Bringing it around full circle

[LetItGoAlready]

Hi Everyone,

I doubt any of you will remember me, but I joined Your Brain Rebalanced (YBR) https://yourbrainrebalanced.com/forum/index.php?threads/trying-to-get-a-grip.18047/ and Reboot Nation (RN) http://www.rebootnation.org/forum/index.php?topic=96.0 under the name of Cosmo about 6-1/2 years ago. I left after a series of relapses, certain I would never return here again.

What made me decide to come back after all of these years and give it another try? Well, the current health crisis is part of the reason. With so few options to meet with folks in person, joining an online community like this one seems like a no-brainer right now. Also, I guess I feel a little bit nostalgic for the days when I was new to the fight and felt inspired by the many fine people here who offered up their stories, struggles, and words of encouragement. Being part of the YBR and RN communities was such an uplifting experience for me, in fact, that within a few months of posting my first journal entry I reached 64 days porn-free, a record I have not been able to beat since.

In addition to my time on YBR and RN, I spent a year completing the lessons in the Recovery Nation Workshop; joined a porn recovery support group; saw a variety of therapists, including a recovering porn addict turned addiction counselor; went to a handful of 12-step meetings; read countless online articles and books on addiction; listened to dozens of Porn-Free Radio podcasts; tried out a staggering number of porn-blocking filters on my phone and PC; and created a shitload of charts, plans, and schedules to track my progress and keep myself from going off the rails. Yet after all that, here I am again, 6-1/2 years later, with a lifetime record of only 64 days clean.

What gives? Am I just bad at recovery?

For me, the thought that I keep coming back to (and that offers me even the slightest bit of hope) is that no one recovers in exactly the same way. Some people move faster than others through their recovery. Not because they care more, work harder, or dig deeper than the rest of us (although maybe that's true in some cases). But because that's their journey.

And let's be honest. Some of us have never known a different way to live. I was a mere child when I discovered that the JCPenney catalogs that showed up at the front door several times a year were chock full of scantily-clad women, whose allure I couldn't quite fathom but also couldn't resist. A helpless little kid when I found Playboys carelessly thrown in dumpsters and stashed in the storage nooks of my friends' houses. A simple-minded teenager when my attraction to pornography ceased to be an affectionate hobby and turned into a full-blown obsession... Looking back, it's no wonder that it's been so hard for me to quit this addiction. I never had a chance from the start!!!

Nor does everyone have the same underlying issues that feed their addiction. Or the same triggers. Or the same edging or acting-out behaviors. Which brings me back to my original point: No journey to recovery is exactly the same.

Now, I have to admit. After 6-1/2 years and at the ripe old age of 50, the journey is starting to feel a little stale. But hopefully, with your support, I can finally bring this journey around full circle and end it where it started, right here on the pages of my journal.

Thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this. Stay healthy, all!

[mousemat1]

It's good that you're back. It shows real commitment to quit. It's not easy, but you don't need me to tell you that.

I look forward to reading your success story.

[NoMoreSelfHate]

Hi. Welcome back. I'm a newbie here but read your story and thought...... If you hadn't done what you have already done with the repeated attempts and long stints of success, just imagine where you'd be right now. Every little bit of work, reading, charts and workshops you have done have had some impact and some worth, don't discount it all because you had a relapse, dig into it all again and kick on.

Good luck and hopefully you break a few records.

[UKGuy]

Welcome back LetitGo. I look forward to reading your old Cosmo journal. What I know already from reading what you've written here is that you'll be a real asset to the group, and hopefully we can offer you some support in your renewed journey too. Cheers for now!

[LetItGoAlready]

Thanks, Mousemat, NMSH, and UK Guy,

I truly appreciate the welcome back. It feels good to be back here again, even if I can't help but wish that I would have finished the job 6-1/2 years ago. Still, as much as I'd like to believe I could have gotten sober then, it's clear to me now that I didn't have all of the tools that I needed or the right perspective on my recovery.

And, to be honest, getting clean really sucks. During my longest streaks, I experienced powerful headaches, mood swings, and anxiety attacks. One attack I had (about 4 years ago, after a 40-day streak) was so bad that I thought I was going into cardiac arrest. That's why withdrawals are probably the thing I dread most about getting sober. Intellectually, I know it's just a matter of "pushing through the pain," but that's easier said than done when you've been relying on porn for the past 35-40 years to get through even the most trivial emotional crises.

It probably goes a long way to explaining why, as of today, I am 8 days sober.  That's not to say I haven't had some success over the years; I definitely have. That's just where I'm at now.  Hopefully by checking in, staying accountable, and helping others with this struggle, I can keep this streak going and zoom past 64 days.

