Age 51 – Celebrating life, no more escorts or femdom

Yesterday I celebrated my 9th month PMO clean.

Big number, I could have had a baby during this period of time  May 12th. Is the day I will celebrate in 3 months my “new birthday”, as the day that I was born again, after 35 years of porn addiction.

I’ve written in past post about my story and how I got to that day so desperate and depressed, feeling I was in a dark tunnel with no light at the end. I put myself in the risk of losing my wife and my kids, and I could not stop doing something that was harming me, depressing me and destroying me.

9 months is enough time to put distance to who I was then, look at the ” old Fercho” with other eyes, and understand how much I changed during these period.
I used to seek refuge in PMO from the daily stress, and from every situation of discomfort in my life. Every time I felt sad or suffocated by a problem, I used to seek the “charming feeling of paradise” that PMO provide us ( for 5 minutes , afterwards I felt even more dad and depressed). This is the biggest change that I can see after 9 months.

These last few weeks I had a lot of trouble at work, projects being cancelled or going South. Besides, my wife has been some weeks very aggressive with me , as a result of the injuries I caused her by revealing my addiction).

In spite of this ,I managed to stay clean. I will not say I did not had some urges, or I have not been tempted by looking to some hot guy in the street and started fantasizing. My fantasies have always been bisexual, and I trend to idolize other guys as heroes when I feel weak or when my self-esteem is low.
But now is different. My immediate reflex is to think: I am weak, this guy looks strong and confident, how great would be to build a fantasy inside my brain and fap thinking on having sex its him or even looking to some good porn, like in the good old days. This lasts a few seconds. I have trained myself to be very aware and alert, to recognize when all this delusional thoughts start building inside my brain, and stop it immediately.

I’ ve learned how to “shift the focus” of my attention to something else, like ” changing to another channel”. I’ ve learned that no delusional fantasy, not porn movie, nothing removes me from the daily stress and problems. It makes me forget for a couple of minutes, but nothing else. They are not easy or mental solutions for dally problems, and the more we try to hide them with PMO, the less ability we have left to work in our real problems and tr to solve them.

I would not lie: is not so easy. It takes time, and some of this behaviors are so automatically rooted in my brain that it takes some times several minutes to realize.
Last week I was during 15′ minutes watching a stupid movie on TV, until I realized I was just watching it because the actor was very hot, and was playing the hero that can solve every problem. I changed immediately to another channel, and the foggy brain was gone.

I can also think now about the nasty things I did during these years, like being with so many guys, hiring so many escorts, watching hours and hours of porn, fapping in bed with my wife sleeping next to me, or at the office with co workers in rooms next to me. So many stupid and risky things, so much money and time wasted. So many hours I could have spent with my kids and my wife, instead of enjoying my hand as my dearest lover.

Anyway, as some guys in this site told me, I need to look forward, never look back.

I want to tell you guys that this fight is worth it. We feel miserable, we feel depressed. Many days we think we cannot stand it anymore, we feel weak, we feel losers.
But do not give up. The reward is much greater than any pain or discomfort we are experiencing.

I feel alive as I have not felt for years. I used to feel a big press on my chest all the time. I used to get up in the middle of the night crying, sad, depressed.
The best way to get rid of the urges today is just to remember how shitty I used to feel. How much I have to lose if I got back just once to PMO. This 5′ pleasure is not worth it.

I want to write my 10th post in a month. I do not want to right my ” relapse post ” never again.

Keep on fighting

UPDATE – Emergency Toolbox that helped me during my first 320 days of reboot

Hi Guys:

I want to update my “Emergency Toolbox” with all the new stuff I have been compiling during these 10 and a half months.
I called “Emergency Toolbox” to some readings that I saves in my cell phone Notes to have them handy to read in “case of emergency” (meaning when I get urges).
They were very helpful, specially the first few months, when I struggled a lot and felt that I could not stand the suffering and needed to relapse.
Reading this helped me focus, and also remember how bad I felt when I started reboot and how much I have moved forward since then. Many times they saved me, I hope they will be helpful for you too.
I just wrote a few, all the rest I copied from other NoFap posts or took them from other websites or videos.

1. The NF journey (I took this from NoFap reddit, I find this is the best description of how shitty we feel as PMO addicts)

Been here for a while on this throwaway, but this is my first ever post.

I lost count of my streak (been a few months) and the mere thought of fapping just makes me sick nowadays. I can’t even imagine myself returning to my old ways. Ever.

Just the thoughts of:

• Being a creepy, lonely fucker- sitting in a dark room alone, face lit by a mechanical, cold computer screen that does not give a damn about you.

• The sweaty hands and balls, stinking crotch and heavy, animalistic breathing- like you’re a fiendish creature. The more you watch and wank, the more disturbing your fetish gets. You end up watching gay sex when your not even turned on by gay sex. Beastiality. Peadophilia. You name it. It erodes your conscience. You’re a beast.

