NoFap Consciousness

Georgos

Well-Known Member
So I'll introduce myself. My experience with porn started before puberty when I started drawing my own pornographic pictures. I didn't really look at porn produced by others until we got the internet and even then it started with me just looking at anime, not even pornographic pictures, just suggestive ones. Eventually I started looking at actual porn on the internet. Since day one of fapping I have counted every day that I didn't fap, trying to stop, I was so ashamed. At the age of 21 I had a breakdown over my shame and developed psychosis, the years of fapping wasn't the only factor, but it was the trigger. As I said, I counted every day I didn't fap since I was about seven years old. For most of my life my record was 20 days and that was only once. Then about eight years ago I started reading spiritual books and though I was brought up an atheist I decided to give meditation and prayer a go. Even if it is only a form of auto-suggestion, it had immediate benefits. About six years ago I managed to finally stop making my own pornographic pictures. I started being able to go months at a time without fapping. My record now is five months. I achieved all of this on my own (or maybe with the help of a higher power) without any communication with the outside world about my addiction. However, my record of five months was a few years ago, and since then I have gone back to once every ten to fifteen days or so, sometimes more. Today marked the tenth day. I started suffering serious withdrawals. I prayed and managed to resist for most of the day, but the withdrawals didn't go away. In the end I succumbed. That was when I decided to reach out and see if within a community I could get better results. My aim remains the same, to stop for good. Finally, as a side note, I should mention that I still suffer from psychotic episodes from time to time and am wary about posting on the internet lest I post something crazy. If I do I hope you will be supportive and understand that it is a result of my mental illness. Thank you.
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Day 1... it is not so hard for me to go a few days so I'm not going to post about that... what I wanted to post about was my thoughts on the whole reality of nofap. I have read some of the other journals and noticed a mentality that I can relate to strongly. However, what I want to say is that this mentality is the real issue, not porn. Some people look at porn and joke about it openly, when they're with other guys, some even feel comfortable discussing it with females. They view it as fantasy and can easily place it in that category of reality. They don't confuse it with sexual activity with a partner. They may even look quite a lot. But their attitude towards it is that it is entertainment and they don't get emotionally involved. Other men, perhaps a minority in this day and age don't look at porn at all, but still masturbate. I don't know what the percentages are, but whenever I've broached the subject, it seems to me that 99% of men masturbate. Now 99% of men don't have the mentality of people on this site, which if you forgive me I would say is somewhat neurotic (I include myself in this description). Counting the days, obsessed with the notion of relapsing, this is a form of neurosis or obsessive compulsive behaviour to my mind. It is a bit like the relationship anorexics have with food. The difference is that not fapping or not looking at porn has beneficial effects on your life, in Chinese medicine for example it is actually regarded as the ideal with benefits to health, let alone self-esteem. Anorexia on the other hand is not healthy. So I am not saying that people shouldn't try to stop looking at porn or masturbate. It is a really good thing to be able to do. However, I am saying that the mentality of many on this site, including me, is the real problem. The problem is not porn, it's us. After meditation my state of being improved much, not just because I was able to go longer periods without looking at porn, but because I came to accept myself and my actions more and not feel so ashamed. The flip side of this was that by no longer feeling so guilty at looking at porn, I weakened my commitment to stopping, but I felt better about myself. Now I really do want to stop looking at porn. I get emotionally involved and it corrupts my ability to form meaningful relationships with women, let alone sexual ones. But what I am trying to say is that this is a deeper problem to do with my mentality and managing of emotions. Porn doesn't help. It is the escape, that acts to stop one dealing with these deeper problems, by getting rid of porn from your life you force yourself to focus on the real problems in your life. However it is important to acknowledge that this obsession with counting days is a form of projection of all your problems on to the one compulsive activity of watching porn, like the anorexic projecting on to the natural drive to eat food. Of course eating junk food is no good. Looking at porn a lot is like eating a lot of junk food. It is damaging. As I said, I want to stop. However, I don't want to be counting days for the rest of my life. I want to transcend my compulsion to look at porn, simply lose interest, and I want to have a healthy relationship with sexual feelings. Let me be clear, I want to stop looking at porn, not just for six months, not just for a year, but for good! As I said in my previous post, I have never managed more than five months, and that was only once. I am hoping that by joining this community, and getting feedback, particularly when I am suffering from withdrawal symptoms, I will be able to achieve my aim. Thank you.
 

