My story of dealing with severe AGP from porn addiction.

[hooked on monkey fonics]

This is a very long read and it’s definitely not the usual story you have heard, so I urge you to read carefully if this interests you.

I have been struggling with AGP since I was a child (developed between 5-10 years old). Before I get into that, I should explain what AGP is since I doubt anyone here is familiar.

AGP is autogynephilia - the sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as a woman. It typically manifests as crossdressing, feminization, and sissy fetishes.

Now, this is a very complex topic that is still poorly understood. This is because the trans communities lobby against AGP research because it's "transphobic" (despite the fact that the majority of MtF transsexuals have AGP). If you want to know more about this, the best place I would suggest checking out is /r/itsafetish subreddit to see it in action.

Anyway, AGP is considered a paraphilia (basically a super-fetish that significantly disrupts daily life, pedophilia is considered a paraphilia, for  instance) and it's much more complex and common than people realize.

You may have guessed that porn only reinforces AGP to the extent that it completely takes over people lives. I actually have strong reason to believe that porn is the primary cause of the "gender dysphoria" trans movement...but that's another discussion. I want to make this clear that this is not a political topic and I am NOT confused about my gender or sexuality. But in order to understand my problem I needed to make this clear.

AGP is incredibly self-destructive addiction that ruins lives. I view it as a parasitic invader that creates a psuedo-feminine narcissistic monster in your head; eventually taking you over completely. It’s based on a very warped idea of female sexuality (aka porn).

---

The beginnings:

When I was about 5 years old I went to a shoestore. I was wearing flip flops, so the saleslady brought out nylon stockings for me to put on for sanitary reasons so I could try on shoes. A child’s mind is extremely vulnerable to imprinting like this. Paraphilias, in general, are suspected to be caused from imprinting experiences like this (children who get molested often grow up to be pedophilic themselves, for instance)

Logically it made sense: Ladies legs in stockings are sexy and so by putting them on, the idea of wearing women’s clothes became sexy.

I remember being around 9 or 10 years old and fantasizing about my female classmates tying me to a chair and forcing me to wear a dress, wig, etc. This preceded my porn use, and so that can speak to you about how powerful this is.

But of course, I was a severe porn addict for my entire adolescence starting around age 11. As you may have guessed, this only strengthened the already powerful AGP obsession to a supranormal level.                                                               

I started with out with solo/lesbian porn. With no male as a reference point, I associated with the female body, her moans and pleasure, as my own. It was a rewiring error. In fact, AGP men have been suggested to be extremely empathetic and overly moralistic towards woman, to the point that they’d rather objectify themselves than woman. But I kind of question this, I think it’s more pseudo-morality and pseudo-empathy, AGP men are simply objectifying female clothes/behaviors in order to project themselves in that role. Anyway, I digress.

The next genre was anal sex, at which point I was consciously imagining myself as the girl getting fucked rather than the guy fucking the girl. Then I went to shemale/sissy porn which was the breaking point for me for obvious reasons – a perfect representation of my AGP desires.

---

Going down the rabbit hole:

Starting in late 2014, I began going deep down the AGP rabbit hole. I bought tons of female clothes, toys, and recorded tons of photos and videos of myself that I posted online. My content easily accumulated tens of millions of views over the years. I literally became porn, my very own content served as my ultimate fantasy.

I developed an intensely narcissistic “feminine” persona that was fueled from all the validation and attention. Here’s the craziest part: after all of it, I did not like getting attention from men, especially gay/bi men. I craved attention from woman, and desperately wanted to find one who would partake in this fantasy with me. Occasionally I did get woman who were into it and wanted to meet me, but it never ended up happening.

Near the end I actually ended up posting on /r/gonewild almost exclusively because it felt more validating to get attention from straight men and lesbian woman who were unaware I was a man… this shit goes deep, I’m telling you.

Only recently did I put a lid on all of this. At the very beginning of 2018, I deleted all my content and purged all my crossdressing/sissy items. And boy, that was a huge stepping stone. I can’t even begin to describe how hard it was to do all that.

I had reached a 4 month streak of no PMO (my longest yet). I thought I was on the path to recovery. Without going into the specifics, by the fall of 2018, I started the process all over again - mainly due to severe relapses in the summertime and work/life stress.

I reordered a bunch of clothes/sex toys/etc, recorded myself and posted stuff online all over again. I think the very fact that I knew how self-destructive it all was only added to the thrill. I felt like I was voluntarily creating my own personal hell and it was exciting.

I remember hearing this song and it seemed to perfectly describe the situation I was in. I knew exactly what I was doing.

…The scariest part of all this is I knew what I was doing all along. Before even before “taking the plunge” in 2014 and onward, I had come to the realization what this was all about:

I had an intense sexual arousal imitating the female form and role. I recognized that porn had strengthened this to a supranormal level. I knew it was mere a fantasy, not a reality. I had zero interest in living as a woman or having sex with a man.