• The frying of your dopamine receptors- and your mind is submerged; eroding in a chemical bath. You’re somewhere else, and nothing makes sense. Your facial expression is enough to turn your mother away in disgust.

• The mindless, 5 seconds worth of numbness upon orgasm (I say numbness- this isn’t pleasure not even close). Forgotten as soon as it happens. No emotion post orgasm. Just the blurry vision and aching heart. Your dick hates you for lying to it again and shrivels up even smaller than before.

• Your load- the millions of sperm, the life force in your body, scrunched up in a tissue and thrown in the bin. These sperm, your potential future sons and daughters, spat out and killed, left to rot in the rubbish because of your selfish, ghastly desires.

• And that EMPTY ass feeling when it’s all over- you fall back into reality with a crash. You quickly turn off the porn on your PC because you suddenly fucking hate it. It’s the worst thing ever at this point.

• Then that burning sensation of regret as you sit there alone. Thinking “What the fuck”. You spend the rest of the day alone- weakness, anxiety, depression all kicks in 10x worse than before you PMO’d. Video games are your friend- they don’t judge you for being so vile. Soulless, mechanical mediums suddenly replace intimacy with real people.

• You can’t look your mom in the eye and tell her you love her, you can’t go outside and play football with your innocent, pure brother. You can’t imagine helping your sister with her homework because the thought of being alone in a room with a “vagina” instantly means you must fuck it.

• Withdrawal from closest friends who cannot help you because they’ve no idea what the problem is. Grades suffer- future looks bleak. Think about ending it, suicide. Think about cutting yourself, drugs, prostitutes… And then realise you’re a pathetic fuck who hasn’t got the balls to do either-

• And so you turn on your computer. And so the cycle continues.

NoFappers, looking back at these points in my life, I hand on heart swear that PMO addiction is the worst thing to have ever happened to me. It sickens me thinking of these points in my life, and I vow I’ll never return to this endless cycle of misery.

And I hope that those out there reading this can relate to my experiences, and see in writing how pathetic it is to give in to these urges. See with your own eyes and learn from my experiences about about how PMO lifestyle is just a downward spiral. And find it within yourself to bring yourselves out of this pit of darkness.

It’s not worth it at all is it? Don’t destroy your valuable, short time on this earth. Live it to the fullest, and live it well. There are no second chances.

I wish you all the best,

2. This has became my life motto, I repeat it to myself every time I feel an urge, I took it from some inspirational video:

“To figure out if something is good for you, you have to ask two simple questions : where does it lead me? And how will it leave me?”

“For every urge you face, you give yourself a choice. Do you give in, or do you outlast the urge? No urge is uncontrollable. No matter how shitty how situation is at the time, you can always make the right decision to walk away and stay clean.”

3. “…maybe we shouldn’t even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each other, but if you can’t do that, because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s our nature. That’s what we want as human beings.”
From a TED Talk inspirational video

4. Carpe Diem, seize the day, make your life extraordinary:

Why he has the right to use these lines?

…because we are food for worms. Because believe it or not, each and every one of us one day we will stop breathing, turn cold and die. They believed that they were destined for great things; their eyes were full of hope. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – – Carpe – – hear it? – – Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”
Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society”

5. I guess it comes down to only two options; get busy living…or get busy dying.” – Andy Dufraene

6. “They are human beings, they are simple guys, they are not Adonis, some god that I need to idolize”.
A recommendation from my good friend @JoeinMD

7. “It’s this ethical, moral paralysis that I have been dumbfounded by many times – I’ve literally have caught myself going into a comatose state and becoming numb in my mind, letting my ethical voice get suspended (I’ve even acknowledged this happening in the past, but let it happen still), so that one lapsing moment, one-second of consent in will, relinquishes me to the downfall and shit of addiction once again. I’ve seen it unfold before me many times and have still chosen the sickness. ”

8. “I’m worth more than a dark room wank to a pixilated babe who name you’ll never even know.”

9. “There is nothing as powerful as a change of mind.
You can change everything else, but if you do not change your mind the same experiences will perpetuate over and over again because everything outwardly changes but nothing inside you changes.
If you want to change something in your life, if there is some goal you want to reach, changing your behavior and overcoming negative habits is something challenging and hard.
The only thing that will make you happy is to step up, discover what you are capable and feel that incredible power pushing though wherever is holding you back, and get to the other side.
How much time do you have left? We do not know. Stop wasting valuable time, if you want something you have to be relentless.
The ability to face sweat again and again without giving up is the power to endure, this is the winner quality. This power only becomes available when somebody is in that state of mind when he or she knows exactly what wants and is fully determined not to quit until they find it.
You are unstoppable; love your life with passion.
I’ve got what it takes. This is my day, and nothing out here is going to stop me.”

From “Mindshift”, a motivational video.