TiramiSu

Well-Known Member
I totally agree - the idea of counting is odd. But in the beginning it helps. yeah we should all just get rid of pmo.
 

offaxis

Active Member
I can understand your desire to get off porn and how you describe wanting to change your attitude towards sex and women.

You seem to have great success before some years ago but then came back to porn, why? I think perhaps because the things that were negative in your life and compelling you to use porn probably weren't solved really.

For me, a turning point has been not just intellectually understanding that attitude change but feeling it too and reflecting it in my behaviour. It's a bit of a catch-22 and you have to find some way to break through and keep persevering until you do.

Paradoxically, the more you focus on how many days, or not thinking about it, the harder it is. My best times of progress feel like they've been when I'm very engaged with life and then don't feel the pull of porn at all. But it's a step by step thing, so I hope you can be kind to yourself through that.

I am kind of finding sex a bit boring now as a concept. Rather than being the most important thing and be all and end all, it's taking much more of a backseat in my life at the moment. I realised my view was really badly skewed before, that sex and porn was more important than pretty much anything in my life. That's messed up and not how a balanced person thinks. Sure, people have a basic need for sex but it's similar as the need to eat, drink, have a roof over your head etc. Important but not the sole focus of my life, and the better things in life come after those basic needs are met. When your obsessing over something, how can you grow into a more fulfilling life?
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Thanks offaxis and TirimiSu... I think you're right the things that were negative in my life have been properly solved yet. The five months I abstained were really good for my self-esteem, but in that time I completely lost my sex drive. Since I was still a virgin, this worried me as losing my virginity was a huge issue for me. After I started to worry about not being interested in sex enough I found myself looking at porn again. I finally lost my virginity when I was 33. This had several effects, some positive and some negative with regards to looking at porn. The positive effects were that like you I realised that sex was not the be all and end all. I stopped obsessing about it. The negative effects was that whilst I enjoyed the foreplay, the actual sex seemed less pleasurable than masturbation (probably because I was so inexperienced). On top of this, I found having a girlfriend required a lot of effort on my part. These things made me think that maybe I should just accept that I experienced sexual gratification through porn or at least masturbation. The problem is porn still makes me feel bad inside, I cannot treat it like a joke. I feel low-self esteem and anxious that I get my sexual gratification without an emotional relationship. I invest emotionally in the porn, and of course get nothing in return. I don't obsess about having sex any more, but I do crave emotional intimacy. My relationship lasted six months, and I haven't had another one since (I am now 36). Thus the real problem is emotionally connecting with women. Porn doesn't help, in fact it acts to displace the problem, with my attention completely focused on trying to stop. It is also a vicious cycle of investing emotionally in something that gives nothing emotionally in return. As I said, when I stopped for five months, I completely lost my sex drive, and since I thought that was important in forming a sexual relationship, I relapsed. Now, when my focus is elsewhere, I can go the odd month without looking at porn, however when my sex drive returns, I reach for the porn. I really don't know what the solution is. I still want to stop looking at porn for good and I am thinking that I need to learn to be able to ride through the discomfort of feeling sexual compulsion but not acting on it. I have never managed that in the past, either I have simply not had the compulsions, or I have acted on them. I am hoping that engaging with this community will help me overcome this hurdle. Thank you.
 

