2heal's Journal

Well, I've decided I need this.  I feel like I have messed up my life and I'm feeling pretty low right now.  I have to say porn is the reason I feel this way.  It was behind the destruction of a 32 year marriage.  Like most people, we had our problems, but I believe it was my problem with porn that caused my ED.  Because of this, I avoided sex with my wife.  My wife didn't really mind it all that much, she never cared for sex anyway, or at least that is what I thought.  I made excuses...my BP medication, stress at work, etc.  She also found my trail and discovered I was using porn.  At that time, we still had relations on occasion but it had escalated to the point I would fantasize in order to perform.  After several years of this I began avoiding sex altogether for fear of failing.  My wife decided I didn't really care anyway, so she entered into an affair with her boss.  I moved into an apartment in order to try to figure things out and decide if I was going to try to make my marriage work.  That got decided for me when the two of them moved in together.  I ended up filing for divorce and I thought that would be the end of my problems.

When you are single, you are free to masturbate just about any time you want to.  I figured I wasn't in a relationship, not dating, why not?  What I didn't realize was how severe my habits were becoming.  It got to where I would masturbate to porn just as soon as I got home from work, maybe a second time as well.  Sometimes 3-4 times on the weekend.  I began edging and searching for the 'perfect' scene, which I never found.  My viewing habits also started to get harder core and I began watching other genres which included gay porn.  When I think of all the time I've wasted it makes me ill.

When I had the opportunity, I found I was unable to perform - and this was with someone I was very attracted to.  I was devastated and embarrassed and frankly it scared me to death.  I still didn't know about PIED (and this was very recently) so I went to see my doctor. I tried to get him to remove me from BP meds, but he didn't think what I was taking would cause ED. He gave me a prescription for Cialis, which helps a little, but not enough to get an erection for sex - it helped with oral sex but not with any kind of penetration. 

I started researching on the internet for some kind of help and I got a lot of hits on ED being related to porn use.  I have been stalking this forum and reading on YBOP and it hit me that so much of this is true to my case.  I CAN get an erection and O to porn, but having sex or masturbating without porn?  It's not happening.  I can now without porn, but with fantasizing.

Ninety days ago I gave up porn.  I haven't masturbated to orgasm to porn in that time.  I have to admit, I did start to once to see if I could get an erection, which I could, and stopped - didn't orgasm.  I started getting morning wood again recently, which I don't think I've had in years.  I believe I even had a wet dream a few nights ago, even though I didn't wake up (but I had the evidence). 

I'm back to worrying a little now.  It's been 90 days, and I still don't think I would be able to get an erection to perform.  During this 90 days I have MO 4 or 5 times and it wasn't to 'porn', but it was to what my brain probably perceives as porn - chatting with someone on a dating site.  Because I feel I'm going to have to give all of that up - dating sites, texting, I decided I needed to start a journal, set a counter - set it to zero, even though I haven't been watching porn for awhile.  If my brain considers what I have been doing a dopamine creating activity, I need to give it all up.  I'm going to see what I can do if I give up MO all together.  No porn, no orgasm, no masturbation.  I really, really want to be back to normal.  I want to stop worrying about this.  I'm desperate enough, I could cry.  It makes me sick to think about what I've done to my life.

I'm up for any advice and any encouragement I can get!  Thanks, guys.

I can relate to a lot of what you have written and I feel for you loosing so much because of your addiction. My first marriage of 28 years was destroyed by my addiction too. The inability to be sexual with my first wife (PIED) brought us undone in the end. There were other issues going on in the marriage that would have ended it eventually anyway, but it was the lack of sex that lead her to find satisfaction in the arms of another man.

I wish you success in your journey . 

Thank you rider!  I appreciate that.  I'm sorry you went through something similar.  I don't think there is anything worse that truly loving someone and not be able to show them in that ultimate way.  And then to lose them for that reason, it's heartbreaking.  My wife said that my porn use was equal to cheating anyway, in her mind, so she felt justified in looking elsewhere. 

I wish I could tell these young guys that haven't yet experienced sex but already have PIED, how much they are missing by their habits.  My first sexual experience was so intense - it was the most wonderful thing I had ever felt in my life.  I just slowly ruined it.  I didn't have any experience with porn before my first sexual experience.  It felt so wonderful, I only lasted a few seconds.  I came in contact with porn about 4 years later when I went out of town on a business trip.  It's been a slippery slope ever since.  I wish I could scream it to everyone - DON'T USE PORN - IT'S GOING TO DESTROY YOUR LIFE!

Thanks for reading my post.  I intend to stick with the no porn use and add to it no MO.  God I want to heal.  I want it so bad.

