Thoughts and Musings During my Reboot. Started on Day 2 (27, PIDE)

So here's the long, twisted background to my story.

I'm 26, almost 27. And have never had a girlfriend. And was okay with not having a girlfriend (maybe I was just convincing myself of it because I thought I was unattractive and unfit to have one,) until my first trip to Japan. That's where I was egged into asking a girl on a date (even though I had less than 2 weeks until I was back in the States) and when I asked her she said yes. The date never happened, but getting a "yes" to a simple date was eye-opening and hope-igniting. This was 3 years ago, and was the first of several eye-opening moments for me, most of which happened in the last 8 months.

Suddenly I wanted a girlfriend, because I knew I could get one. I still didn't feel emotionally lonely without one; all I wanted a girlfriend for was sex. Which, of course, was because I'd watched so much porn, and the idea that I could have my own moment that was anything remotely similar to what I saw on the screen, was beyond tantalizing. I wanted it more than the world.

Of course, 3 years ago was also when the Julien Blanc video blew up on the internet, and I found myself genuinely disapproving of what he was saying. About going to Japan just to find loose girls in Roppongi who like you just because you look white, shoving their head into your crotch, taking them to a love hotel and whipping out your belt to make them submit, shit like that. (I wonder how heavily influenced Julien's mind is by porn. But I digress.)

I grew up in a Christian household, where my parents said I have the choice to do whatever I want with my body and my relationships, but also told me about "what God says is right," and it was obvious that they would be sad and disappointed if their good little boy were to stray off the righteous path. I have really been a good boy, for good reasons, all my life. No drugs, except weed after it became legal, no alcohol until I was a couple weeks away from turning 21, all that good stuff. Anyway, the one thing I did find myself okay with was the idea of having sex with a girl without being married yet. But I did respect my parents' values and morals, and had majored in Japanese in college and was planning on coming to live anyway, so the easy solution was to just not have a girlfriend until I moved out and across the ocean.

Before I ever watched porn, I had some sadistic thoughts and fantasies about ways you could cause pain or discomfort to a girl's lady parts. And I had a feeling that I was the minority in this regard, and I also thought that I was something of a monster for enjoying the thought of this. And that was a fetish that inspired many a porn search for me later in life, which led me to also start watching a lot of nonconsent porn (or consensual but with non-consensual undertones, i.e. Japanese porn,) and all of that porn, in turn, gripped my mind and became something my brain was probably too comfortable having an O to. (I'm using this as a big motivator to stop watching and fantasizing, because I don't want to reenact any of it with a girl I actually like, or hell, even a girl I don't know and am paying for, but I wonder if the reboot will make the sadism go away, when it was there before porn.)

And what Japan was to me, in the porn-poisoned recesses of my mind, was the holy land. There's no religion that is widely accepted by Japanese society telling you not to have sex. The girls make the noises during sex that drove me wild whenever I would watch J-porn. It's a male-dominated society, where train groping is a very real social issue (not that I will EVER even attempt that) and there are lots of kinds of sex industry establishments complete with a physical address and a website, that the law turns a blind eye to because they all pay their taxes. It's behind the times in terms of gender equality, but that's a-okay to the brain on J-porn. Plus, my family has no reason to ever follow me here and check up on me, so even if we talk occasionally, and even if they know I'm sexually active, I don't have to hear what they think about it every waking day. And lots of Japanese guys told me I would be really popular with the Japanese girls, and I believed it because of the "one small step" I'd made three years ago getting a "yes" to a single date.

I applied for the JET Program after I got back home (and didn't get in,) but even as a Japanese major it was super hard at first to think of any motivation to want to come to Japan when I wrote my application essay, other than sex and the idea that there was a harem of Japanese girls just waiting for me to approach them like the eloquently spoken gentleman I am (and not like Julien Blanc, I had to keep reminding myself.) I never asked a white girl out in the meantime, but didn't want to because, well, J-porn was so much more up my alley, and I wanted that to be the amazing first experience that I achieved as a man. (Come to find out that everyone's first time usually sucks anyway. Mine sure did.)

(Post-submission insert: After reading success stories on this forum, I've actually realized that, while sex is a large force behind the motives of all healthy males, there's a borderline toxic level of obsession like this that comes from watching porn. And I've since let go of that obsession. I'll let it come back once my libido comes back independent of porn.)

The weirdest part may be, that I was never attracted to Asian girls before I turned 18. Once I started watching porn, and the Japanese variety specifically sucked me in (slowly at first, my excuse being that it was just to help me study by making all the dialogue and search keywords more memorable,) I eventually became conditioned to see Asians as more attractive than white girls. That's another thing I wonder if I'll lose through the reboot. If the only value my brain sees in them is that it perceives that they can be taken advantage of and forced to orgasm whether or not they want it, like you see in so much J-porn, then that attraction might even go away after I've healed. Although I probably have simultaneously acquired a genuine taste for them visually, where I can have a normal platonic interaction with a Japanese girl and still have my brain acknowledge that she looks cute/pretty/attractive. We'll see.

WARNING: This post is about my experiences so far. It gets a little graphic, so don't feel obligated to read if you think you may be triggered. All this is just the evidence of PIDE.

So I saved up enough money to come to Japan and find a job where I could live close to Tokyo. They have the Olympics coming up, I'll have all manner of tourism and hospitality jobs available to me over the next few years in preparation, and equally as important, there are millions of people in Tokyo, meaning millions of girls. I flew over last November, the start of an unbelievable journey. And of a new chapter in my life, living on my own for the first time and also living in a foreign country for the first time.

I also had done quite a bit of research on the sex industry, because I still had never even been on a date with a girl, so there was no guarantee I'd be able to get anywhere in the 6 months I'd saved up for to job hunt. I was a virgin at age 26, and was somewhat ashamed of it, and knew there were all kinds of ways I could lose my virginity in Japan. And since there were so many ways to do it, including several that required nothing but money, I had vowed to myself that I wouldn't come back home a virgin next time I came to Japan. I wanted to keep that easy fallback open as an option, so I also saved up a few thousand dollars for the purpose of that fallback alone. And I fell onto it right away.

Day 2 in Japan. I went out drinking with some buddies, got on the train drunk, couldn't remember the way to my AirBnb after I got to my station, and got pulled into a happy ending massage. Which surprisingly was full-on sex for $100. The catch: It was a Chinese woman in her 40s. But it's sex! Who cares, right?
I was able to quite legitimately chalk this bad experience up to the fact that I'd left my condoms in my suitcase, and the one she put on me was way too small. I thought that the fact that I lost my erection was because I was drunk and jet-lagged. Which could still be true. The woman tried to finish me with her hand, but nothing happened and I went home minus 100 bucks. (Wasn't any skin off my nose at the time, but was still a bummer. And simultaneously hilarious, even to me, because now I have the best first-time story to tell.)

Day 4 in Japan. Not to let things lie where they'd fallen, I went of my own accord to a love hotel and ordered a delivery escort. Had sex with her, but couldn't finish. Lost my erection and couldn't recover for anything. She gave me fellatio, but it didn't excite me because she wasn't going deep with it like in porn. (This is the part of the story where a good friend of mine, hearing about it a week later, said that porn was probably ruining sex for me. I didn't believe him at the time.) I thought it hadn't gone well because I was nervous and maybe still jet-lagged. And maybe because it was another Chinese girl when I'd been expecting a Japanese girl.