---

Here is where I am now: 100 days of no PMO

At the beginning of this year, I repeated the same path to recovery as I did at the start of 2018. Threw out all of my shit, deleted all my content, and made it a goal to quit porn at all costs.

I’ve been using meditative to deflect urges with immense success. For the past few weeks I’ve also started taking cold showers every morning to build willpower. I’ve also cut out weed and caffeine (temporarily) to help stabilize my dopamine functionality.

Best of all, I’ve been working out harder than ever.

The thing is, I’ve been lifting for several years. When I first went  down this crossdressing/sissy rabbit hole, it was quite easy to pass as a  woman (my body at least). I had always been hesitant to work my upper  body because it would make me look and feel less "feminine".

I focused heavily on squats and deadlifts all these years, but little  did I know this would increase overall mass in every muscle region (even  my fucking neck got larger). Of course, my quads and glutes got bigger, but I was getting more bulky in general with each passing year. Near the end, I had to resort to concealing my upper body with flowy,  fully sleeved tops/dresses, camera angle trickery, and specific poses.  How silly.

And since getting back on the path to recovery again, I’ve been hitting  upper body more heavily than ever. My biceps, traps, and delts in particular are pretty beefy. I think this is helping immensely because it has killed  any sense of feeling “feminine”.

Furthermore, I’ve had a relatively successful sex life for the most  part - I’m a decent looking guy. And the last sexual  relationship I had was incredible, very satisfying, and I feel confident  playing the role of a man.

…But, I still have a long way to go. I can’t actually get hard without taking boner pills. And this is not  performance anxiety – this extends to masturbating – yes, I can’t even  get hard fapping. I rarely even wake up with morning wood.

I did serious neurological damage to myself to the point that I have  generalized anhedonia that has seriously impacted the quality of my  life. Everything seems lifeless, dull, and boring. My emotions are flat  and empty. The only thing that can excite me is crossdressing and porn.  This is a classic symptom of porn addiction: sensitization to the  addiction, desensitization to everything else.

This anhedonia has naturally extended into my libido to the point where I have sexual anhedonia at times, not enjoying orgasm or sexual acts in general.

I think in my case, and in the case of almost all people with AGP, the term analloeroticism describes the state of their sexuality more accurately: a lack of sexual interests in other persons. This is distinct from asexuality which is a lack of a sex drive altogether.

When I do anticipate sex, I usually take aphrodisiacs + boner pills, and try to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.

---

This isn’t the first time I’ve shared my story with people online.

I’m usually careful about sharing it since people don’t seem to understand the  severity and as such end up giving harmful advice. They say things like: “why don’t you just incorporate these  crossdressing/sissy fetishes with your sexual partners?”

Well, honestly there’s no place for this in my life. I cannot incorporate it “healthily”, it’s either all or nothing. To give you an idea, I’ve done coke several times and it was a joke in comparison to the rush I get from this. Green tea is to a coke addict is what cocaine is to a crossdressing addict.

Another thing people like to say “you should find a therapist”. Yeah? What are they going to say? I’d go out on a limb and say that most would suggest I’m closet trans/homo.

Most therapists stay away from the sexuality/gender issues with a 10 foot pole due to the SJW/trans nonsense. And the ones that do treat sex/gender issues are completely full of shit and think everyone should transition. How many therapists do you think have a background in the neuroscience of porn addiction and AGP and aren’t a part of the transition express train? I don’t know, maybe I’ll get lucky enough to find one, because I do need help.

One day I think I’m going to write a book about this. But I’m still too young now. I’m still making sense of it all. I wanted to write this because I’m struggling a lot right  now and I find writing highly therapeutic.

Don’t feel like you have to give advice (but I definitely welcome anything). Thanks for reading.

[jixu]

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

[DoneAtLast]

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

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

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

[hooked on monkey fonics]

You bring up a good point about this whole "sex positive" thing, it seems to me like its mostly just hedonism and a lack of critical thought towards sexual behaviors. Its as if people think that if something is sexually pleasurable and gratifying, that it's automatically okay and should be pursued. Obviously that belief doesn't extend to something like necrophilia or pedophilia - so where do we draw the line? (and by the way I do think that most pedophiles are in fact victims, we regard them as evil even if they've never acted on their urges, which shows how ignorant we truly are about sexuality).

People like to draw the line if the sexual behavior is hurting other people, and assume that what the individual does alone is not to be questioned. But I think this is a shit-brained idea, just because you're not harming other people doesn't mean it's okay.  There are plenty of hardcore drug addicts who have no history of violence or crime and yet we punish them severely, and at the end of the day I see very little difference between drug abuse and a self-indulged sexual paraphilia.

To answer your question, I don't really know. I do see a lot of people who act like their specific porn/sexual preferences are somehow more special than the others. There are plenty of people with similar fetishes to mine who pontificate that its  due to x y and z, not being loved, society not accepting them etc but I think its mostly BS, they just want to rationalize why they should embrace it.