I forgot to mention in my last post that I did wake up to an erection during the night last night.  It wasn't 100%, I would say 80-90, but this was after having MO'd Friday evening.  I don't know it that means anything, but it does give me a little hope.  Hope that if I eliminate MO as well  as porn, maybe I will be on my road to recovery. 

Hang in there guys...

I would also suggest you have a read of the first post in this thread by William. It's a tremendous insight into the addiction to dopamine, which as William explains is the drug that gives us the high we seek from porn. 

http://legacy.rebootnation.org/index.php?topic=1256.125

Welcome to the Nation 2heal!

You are at a great site, you are not alone here, and we are here to help.

Also suffering from PIED, struggling to accept that this will take as long as it takes.  You can only do so much - and for us the mainly means things NOT to do, but it is one day at a time.  I have read alot that it does get better, when? - I too hope soon.

Find your strength my friend, you have it inside you. 

Thanks, Rider.  I read the post and I'm going to re-read it (and re-read it).  There's a lot of good stuff there.  Hello, SMS.  Thanks for the encouragement.

My first experiences with porn were before the internet, before DVDs, before VHS.  My first experiences were at adult 'arcades' where for a quarter you would get a few seconds of 8mm loop.  I did this on a business trip, so I wasn't where anyone would recognize me if seen.  It's probably the worst mistake I ever made because it set me down this path.

I found that just the anticipation of going to one of these places was enough to set off a rush in me that was just as powerful as the porn itself.  If I knew I was going to go, my heart would race, I would get giddy, excited, start shaking and my face would flush.  I assume this was a huge dose of dopamine and it felt wonderful.  I looked forward to this 'rush'.  I also found that when I had a fight with my wife, I would jump in the car and head to one of these places.  That feeling just going there, watching the porn and masturbating gave me this release that calmed me, relaxed me, made me feel better (except that I was so disgusted with myself for doing it).

Can anyone tell me - was this 'rush' I was receiving from just heading to what I knew was waiting for me - was that a dose of dopamine hitting me?  It was powerful and kept me going for years...until the internet delivered it right to my home.

I'm 55 now and I've been seeking it out since I was 21.  I assume this is why I may take quite some time to reboot.  I so, so want to heal.  I want to get rid of this.  I want to feel normal again.  I haven't PMO'd for 93 days now.  Even though I MO'd Friday evening I had MW during the night last night that was about as good as it gets.  I hope that's a good sign.

I am divorced now (a little over 4 years) and not dating so I'm a little concerned about re-wiring.  To be honest, I'm afraid to date because I fear I'll get myself into a situation where I might want to have sex and not be able to 'get it up'.  This happened to me a couple of years ago and I was devastated.  Most would agree, this doesn't help when you get anxiety on top of PIED.

I am encouraged by the healthy MW I've had the last couple of nights.  I'm not going to test.  I'm not going to PMO.  I'm not going to MO.  I'm going to heal.

I don't know if any of you other guys have this problem, but a huge part of what sent me down the road to addiction was stress.  I am under a huge amount of stress and have been for years.  A lot of it is me and how I handle stress - not well at all.  And it could even be that I perceive stress that others wouldn't even blink at. I found early on that PMO was a tremendous reliever of stress.  Have a fight with the wife?  Run down to the adult store, watch some porn and masturbate and go home like nothing ever happened.  Now?  Have a stressful day at work?  Get home and immediately pull out the laptop and click to my favorite Porn tube site.  Hundreds of new videos everyday.  It's what I looked forward to.  I relaxed and felt better. I felt like a new man.  I had no idea what I was doing to myself until it was too late.  Here I am 55 years old and I could honestly say I PMO'd daily - sometimes 3 or 4 times a day on weekends.  I also found it helped me sleep better at night.

Now all I can do is pray that I will have relief from this.  It hasn't been terribly difficult for me to give up porn.  I admit, I miss it. Yes, I'd really like to go back to it, but I seriously want to reverse my PIED and I'm willing to give it up for life.  I don't want to fear having intercourse any more (actually, I don't want to fear the failure).  I want to heal.

Hi 2heal, welcome to the forum 

I've been part of this community for 3 weeks now and it has been a tremendous help. I'm a single guy and I don't have a sounding board to vent my feelings and thoughts, so this community is really great and provides the motivation for stopping PMO. I've tried stopping before but never had support or someone to share my journey with. Although anonymous, I find rebootnation a great way of getting that support.
I can relate with you using PMO and M as an outlet for your stress. I discovered the sensation that M brings at a very young age, even before there were any fluids involved. At some stage in my life M became an outlet which helped me to feel good just for fun but also when I was feeling bad. I think that in my brain those highways to pleasure started to develop and just got deeper and wider as time went by. I'm on this journey to erase those paths I've created in my brain, to reboot myself and put myself on a new path.

