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On the healing process
Has the healing process finished? No. For me it has basically just started. It has just begun because I have so many other self-destructive patterns to handle that this one, porn, was just a small factor in the entire equation. Maybe that’s what made it easy not to relapse, the fact that I was paying attention to so many other things, that at times I had completely forgotten today was the set date for the Big Goal.
Did I really never relapse?
That is true with a small sort-of exception which I will explain:
After having started on normal mode for two weeks, I managed to get a one night stand with a girl acquaintance I had. I hated it. I hated her taste and her smell, I hated the feeling of emptyness in my stomach afterwards and I really hated the Chaser Effect. I think I sat the same day for the first time in my life on nofap.com (Instead of the reddit page) and that same day learned hard mode existed. It sounded like I needed to do it. I thought about it, hard mode sounded like the way to go. The next day I had a second one night stand with a second girl, she loved it, and I liked it but for some reason I realized hard mode was a necessity. After that day, september 25th, I never looked back.
So if you count sex as a relapse, without knowing hard mode exists, and then sex one more time to finally make the choice that hard mode is the way to go, then yeah, I relapsed once before knowing hard mode existed, then once more when I hadn’t made the decision to go hard.
I don’t think it should count though.
Did 90 days do the trick for me and why?
Hell no, it didn’t do the trick for me. I don’t feel that different. My life IS different though. I’m starting a job on January, and learning a new language. I have a slightly better relationship with my parents. I have a couple of constructive friendships, instead of a lotta destructive ones. I guess I feel somewhat less guilt.
The problem is I had other addictions and I have a few personality disorders according to my doctors. So just because I don’t have a plethora of superpowers, doesn’t mean you won’t when you’re through. I do believe however, that for some of us, those most self-destructive of us, we have a slightly longer way to go than just 3 months. Maybe 4 or 5 free of addictions for a full reset to happen.
Lifestyle changes are necessary, cannot stress this enough. We need to stop counting days (counter is there anyways) and focus on a grand scheme. Large changes for a different life, a different routine, different friends, different landscapes, different hang-out spots. Different everything.
Any superpowers?
Even though I don’t feel different, some people tell me I look like an absolutely different person. They say I don’t look so anxious and angry anymore. I pay attention to how I dress now. I’m not fit because I had an injury like a month after starting hard mode, so girls look, but they don’t oggle me that much. I don’t get the crazy eye contact many guys get, but I can easily imagine if I hadn’t gotten injured and had spent the last 2 months at the boxing gym, how things would have gone. Me without belly and dressing nice could have been awesome.
By the way, improving my relationship with my parents was number 1 priority when I started this. It happened. To an extent, but it did happen.
WTF you didn’t work out?!? The hell did you do with all the extra energy?
I was diagnosed with an anxious-deppresive personality disorder (which is allegedly different from bipolar disorder, but still don’t know how) by a psychologist. I’m taking medication for anxiety, depression, and for regulating sleep. Now, regarding orgasm and brain chemistry, orgasm is a natural sedative for the body. You produce this thing called betagammatic acid or something like that after orgasm. People who become addicted to sex are usually very anxious because they need the physical contact and the orgasm to calm down. So my suggestion is that if you can’t handle the anxiety after going cold turkey, then get help. It is worth it.
On my love life
It sucks, but I’m working on it with a therapist. As americans put it I’m working on my trust issues.
On telling your parents
I told them. They didn’t freak out. They just told me to help my brother with his own video game addiction. They didn’t yell. They ardly budged. Although I do think it is a sensitive matter because they have never ever mentioned it since. I believe truth sets you free. And like my therapist told my parents: “No ammount of therapy or prayer can help someone as much as a small pat on the back or a word of support from his parents”.
I am a spiritually dedicated person, I believe all budhas and angels are there for people who always tell the truth. Even the atheist ones.
On The Urge
Urges come and go, but I think they went really down after week 2 or 3. They’re not really a problem after that.
On Headaches
They go away after day 20. If anyone has gone past day 20 and continue to get those weird abstinence headaches, please reply to this.
Edit: Mijereah reports headaches around days 45-50. This never happened to me so far down the road, but I do believe those headaches to be a part of the healing process. I explain my reasoning using a quote from a book down in the comments.
On what I think about when not thinking about sex
I’m going to say this assuming most of us here have a obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is what makes us addicted to things, not just to porn.
People with OCD (are we popular now or what?) have an innate ability for perfectionism. We think things through over and over, we review the past, we reopen old wounds. Is there any way we can make that productive? Sure, if we
- Learn a funky language: like french (so many silent letters) or oriental languages (Doumo Arigatou gozaimashita!). The amount of tiny rules you will have to learn in order to master japanese, chinese, french or german will make your OCD’d brain have a strawberry pijama party in your head while in class! You will hate it, but your brain will thank you for it
! - Play an attention-intensive sport: Sports that require intense attention to detail and concentration, such as martial arts, surfing, or tennis (maybe, I haven’t tried it personally) are strawberry flavored for your OCD’d brain. Feel free to add any sports to the list.