Day 22 in Japan. I have a friend who's feeling sort of bad for me and the experiences I've had so far, so he takes me to the expensive red light district in Osaka where I'm staying. It's $400 for an hour, but you get to window shop and pick the girl you want to be with. Had sex and was unable to finish again. Actually finished at the very end, after the 5-minute warning chime, and that was from her removing my condom and giving me fellatio. The fact that it gave me an orgasm probably means it was similar to porn in some way.
This girl told me she felt bad that I wasn't able to finish from sex. I told her that she was the first girl I'd ever fingered, and it felt different from what sex had been like. And she said she'd suspected the whole time that maybe my condoms are too thick. I held onto these words with every fiber in my being, deciding in my mind that really what I needed was a girlfriend who I could get on the pill, and then everything would be okay. I still have yet to confirm or debunk this theory, but it seems fairly unlikely.

Fast forward to January 1st of 2017. Works out to be Day 60. In my mind I'm done with casual or paid sex of any kind, because it requires a condom, but I go with a friend to a place that provides/allows sensual groping. No happy ending; it just leaves you jonesing to go spend money at another kind of establishment. The girl there started licking my ears and neck, and got me plenty hard. Then she straddled me and gave me my first kiss. Yes, that's right, she was my first kiss. It might have just been her giving good service, but it's not like you go in expecting a kiss, so that was at least somewhat good for my confidence.
Then my friend takes me to a happy ending massage. This one is only a handjob. The massage is long and thorough, and at intervals the girl would stand in front of me so I could see up her short skirt. I was plenty hard and ready by the time the handjob started, but a handjob by itself wasn't arousing or exciting to me at all. I lost my erection momentarily, but then started fantasizing that she had a vibrator being pressed on her from behind, and that plus her making vocal noises as I escalated was enough to bring me to an intense orgasm. But it only happened with the fantasy there as a catalyst.

Here's the halfway point, probably a good place to wrap up this post. Doesn't involve sex, but I went to Korea mid-January and got hit on by a Korean girl at a bar one night. I took her to a hotel, but she passed out asleep as soon as we got to the room and she pushed away my advances, so I let her be. But before long she had her arm around me, and the whole night, no matter which way she turned over in her sleep, she had an arm over or around me until we woke up. This was the first time I'd ever slept together with a girl, paid or not, and it felt so good to be desired that way, even if we weren't having sex or even kissing or doing anything beyond cuddling.
In the morning, she was so hung over that all she did was lie there miserable and get up every couple hours to throw up in the bathroom. Eventually I tried petting her the same way as the night before, and she actually let me do my thing, but when I hoisted her up on top of me to invite her to start playing back, it probably gave her vertigo and she went to throw up again. So I gave up on having sex, but we did cuddle naked and she did touch me, but again, it didn't excite me very much to be touched. Anyway, I went back to my own hotel afterward with a newfound sense of confidence, and a good feeling about the future of my sex life.

WARNING: This post is about my experiences so far. It gets a little graphic, so don't feel obligated to read if you think you may be triggered. All this is just the evidence of PIDE.

And then I went to Thailand. I had originally wanted to go with a buddy of mine from back in the States, but he had car trouble and it cost him so much that he couldn't save up for the trip. So I went alone, and I had actually booked my hotel the day after the delivery escort thing, thinking I just wanted to go have as much cheap sex as I could to make up for two bad tries. I got a hotel that was a 5-minute walk from the red light district.

I paid for sex with 4 women over the course of that trip. Actually it was 5, but one of them I couldn't even get it up for. It could be because I'd drunk so much, or it could be because I had fapped myself dry the day before. At this point I was super-into studying Korean, because I'd had my little moment there and it only took a week, so I was watching what little P there is to find from Korea and reading erotic stories in Korean to "help." And the novelty of P in a new language with girls from a new country had given me dopamine rushes on a new level, so I'd been binging like you wouldn't believe in this way, the previous day.
Anyway, what also was interesting with this escort was that even if I started to get it up, she would start stroking my penis, but apply more pressure coming up toward the head than the other way around, which is the opposite of what I did when watching porn. And it made my boner go away quite rapidly. The way she was doing it makes sense to me now, knowing what sex feels like, and in the moment I knew it was probably meant to feel similar to real sex, but when I would masturbate before I knew any better, I always thought there would or should be more pressure when thrusting, because it looked that way from porn.

So after not even being able to get it up that whole night, I was a little shocked and discouraged, and I stayed away from buying any kind of sex for a good 10 days. I also tried to abstain from PMO for those 10 days, just in case, but I wasn't very motivated or able to stay away from it for very long at a time. I also started hitting the treadmill in the gym at the hotel I was staying at, wanting the next erection to be as hard as it could be. And after those 10 days I tried again with a blow job bar. Of course, I was offered full-on sex, and took it, but couldn't finish, temporarily lost my erection, that whole thing.
One thing to note here is, my favorite type of scene to finish to during PM was always when the man was entering from behind. And to this day I have not once even attempted that position (except with the girl I couldn't even get it up for) because I'm afraid I'll lose my grip on reality and start thrusting too hard for my partner to enjoy it. Anyway, probably because of that preference in porn, I've always found it hard to enjoy myself, or even to enter at times, in the missionary position. I mean, it's gotta be a psychological thing due to porn. Lack of anticipatory dopamine.
Anyway, this time she gave me fellatio to finish, but it wasn't the kind that I preferred to watch in porn. It was shallow and had a lot of hand work to it, but I somehow got a nice O from it. At the time, I was making myself get out of my head and be in the moment, taking in every last detail of what was happening, not comparing it to my expectations or what I would rather have happening. "This moment is all there is. Be in the moment."
Part of the reason it aroused me was possibly because I knew she was just doing it for money. It was a service that she was giving me, that she was bound to by the money I was promising her, and there was no way out for her. I was participating in sexploitation and enjoying it. Absolutely porn-influenced motivation.

I do remember the last girl I paid for in Thailand. She mounted me from on top, and I was watching her face and how pained it looked, which actually did help make my erection harder. She stopped in the middle and laid down for me to enter her in missionary, and that's when I lost my erection. The condom was already on, and the moment was still hot, but that's what probably stopped the train.