All the best to you, I believe that we all have it in ourselves to stand up against the mess we got ourselves into and find a way out of it.

Hey, challenged, Hey Horpio.  Thanks for the comments.  I think I'm going to stay here awhile.  This seems to help me keep my mind off P and M and O.  I've been doing a lot of reading and there is so much here to digest.  I have a lot of fears.  I sure would like to hear from someone about my age that had been through this and succeeded.  I worry that at my age and the number of years I've obsessed with porn and masturbating that I might never heal.  Also, no longer having a SO - how am I going to be able to tell if I've healed?  I fear dating and getting into a relationship because I'm afraid of failure.  You're kind of at a disadvantage when you don't have someone to test drive with.  And, speaking from experience, it's humiliating to fail. There's another thing that worries me.  The first time I experienced penetration at the age of 16 it was the most profound, pleasurable experience in my entire life.  I mean so pleasurable, I didn't last more than about 5 seconds.  I couldn't help it, it felt that good. The last time I actually penetrated, which was about 2 years ago, I couldn't feel anything.  I wasn't even sure I was 'in'.  When I masturbated, I had to use what I've seen termed here, the death grip.  I would give anything to feel that intense feeling again - and not with my hand.  Will that feeling ever return?

I want to heal.

challenged said:

This is an interesting thought, and something I've more or less just discovered in the past few days.  That is, there are some things that might seem relatively harmless (in comparison to viewing explicit hardcore porn on the internet) that nevertheless seem to get the dopamine flowing.  It could be a sexy scene in a mainstream movie or cable show, or even something I've read on the internet on a non-porn site.  You can almost feel the rush in your brain and the transmission of signals from the brain to the lower regions, and you can sense that they are basically instantaneous.

Click to expand...

This is something I became aware of recently also. It's not just the porn that can trigger those old pathways to the dopamine rush. It can be something as seemingly harmless as celebrity photo's where the celeb has her boobs hanging out of a low cut top. Everything has become so sexualized these days.

It gets easier as time goes on though to move my mind on from those images and not dwell there. As soon as I feel that dopamine rush kick in I know my mind has ventured into forbidden territory, even if its just from seeing a hot looking woman in the street, or viewing a photo in yahoo news. That awareness of the dopamine kicking in is my cue that I need to shift the focus of my mind immediately.

Last week I looked into getting one of the Buctools routers but they are currently unavailable here in Australia (I was told they will be soon). So I have installed the K9 filtering program to my computers for the time being. K9 does a good job of blocking even celebrity related articles. It takes a little fine tuning to get it to not block everything. For example I couldn't watch anything on youtube at all until I tweaked the settings.

I want to get a Buctools router so that I can filter porn from all the other computers and mobile phones that my family have here in the house that are connected to our wifi service.

I have a 23 year old son who is Aspergers and I know he spends a lot of time on the internet. I'd like to have the tools in place to prevent him from falling into the same trap I did with porn. I know from images I've seen on his phone and computer that he looks at soft core girly images, but I'd not be surprised if he's also seen his share of hardcore material as well.

My 20 year old daughters in the same boat. I discovered years ago through a tracking program I had on the family computer, that when she was about 14 she'd been exposed to hardcore porn images. I thought it was my son, but it turned out to be my daughter clicked on a pop up and was taken to a hard core site. We discussed it at the time, but I have no idea if she has viewed porn again since?
   

2heal said:

I'm 55 now and I've been seeking it out since I was 21.  I assume this is why I may take quite some time to reboot.  I so, so want to heal.  I want to get rid of this.  I want to feel normal again.  I haven't PMO'd for 93 days now.  Even though I MO'd Friday evening I had MW during the night last night that was about as good as it gets.  I hope that's a good sign.

I am divorced now (a little over 4 years) and not dating so I'm a little concerned about re-wiring.  To be honest, I'm afraid to date because I fear I'll get myself into a situation where I might want to have sex and not be able to 'get it up'.  This happened to me a couple of years ago and I was devastated.  Most would agree, this doesn't help when you get anxiety on top of PIED.

Click to expand...

Hi 2heal,

I've been addicted to porn for as long as you and I thought it would take ages for me to turn things around. But it didn't. Yes, I had one relapse after 63 days, but that hasn't set me back and if anything, it was a good lesson on why relapsing isn't a good idea.