[ZiggyBoo]

Welcome (back) to the forum Cosmo!
Thanks for sharing your previous journey, a lot of it sounds very familiar!
Good work on your start of 8 days, good luck on your journey here - I look forward to hearing about your successes!

[LetItGoAlready]

Day 9. I'm sure many people on this forum are familiar with the concept of "flatlining." It's when your libido suddenly heads south and you find yourself with a more diminished sex drive than before. That's exactly what I'm experiencing right now. I can usually anticipate this sudden drop in libido after a long stretch of binging, which I think accurately describes my behavior 9+ days ago. When I'm flatlining, there is a certain pleasantness to it, along with a sense of relief, almost as if someone suddenly turned the dimmer switch on the brightly burning, sex-obsessed light bulb in my head and moved it to a lower setting. I've actually come to enjoy this aspect of recovery, even though, at the same time, it also suppresses my emotions, which means I feel pretty blah most of the time.

I know there's a lot of controversy around whether compulsive porn use should or should not be called an addiction, and I'm not really interested in arguing one viewpoint over another. But I will tell you this: these are withdrawal symptoms, plain and simple. And if addiction is a dependence on something to the degree that it causes massive chemical changes in your brain when you stop using the substance in question (e.g., causing your libido to plummet, muting your emotions, etc.), well, then it's pretty clear to me that I'm addicted to porn.

Overall, I feel good about the path I'm on right now, and it feels great to get out my own head space and start to connect with other people again. I hear it said repeatedly, and in fact, I heard it on Porn-Free Radio just the other day: "The opposite of addiction is connection." No matter which camp you're in, or even if you're on the fence about whether this is an addiction or something else, I think we can all agree that human connection plays a big part in solving this puzzle.

Thanks again to everyone who's dropped in on my journal and given me encouragement these past few days. I really appreciate it!

[workinprogressUK]

"The opposite of addiction is connection." No matter which camp you're in, or even if you're on the fence about whether this is an addiction or something else, I think we can all agree that human connection plays a big part in solving this puzzle.

Totally agree that it plays a very big part. If you follow-up your "is it an addiction" question with the stuff on YBoP and similar, about how the fast and easy supply of dopamine that our brain gets from P makes it increasingly crave P at the expense of other, slower, sources of pleasure chemicals..... you can see straight away how addiction kills connection, and why re-establishing those connections becomes so hard after a long time binging on crack-dopamine. Good luck to you LIGA. Congrats on getting back into the fight.

[LetItGoAlready]

Thanks, WIP!

It's Day 11, and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty good. I started the morning with mindfulness meditation, then went for a run. After that, I headed out to the backyard to check on the garden.

Gardening is a new thing for me. I started a small flower garden in the backyard after the pandemic hit, and it quickly grew into an obsession. (Actually, I'm not even joking; it is an obsession, but I'll get into that later.) At first, I found it a bit intimidating. I mean, there's so much more to it than just sticking a plant in the ground and giving it water.  Every plant is different and requires a different level of care. Some prefer sun; some prefer a little shade. Some prefer a lot of water; some don't. Some you have to fertilize frequently; others infrequently or not at all.

A month or so into my new hobby, I began to see the results of my novice gardening skills, and they were decidedly mixed. I could see that some of the flowers were already dying while others appeared to be thriving. That's when the worry set in, and I begin to question everything that I was doing. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? What can I do to change this situation? If I water that one more (or less) will it start to perk up? What if it doesn't? Will I ever succeed at this?

I couldn't help but feel like my garden was a referendum on me as a person. Soon, I begin checking the garden multiple times a day, looking for signs of distress. I became obsessed with the idea of having the perfect garden. In that way, gardening is a great metaphor for recovery.

If I've gained any wisdom at all from this journey, it's self-wisdom. And what I know about myself is that I'm a perfectionist to a fault. When I began this journey 6-1/2 years ago, I obsessed about having the perfect recovery. I thought if I just do this recovery strategy plus that strategy and that strategy, and do them all perfectly, I would sail through recovery and never look back. But nothing has ever gone perfectly. I found that porn blockers could be easily bypassed (I have another story about that, which I'll save for another day). My meditation practice has been spotty and inconsistent at best. And I don't always go on runs when I should, or go to bed at the right hour, or write in my journal everyday. And yes, I still give in to urges and end up back in front of the computer, looking at porn.

It used to be, when I would slip back into old habits, I would punish myself relentlessly for not getting it right. I'd call myself names. Get caught up in a shame spiral. None of it helped me. None of it made me better at recovery.

