin is trying to get awake ( and believe me , he is trying all the time), I am aware fast and use my "emergency tools" to send him back to his eternal sleep
Keep on fighting
Fercho

 

I think, from my understanding, it comes down to will power. The more complicated my life gets, I feel, the more likely I am to relapse. However, I find setting up simple road blocks that require skill to unlock, on those days, to be very useful. For instance, I have the internet on my phone locked, its not that I can't unlock it. It takes a while to unlock. Because of that even if I wanted to unlock it, I do want to unlock it once lets say every 100 days. On that day I make good use of my road blocks, When I want to fap I usually won't go past a password. Last time, when I messed up, I didn't have this road block on my phone. As I am just throwing it out there, I posit these road blocks, and this website together may be a specific way of combating this tired state.

 

You are right @galaxim , we become overconfident so and cocky , because our self-esteem has improved a lot since we started reboot.
At least mine was down in the drain before I started my recovery, I felt a loser against this fight, weak and without will power.
Now I feel confident and empowered, but perhaps this is a double sword, because no I am nearer of feeling overconfident and arrogant.
One of my tools to avoid this is to keep my registration to NoFap Academy, although I already completed the course once. They have a video conference once a week that I never miss, because it allow me to keep asking them questions and listen to the replies to questions from other guys
Fercho

 

I relapsed a little over 2 months ago after almost 150 days, my first effort at quitting PMO. Since then, I relapsed every 2-3 weeks or so until I got on my current run. And if I had to boil the reason for my fall down to a single word, it would be this: Complacency.

It took a lot of discipline, will power and hard work -- including cultivating healthy replacement behaviors like exercise and meditation -- to go 150 days. But at some point along the way I must have started feeling like I had won the war, and that I didn't have to keep up the fight. Replacement behaviors became less regular, I was less militant about avoiding triggers, etc. And that's a slippery slope.

And once I fell, that feeling of failure and discouragement haunted me for a couple of months. I went through the motions of getting back on the path, but I never really committed myself to the kind of effort this battle takes until a couple of weeks ago. It took a couple of additional falls -- and a couple of encounters with some old, familiar consequences of relapse, like ED -- to remind me how important recovery is and what I need to do if I'm really committed to it.

So, yeah. Complacency. That's the biggest enemy of the grizzled veterans, in my opinion.

 

You aré right @The Eleven , complacency and arrogance are big threatens once you passed the euphoria of the first successful months.
I will have this in mind, I am so afraid to relapsing after so much hard work to get where I am now.
Mark and Alexander from NoFap Academy told me that I should start getting more relaxed and confident already, but I do not want to sleep over the laurels
Fercho

 

Well, it is good to see @The Eleven is still hanging out here, not the relapse part but the hanging out. I am glad to see you still kicking away! To me I can't reiterate enough what the others have said. It boils down to 3 key aspects. A) Complacency, we become complacent, we feel that were 80 days out so its easy. In a manner, yes it is easy, urges you know how to handle, but because of that easy we feel that its safe to lean of this forum when maybe we are not ready, and more importantly we begin to feel invincible and no longer an addict, rather than humble and growing. B) That complacency pushes us into a lazy stupe. We begin not feeling that we need to divert our eyes do to we are the warriors who beat Fapping, who beat porn. Unfortunately, even like I said before when I was on round 1, we never win the war. Ever. C) We allow temptations to no longer be avoided. They create a terrible foot-in-the-door phenomena. For me, I allowed myself to come while dry humping with my girlfriend, of which we have discussed before to be a boundary we want to try to avoid. I let lust take hold during as a result of A and B, and I began letting my walls and morals down. I went from I will not cum before I get married, to I will as long as its with my girlfriend and not to "often," before I knew it I had morphed too as long as I don't use my hands. The slippery slope is painful, the worst part about it that I noticed was once I begin to allow myself to slip, when we are not actively involved in the forum to encourage others and be filled with good habits and thoughts, we don't have a way to voice of reason. We abandon'd it when we abandon'd NoFap and with it in times of temptation, we abandon all our work.

 

I may win the award for falling off the wagon after 18 years of being clean. For me, the trigger was, and remains, this notion of: am I really going to go to my grave without seeing another young woman nude? Seems impossible. But then I think about what Bob Dylan calls "the innocent geometry of flesh on the bone", and remember that it is just flesh on the bone, arrayed in a tempting matter, but nothing more than that.

On Day 2 of my next 18 years (I hope) of being clean. By that time, I will be at an age that an 0 in the PMO triad might not even be a possibility

 

Thank you for sharing your insights guys. This is an invaluable thread because while I've seen many veterans fall and talk about their anguish, this collective discussion really lays it out and warns of the clear and present danger that will always be around the corner, whether we like it or not.

Congratulations to you all for being committed and coming back despite having to start over again after such long streaks. I am still no where close to recovery and I'm not looking towards 90 being the golden date. I have a feeling it might take longer. But I want to stick through this and thanks to you folks, I'm going to be extra careful not to let my guard down.

 

Just hang in there. What is the point of putting yourself through more agony then you have too? Nobody I know who has done NoFap has ever said they were glad to relapse!

 

Which means that instead of PMO addict now we should be NoFap addict the rest of our lives?
Just kidding. I prefer to spend 20-30 minutes per day in this site, reading posts and advising the newcomers, than 2-3 hours fapping like an idiot while watching hundreds of porn movies, switching from one to the other every 5 minutes because they do not make me horny anymore, and edging like an automat because I want to "feel the thrill" a bit longer
How stupid we were (or are) , right? i can see it now, with the eyes of 5 month clean, and all sounds a big waste of time :-(
Fercho

 

It does worry me that somebody can relapse after a year of being clean. That leads me to this question. Is it possible to ever be cured?

 

For recovering alcoholics, the one year mark is the most dangerous one. You think you're back in control and can handle it but your brain is still recovering, so you run a greater risk relapsing and falling into old habits.

 

The first time I hit NoFap, I did it running. I went a long time, which lead up to me leaving and long story short I relapsed. Now, I am trying to come back to NoFap, and these first few days have been the most grueling, difficult days I have ever had in regards to NoFap. They have been way more difficult than the first time. I am a firm believer that with each relapse, we are destroying our soul and will-power more and more. That I feel is a big reason why people sometimes get caught in a perpetual relapse cycle when they come to NoFap, and eventually quit do to "it not being possible." As @galaxim said, I couldn't agree more with you. Boundaries are so important, and pre-defining them in a firm manner (writing them down etc) is so important. I also know exactly what you mean with "mainstream" and it being a slippery slope. It is a dangerous place to be. I began to slip down that mountain after being clean for nearly 3 months not from porn, not from M, but what triggered it for me was that I came into my pants while making out with my girlfriend, which we were grinding. We have discussed that several times and we are trying to stay away from anything that can result in grinding, because we know it can lead to greater desires, and we are are not married. That doesn't mean we don't kiss, we still do, but we have to be cautious of how we are situated. Just something as simple as that strapped me to a sled and down the slippery slope I went. First it was that one accident, then it was intentionally trying to get to the O while making out, then it was humping the bathtub in a shower, my bed, other motives. But I "wasn't masturbating" because I wasn't using my hand. Then it led to a little porn, and so on. Full on relapse from one slip. Now I am paying for it in the fact that this go at NoFap, #2, has already been way more difficult than my first attempt.