People love to force interpretations of events in their past and I think more often than not they are just filling in details and making shit up (especially if they're vulnerable to suggestibility). While there may be legitimate psychological basis for these fetishes and paraphilias forming, I think more often than not there is a large degree of randomness to it all - simply being exposed to certain stimuli under the wrong (or right) circumstances.

Obviously something like a stocking fetish cannot be innate, but I do think a lot of people may be "primed" for them in some sense. By this I simply mean that some people are far more vulnerable to imprinting than others, however "unnatural" the stimulus may be. I think in principle, a hunter gatherer from 100,000 years ago could develop a stocking fetish if he was exposed to it the under the right conditions, despite a vastly different environment.

The human brain is extremely malleable at a young age where it undergoes significant synaptic pruning, and some stimuli may simply be more powerful than others. Factors such as openness to experience, religiosity, and shame/guilt levels may play a role.

[achilles heel]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[AlexthenotsoGreat]

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

[malando]

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

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

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

Thanks again. M.

[DoneAtLast]

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

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

[Lero]

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

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

[hooked on monkey fonics]

Made it about 7 months without PMO, but in the past month I've PMO'd about a dozen times and even before that I had been constantly peeking.

I'm feeling utterly hopeless. I don't remember it being this difficult in a long time...

I feel mentally ill. Chicken or the egg comes into question - do I feel unwell because of my recent string of relapses? Or, is there something seriously wrong that has nothing to do with porn and simply making my relapses more likely? People like to blame porn on all their problems but I don't think it's that simple.
 
I'm actually not convinced that my mental "unwellness" is caused by PMO. It hasn't been this bad, for so long, in years. Really I've been fighting these symptoms since May, which include:


-Inability to focus or do any goal-oriented behavior.

-Brain fog and headaches - thoughts are vague, mind is generally vacant, hazy, and lacking any insight or ideas beyond very simple observations about mundane things. Sometimes I space out and people think I'm having deep thoughts, quite the contrary there is often very little going on in my mind. This may sound "zen" but I promise you it's actually awful - this is actually the most troubling symptom for me.

-Little to no motivation - complete lack of ambition and reward-seeking behavior for basically everything, including sex drive. Stagnating progress at the gym and no desire to try new programs or switch things up. Everything I do is just out of habit or routine.

-Generalized anedonia, lack of pleasure/excitement, emotional flatness - almost no pleasure or excitement from anything. Music doesn't sound like it used to (despite getting audiophile headphones recently). Video games often seem pointless and terrible. I rarely if ever have any sexual interest. I almost never get an endorphin high from working out, happens maybe once a month. The only emotions I ever really experience are anxiety, but even that tends to be fairly mild since my entire emotional spectrum seems to have been compressed so much that I'm constantly left in a "numb" state of shallow, empty feelings. Hell, I'd kill to even feel "sad" again.



Solutions:

-8-9 hours of non-negotiable sleep, same bed times and wake times every day (magnesium+melatonin as needed)

-No sugar, period. Limited refined carbs (about 100g of day of total carbs), high protein diet. Somewhat good about eating greens and getting healthy fats such as a salmon.

-Deleted all social media and implemented a "no surf" policy - blocking reddit, youtube, etc in addition to all the porn sites

-Consistent weight lifting (about 5 years now) and occasional HIIT

-IM fasting, although this is more to do with a lack of interest in eating except when I'm very hungry

-Try to hang with and stay in touch with friends as often as I can

-Try to maintain relationships with my family

-Therapy (did it for over a year recently but stopped because it was too expensive and stopped helping like every other time)

-Limited drug use (per month basis about 0-6 drinks a month and 0-2g of vaporized pot; 2 daily cups of coffee; no medications)

-Try to meditate with some consistency (but I'm quite bad about making it a habit)

- Have specific goals written down and concrete plans for achieving those goals


Additionally, I've kept a PMO log/journal for 2 years now...I've known about the harmful effects of porn for over 7 years. And yet I feel like I've made almost no progress (even though I know that's not true). I know so much and yet my crippling brain fog seems to prevent me from thinking or acting carefully. I'm at a loss.

[DoneAtLast]

Congratulations on those milestones!

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

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

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

[hooked on monkey fonics]

Congratulations on those milestones!

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

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

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

Good points you raise. The reason I am skeptical that all my mental unwellness is due to withdrawal is the fact that I haven't really felt this bad, for this long, in many years. I mean, just the other night I spend a good hour researching suicide methods and actually came up with a really good one (skydive by myself and disable the parachute 3/4 into the descent)... it hasn't been this bad since I was in high school, and back then I was a very heavy addict and constantly sleep deprived. So I'm just baffled at how bad things have gotten. I mean, I never once felt better during those 7 months, it only seemed to get worse (even before the habitual peeking started after about 4 months)

Anyway, I actually do know my triggers quite well, but I don't really know what to do about them. Interesting how you describe the urges you get after all this time, I definitely have noticed the similarities between seeking out porn and sites like reddit, which provide endless novelty.

[DoneAtLast]

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

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

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

[hooked on monkey fonics]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[DoneAtLast]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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