It wasn't until I begin to change my outlook and finally accepted that my recovery - like my struggling garden - is never going to be perfect, that things started to feel like they were turning around. And hopefully I can keep that momentum going in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

[Georgos]

So I had some mild gardening hallucinations on my date,

We went out for cigarettes whilst it was raining,

I looked at the bushes, there were only a couple of flowers, when I looed back there was a whole heap of white flowers blossoming in the bushes,

My date remarked that roses would be nice, they appeared for a second and her face lit up, but then they disappeared the moment I looked at them,

I've had similar experiences before,

I'm trying to grow potatoes, I have a bag of them in my kitchen cupboard,

So far, I've only been able to grow stinging nettles and doc leaves in my garden,

I did however manage to produce some compost,

I followed the instructions and some perfect organic fertilizer appeared, so I put some of it into the composting wormery to help the worms,

I'd really like to grow tobacco, although I think it's illegal,

Anyway, that is my experience with gardening in my flat,

I do have a few pot plants that I take care of including bonzai trees, ginseng and cacti,

Thank you.

[LetItGoAlready]

Hi Georgos,

Sounds like your hallucinations were mild, but I would imagine that all of the shape shifting and reality bending can be unsettling for you, too. Hopefully you were able to hide that from your date?

I think you're more of a green thumb than I am (and I'm not much of one, believe me). Making your own compost is another level. I just buy the store-bought stuff now, but someday I hope to invest in a compost bin.

Thanks for dropping in!

[LetItGoAlready]

Day 12. Can't say for sure, but it feels like I'm starting to come out of flatline.  It's a little hard to tell, to be honest. There's no tell-tale sign, like an image of Austin Powers popping into my head and saying "We're back, baby!" But there are little signs that, taken together, point to an uptick in my libido.

I don't really want to go into details about what the signs are because I've learned that being overly-focused on what I'm experiencing leads to obsessive thinking. Chasing a thought or a feeling too far down the rabbit hole just keeps it alive, and the longer it stays in the forefront of my mind, the more I find myself resisting it, pushing against it while also pulling it closer.

This is not an original idea by any means. I credit mindfulness training with the idea that we can observe thoughts without judgment, without buying into them. It's not always an easy thing to do when the thought is cunning and deceitful like so many of our amygdala-inspired thoughts are, but I'm trying. In fact, this morning I had a brief thought about MOing that I quickly brushed aside. I hope I can continue to maintain a focus on taking positive steps towards recovery and not allow myself to get distracted by other thoughts. The alternative is just not worth it.

[TheNorman]

Welcome back to the forum LIGA, I've only read your recent posts but will definitely go back and read your older stuff. I'm sure I will learn a lot from your posts.

I too found magazines as a kid (in hindsight it's really gross how we picked those up knowing what people were doing with them). I'm new to all of this, rebooting, mindfulness, therapy...all of it. I'm happy there are a lot of guys here to help, you included.

[Fappy]

Nice to have you back.
Its never too late and youre never too old to reboot and get your life back on track.
The hobbies sound great! Completely devote your whole time to them, obsess over them, keep your mind focused on them and let the natural healing power of the reboot take effect.
Not only do they give us a sense of fullfillment and accomplishment, they take our minds off fapping to pixels or some dirty whore sitting at a computer on a sex chat site.
Keep journaling and doing what you enjoy!

[LetItGoAlready]

I too found magazines as a kid (in hindsight it's really gross how we picked those up knowing what people were doing with them)

So true, TheNorman. That really was gross, wasn't it? Back in those days, if you were too young to buy one in a store, you were pretty much reliant on the charity of your friends. Or in rare cases, you might come across a lucky find in a dumpster. Yuck. Pretty sure if COVID had been around back then, we never would have survived it!

I'm new to all of this, rebooting, mindfulness, therapy...all of it. I'm happy there are a lot of guys here to help, you included.

Kudos to you for taking a leap of faith and trying something different. This is a great place to share your struggles, give support, and receive help from others without fear of being judged. Who can ask for more than that?

The hobbies sound great! Completely devote your whole time to them, obsess over them, keep your mind focused on them and let the natural healing power of the reboot take effect. Not only do they give us a sense of fullfillment and accomplishment, they take our minds off fapping to pixels or some dirty whore sitting at a computer on a sex chat site.

Fappy -  Thanks  for the encouragement on the hobby front! However we spend our time away from P,  I totally agree that the end goal is the sense of accomplishment we get from using our energy wisely and well.  Nicely said, friend.

[LetItGoAlready]

Day 15. I spent the last couple of days revisiting some of my older posts from 2014, as well as the many plans and goal statements I developed through the end of 2017. I don't have much to show for my time after 2017, except for one very time-consuming project that I'll explain later.

