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  I can't give you any advice but I would like to give you my respect; you are one heck of a courageous individual doing what you are doing to seek a life change from all you have been through.  Don't give up and hopefully the road ahead will clear more and more as time goes by with porn abstinence. Take care friend.

Thank you for posting this.  Whenever I've read you talk on this topic, I think to myself "this guy needs to write a book", so I was delighted to see that you've thought of this already.  You have a compelling story, you have done some great research, and you are saying things that many people desperately need to hear.  Yours is a great instance of how our obsession with being "sex positive" or whatever means that proper diagnosis becomes impossible.  I believe you when you say that therapy is impossible because no therapists would dare see your line of thinking on this.  That said, I'm sure they are out there and it might be worth finding one of those rare ones, even if it just means skype sessions.

It never ceases to amaze me how we can be a culture so incredibly saturated with sex, but yet our ignorance of sex is at an all time high.  We need more and better understanding.

In your opinion, how transferable are your experiences to others on this board?  It has been my observation that a vast majority of porn addicts have some special kind of porn that REALLY gets them going while other stuff doesn't work.  Some feel that it is just a matter of escalation, others try to trace it back to something to make it significant.  Do you think your case is a rare case in that no one else experiences it, or is it rare in that yours is just a more vivid/extreme example?

You should definitely write a book, tough story - all the best for leaving the past behind!

hooked on monkey fonics said:

Being able to stop yourself from escalating at the height of a dopamine response, right before an anticipatory reward, is a very empowering feeling. But I know the next few days will be substantially harder. I don't think I've ever peaked this much and not relapsed after. I will have to be extremely careful.

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Porn addiction (in all its varieties) is a chameleon and our brain knows all kinds of tricks to get its dopamine fix. One trick is "curiosity", I've fallen for it many times and you also seem to know about the danger.

My "holy grail" of porn were nudes various girls (including ex girlfriends) sent me and it was a long fight between me deleting all pictures and my addicted mind using recovery software to get them back. I finally managed to definitely delete them as I found out 3 days ago when I desperately tried to recover anything. As long as those pictures were there it was too tempting to check out and I fell for the "Let's just check if they are still there" trick played by my dopamine starving brain.

In your case the internet doesn't forget completely, but good news is: These days there is so much porn that it will be buried in tons of new material and nobody - besides you - cares. You should never ever again check out if it's still there or even care about its existence, every act of "curiosity" is just your starving brain trying to trick you back into the self-destructive path.

It's not a relapse, but you keep the pathways in your brain active and remembering. Healing will take time and it's not a proof nor anything useful to withstand temptation. Just avoid temptation whenever you can and try not to think about the past. Build new memories and accept your past as something you left behind definitely.

If porn addiction should teach us one thing it's this: We are not in control to take a controlled little dose or allow ourselves a peek, complete abstinence and avoiding all possible triggers and thoughts is the only way out - at least during the first stage.

I know that's easier said than done, as I myself failed hundreds of times to leave porn behind. But maybe that advice might be useful to you or anybody else anyway 

Thanks for sharing. Write a book, more people need to learn the deception behind today's confirmation bias.

Thanks for your openness, HoMF. It's important to talk about these things.

Far from being impossible to conceptualise what you describe - I suspect what you wrote rings true in a lot of people here. Being a porn addict can lead you down a lot of very dangerous rabbit holes. Most addicts have viewed, or been obsessed with various paraphilia  at least some of the time. Although you are probably at the more severe end of the spectrum due to your early experience, it is a relatable story because all severe porn addicts end up searching high and low for dopaminergic super-hits just to keep the arousal feeling from dying away. This usually results in having a selected range of "tastes" which can be highly obsessive for a period of time. Some of these are along the lines of what you describe.

The way you are handling it is an inspiration to those who are struggling to believe that they can change. Your situation, being so severe, and yet you are making real progress, gives hope to many others. We mustn't succumb to our weaknesses. We must fight them so that they don't consume us and change us into freaks we wouldn't even recognise if we could have looked into the future at an earlier age.