Then, back in Japan. Early March. I went to a bar and got "picked up" by a mature Japanese woman. She took me to another bar, where she told me about her upbringing, how her parents forbade her from having sex with men, how they tried to arrange a marriage between her and a rich man her father knew from business but she rejected the whole thing with disdain, how they told her they didn't expect her to go to college like they did her brothers, how she hates the misogyny in Japanese society in general. And I genuinely agreed with the things she had to say. In reality, I'm completely for equality between genders, and having an emotionally safe love life based on respect and consent; the fact that my sexual psychology requires that I do the opposite, but I can't bring myself to act upon it, is the problem here.
This woman is probably rebelling as an adult against all the things that constrained her as a child/young adult (kind of like me.) She is confident and comfortable with herself and her sexuality, and happens to be willing to have sex with a man the first time she meets him, if she genuinely decides she likes him. And she must like me, because she took me to karaoke for more drinks and then a love hotel. I was unable to get a full erection, and blamed that on the alcohol afterward. But we exchanged contacts and have gone out a total of 4 times. And this woman is not my girlfriend, but is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

The second time we went to a hotel, I was still unable to keep an erection, let alone penetrate. We even tried some kinds of foreplay that were extremely erotic to me in my head and that I knew should be making my dick explode, especially from her because of the way her body is, but even with an erection, that was less enjoyable than I knew it should be and I was unable to climax. I was really perplexed this time, because I hadn't been drinking at all, and it was my first time being in bed with a woman for the second time (meaning the "your mind isn't comfortable because you don't know her yet" theory I'd been told seemed less likely); and I had also told her as she was leaving the previous time, that I was single so she had my sex drive all to herself, but here I was unable to deliver on my words. But she told me that it was alright. She told me that some days are like this. She told me that it doesn't even matter if we have sex or not. It doesn't even matter if either of us has an orgasm or not, as long as it feels good. That she's never had an orgasm from sex, and doesn't really care. It absolutely blew my mind and awakened me to a reality that I felt really unfamiliar with after so much porn.
Of course, after I lost my erection the first time, we were laying there talking, and she brought up a story about someone she knows from work who is a model by profession and goes out all the time to special bars where people meet and have sex, and just thinking about that brought my erection back. Not looking at the woman I was in bed with, not feeling the sensations of her body, but envisioning her friend having sex with strangers in my head, is what successfully aroused me for more play. And the play in real life wasn't that exciting, when I knew it should have been.
One thing the woman told me this time, was that it's not like I can't get it up, so there's probably not any issue with me. I honestly wasn't sure about this, but it led to a misguided conclusion later on.

I was suspecting that I had just "emptied the tank too much" by masturbating one time without porn the day before meeting with her that second time. So the third time, when we scheduled a day to meet again, I decided I was going to do anything it took to not masturbate. But I had been having difficulties stopping the MO part, so I started googling around about fantasy. Which is when I started really reading about NoFap, and watched a bunch of videos similar to Gabe's by Universal Man. At the time I still didn't think I had PIED, but this struck me as a good practice I could use to help myself stay thirsty for the real thing. Also, I talked to my friend who had been trying to tell me porn ruins sex, and he sent me the TED talk on porn with Ran Gavrieli. That video put porn into perspective to an extent for me; I could now see how it was documented prostitution that just created and propagated a gender hierarchy where men are dominators and agressors, and that it was inorganic and the shots were composed in a contrived, unnatural way.

Anyway, there were a good 10 days I had to wait before I saw her again, and I successfully made it to the date with absolutely no PMO. Although I did fantasize and start getting erections from my fantasies, but I didn't touch myself or let them go to their conclusion. Anyway, before we met that night, she messaged me during the day saying she didn't feel very well, and wasn't really feeling up to sex, but was still willing to meet me. So I instantly gave up and masturbated to porn. But that night, we still went to a hotel together, and every single touch (still mostly me touching her) was the most amazingly arousing thing. It was like I was a teenager again. She eventually even told me to put a condom on and try to enter her, but this was the first time I was attempting this with someone I wasn't paying. I mean, maybe she would have helped me anyway if I'd asked, but either way, I wasn't quite able to enter her before the erection was gone.
But because it had gone so well, I thought I was okay and could go back to watching porn again. I figured all I needed to do was not fap for 10 days or more leading up to any given encounter, so that I could "fill up the tank" and have my libido charged up to the brim.

The fourth time, I actually entered her, but lost my erection during sex. I guess it's a significant thing to be able to say I did it, at least in Japanese society, since I lost my "amateur virginity" and can actually say I've had sex without paying for it. But that doesn't matter at all to me. I want my sexuality back.
One more observation I've made that concerns me, is that even though I've successfully had an orgasm from fellatio before (in Thailand,) I find it hard to get one when this woman is giving it to me, for no other reason (I believe) than her hair is in the way and I can't see my penis penetrating her mouth. Definitely feels like a symptom of PIED.

But I am extremely thankful to have someone like her in my life. She is okay with it if I can't stay hard for her; she just likes to be together (and I like going down on her to give her Os anyway) so I think I can keep her around until I find myself a girlfriend. In fact, this makes me feel a lot less pressure to rush and find a girlfriend and start a steady relationship, because I already have someone who is understanding and isn't going to demand that I perform like someone without PIED. She's not my girlfriend, which by definition would make her my FWB, but she's actually told me she doesn't think of me as just a FWB. Nor am I her boyfriend, but she's a free spirit who defies the hardline definitions society imposes on sexuality like that.

But yeah. When I think back to the past, I remember many occasions over the years where I've laid in bed at night, putting pressure on my penis in a unique kind of masturbation, and had an O to a fantasy without even having a proper erection first. That's the scary part. My brain can make the semen fire off without me even getting hard, given some pressure down below and the right stimulation up top in my head. The dopamine mechanism works like a super-cooled computer when I'm in my head controlling everything with no social consequences. I need it to start working when I have a real girl who I really care about in front of me.

I've been told by friends that "with a condom on, you feel so little that you may as well not be having sex," that "If you can get her on the pill, you'll never want to go back," that "I bet like, 60% of condoms don't see any spunk," and things like that. But the only condoms of mine that ever did see any, were the ones I put on for practice and masturbated to porn with. I see a correlation here, and I don't like it. So here goes my reboot.

The other day, I read a page on YBOP that I believe will really help. It can be easy after a while to stay away from porn itself, but the fantasies are the thing that can stay with you and suck you back into porn. But this is one of the quotes I read:

I'm on my 69 day thus far, and I can tell you that it only gets easier to ignore the fantasies over time.
I've had several fetishes in the past, and the earliest ones are almost completely gone from my mind as a fantasy I'd be into. It took quite a while, I've been battling the beast of PMO since mid-January, but it's been easier than ever to steer clear of them.
My advice to you is not to consciously "not think about it", cause obviously you would be thinking about it, but to think of something else whenever those thoughts come to mind.
Try thinking about nature especially - How beautiful the sun is, the green grass, the delicious meal you ate, etc.

Click to expand...

He also says it's natural to stare at female bodies in real life, but someone else said it might help things along to try not to look at real women either. Not sure which is right. It could be different for every person. But I think this quote is gonna give me the mindset I want.