When I look back over the years, I see four distinct phases of my recovery.
-A discovery phase when I  began to explore the many resources available for the treatment of sexually compulsive behavior and sex/porn addiction
-An implementation phase when I  began actively working on my recovery
-A regressive phase when my enthusiasm for recovery began to wane and I backslid into old familiar patterns of addiction
-A re-commitment phase when I began a renewed commitment to my recovery and approached it with a fresh set of eyes

I'm currently in the re-commitment phase, but it wasn't that long ago that I found myself caught up in a regressive spiral of addiction. How did I go from being fully committed to recovery to being back in the grips of addiction? Well, what I think happened is that my expectations of myself during recovery were unrealistic, which eventually caused me to burn out.  (I call this "recovery fatigue.") I only need to look back at the "Relapse Prevention Plan" that I created in November of 2017 to understand just how much I was taking on at once. The plan consisted of a long list of daily actions to maintain my recovery (things like "I will exercise at least 4 days a week" and "I will be in bed by 9 pm"), which by themselves seemed perfectly reasonable but when paired with 10 or 15 other actions began to feel like a burden. I also used a schedule to chart out how much time I would use each day to complete the actions. It left me little time for anything else.

And so, after three very productive and hard-won years of progress in recovery, everything broke down. I stopped focusing on doing healthy things to propel myself towards recovery and instead turned my attention to porn-proofing my environment. I began testing out a variety of porn blockers, thinking that I could stop the addiction by blocking my access to it. What I learned was, everything was effective up to a point (aka not perfect). And to my deluded way of thinking at that time, if something wasn't perfect, then the temptation would always be there and I could never feel truly "safe."

I eventually found a software program called Website Blocker (that I don't recommend), which allowed me to develop and block an endless list of search keywords. After spending hour after hour, day after day, week after week listing out every sordid search term I could think of that would lead to porn, I ended up with a list of half a million terms! Did it stop me from accessing porn? Nope. I just found new and inventive ways to bypass the filter.

At a certain point I had to admit defeat. The problem, I realized, was that I was being a perfectionist. Just like with my attempts to obsessively plot out my daily routine, putting too much pressure on myself to do everything perfectly, I was putting too much faith in an engineered solution to solve the problem. I was trying too hard to control everything when what I really needed to do was surrender some of that control.

So, anyway, here I am on Day 15, still going strong. I'm putting in the work but not expecting perfection from myself or the process...and it feels good.

Be well, everyone!

[TheNorman]

Thanks again for posting your story with such detail and thoughtfulness. I learn a lot from your posts about my own recovery and what to watch out for as I go along. Nobody is perfect but I feel like the idea of truly loving our partner and ourselves without porn in our lives sounds like perfection to me!

[LetItGoAlready]

I learn a lot from your posts about my own recovery and what to watch out for as I go along.

Thanks, TheNorman. I'm glad they're helpful to you. I think it's really important to learn how other people - not just best-selling authors who've become "experts" on the subject; regular everyday people - are processing and dealing with this struggle. In a way, coming here is like combing through thousands of self-help books, each with its own unique backstory and morsels of wisdom. I really have learned so much from other people here. Some of them aren't even active on the forum anymore, but their words live on. I guess if you can't pay it back to those people, you may as well pay it forward, right?

Nobody is perfect but I feel like the idea of truly loving our partner and ourselves without porn in our lives sounds like perfection to me!

Me too!

[LetItGoAlready]

Day 17. After reading through several posts this evening, I'm struck again at how different everyone's journeys are. Nothing moves in a straight line, it seems, although judging by how much my mood has improved over the past couple of weeks, it certainly feels that way at the moment.

It's usually during times like these, when things seem like they're going particularly well, that I start to entertain feelings of self-doubt. Rather than just relishing the good feelings and being happy with where I'm at, I start to question whether I have what it takes to keep the momentum going. I ask myself "How long is this going to last?"

If I thought I was the only one plagued by self-doubt, then this would be a very lonely journey indeed. But I'm sure I'm not the only person here that has ever questioned the sincerity of their reboot. 

In his book Breaking the Cycle, George Collins poses the question "How good can you stand it?" It's a pretty powerful question, and one I've been asking myself a lot lately. Basically, he's daring the addict to lean into the idea that they deserve something better. By leaning into it, they are forced to confront their self-limiting beliefs, like the belief that they don't have what it takes to recover or that they don't deserve it.

So, that's where I'll leave it today. I've reached this point of relative happiness more times than I can count during my recovery, but I want to believe that it can get so much better. It has to because I'm sure as hell not giving up now!
 