TiramiSu

Well-Known Member
Georgeous,

you said I am thinking that I need to learn to be able to ride through the discomfort of feeling sexual compulsion but not acting on it

you are right, as men we need to learn not to be depend on our sexual gratification. We must learn to go through very bad emotions. If we can withstand very bad emotions, we can master everything. But that is a long and difficult way to learn and go through
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
So it's day 5 going on 6 and no real urges to look at porn yet... as I said I have gone a month many times... it all depends when the urges come... so long as there are no urges I'm fine... usually it starts with me thinking I've done pretty well... then thinking of how far away a year or even six months is... then going over and over the days in my head until I start to get serious urges to look... then I resist for a couple of days before out of nowhere I just cave and say f*ck it... then afterwards I feel terrible... like I said, I've been doing this for most of my life and it's become a neurosis with me... hopefully this time, now that I'm actually sharing my experience with like minded people, I'll be able to quit for good... anyway, as I said, I'm not getting any urges yet, however, had some minor psychotic symptoms today in a bar. My filter goes and I become conscious of all the conversations around me and body language and relate it to myself or to other people. My psychosis is definitely linked to my porn use over the years, and also to my incel, which is a term I came across recently for the in(voluntary) cel(ibacy). Apparently it's a condition identified by some wacky psychiatrist which a small but significant proportion of men identify with. Having read up about it I relate to a lot of the symptoms. Don't know if anyone else on this site does or knows about it, but I suspect a few do. Anyway, psychosis involves one's filter of what relates to oneself breaking and so becoming conscious of one's environment in a heightened way that relates to oneself. If I'm focused on sex then obviously I interpret the conversations as relating to that. So in the bar I was thinking that couples were jostling for establishing the pecking order, either by establishing where they stood, or if they had established where they stood, either trying to help other relationships or laughing at other relationships. Don't know if I expressed that very well, but anyway, hopefully you get the idea. It was a struggle not to feel paranoid, what with my weird incel reactions, but luckily now that I finally lost my virginity three years ago, I am slightly more confident than I used to be before. Back home now, and feeling better, we'll see how the week pans out.
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Day seven... had my first real urge to look at porn today... don't know how to describe it, it's like a dirty cloud of smog of desire descends on my brain and says "you want to look at porn!"... the first thing I thought of was to write here, and that's good. Now I have somewhere to share my situation with and hopefully this will help me get through the urges. The urge was not that severe and it has gone now, but this is only day seven :(
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Day 12 and no urges since I last posted... things are going well. The only problem is since starting this journal I've stopped all the other activities I was trying to do to get me out of the dead-end situation I'm in.
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Well I have discovered something new... DE... I didn't think I had any major problems due to PMO (I think that's the right acronym, I get a little lost)... as I said, I have only had sex twice and I had no problem with ED... however I didn't actually ejaculate at all... I was quite proud of this... two reasons, one is that as far as I understand it, Traditional Chinese health practices say that you should try not to ejaculate when you have sex or masturbate, and the other is that again as far as I understand it, in the perfect sex, both partners orgasm at the same time... since as far as I'm aware she didn't orgasm (being new to this I don't really know but I assume I would know if she did), I thought it was good that I had DE... indeed the thing I was most worried about was my fitness... I hardly do any exercise... don't know what people's thoughts are on this...
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Day 15... I felt the first stirrings of impatience today. Just re-read what offaxis had to say about it, how it is a form of bargaining and denial. That's very helpful. I've been trying to stop in private almost from the moment I started nearly 30 years ago. The whole battle has become a comfort as well as a burden. Obviously my life is better without porn, but once that battle is conquered I have to face up to dealing with all the other issues of life. It is easier to fail and then go back to focusing on porn as the only problem I have to deal with. A vicious cycle. In my life I rarely finish what I set out to do, and I think this practice has developed due to my constant starting to give up porn and then giving up. I have trained myself to fail. It is easy to blame the process of counting days. One sets a goal and then when one reaches the goal one