- Write a book/keep a blog/draw pictures: Can’t stop thinking about the past? Do something creative with it! Drawing and writing are difficult tasks, and your OCD’d brain will have a blast going all pesky on your hariy lines, and less-than-perfect phrases. Try to guess how many times I edited this post XD!
- Reshape our bodies: Your OC brain hates your imperfection-filled body, doesn’t it? Ok, maybe it doesn’t care what you look like, but if it does, and you can’t keep it from criticizing you (and you’re not injured like me) Then just join a gym for the sake of bringing your body to its full potential. In reality, getting in awesome shape is not something you do for your body if you have OCD, it’s for your mind and for your self esteem.
- Zen Buddhism!: The whole Zen doctrine looks like it was made for OC people! The minimalism, the attention to order and detail, the discipline, the silent-mind thing… You will love it! Promise! Not trying to evangelize anyone though! XD just kidding though serious still…
So what do I think about when not tinking about sex or NoFap? Basically, on getting my life in order. On my fears and preoccupations. My OC brain keeps talking shit about what my life could have been if I was not an addict. I just try to keep my brain busy on other stuff.
On editing this post
Is this it? No, I don’t think it is, but I’ll be editing this as soon as I think up more stuff in my 90 day anniversary and, of course, as the conversation gets flowing.
Merry Christmas to you all
Thread: 90 days. Realizations so far
BY – JimmyParacas
Hi, new guy here.
The text enclosed tells a bit of my life story. Basically I’ve been addicted to videogames and porn nearly all my life, have barely known anything different. Skip it if you want to.
Hope I don’t get banned or anything for such a long post
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Very Optional-To-Read and rather arrogant Life Story
When I was five years old my parents gave me my first video game console, and that became my life. Just video games, zero friends and a broken home.
Then I turned 14 years old and by mistake, mistyping the name of a web-site (yahhoo.com was what i wrote), I ran into porn for the first time. From 14 to 16 yo my life was porn and videogames.
At 16 an older girl, Emily, fell in love with me. She was 22 and lived in a different state. We had phone sex most of the time, and the times we met we had what I now see as “binge sessions of real sex” for 2 or 3 days. She kinda looked like pocahontas, only shorter, and very well-read. I joined a gym because I guess I felt intimidated by her college friends, and because I wanted her to be completely obsessed with me. So by my 17th birthday my life was gym, phone sex, videogames and porn.
I cheated on Emily several times over the years, mostly just kissing other girls. She cried like crazy, over the phone, when I told her what I had done, but she was dependent on me and wouldn’t let me go. Guess she became addicted to the phone sex (masturbation) and sex-binging as well. Or maybe she fell deeply in love, and had a very low self-esteem. Myabe I was too hot to handle XD, my very few long-time friends tell me at that age my body was unbelievable, but my self-esteem was so low that I don’t notice the difference even today, when I look in the mirror.
I broke up with the long-distance girl after having found David Deangelo’s stuff. With the pick-up artists’s theory, and a little help from my hard-won gym physique, I got myself an unbelievably beautiful girlfriend when I was 23. She was thick, fit, with black hair, white skin, part time model and literature student, quirky, giggly, sexually starving, bisexual, and extremely fucked up in the head. Raped during her childhood repeatedly by two different step-dads. Her name was Karla. I think for me, Karla’s only two caveats were that she was frigid (couldn’t have orgasms unless she helped herself) and had small breasts. Everything else I loved about her. Everything. Including her perversions. We would do it like bunnies and then we would spend the night talking about books and mystical stuff, having dinner, never geting tired of each other. Still, I masturbated to porn during that relationship, to big-breasted women who had mulitple orgasms.
While being with karla I kissed another girl, a model with humongous breasts. Karla cried like crazy and ended up sleeping with one of my best friends. I guess It was some sort of revenge because she picked, out of all my friends, the black guy with the huge endowment. I still have severe trust issues from that episode, and from me being a jackass my entire life.
Fast forward to being almost 30 years old, today. I discovered meditation and attempted to fix my life. No relationship as worked for me since Karla,I can’t even date unless it’s with not good looking women who have zero self-esteem. If you read all of this you probably realized I’m not just addicted to porn or masturbation, but to sex and to the adrenaline of both chasing women and playing videogames.
End of Optional-To-Read and rather arrogant Life Story 
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Long story Short
Point is, those two addictions, videogames and porn, ruined my entire life. I only discussed the relationships, but I also have no job, no girl, and studied a career I don’t like. I have lately developed PE and ED. I’m sick of this.
I already got rid of my videogame addiction when I started boxing. Gets all the anger out. But not the sex addiction. So now I try this. This is the most difficult thing I have ever tried. I can’t sleep, my scrotum feels like it has fat leprechauns hanging from it, I get angry/sad/panicked out of nowhere…
However, I did spend two weeks without a reset… And only resetted to a one night stand before realizing I wanted to try hard mode nofap. Which means I felt the Surge… the superhuman stuff… And I gotta tell you, it’s just as addictive, specially when you super-perform at boxing/weight lifting, even though my body looks nothing like my teens (nobody notices anymore) XD.
Wish me luck, sorry for the long post, and please let me know how I get badgers/counters.
Love ye all
Jimmy from Paracas
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