I've also realized that I can have the same attitude about fantasies, especially the porn-like ones, that I do about scary imagery from a horror movie. When you've seen a really scary movie that puts you on edge for a couple days after watching it, what do you do? You rationalize things, and start looking around you to reassure yourself that you're in the same reality you were in before you watched the movie. I mean, you also tell yourself that if the villain of that movie was real then it would've killed you or come after you before you even saw the movie. But that's beside the point. When the imagery you don't like comes into your head, you snap out of your head and grab for cues in reality that tell you you're not stuck in a nightmare and that you were just imagining something. If you're really set on edge and paranoid because of the horror movie, your motivation to get rid of the imagery and begin to forget it is that it's holding you back to have it in your head at all. (Only causing unnecessary stress and maybe mild PTSD.)
In the same way, porn is holding you back. If you can snap into reality, hone in on something in nature, and tell yourself it's okay, that this is your reality and that's all there is, that the porn isn't something you want to think about because the violent, abusive behavior in it isn't who you really are... That's been making it really easy for me so far. I know it's only Day 2. But at least for me, hearing and internalizing the phrase "it only gets easier" is extremely empowering. It makes me feel like it's easier for me to dismiss the fantasies every time it happens. And lately, when I need something in nature to focus on, I'm fortunate enough that it's summer in Japan, and there are cicadas chirping all day. Those cicadas have become my best friend until the summer ends. Hence the screenname. Also, this was really good:

You ask if it's hard to continue to not PMO these days. No - it's really, really easy. My brain knows that those girls [in his former porn harem] are gone. It has accepted. It has given up trying to make me go back to them. It has moved on. Now when I'm at home, my brain knows there is nothing sexual there at all. When I go out, my brain knows there are fine women around that it might want to get with, but that the only way that anything sexual will happen is to have sex with them, because M and fantasizing at home is no longer on the menu, no longer an option.
But it took 8 weeks to get to that point. In the meantime my brain was screaming bloody murder. And sometimes it stopped screaming, but it's only so that I got used to it not screaming, so that it could shock me even better when it started screaming again.That's also why I say cut out TV. If you're at home, and a fine woman comes on the TV, your brain says "Hey! There's a girl from my harem! I guess my harem didn't disappear after all! Hummana-hummana-hummana." And you get all excited again.
Home has to be dead of women to you. Nothing there. No glimpses, no faces, no bodies, no fantasizing, no nothing. World outside: women. Your home: boring as f*ck.That's the only way your brain gets the message it needs, which is that the harem is no more. Gone.

Click to expand...

I need to go for this. To teach my brain that there is nothing sexual at home. To not turn the TV on, and to turn off the radio if they start getting onto a sexual subject.

[POSSIBLE TRIGGER ALERTS BELOW]
Knowing that I want to get rid of the sadistic side of me, which I tend to see as nothing but childish and immature to begin with, has helped me stay clear of fantasies, at least during the day. Which brings me to a question about the strategy I had just before my last relapse 6 days in. I just recently found something of a holy grail for myself (or at least my former self), which is information on the blow job bars in Japan that actually serve foreigners. I have never seen one to date, but there's a website that actually lists a few. The reason it would've been so great to know before is that you don't need a condom to go there, which is what I thought was the problem for some time. Since I haven't seen the woman from the bar in a couple months, and I won't be able to see her until at least sometime toward the end of this month, what I was originally going to do was give myself an incentive like before. A carrot to hold in front of my face to help me stay clean. A reward for every 10 days I could stay clean, which would also give me a dopamine release incurred by a real woman. I was going to go to a blow job bar on day 11 if I could rack up 10 straight days of absolutely no PMO of any kind, and repeat every 10 days. Or maybe 14, because I tend to only have weekends off.
But I think that may defeat the purpose. For me, I had the one encounter in Thailand where fellatio was enough for an orgasm, but it still happened because there were some mild dominating/socially binding tones to the whole scenario. This would be the same thing; I would have a Japanese girl doing her thing to me just like it were out of a porn. So I'm not sure if it would cure me or help at all.
I also messaged a friend today, who I was going to go to another kind of sex place with, telling him I might not want to go and listing the reasons. And one of the things he said was that sadistic stuff isn't necessarily a bad thing. Which I guess it maybe has its time and place, but I do think I need to stop relying on it and heal.
EDIT: I just now read the rules for posting and it occurred to me that even if you guys think the prostitute solution is a good answer, you aren't allowed to tell me it is or encourage it. I'll take that rule and the reasons behind it into account in my decision process.

A little bit on my last big relapse and why it was the last one EVER. (Confident thinking on Day 5)

As I watched Gabe's video on the science of porn addiction, a lot of the content I already knew from seeing a similar video on the What I've Learned channel. But pondering the idea that eventually your brain gets a heightened sensitivity to porn at the same time that its wiring toward women in real life loses priority and begins to atrophy(?) I heard Gabe say that porn will never satisfy you. And I can agree, because really it makes you wish that you could have whatever you're seeing on the screen in real life. But I had had a friend ask me how long I'd been into porn, and I remember telling him it had gotten more intense since I first came to Japan on vacation but that I'd been watching since before then. And after that pronounced increase in frequency, I remember one time when I got such an intense dopamine high from PMO right before work that I actually felt a momentary sense of satisfaction/intense sexual satiation, and walked to work with the lingering buzz from that high, feeling a total lack of stress, and I remember actually thanking the website in my mind for the delicious meal I'd just had. Those may have been my famous last words before I PMO'd myself into PIED. Or I could have already had PIED, but there was literally no way to know until I started experimenting in Japan away from my family.

After my last encounter with the Japanese woman, for the next month or so, I found a reason to not watch P; I wanted to stop MO when I was laying in bed. If I ejaculated then I could just tuck my shirt into my pants to keep the damp fabric out of contact with my skin, but it gave my PJ shorts and the bed a bad smell that I knew well enough to distinguish it from just sweat, so I had made up my mind that I just didn't want any more of that. And my mind would be filled with sexual thoughts that just led me to MO on a day where I'd watched P, but it was easier to have control when I didn't. So the motivation was, don't watch P because it'll make you M in your sleep afterward.

Then one day I was out drinking and got home to find I'd lost the key to my apartment. I have spares, but I keep them inside the apartment, so I needed to wait till the morning and have someone open the door for me. In the meantime, the thing to do in Japan when you can't get home is to sleep at an internet cafe. It's cheaper than any hotel, although you don't get a bed, just a hard reclining sofa-type piece of furniture. Anyway, the nearest one was a 15-minute walk away or so, so that was my obvious choice. And this cafe just happened to offer unlimited DVD viewing for the entirety of the time you were spending. And easily 80% of their DVDs, including all the ones right in front of your face as you walk over to the DVD area, were none other than straight-up porn. Figuring this freak accident to be a weird, twisted "aligning of the stars" or something (not that I believe in astrology,) I couldn't say no. I knew that it was a bad thing to watch P, but I figured that if there were bad consequences from P, like a relapse into addicted behaviors, then it would really help teach myself the lesson of "Don't lose your house key, dipshit." I watched three DVDs, and as I was watching I was consciously aware of everything I'd heard from Ran Gavrieli; it's documented prostitution, and everything you see is quite deliberately scripted and planned out, down to the composition of the shots. One of the DVDs didn't even appeal to me at all as I was watching, knowing just how fake, staged and contrived the images on the screen were. So I thought I was able to watch porn and see it for what it was, and that I was in control as I was watching; this was the start of a big overall relapse.

Two weeks later, my friend checks up on me and asks how the P experience has been and if I'm still cutting back. I tell him not really, and he sends me the What I've Learned video (Why Porn Changes the Brain: The Science of NoFap) and it makes me go OH SHIT. I'm not addicted but my brain is prioritizing P over real life. Time to quit again. It still seemed to me that my erection loss at go-time could be from any number of factors, but I was going to try not watching P at the same time that I experimented with all the other possible solutions.