feels "so what", my life is still full of problems, not realising that problems are part of life and the challenge is to face the new ones. Also, I find that when I set a goal, I end up setting mini goals, like today. When I got to ten days I said, let's just get through the next five days, to fifteen. I started calculating what day of the week that would be, and yes I made it, but now I've got to get to 20 days, and there is still 350 days left of my target. It can be depressing counting days. As I've said in previous posts, I've counted every day that I didn't look at porn almost since I started. Actually, there have been times recently, in the last few years, where I've completely forgotten to count, and these have been the most successful. However after a month, or even two months, I've remembered when I stopped, and got over confident. "I'm cured" I've thought. "I've done it". Then after the initial euphoria, I've realised that my life is still full of problems, and I've fallen back on the old problem, which after all I've proved I can solve, and so relapsed. It seems silly to say, but dealing with porn is perhaps the easiest problem to deal with, one simply has to do nothing for n number of days and one is winning. This is why I am worried that I've stopped the activities that I was trying to force myself do. I stopped them as soon as I joined this site. Porn, or stopping porn, had once again become my focus. "This time I'm going to do it", I said to myself, and threw all my energy and motivation into this. One thing that I have realised, is that I need to work on my emotions. Reading italianwanker's posts about anger, I thought at first that I couldn't relate. "I don't get angry", I thought to myself. But perhaps that is the problem, I am just passive, not even passive aggressive, simply passive. Then when I have psychotic relapses there is a sudden outflow, not necessarily of anger, but of reaction to things I don't like. There is a difference between anger and assertiveness, I am not assertive either. I find banter really hard, often going over the top when I try to force myself to banter, like my post to pinkerton. Crude banter that isn't funny. So this is something that I need to work on. I'd like to start my routine of activities again. I was learning a language, (doing two sessions of an internet course a day), and trying to do fifteen minutes qigong a day. As I said I stopped these as soon as I joined the site. Again it was impatience. Just as with porn, I was doing these activities, and though at first I noticed an improvement in my life, after about ten days I gave up, realising that there are endless things to feel dissatisfied about. "What's the point?" I asked myself. "It doesn't make any difference, life is still life". I guess this is where having a girlfriend helps, it gives you someone else's life to care about. In a way this is also the advantage of this site. Seeing problems outside of oneself is a great comforter and helps to put things in perspective. Anyway, I'm still going strong, so will update in a few days with more progress. Thank you.
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Someone mentioned "mindful masturbation". This is something I'd like to get good at, but at the moment I don't trust myself, masturbation is too associated with porn in my mind and one leads to the other. First a year without porn, then maybe get into the higher stuff.
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Felt miserable last night and this morning, don't know if that's because I'm finally moving out of my parents house. Won't have internet access for at least a couple of weeks unless I come home, so probably will be coming home for an hour or so every day. Found a site www.sexualreboot.com that talks a lot about the problems with counting days and has lots of other useful information. I'm in two minds about counting days, on the one hand as I said in previous posts, I've been counting days most of my life and it's never worked absolutely, indeed for much of my life I couldn't get past the twenty day mark, on the other hand it helps me to keep focused and doing it on this forum even more so. However that is one of sexualreboot's objections, one stays focused on the idea of porn, even if it is the idea of abstaining. Certainly the times I have done best have been when I've just forgotten about counting days and got on with my life. These times have largely been a result of meditation/prayer. However even then, I've usually only lasted about a month before I've relapsed. On balance, I think counting days is not the way to go, but this forum is. It's a form of group therapy. it keeps me focused on the reasons I don't want to look at porn, by reading other people's experiences. So from now on I'm not going to begin every post with the number of days I've gone, I know when I stopped, May 11th, so I might mention from time to time how well I'm doing, but I'm not going to wake up each morning and think: "day 16", "day 17" etc. That in itself will be hard, because over the years I've got so used to thinking in this way. I'm also going to try and post updates on what I'm doing that's positive in my life, like learning a language. I want to do a fifteen minute lesson every day. Did one yesterday. There are eighty lessons to go. Perhaps I will count these ;)
 

