progress report - glass is half full -yay!

raven song

Active Member
Woot Woot!  Some progress in our household. I want to share this because I want to focus on what is going well. I want to see the glass as half full rather than half-empty.  With the trauma of discovery - it is way too easy for me to stay focused on the negative.
 

Emerald Blue

Well-Known Member
Excellent news!

Perhaps Dr Misogyny was necessary to show him how NOT to recover. It's great that he saw right through this sham for what it is.

It's really tough for both partners in this situation especially in the earlier stages when you haven't quite realised what you are both up against. We are lucky to have grown up at a time when healthy sexuality meant having a mutually pleasurable experience with a real human being, and the better the relationship, the better the sexual relationship. There was no need for viagra, there was no expectation of (the female partner) having to perform a repertoire of acts in various positions without the expectation of physical pleasure (more specifically orgasm), there was no need for any sex shop paraphernalia like silly porn-y costumes or gadgets. We don't need to buy any of this shit to have sex. Porn doesn't portray sex, it documents a paid performance which is scripted and predictable. So for those of us who learned about sex through meeting boys and making out in our early teens to having sexual relationships in early adulthood, we learned through real life experience and learned that practice makes perfect. I feel sorry for people who look to porn for some kind of instructions about how to have 'hot sex' but end up being unable to function sexually with another human being. So we are the lucky ones. We know where our 'true north' is. I suspect your husband knows this too.

My husband quit porn and now he can say just how much time and opportunity he wasted, time that he can never get back. He still says it became a lonely, miserable experience and he feels glad to get his life back. Another really interesting thing is that he recovered his physical sensation that was lost through his porn use. You read about this sometimes on the addict sections. From how my partner explained it, the response to porn was actually happening in the brain and not so much the bodily sensation. When we were physical together for the first time after d day, he had been using porn 2-3 days previously and I noticed he looked like he had a small area of redness. It wasn't any sort of STI, don't worry I checked that, but it was likely this vigorous gripping that PAs use. It took maybe 2-3 weeks to recover physical function because he wasn't actually used to a full body experience involving all the senses including touch, warmth, breathing, listening, response and reciprocity. Porn behaviour is limited to staring at a screen with the fast and furious 'death grip' on the penis. He did indeed have a 'broken penis' but the scary thing is he didn't really know it. He said he could ejaculate without orgasm and sometimes he couldn't reach orgasm when he was using porn. Rediscovering physical sensation was quite remarkable because he hadn't realised he'd lost touch with his own body.

Sometimes I've seen online guys saying they've lost sensitivity and I would bet my bottom dollar that it's mostly down to Porn Induced Penis Insensitivity. (From now on known as PIPI, lol! ;D)

Fun times are really important, and since my husband quit porn we spend far more time together and we make sure we have some fun things to do together. It's really important not to let this drift, especially during times of recovery when difficult issues come to the surface.

It's great that your husband finally gets it, even if he had to go the long way round to get there. I really hope it all goes well from now on.
 

Gracie

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Just letting you know, he and Mark Chamberlain and their book Love You Hate the Porn and their blogging got us through the porn part six years ago!  Seriouly check out markchamberlainphd.blogspot.com
Years of great information there!

So happy for you!
 

BKM

Active Member
Me and my wife have been though a few recovery books together, love you hate the porn being one of them. They have all helped, and that one has been one that stands out, I need to go through it again, as I do with a lot of these books. My addiction brain has finally taken a back seat in our relationship, I think reading these books again with a clear mind will help even more. Also we are having the best, most intimate, sex we have had probably ever, so all this painful recovery has some pleasure to it as well.
 
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