A little over a month ago, I was out partying with this Japanese guy who'd been my wingman in the effort to meet the chicks. I was pretty convinced that he had it in his head we were looking for as many ONS as we could get, but I wasn't. I wanted a girlfriend so I could work out whatever mental block there may be. (If P was the root of the problem, having a girlfriend was going to really help motivate me to quit.) I told him what was on my mind, and a little bit about my past, and he said that he also was never able to climax with his first girlfriend, but through experience, he got comfortable enough that after they broke up and he had another girlfriend, he was able to finish. And that from that point on he could O from sex with anyone he wanted to. So I still didn't think I had PIED, but rather needed to have a true monogamous relationship for a while in order to get over this barrier I perceived.

Then, two weeks ago.  I had been on a date with a girl from Tinder earlier in the week, not a ONS but a real date where we just went to a cafe to become friends and take it slow from there, and we had exchanged real contacts at the end of the date, so I was looking forward to the possibility of finally having true love.
Then, of course, I find myself getting a case of P-search curiosity, and I sit there edging to P for at least a good hour, and at the end of it all I O really hard to this really sadistic video. And if that weren't bad enough, I get the urge to go back 10 minutes later to the exact same video for another hit. I could literally see the patterns described in the What I've Learned video playing out before my eyes (i.e. the brain screaming, "Hurry up and do the behavior so we can get the reward stimulus!") and like Universal Man has said in a video, I saw myself getting overwhelmed by the tide of the rapids, able to struggle but getting pulled by the "want" mechanism so hard that I could hardly stop myself. At the end, I felt myself sitting there with an extreme high, but that high actually distressed me. I realized I'd just fallen back into the old behavior pattern of watching P without rationally seeing it for what it was, and to make it worse, the fantasy on the screen that I'd had my PMO to was the polar opposite of the tender, loving relationship I was hoping for with this girl I liked.

That high lasted in its intensity in the same way it had years ago, and in the exact same way, I almost felt compelled to thank the makers of the video for creating and posting it on the internet. It felt like I was so hooked that there was no hope. The monster was within me, in fact it WAS me, and no matter how much I wanted to quit, I was programmed by nature's priorities through dopamine to want sexual satisfaction more than I wanted to quit. I had to deliberate in my head throughout the day, even into the evening, over which was more important to me, reality or fantasy; whether I wanted to give up on real life and stay married to the unrealistic sadistic fantasies of P, since real life had let me down so badly, or whether I wanted to keep going and have the love-driven moment I always wanted. I already knew that P just made you want the real thing that much worse, so to give up the real thing would leave me in a neverending cycle of unfulfilled desire. And to me, getting over that "first-O barrier" (not getting over PIED) was going to be the thing that gave me free license to reign and do as I wished (meaning casual sex if I so desired,) but first I needed to get rid of the unrealistic, sadistic thoughts that were in me.

And I wrote a bunch of words of caution and encouragement to myself in big letters (with my hands half shaking from the high, coupled with the panic of feeling trapped in a behavioral cycle) on these 8.5x11" pieces of paper and taped them on my wall. Some of them I've taken down because they were distress calls and made the task of quitting sound impossible, but most of them I've left up. I don't even look at them anymore, but they're a reminder to me of the day that I found myself so distressed, so torn, hating porn so much but realizing how easy it was going to be to get triggered.

I also have taken TV out of the equation, because my last relapse started with a scene in a drama one night, that triggered a slow escalation from fantasizing but no M in my sleep into complete MO the next morning to photos of the lead actress as a P-sub. That was 6 days into that particular streak, and since I'd failed and broken the streak, I figured it gave me an excuse to do one last round of PMO since the counter was going to be reset anyway. And the P was unappealing to me in a way by this point. I actually found myself empathizing with the women who were having these things done to them, and that was enough to keep me off of P for a while.

Then I watched the "Did Porn Cause My Erectile Dysfunction? Take the TEST!" video, and realized I did have a problem. Sensation itself has been insufficient in the past to arouse me at all, and right now it still is. And almost immediately I felt I wanted an outlet where I could write my story and talk about everything related to sex and PIED safely. And here I am.

This is something I've always thought about from time to time, and I just did a little bit of calculation.

On day 150 of my reboot, I will be 10,000 days old. Kind of makes it a double milestone.

Day 6. I have now matched the length of my last streak. And I've shaken hands with the chaser effect.

I'm glad I thought this part out so I could prepare myself mentally for it. I'm going in ready to have zero expectations or fantasies about the future, and also to not ever revel in the memories of past sexual experiences as they come, even if they just happened. Until the DE is completely reversed, anyway. I know the chaser effect is a thing, so I'm going in bracing for it in advance.

And I was just tested in a very mild way. This girl I met months ago at a Japanese-style pub, but who I haven't seen at all since, was there again last night. And at the end of the night it was just me and her sitting at the counter, and she said she'd missed her last train back home, but we figured out that my apartment is really close to her parents' house. So she escorted me all the way home, grabbing some more drinks from the convenience store along the way, and when we got to my place she said she was about to pass out asleep and wasn't sure if she could make it back home, and that she hated going to her parents' house, so I invited her in and she stayed the night.

Nothing happened, but we did lie on the floor together and at one point she lay there crying into my shoulder as I held her and assured her everything was okay. (She has a lot going on, including a persistent stalker ex.) And not that this is significant, since I've already had success in getting an erection and penetrating a partner in the recent past, but I felt myself starting to go hard just from holding her there in my arms. Not completely hard, but it was something. I think this is positive reinforcement, since it was more of an emotional gesture than a sexual one but I still felt myself becoming aroused because I'm so attracted to her. (I can't tell you how much I wanted to pull her head away and kiss her, but she's also so much shorter than me it would take a lot of unnatural movement to achieve.)

After that, there wasn't any physical contact between us, but the fantasies started trickling in and I held them off. I didn't sleep very well, not because of the fantasies but because we had the back door open and the sun always wakes me up, meaning I found myself laying awake and staring at her body a lot. I would do my typical "Reality check, there are no girls around" thing, only to find the drop-dead gorgeous face and body of this girl sleeping right in front of me. Anyway, after she left (with my phone number) I put my eye mask on and got a nice full cycle of sleep in my bed. The thoughts kept coming at intervals as I slept alone, and this girl is so attractive and her memory was so fresh that it was a little harder to discipline myself away from the fantasies than before, especially because they were relatively innocent and "vanilla." But I knew I needed to. And the streak continues unbroken.

I guess the gist of this story is that last night gave me some good mental practice.
I also really hope something blossoms on a personal level between us, but that's better left to its own devices.

Day 7.
I was just talking to my older brother about the reboot, and when I asked him to experiment for me, it turned out that sure enough, he's healthy enough that his own touch can give him an erection and a climax. And I was explaining that at this phase I don't even have enough libido in the absence of porn/fantasy go get hard from my own touch, and in the process it made me remember that at one point I thought it was a good thing to have no libido in real life. I thought that having no sex drive meant I wasn't a public menace. Of course now I've been introduced to the idea that true love can be mine, and I'm ready to start looking for it at the same time that I reboot.

Man, what an idiot I was. At least the brain is a plastic organ, right?

End of day 7.
I got an email from a friend of mine who has my secondary email address, which he sent it to, and while I was looking at the inbox for that account for the first time in a long time, it made me realize I should delete the accounts I had for P and P-sub sites. So I did. My old favorite site even had a questionnaire for people leaving, asking the reason why you're deleting your account (Video resolution not good enough, downloads too slow, can't find the video you're looking for, etc... "Other") and I actually wrote a little blurb to let them know my sex life had been influenced negatively by porn on not just their site but the entire internet, and that I had made a personal decision to stop watching P and P subs.