malando

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Hi Georgos,

You're moving house and it's a big life change and maybe it's a great time to make that final commitment to banishing P forever. You can make a pact with yourself to never allow P into your new house. Leave it behind and live a new life in your new house!

Best wishes.
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Thanks malando, of course that was on my mind, new start, no more porn ever!

Woke up and the first thing I did was read this forum. Started to feel anxious, as if I'd relapsed. Just the thought that I was a porn addict is enough to make me feel really distressed. However that is the point, I haven't relapsed, and the anxiety reminds me why I never want to go back. I think it was reading tostadora's latest post. I don't know if I read it correctly, does "four years working on it" mean he hasn't looked at porn for four years? The thought of not looking for four years and still being on this forum talking about urges filled me with anxiety about being an addict for life. I don't want to be an addict for life. I want to transcend this addiction so that porn no longer interests me at all. I know it can be done.

As far as my mental state goes, this forum seems to have helped a lot, (besides the anxiety of today), I've been pretty stable, without much psychotic symptoms.

I've done two language lessons so far. 79 to go ;)
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
After a couple of days of mild depression, today I feel relaxed and serene. Both of these experiences, the depression and the serenity, seem to be for no reason. The second day of the depression I could actually take a step back and just observe it. See it for what it was, a chemical low. The serenity is sort of the same. I don't feel the burning need to do anything, and this worries me just a little, at the edge of the serenity. But it feels good, and whilst I'd like to be doing something productive, I don't want to lose this good feeling. I've done five language lessons so far, 76 to go.
 

sm

Member
Hi Georgos, I totally get you. I started to recover at the beginning of the year and I'm still trying to figure out how It can be the best way to succeed for me. I had two very big steps forward in the last couple of months (moving and job), and I'm sure they happened because of me using less pornography and being more focused. Anyway, with these changes also new anxieties came and they push to porn again, to relax. I don't use it more than once a week, but every time i feel like shit.

good luck! i wish you all the best

ps. reading about your drawing made me remember that I used to do it myself when I was very young (VERY young, oh my god, how that stuff came to my mind?)
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Thank you sm, it's always good to get feedback :)

With regards to the drawing, I was brought up to believe that women suffered in real porn, so had a strong inclination not to watch it, which is why I made pictures instead, they only exploited my imagination. My drawings didn't really feature penetration in any explicit detail, I had never had sex and hadn't seen a vagina in real life, and even now I cannot watch the penetration sequences or look at a vagina in real porn without feeling squeamish, in fact I generally switch them off. What I am drawn to (if you'll excuse the pun) is the sexual avariciousness of the women in porn and their bodies. The foreplay. So I never really looked much at anything hardcore, which is perhaps weirder than if I did. Even though I did click on hardcore movies, pretty much all porn on the internet is hardcore as far as I can see, I would turn them off when they got to the hardcore bits. Taking me as an example you can really see how the problem is our relationship with sexuality that we have warped through masturbating over unreal things. I actually at one stage, whilst I was still drawing, thought that I should make a conscious effort to watch real porn as it was more realistic :p not realising how warped and still fiction real porn is. I don't know if it is worse to create your own fantasies or watch other peoples for damaging yourself. But at any rate I'm glad I'm putting some distance between the damage and myself now. So six language lessons done, 75 to go ;)
 

Georgos

Well-Known Member
Wasn't going to post today, but then thought better of it. The reboot is going well, but now my mind is occupied with the rest of my life. Had some mild psychosis last night. Redid my dating website profile, and that was the trigger. I can't seem to write normal things. What are normal things? The problem is I want to control the outcome, I want to make someone go out with me. Much of my psychosis is about this, how do girls and boys go out? I see hidden meanings in conversations and what I write, trying to see what it is that has to be said for sexual contact to be initiated. On the bus journey to my new flat, I observed such hidden meanings in girls conversations and body language, and related it to me, classic psychosis. I'm ok now though. The strange thing is getting a girlfriend isn't a priority for me at the moment. But years of making and looking at porn has warped my ability to deal normally with even the hint of sexuality in a conversation. The years of keeping my only sexual activity (masturbation over porn) secret and thinking of it as something to be ashamed of means that I cannot respond naturally to even the subtlest of sexual dynamics. A girl looking at me because she is mildly attracted to me fills me with anxiety. I have what is known as "incel" (involuntary celibacy) or "love-shyness".
 
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