As for the worry of ED and the associated feelings of performance anxiety I had that too, though if you read through my journal I overcame that fear quite quickly by using the non sexual bonding techniques. I get for single guys this is a dilemma, but I can assure you that the issue is purely in your head and not below the belt. I would consider using ED drugs if necessary to get your confidence back. I used Cialas with wonderful results. So talk to your doctor about that one. 

Thanks Challenged, Rider.  You've both giving me a lot of food for thought.  I've spent so much time here and at YBOP the last couple of weeks.  There is so much to absorb.  I know deep down inside I just need to give it time. 

While reading, it's caused me to reflect back on where I came from and how I got here.  Last night I was thinking about all this and I recalled an incident over 15 years ago when my wife confronted me.  We had had sex the night before and gone to sleep.  I got up in the middle of the night and jacked off to porn - that's after having good sex.  She couldn't understand why I thought I needed to.  I'm sure she was hurt, but it just wasn't enough for me.  I hadn't received that 'rush' that I was looking for making love to her.  I didn't know how to explain it - I didn't understand myself.  If I had known all of this then, I might have been able to save my marriage.  Now all the pieces are starting to come together.  I'm beginning to understand.  Man, I wish I had found this information years ago.

I think I'm going to take your advise and read through success stories tonight.  Put on the world series and just read.

One more day down, porn free!

Rider, I have tried Cialis.  It does help somewhat, but not enough for penetration.  I quickly go too soft.  It does help however with oral sex.  I tried the 5mg daily and it didn't do anything for me.  The higher dose 'as needed' was enough to get a fair erection, but again, not quite good enough for penetration. I was hoping to keep some on hand for when I got further along in my reboot, just to help with my confidence if the opportunity presented itself.

My doctor quit seeing patients and referred me to a new doctor.  I went in for my annual physical and since I had one tablet left, and I thought I would like to have some on hand if I needed it, I asked this new doctor to refill the prescription.  She asked me if I was married (she knows I'm divorced, so I don't know why she asked).  When I said no, she said she would not refill my prescription and that if I wanted it I'd have to see another doctor.  I was embarrassed and pretty bummed out and so I haven't done anything else to get any.

My trigger for PMO, MO, and M is simply boredom. I get bored, I want to experience the dopamine rush of orgasm and the quickest, cheapest, easiest is a mouse click away. So to battle this for me was to get a harem of women I can call and have sex with (I am single). And just rotate these women around. If I was not dating, then it would have to be some other kind of activity. So, 2heal, get busy with something that can give you the same rush as PMO. If you don't know what that is, spend your time finding it!

Thanks, Gunner.  You're right, boredom is an issue now that I'm divorced.  Getting to this point though, I think it was as Challenged said - I've been self medicating.  I always searched out porn and got off to it after a fight with the wife, stress at work, anything where I needed to relax.  PMO calmed me, relaxed me, took away the stress, made me feel good (albeit disgusted with myself).  I even did it so I could drift off to sleep quickly and soundly.  Now, probably more boredom and habit (and the drug hit).  I have, since you mentioned it, gotten back into a health kick.  Lost a ton of weight, started running, and working on a program to work out and strengthen my back - pullups.  I'm feeling good.  Now if I could just get rid of this PIED, I'd be a new man.  I'm getting more and more MW, but as all guys on here know, you can get MW and still have ED.  I'm committed now.  I jacked off maybe 4-5 times during my first 90 days of PMO, and I've cut that out as well now.  Hoping that will help move things along.

I have really been struggling today.  All I can think about is sex.  I don't know if it is boredom or if I'm really horny.  I need to find something to do to occupy myself.  I don't want to give in.  I'm not going to give in.  I'm going to push through this and not have any regrets.

Not always easy  :-\  but hanging in there feels better than giving in to those urges.

2heal said:

I need to find something to do to occupy myself.  I don't want to give in.  I'm not going to give in.  I'm going to push through this and not have any regrets.

Click to expand...

You have it in you to push through  8) Good idea to find something/s to occupy yourself with. I suggest you find something you really like and channel all your reserve energy to doing that.

I made it.  I didn't give in.  I feel good about that.  Counter up one more day.  I think I'll go work out.  Do a few pull-ups.  Go do some grocery shopping and then come back and settle in and read some success stories.  Reading through success stories and journals seems to encourage me.  I've got to work through this unsettling feeling I have.  I just have this fear, in the back of my head that says I'm never going to be back to normal again.  That for some reason this reboot will not work for me.  It's been so many years since I have had successful penetrative sex that I fear it will never return and that scares me. 

Good job 2heal. Rome wasn't built in a day. Keep the faith.