It kind of sucked having to go to the websites in order to delete my account. I had images turned off in Chrome, but a couple of the sites had buttons that were images, so I couldn't see what I was doing without turning images on again. Luckily I didn't get triggered. There was even one site that had a video that autoplayed when the page loaded, so it wasn't turned off by my Chrome settings. I put my hand up in front of the video to block it as I was looking around for the account settings button. And the short snippet that I saw didn't trigger me.

I couldn't find any way to delete my account on this particular site, but they had an email address for the owner of the site, who is also the guy shooting the videos on that site, so I shot him an email too, explaining that I had PIED and needed to quit, and asking how to go about deleting my account.
I feel like the people making, uploading and providing services for porn need to know that they're losing a certain amount of their clientele who have PIED but who have enough steel resolve to reboot.

Can't sleep. I'm not having insomnia but maybe I'm just having shallow sleep, or just bad luck, because I keep getting fucking woken up by a mosquito buzzing by my ear before I can properly doze off. It's been happening since a few nights ago and it's making me furious. I thought it was just one, because I killed one during the day the other day and slept fine last night, but there's another one on the loose. I know it just means I need to buy a mosquito trap, but now I've caught a cold due to both the change in weather and my inability to catch a fucking pair of sleep cycles.

It has no immediate effect on my reboot, i.e. it's not making it any harder to resist relapsing, but I'm pretty sure lack of sleep is going to retard any change in the brain, so it might be adding a day or two onto the overall time it's going to take. Not that that matters, because it's a patience game and I have no idea when to expect my breakthrough. But also now when I pop into the moment and take in everything through my senses, I have this nice feeling of nasal congestion to take in along with it.

Fucking mosquito needs to die.

EDIT: Finally found and killed it, only to go back to sleep and hear the birds chirping outside. FUCK.
I'm still buying a mosquito trap. I have a newfound hatred for the fuckers.

Day 8. I feel like there's almost no way I'm not going to make it through the day because 8 is my lucky number.

I actually ended up sleeping for a whole 7 hours after I dispatched that mosquito.

In the past, if I had porn-like thoughts in my sleep, they almost always came as I was going to bed, and were all either conscious fantasies or involuntary flashbacks that I then grabbed onto and played to their conclusion in my head.
Today just before I woke up, I had a dream that was relevant to my fetish. It wasn't a flashback, but it probably was a varied imitation of some scene I've seen in P. I can say with a fair amount of certainty it wasn't voluntary, and I was also just deep enough under that I wasn't aware I was having a sexual fantasy and ought to snap out of it. Of course, there was absolutely no MO, but I woke up and realized that had been the last thing playing through my mind in my sleep. My D was awoken out of flatline, but even that was probably at 20-40%. I wouldn't call it morning wood by any definition.

Thinking about the scene I had just created in my mind did start to make me get hard again, and there was a brief struggle against the pull to let the thought stay in my head. But I used my horror analogy and figured it was like I'd had a nightmare before waking up, and I should do the same things to let it pass, meaning go about my day and make myself busy and get immersed in reality again. Although I don't have any plans all day and still have this cold, so I'm gonna be staying home. In my boring house with no women, that is. Don't you forget it, brain.

To borrow my horror movie thing again, I guess this would be like if you'd been keeping your mind occupied to get scary imagery from a movie out of your head, only to find yourself having a nightmare about the movie just before you woke up one day. It just means you have to keep moving on and teaching your brain that it's not there in reality, and let it slowly forget.

Although the other day, I did recount some parts of my Japan/Thailand story to a group of friends, and the idea that I have tendencies toward S and M came up in conversation but I didn't tell them I'd been predisposed to liking it since before porn. But when I told them about the experience with the last escort in Thailand and how the look of pain on her face made it easier to stay hard, someone said they definitely felt there was an inherent disposition for sadism inside me and that maybe I should search for partners in a local SM community. Of course, another person present said exactly what my friend who's been saving me from P said, which is that I should reboot and have normal sexual relations first, and then maybe explore that side of myself. Which my gut completely agrees with.

I was just saying all this to entertain the idea that maybe I had that dream because it's inherently in me to enjoy thoughts related to that fetish, but on the other hand, that argument doesn't hold much water. If it was 100% all me then I would probably still be having the fantasies that I had before P. This dream, like I said, was essentially a varied imitation of something I saw in the last couple months in P.
I guess the best thing I can do is to not give my brain the satisfaction of getting an O from its favorite memories of P, and to not feed it any more P to flash back to. I'd rather it flatline than be so receptive to the fetishes it's come to hardwire its reward circuits to.

I started to have more thoughts and new self-made fetish fantasies come my way earlier on today, and I stopped and realized that that may have happened because I'd begun to entertain the thought that maybe it's okay for that fetish to excite me because it's an innate part of me, and that maybe someday I might end up actually exploring it, which made the fantasies not seem like fantasies anymore, but rather blueprints for a possible future thing to do. (APPEND: This also reminds me of the phenomenon that goes on with that scary scene in a horror movie. When suddenly your brain has a reason to be like, "It could actually happen, though, couldn't it?")

We're still good. The streak is still going on unbroken.
The moment is gone, and now I'm so glad I didn't cave in. I've come back down to earth and it's completely clear that there was nothing realistic and everything fantastical about what my brain was trying to play through earlier.

Back when I had my big awakening to reality by my fwb+, I guess I'll start calling her, I opened up about literally everything that had happened. That I had bought several escorts but had never had sex without paying for it, that I had never been able to finish from sex, that I was thinking maybe I only respond sexually to cues that porn has conditioned me to, all of that. I think I may have said something about having to use my imagination during the massage on New Year's, and in response (to that or something else) she said "Imagination is important."

Maybe so. But not in the way it was happening earlier today.
I can let my imagination run buck wild after I reboot and get free of this dependence on the wrong shit.

I had a moment today of looking inside and reminding myself of who I really am, not who I am in my fantasies.

There was a guy I was going go to Meetups with for a little while in order to meet girls (I wrote about him in the post about my last relapse ever,) but he and I didn't really see eye to eye on our objective or the way we went about getting it. He just wanted to get close enough to lay as many girls as he could, but I've been looking for a real, steady relationship. Needless to say, I'm done partying with him.

But there was one girl we met who I liked, but who ended up hanging out with the other guy for a while. And today she asked me to have dinner and ask me about something that was troubling her, which turned out to be the other guy. She suspected he'd been playing her, and I told her I didn't know for sure, but knowing the guy, she was probably right. I came out and told her everything about the nature of him and me going to parties and Meetups, and the stuff I didn't really appreciate myself about his attitude toward women.

And she said it sort of made her sad, but she was glad she'd asked me. And said she could tell I'm a trustworthy guy. And that she somehow always falls for the bad boys, and feels like she's going to have an even harder time trusting men after this. Well, I didn't feel like having a damsel in emotional distress in front of me automatically gave me license to be Mr. Knight in shining armor, so I could sort of feel myself retracting slightly into my shell as we hung out the rest of the night, and so I'm pretty sure that could be the last I see of her, as much as I kind of wanted to keep a friendship going and let things maybe go farther from there.