Thanks again. M.

I like what malando says, even if what you experience is fundamentally different from other rebooters, it is still relatable and teachable.  I had to struggle with a strange pregnancy fetish.  WTF?  No idea.  I just know it was way stronger than the regular brew for me during my porn addiction.  It seems like everyone has something that is stronger than "regular porn".  Sometimes I hear plausible explanations where stuff came from, sometimes sheer escalation makes sense (much of the "tranny" or HOCD stuff seems to mostly manufactured by the porn itself), but other times all I can do is shrug.  I'd love to see research on the topic, but all we can do is speculate.  Once I got to a place in my reboot where triggers weakened I tried doing some leg work to figure out the what/why/where of my particular fetish, but came up with nothing but cheesy sex articles (and of course links to porn). 

I agree that the "as long as no one is getting hurt" argument is bad.  I read a news article a while ago about a guy in Phoenix who was pretending to have down syndrome and had state paid caretakers come and change his diapers for him (diapers which he did not require by the way, but must've soiled in order to maintain the illusion...?) and was eventually found out.  Chasing weird fetishes and fantasies is a very, very slippery slope and that guy slid all the way to the bottom.  I remember reading weird kink hook up stuff in a local weekly rag years ago about diapers and nurse/baby roleplaying, and I am sure those people were saying "as long as no one is getting hurt" to themselves regularly.  He was hurting himself long before he was abusing state programs (those poor young women who had to change him!).  Like the drug abusers you mentioned, they are destroying themselves even if they do so with no outward violence.

hooked on monkey fonics said:

6. MOing to physical sensations only - may set you back 1-2 days, though this may vary wildly and some people obviously prefer not to do it.

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I think I could agree with this, though in my case it took 4 days of flatline symptoms after a masturbation session. Starting with the 5th day, I returned back to urges.

Congratulations on those milestones!

Your unwellness may or may not be entirely from PMO, but the symptoms you list are classic PMO withdrawal symptoms.  If there are reasons to think your problem is beyond PMO, it isn't evident from your posts.

Even today, two years (to the day) rebooted, if I am around stuff online that is even vaguely like the porn stuff I watched, I get some of those weird feelings again.  Not a desire for porn, but that dark, zombie-like feeling.  I don't relapse anymore, but I can feel that demon tugging on me.  Usually it is mindless clicking around on things, especially if it involves people (of sexual interest or not, doesn't necessarily matter), and sometimes even just scrolling through a news feed will do it.  It is possible that the peeking and so forth was holding things up a bit.  That isn't to say that your accomplishment isn't something great, but it might be why the symptoms didn't really move for you.  It is like keeping that one coal going on the fire.  It isn't a blaze and may even appear to be out, but it is still hot and ready to ignite if you get close to it with some good, dry tinder. 

You likely have some triggers that are very, very hard to eliminate and keep a functional life.  I don't know how to deal with those, but I'm sure that will be key.  It isn't easy, I know.  Heck, I still deal with that stuff trying to further unlock my brain, because part of me would love to give up my smart phone and internet - just read books, and the only TV/movies I see be ones where I can find physical media.  I haven't figured out how to do that just yet... or maybe I'm unwilling. 

Yeah, I wasn't implying that you don't know your triggers - you've clearly done a lot of work to know them.  I'm just saying your particular set of triggers is likely really hard to avoid... so I guess it is the "what now" part after you know the triggers.  The hardest ones to avoid are the ones that you can encounter in a G rated or PG rated world.  Women's clothing exists all over the place.  My weird fetish was pregnant women... by no means is seeing that limited to porn.  I could see it at church or the grocery store, and often did.

