Hello all, I’m a new user to the forums and this is my first post.
I have not watched porn for 123 days now. I have not actively looked for it during that time period, and the results are consistent with what members of this community have mentionned.
A little background about myself: for the most part of my life I have been a very lonely person, not having many friends, being shy and keeping to myself. I’ve started porn at 8. I am 28 now, turning 29 in September of this year, so that’s 20 years of my life taken away. When I was a teenager I spent most of my nights watching porn, sometimes for hours, sometimes all night long, wasting my youth away instead of developing real meaningful relationships with women. I regret that part of my life so much and wish I could go back and erase all of it, but I can’t. All I can do is move on and never look at porn ever again.
tl;dr: I was a very shy and reclusive person, and watching porn was my coping mechanism to escape my loneliness.
Today is my 123rd day without porn. Although I still suffer from compulsive masturbation and edging, my sex life has changed tremendously. I have been with a woman for a few years and at the beginning, I used to binge-watch porn frequently, many times edging to it for hours. It was a long-distance relationship at the beginning, which certainly didn’t help me with my porn watching habit since I was alone most of the time.
Over the years I consulted a therapist who helped me climb out of my porn addiction, and now I have regained my confidence and ability to perform with a woman on bed. When I started dating my girlfriend, PIED was common and sex was mediocre. I could only very rarely do a full sex cycle with her and be able to finish, because most of the time I would lose my erection before penetration. Today, PIED is a thing of the past. I have strong morning erections and strong erections during sex and even was able to do a full cycle, finish, then be hard 5 minutes after for a second session. So eliminating porn from my life has been a real success and has had a real, tangible effect.
My new problem is finding myself with a lot of sexual energy and a desire to have sex with many women. I look at women in public in a sexual manner a lot and sometimes find myself aroused by them, something that never happened when I used to watch porn compulsively, because real life women just couldn’t compete with porn stars. I now find that real life women are the porn stars, the imperfection of their bodies is what makes me so attracted to them. Another problem I have is the compulsive masturbation and edging, this is something I am still struggling with and need to stop as soon as I can. The longest I went with no masturbation is 37 days. However, I believe that rare, short masturbation sessions are not a problem as long as they don’t develop into hour-long edging sessions. I’d like to stop edging and masturbation for maybe 30 days, and see if this makes my sexual attraction for real women stronger or not.
What I can recommend to people wishing to eliminate porn entirely from their lives is the following:
1) See a therapist that can identify what is causing you to watch porn, and try to solve this problem, or coping mechanism. For me, it was the fact I was a very lonely person that was the trigger for all my porn watching. So my therapist told me to go out there, make friends, do some volunteer work, any social activity that prevents me from being alone can work, it can also be group sports. I also have ADHD, which doesn’t help with all the compulsive porn watching behavior and edging, so he told me to take ADHD medication, but I declined because some of the after-effects of such medicine is lower libido, which I was already suffering from. Many people say that you are ”addicted” to porn. What my therapist told me is the ”addiction” to porn is caused by the situation which causes you do watch it. Once you fix that situation, whether is be loneliness, emotional distress, a lack of confidence of whatever it is, you will be able to replace the coping mechanism (porn) you have used all your life to deal with that situation with a healthier habit (making friends, going out, etc).
2) Eliminate all the triggers: any equipment that you use to watch porn (tablet, PC, cellphone), lock it away, put it somewhere you can’t access it. I got rid of my cellphone for 123 days (it was very hard to do, but a necessary pain to succeed). If it’s not absolutely necessary for your work or life, get rid of it. You must completely eliminate any situation which is even slightly susceptible to make you watch porn again from your life for at least 90 days.
3) If you absolutely have to use a PC or anything you can access the Internet with for your work, work offline if your work allows it. Activate airplane mode for example. If you can’t work offline, use website blockers to block any adult-related content on the web and turn Safe Search on when you use Google.
4) Find a supportive partner, and work your way to a full sexual relationship slowly, starting with foreplay and then going all the way to full penetration. When you are able to penetrate, start with a simple position like missionary and as you gain more confidence, start working with different positions with your partner. Don’t try to rush different positions or penetration because PIED might reoccur.
Quitting porn has been the hardest thing to do in my life by far. I still have flash backs and sexual thoughts, but they have reduced tremendously and I am able to focus on the normal things of my life again.
LINK – Day 123 My Journey
By – tom62
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