But as I was walking home, I found myself counting the number of girls I know who are in emotional pain of some kind who I would love nothing more than to be the one good guy she found and wipe those tears away. I know, it's probably a male instinct that we all have. But it just confirmed that in reality, I really don't want to hurt anyone; I want the opposite. I want tender love in its most loving form. I don't even WANT that thing porn sent me on a wild goose chase for anymore.
And I edited this into my very first post earlier on today too, but after reading success stories from this forum, I sure as hell am done obsessing over sex and orgasm as the end-all, be-all thing I'm here in Japan for.

Today is day 0 again, but I didn't relapse to porn.

Although it was to flashbacks of porn. But I had a somewhat rational reason to want to deliberately fantasize and confirm my liking for the fetishes I have.
Even if there was a reason, though, in the end I noticed that the negative things about MO this time had been that A) the scenes I'd been playing back in my head were in third person, and B) toward the end I had been changing around through different memories until I hit one that made the O happen. It was like internet P surfing but in my head. I don't know if I remember ever doing that before in my sleep, though.

I'd had a nice, long chat with a friend of mine who is very open to talk about sex, and who never knew PIED was a thing until I told him about it and had him read my story. He could see my side of the story, and acknowledges that getting no morning wood in years is a red flag, but also said he saw me not communicating what I wanted to any of these women.

[TRIGGER ALERT FROM HERE ON DOWN.]
According to him, if you tell a woman you're into rough sex up front rather than just going for it out of nowhere like you see in porn, a shocking number of women are actually into it. In my mind, escorts are different because it's more difficult for them to be physically ready, as in to get wet or let their vagina umbrella, for someone they don't know personally. I mean, I guess the same could be argued for women in a ONS who aren't doing it for money, but at least they have a say in who they choose as their partner. But I do see how I could at least communicate the things that I liked seeing in porn to my FWB and see if she's willing to try them. In fact, there are some things we did try, that my ED still got in the way of enjoying, and some things that she agreed to do the next time but that I took back after seeing Ran Gavrieli talk and getting it in my head that everything I had seen and learned from porn was negative and degrading. My friend suggests there's some gray area for exploration, as long as it's consenting and communicated.

That being said, I felt like I'd been saying no to my fetishes, understandably so because I don't want to have to rely on them to enjoy a sexual encounter, but that attitude had been challenged by my friend. He made me realize that I had been taking the "Don't let porn make you think that sex is about being rough" idea as an absolute, when it's not the case. Sure, it should primarily be about tenderness, but it can have a little bit of rough time at the very end, given the right communication and consent. According to him, I could embrace my fetishes and be ready to explore them a bit after my reboot. Maybe it was because I'd gotten so good at dismissing even fantasy in my head, but I found myself able to talk in vivid detail about some of the porn videos I had watched without getting triggered, which actually was starting to concern me as we talked, because I thought I might even be in a process of losing an affinity for everything I associated with porn, when here I was being told that maybe there was some hope for a successful encounter for me in the meantime, based on what does work for me from porn, even before I got re-sensitized both to reality and to some tamer forms of play. (Again, I had told my friend that in hindsight, stopping my M momentarily to de-escalate whenever they were in the missionary position so I could O to a more worthwhile scene was a TERRIBLE habit because it conditioned me in a negative way in reality. But he said it might be possible to work with what I do have, and that I ought to try entering from behind next time and not be afraid of going too hard, as long as there was communication.)

So I was thinking maybe I ought to work with what I've got, as far as the things that do and don't excite me. Of course, then the argument arises again that I've actually tried some things like dry humping (or "labia grinding" as my friend calls it) that in all rights should be taking me straight to O without a moment's hesitation, but something in my head (probably down-regulated dopamine receptors) kept me from actually enjoying the sensations. Meaning that no matter what I do experiment with, even if it's the kind of play I love from porn, it's going to require a reboot before I can do it.

But as a way of saying to myself, "Okay, I take it back, it's not necessarily bad to like those things," I found myself having a little flashback session. And afterward realized that it probably hadn't been a good idea. It's just prolonging the reboot.

Luckily I don't feel any urges to PMO. I will never give in to that kind of curiosity again.

I tied my record of 10 days, but didn't beat it. At least this time it felt a lot easier. Maybe having a reward to look forward to was actually making it harder to stay clean before. With no plans on my mind and with no reason to obsess about sex, it felt surprisingly effortless to keep "hard mode" going for the last 10 days.

Day 1.

Kind of ironic that the streak that finally goes unbroken should start on my 27th birthday.
Because this will be the streak. It will never end. I mean, my P-free streak technically hasn't stopped since I started my journal. And never will.
Of course I technically haven't lived 27 years yet. The date hasn't changed to my birthday back where I was born yet. But as far as local time is concerned I'm 27.

After feeling the need for a change of mindset yesterday, I changed my mind back again afterward. There's no way I'm going to be able to succeed if I keep thinking about quick fixes or ways around a reboot. I thought about it, and there's really no way to get around PIED except getting rid of your PIED. I mean, sure, my friend's advice about communicating what does and doesn't work for me now might help a little in the rewiring process, but I can't change my stance toward the fantasies that porn fixed my mind onto without it inevitably leading to a relapse at some point. And relapse is not an option.
Porn is not an option.

I'm now using Gabe's gunshot metaphor to keep things in perspective.

First of all, it doesn't matter what my sexual likes and dislikes may be after the reboot, as long as I can make the reboot happen.

But really, a gunshot isn't going to suddenly be inaudible after tinnitus goes away. If my dopamine receptors get sensitive enough again that I can stay aroused and enjoy good old-fashioned sex, chances are that everything (in terms of play) that I like now will still excite me just as much then.

And on top of it, doing it with a real woman will excite me.

Patience and perseverance. I have them both.

Day 2.
Still kind of feeling down on myself about breaking the last streak. I feel like my resolve has been broken, even though I'm confident I'm going to make it this time around. It feels like I betrayed myself in a way, introducing a "member of the old harem" back in, to borrow a concept from that post quoted on YBOP. And now it's hard to convince my brain that home is a boring place with nothing sexual in it anymore. It's going to take a couple days to make it forget the fantasy and accept that idea again.
I started from my first non-background-story post and read everything up until now, to reinforce the mindset driving my reboot and re-center myself.
It's been hard to even do that, when some of the friends I tell about my PIED come back and say that they think it's not because of porn. They say it's just inexperience, but in my mind I know that no amount of inexperience is going to make me unable to climax from my absolute favorite foreplay. Some messages out there in the media, not just my friends, say it's healthy to masturbate. I'm sure it is, but my imagination has been hijacked by porn, so right now it's an unhealthy thing for me.

The night of the eve of my birthday, there was an older woman at the pub who was saying that the guys who can talk slick are the ones that get the ladies, and how the ladies are naturally drawn to the bad boys because of the excitement, and the good boys just can't compete with that. It made me feel like a beta male, made me feel like the creed driving my reboot is lining me up for ultimate failure as a male. Man, my motives and my very walk itself have been questioned so hard that I just have to keep clinging to what I know. I have DE, but it goes away when I watch porn, so I have to reboot. I want a 450-day streak, starting now.