The one thought I have on the suicide stuff is that I've often heard that suicide planning has an OCD nature to it.  A person rehearses it in their heads over and over, and it becomes a massive fixation.  Perhaps that is the alternate antagonist in your life that you're suspicious of, and OCD tendency on suicide?  Maybe it is interactive - the fixation and repetitious envisioning and planning very well may have similar dopamine hits as porn.  I'm guessing, so take it with a grain of salt.  It seems plausible that withdrawal symptoms mean that other underlying issues end up taking on that neediness for novelty, dopamine hits and sense of release.  Maybe suicide content is a new sort of "porn".  Again, just guessing and thinking out loud.

I sometimes wonder how much I'd have to give up to get the "full rewire".  Yeah, I'm more or less rebooted, but my concentration and emotional health could certainly be better.  Maybe there is no upper limit on how many of these bad activities we eliminate.  Who knows.

hooked on monkey fonics said:

DoneAtLast said:

Yeah, I wasn't implying that you don't know your triggers - you've clearly done a lot of work to know them.  I'm just saying your particular set of triggers is likely really hard to avoid... so I guess it is the "what now" part after you know the triggers.  The hardest ones to avoid are the ones that you can encounter in a G rated or PG rated world.  Women's clothing exists all over the place.  My weird fetish was pregnant women... by no means is seeing that limited to porn.  I could see it at church or the grocery store, and often did.

The one thought I have on the suicide stuff is that I've often heard that suicide planning has an OCD nature to it.  A person rehearses it in their heads over and over, and it becomes a massive fixation.  Perhaps that is the alternate antagonist in your life that you're suspicious of, and OCD tendency on suicide?  Maybe it is interactive - the fixation and repetitious envisioning and planning very well may have similar dopamine hits as porn.  I'm guessing, so take it with a grain of salt.  It seems plausible that withdrawal symptoms mean that other underlying issues end up taking on that neediness for novelty, dopamine hits and sense of release.  Maybe suicide content is a new sort of "porn".  Again, just guessing and thinking out loud.

I sometimes wonder how much I'd have to give up to get the "full rewire".  Yeah, I'm more or less rebooted, but my concentration and emotional health could certainly be better.  Maybe there is no upper limit on how many of these bad activities we eliminate.  Who knows.

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Interesting perspective...that suicide research was right after PMOing 4 times in the span of 2 hours and then trying to wind down to go to bed. It's like all the dopamine in my brain was depleted so I had to turn to something like that to maintain my sanity. 

In the past few months I've noticed such a strong parallel between porn and other supranormal stimuli (junk food/sweets, reddit, social media, dating apps, video games, etc) that I've basically eliminated all of it sans video games. All the current literature i've read indicates that internet addiction is in the same league as porn addiction, which is crazy. I mean, unlike porn there is not a dedicated brain circuit (sexual arousal) for the general novelty/information seeking dopamine response you get from places like news feeds, so how can be as harmful? Who knows.

Perhaps I've been struggling so much recently because i wasn't as willing to substitute porn with reddit/youtube/etc, or perhaps the relationship I've had with electronic media in general has gradually been getting worse and the damage has already been done. Trying to quit it all cold turkey is very hard. My mind doesn't even work anymore. All I can do with myself is reread old books, re watch old shows, and replay old games - almost everything else is feels far too cognitively demanding.

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I understand on the cognitive demanding part. It was the end of the day "brain fry" that was hard for me, and I've seen it hit others on here, too.  Every so often someone posts about their well intentioned gung-ho rebooting style that involves intense gym routines and some very ambitious goals, but they never plan for when the day is done and they don't feel like dead lifting or brushing up on their Cantonese.

Have you tried seeing how light of reading you can find that will be satisfying and engaging?  Young adult fiction, comics, comic/humor books, science fiction, anything pulpy.  My mistake was always to try to pick up something really ambitious with the best of intentions, and then realize that when I worked a long day, ran errands after work, and dealt with personal stress the whole time, my brain just wasn't up to it.  I tried the "reread old stuff" thing too, and it works to an extent, but it isn't as exciting and it doesn't make you want to leave the light on for another half hour to see what happens next in the book, and that sort of engagement can be so helpful.