[workinprogressUK]

In his book Breaking the Cycle, George Collins poses the question "How good can you stand it?" It's a pretty powerful question, and one I've been asking myself a lot lately. Basically, he's daring the addict to lean into the idea that they deserve something better. By leaning into it, they are forced to confront their self-limiting beliefs, like the belief that they don't have what it takes to recover or that they don't deserve it.

I wonder if this is based on a recognised therapeutic theory? Looks very similar to Richard O'Connor's theory in his book "Rewire - Change your brain to overcome addiction" that those of us who repeat self-destructive behaviours have a profound "fear of success". Certainly resonates with a core belief that I've suffered from for years that I don't deserve success, happiness or fulfilment. To your point on self doubt, that belief's about as conducive to recovery as shooting holes in your own boat. I hope that you can keep hold of your belief that "it can get so much better" for you. I'm sure it can! And maybe tomorrow, or later today, that self doubt will have moved out of your consciousness.

[LetItGoAlready]

HI WIP,

I have no doubt many of the concepts in Collins' book are "adapted" from the work of others. I suspect there's a lot of borrowing and repackaging of ideas in this field. In fact, I know there is. I once attended a talk by Dr. Robert Glover, author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, and he flat out said that no one in the self-help field has an original idea. They're all borrowed ideas that build upon an original idea someone came up with long ago. I'm sure he was exaggerating, but I appreciated his honesty that he himself had not come up with any original ideas when he wrote his book.

I'm pretty sure everyone on this forum, if they were motivated to do it, could write a self-help book based on their personal experiences and integrating the strategies they've used successfully during recovery. Of course, in order to have credibility, you would need to have a good amount of days clean behind you, but other than that, everyone here has the life credentials to speak with expertise on the subject of porn addiction.

Certainly resonates with a core belief that I've suffered from for years that I don't deserve success, happiness or fulfilment. To your point on self doubt, that belief's about as conducive to recovery as shooting holes in your own boat.

Haha. I love the idea of shooting my boat full of holes when I buy into the belief that I don't deserve success. It's a great visual!

I hope that you can keep hold of your belief that "it can get so much better" for you. I'm sure it can!

I appreciate the vote of confidence, WIP, and I wish the same for you.

[Artemus]

Amazing, your journey sounds eerily similar to mine, same age, same story thereabouts.  Just wanted to pop in and share my bit of encouragement to your cause as you did mine.

[LetItGoAlready]

So, today is my 19th day clean and also my 15th wedding anniversary. When I look back over the past 15 years, I realize how very much I have been blessed to be married to woman who fills my life with love and kindness. She has such a capacity for love that she wears it on her sleeve, literally. T-shirts with quaint little sayings like "live, laugh, love"... Scarves decorated with little pink hearts... And the thing is, she wears these things with no irony whatsoever. She actually believes in the power of love - for herself and others. 

I, on the other hand, have a somewhat more complicated relationship with love. And not just because I'm an average male with a culturally-mandated aversion to displays of affection around other males. But because I started life with a significant love deficit. Apparently, I did not get what I needed to feel loved as a child, and I have struggled to connect with that feeling for virtually my entire adult life.

I eventually came to understand after reading about something called attachment theory that I had an insecure attachment style, meaning that my relationship style suggests that the bond I had with my parents as a child was not reinforced in a normal way. Typically, people with this type of attachment style have difficulty forming close relationships and allowing themselves to be loved by others -- or even loved by themselves.

While this may sound like a litany of complaints about how unloved I feel, that isn't my attention at all. These are the basic facts as I understand them. The building blocks upon which I've built my so-called life. Part of my journey has been to peel back the layers. To understand how these feelings have become fertile ground for addiction. But the other part of my journey has been to gradually give in to the idea that I can feel loved and to try to embrace it fully.

Today I'm looking back on that journey and realizing that I have actually come a long way in my relationship with love. I've learned so much from my wife - and my daughter - about having compassion for myself and others. About being worthy of my own love and theirs. In many ways they've saved me from myself, and for that I am eternally grateful.

[jixu]

That was a wonderful post of gratitude, self-awareness, and humility.  Best wishes as you continue your restart! 

[LetItGoAlready]

Amazing, your journey sounds eerily similar to mine, same age, same story thereabouts.  Just wanted to pop in and share my bit of encouragement to your cause as you did mine.

Artemus - Thanks for popping in! There's a comfort in knowing that other people have had the same experiences. Makes it a little less lonely, I think.

That was a wonderful post of gratitude, self-awareness, and humility.  Best wishes as you continue your restart!

Thanks, Jixu. I appreciate the kind words. Best wishes to you, too, my friend!