Nexus974 said:
The worst part of this ordeal is discovering just how alone I am. I have no friends. I?m married but my wife isn?t the kind I can lean on. I have siblings but I have never been close to them. I have tried and failed to beat this addiction on my own. Maybe I?m not capable of doing this on my own but I have no support network. I did have one friend I could count on but she?s cut me off. So what to do when you need help with something but have no where to turn...
IMHO the woman friend in your life might have been a perceived emotional betrayal on your wife's part. There's a lot of insecurities involved when a married person has a friend who is of an apposite gender.
Also porn use has and can destroy relationships. Perhaps even justifiable so, after all this is some form of betrayal of our wife's.
One thing that I understand is that to repair my relationship and get out of my loneliness, my head needs to be screwed on correctly. That is, I now realize that so many issues in my marriage are simply me not having the normal emotional spectrum to be able to relate to the wife. Because porn had numbed all that.
On top of that, because my reward center in the brain is so screwed up, I never noticed all the tiny good things that my wife does everyday. The dopamine is simple just not there.
This is a huge reason why I am doing this. To repair my reward system so I can relate to my wife like a normal emotional person. After this and only after this can the relationship be repaired.
So my words of encouragement are, get free of porn addiction, reboot your mind and emotions and the relationship with your wife and friends can be fixed.