I'm having the same kind of freakout I had after the relapse that broke the camel's back and made me write all those messages to myself that I have on the wall. I'm feeling like a monster, like my brain is ready to pop a boner and start secreting the dopamine at the slightest mention of a fantasy, like it's going to take a while just to get back into flatline, which flatline is actually somewhat comfortable and reassuring in its own ironic way knowing it means the brain has given up on screaming for its next hit from fantasy land. I'm feeling impatient to be healed, impatient to have a girlfriend, scared because I know that kind of impatience and lack of confidence makes it harder to find one, impatient to see my fwb+ again and do some rewiring, impatient for myself to calm the fuck down and regroup. I think I just need to go for a run. I'm feeling better physically and the cold I had is pretty much gone. I think I can manage a run, just to prove to myself that I have the discipline and endurance to handle long periods of intense physical and mental trial without stopping, when there's no reason not to stop other than the fact that inside of me I don't want to stop. I've done it many times before, and I'll do it again.

Cut the fantasy short before it can make you even anticipate the pleasure it will bring. That's the name of the game. It only gets easier. Gotta remember that.
I think I need to go into town and hang out with people again today. That's my saving grace.

It could just be related to having a new appreciation for beautiful things that have something to offer at face value and not sex/fantasy value, but I have just about never watched porn of a girl in a yukata gown, and I'm starting to notice how pretty the girls look in them since I started my reboot.
I'm also remembering that my non-P relapse was a double-header just like last time. I MO'd in my sleep, then again when I woke up because I'd already reset the counter. Probably a bad practice. It's just providing frequency to the reward circuit whenever a relapse happens. I feel like I'm already feeling the consequences in the form of a little more difficulty subduing the urges than last time. Or again, maybe that's just from feeling discouraged because my counter got reset.

Day 3.
Finally (re-)realized some fundamental aspects of the very mindset that was driving pleasure in my old porn habits that are unrealistic, and can't be brought into reality without essentially having the girl agree to be a sex object every time we go to be intimate.

I messaged my "devil's advocate" friend, we'll call him, about it. I know he has the absolute best of intentions and doesn't want me to miss out on great sex for the simple reason that I'm afraid to explore my sexual tastes. But at the same time, even entertaining the thought that given the right communication and consent, my fantasies could actually be a reality someday, makes it really hard not to fap in anticipation. Which is what I told him.

In the middle of writing a whole schpiel about this, I was about to mention that there may have been some fantasies I had before porn that were objectifying or involved coercion and non-consent, but I also realized that I didn't know which ones I had before or after I started watching porn. Either way, I started describing some of the fantasies I had in order to make a point, but just writing about them started to trigger me and make me go hard, and I felt the urge to whip it out and M. Which I resisted the urge and the moment passed, and I realized I just need to stop explaining myself and the reasons behind giving up PMO to my friend, because it was just making me think about the fantasies that much more. Of course, then I went to the bathroom to piss and found pre-cum seeping out from before. That was a really close call. Of course, now I have a victory to go on. I have a tally on the scoreboard to shove in my brain's face. It tried to get me to MO but it failed. And it's going to fail every time from now on. Now I have no reason at all to feel like it's okay to indulge in the thoughts that got me into this pathetic situation.

Day 4.

I had to go off on a little rant to my "devil's advocate friend." Here's what I wrote to him.

One more thing: I've had every intention of exploring all the stuff I like (maybe not pain because you can't bank on meeting someone who's into {hardcore SM}) from the very beginning, just after I figure out what I'm doing/how to get myself to cum from sex in general. I get that maybe I ought to be exploring stuff now, but my logic is, you'd also think that sticking it into a vagina in any position would be enough to trigger an O, or at least once you've tried it about 4 times with different partners. My next step, before you even said anything {about being afraid to communicate and tell her what I like,} or before I figured out I have PIDE, was actually going to be trying out different positions with the fwb+, while I look for a girlfriend so I could REALLY experiment with different positions, costumes, alternative contraception and whatnot.

I do think you were right about one thing though. I'd figured after watching so much porn, that thrusting super hard was just a natural progression that happened at the end of sex, as in, you start slow and let your feeding frenzy build as it starts to feel good, until you're pumping so hard and fast that you cum... without letting her know that's what you want to do. And it was probably reinforced by seeing the girl {have a positive reaction to all this}. But then you get the message from people in reality saying "Don't default to {imitating what you see in porn,}" and it left me completely confused as to how I should be going about sex. And thinking I should err on the side of being gentle since I'm so, you know, big. {Insert: I'm aware this last bit is completely and utterly irrelevant, hence why I've never mentioned it on the forum and will never mention it again. Perhaps the only time it will ever matter is if you're with an escort, in which case I've heard it's better not to be big.}

Again, now I know it's okay to try different things, but I can guarantee you that virtually nothing is going to work if {my favorite foreplay} didn't work irl. They say that after you reboot, sensations to your dick will start to be enough to drive you crazy. And that's what I think the missing piece is. Well, that and the obvious unreceptiveness to real-life stimuli because my brain is too wired to porn. Or I guess the two are one and the same thing.

And giving her what she wants first is a moot point, if my dick goes limp when it's not constantly getting what I want. Which has been the case in experience.

Or hell, even if my dick IS getting what I want. And here we start talking in circles...
I probably have been talking in circles a bit anyway.

I just feel like the reboot isn't going to work if my brain has ANY reason to think it doesn't need to give up porn and fantasy. We're talking about the strongest drive that can possibly motivate the reward circuit, and we have to shut down the routine it's most comfortable with. You can't give it any holes or it WILL find a way to get what it wants. No duct-taped oven mitt can keep its hand covered, to borrow the stroke patient metaphor. It literally has to be, "I don't want to use my left hand to eat this cereal, even though I know I can. Come on, right hand, move."

The object is to take advantage of plasticity and change the brain. The greater the change, I feel, the better. I look at guys like Gabe Deem who recovered from rock bottom and have only gotten better and better after years of no masturbation at all. And I know that I've gotten so messed up that that's the only solution for me. I know that masturbation is supposed to be healthy, but when it's caused wiring of a negative nature, it has to stop. I feel like I need to commit so strongly that I tell myself I'd rather die without ever having another orgasm as long as I live, than masturbate and fall back into the old pattern.

Don't get me wrong. Even the guy who told me porn was ruining sex for me and that I should try stopping, even he tells me I should experiment with that S&M/fetish side of me in the bedroom, after I get used to a normal sexual relationship. Which means forgetting this BS script that porn has programmed me to, involving embarrassment, {violent sex with a lack of communication,} and the act of sex necessarily ending in a male orgasm. Which maybe it does end that way a lot irl, but it has become the goal in a toxicly consuming way, and my body doesn't know how to react to tenderness and emotion. Gotta unlearn porn and learn that, for the first time, before I can even take the great advice you've given me.

Click to expand...

And my friend responded:
"Sounds like a lot of work. I'm really proud of you for having that vision though. Without that fire and dream, you won't get there. Just gotta keep fighting"

Feels like I'm back on the horse now. Ready to never go back to fantasyland as long as I live. It feels like my reboot just truly started again today.
But it's day 4 with no relapse.
Here's to knowing it's gonna turn into day 40, and then day 400. Just gotta keep trucking.