Also, porn is a chameleon. You have favorites, you have categories, a lot of us go to places that are far, far, away from what we would consider our natural, healthy sexual taste or orientation. You have to understand that "porn" is just a button we push to get a dopamine high. Once those early porn pathways are desensitized, we look for new, novel, different pathways, leading us father and father away from who we were in the beginning. When quitting porn, though, we will trigger on almost anything. Porn addiction can be starved to death, but when quitting, the addiction is willing to be fed by almost anything. No matter how hardcore your porn addiction became at the end, when quitting a Victoria Secret's layout will trigger you. You have to avoid the chameleon, it is just your dopamine soaked brain trying to talk to you, whisper in your year, that you must relapse. In fact, you must NOT relapse. Porn is not just porn for the addict quitting porn, it is any sexual imagery that sets off dopamine release. Porn is seeing it, watching it, perceiving it, hearing it, thinking of it, imagining it, remembering it. It is having an orgasm while thinking of it, whether with a partner or during MO. It is edging. It is PMOing. It is using porn substitutes like chat rooms or soft core imagery that triggers a dopamine release.
A relapse is slipping back into the behavior you observed while addicted. There's no doubt that images you find explicit will trigger that little dopamine rush and may cause your recovery to take a little longer, but they won't set you back, and with 30 days PMO free, there's no way anyone can argue you haven't made great progress. So no, you haven't relapsed. I think these sorts of triggers are IMPOSSIBLE to avoid in today's modern life, but if you turn the other cheek, hide the trigger, ignore it then you've done the right thing, letting your limbic system no that there's no way to get rewards here. Eventually your reboot will be a success Correct me if I'm wrong here, people! :p
@ tien, thank you. The first thing I would say, in response to your post is, not everyone is a porn addict. Not everyone who watches porn is addicted to it or is going to become addicted to it. While delayed ejaculation and erectile dysfunction are often noted as problem for porn addicts, and symptoms of the problem, premature ejaculation, not so much. I don't personally feel PE is a symptom of porn addiction because I experienced PE before becoming addicted, so it can certainly happen to people who are not porn addicts. I think taking porn addiction totally serious is helpful to one who is addicted and who is quitting. That said, a sense of humor has its place. Gallows humor I suppose. I don't know much about sex problems, I know quite a bit about porn problems, but I will give you some sex advice which you can take or not. When I had PE I came up with the "making spaghetti" solution. When I began to have sex I would think about making spaghetti. Not very romantic but this is a solution. In my mind I would go to the kitchen, I would open the cupboards, and I would see I was out of the ingredients. I would make a mental list of what I needed, then (all in my head) I would walk out to the car, drive to the grocery, go in, go through the aisles, find the ingredients, go to the check out, pay, get in the car, drive back home. That whole trip took me about 20 minutes. If by that time I still needed more time I could always cook the meal and serve it so to speak. This sounds ridiculous, I know, and it is, but after I developed that method I always had a distraction in my head I could use to avoid PE. I even sometimes still use it. You might try it for a laugh.
There is still one thing that I don't understand : if you are one year-365 days(!) clean and free of this addiction, why do you say that posting here is part of your recovery? Isn't your recovery over?
I think in all the years Ive been dealing with this problem this is without a doubt one of THE best threads Ive seen.Thank you William. The time and effort you put into this thread has literally changed my life!