10. “I realized I was not using porn because it felt good. I came to view porn as a way to run away from pain and loneliness.
I was feeling bad and I can just turn on porn and I can forget the world, forget myself, forget my problems; run away from everything and just lose myself for some moments.
I feel awake now, and being awake hurts but it also feels incredible.
Despite all the pleasure that you can get from porn, I do not have any cherished memories from watching porn.
I indulged in fantasy all that time and I ran away from reality.
I feel more connected to every moment in my own life now and every moment is more powerful without porn.
I love my life so much now that I am not running away from my life anymore.”

11. “This isn’t real. You know what it is? It’s St. Elmo’s Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them… there was no fire. There wasn’t even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you’re making up all of this. We’re all going through this. It’s our time at the edge.”

From the movie “St. Elmo’s Fire”

12. All limiting beliefs are rooted in fear. Fear is the aversion to discomfort and pain.

Pretty much every problem we face as humans comes back to fear. This is because all of our problems come from trying to avoid discomfort and pain. This pain can be physical, emotional, or mental. This pain that we are resisting can be the pain of having to detach from a desire, the fear of moving forward in uncertainty, or the fear of facing our own truth.I believe that many people’s reliance on porn is because they have not learned how to effectively manage this stress. Porn and orgasm are such powerful levels of stimulation that they can make you forget about your worries for a while. For many people, they may feel that PMO is the only escape they have to deal with the troubles in their lives.

If you want to make your reboot easier, then you need to learn how to create your own security.

Otherwise, you risk the chance of getting overwhelmed, panicking, and turning to porn to escape the discomfort of your own self-created stress. If you feel like you aren’t creating your own stress and it’s some external circumstance’s fault, then you aren’t taking ownership of your own perceptions.

An even simpler argument is that, just by looking at the design, we can clearly conclude that the penis was made for the vagina, not the hand, and semen was made for fertilizing eggs, not for fertilizing tissues. Throw a computer screen and infinite pixilated hotties into the mix and masturbation seems anything but natural.

Mark Queppet from NoFap Academy

13. “The more heavily you’ve identified with something, the more it has become a part of you. Just like when part of your body gets cut off and you feel pain, when an emotional attachment gets cut off, it hurts. This is the pain that we cannot avoid, no matter how good we are at modifying our own emotions.

Here is where the turmoil lies: your intellect realizes that the path of lust (and lack) leads nowhere truly worth going, but your subconscious wants to cling to the fleeting-but-familiar pleasures of this road. Your subconscious is afraid of finding a new path. It protests:

“What if there is no happiness to be found out there? We should keep trying lust, maybe we will be happy if we have sex with someone hot enough. If we stray from this path then we might not find anything, and if there’s nothing better out there, then we’re better off sticking with the pleasure we know we can find on this trail.”

So what we are seeing here is that in order to gain freedom, we must detach. This detachment requires that we sacrifice our current experience of comfort to eventually gain a new experience a new, less conditional, form of comfort

Mark Queppet from NoFap Academy

14. I noticed that you are a Bible reader, i think that a scripture that really ties to this is James 1:14,15, it is natural to be lured by and enticed by our wrong thoughts or desires, its when we let those thought become reality that we head down the path to death, or in the case of PMO or acting out i usually think of it as the DARKNESS because that is how it makes me feel to the core of my soul… Choosing is our defense against the addict, it is what makes us our true self, it is the reminder that we are responsible for our actions, not our every thought… keep making the right choices where ever you are in the funnel, remembering that you can still get out, and when you do, which i am sure you will again and again (because the funnel is just part of our lives even when we are beyond the current state, because sex is a natural part of our being), be proud because that is the feeling that you want to keep getting… you want the joy of success which is much stronger than the fear of failure…

15. “A Slip Does Not Need to Become a Slide”:
If you slip, your addict may tell you to just keep going: ”Since you’ve already slipped, you might as well do more.” But if you start to slip, or you do slip, that doesn’t mean you need to continue to slide. What if you were on a mountainside and you slipped? Would you give up and just keep sliding until you fell off the mountain? Or would you try to get a foothold and keep climbing upward? If you slip in your recovery, you can still stop right there and just keep climbing. You might have some ground to make up, but you can do it. You have the tools.
A crisis can be a gold mine. That may sound contradictory, but it’s true. For example, if you’re triggered and you successfully resist, you will less likely to be triggered next time. We all live in worlds of chaos and unpredictable moments. When you are prepared, you can turn what could have been a slip into another positive step in your recovery.

16. I can’t over-emphasize this enough……all of those white knuckle battles…..all of the moments of feeling like I was going to slip….that it was INEVITABLE that I would……feeling that even if I make it through tonight, there is no way an hell I can do this “forever”. Those battles MUST be won. Over and over and over until the become less and and less frequent……and then one day its like they stop. Not because urges go away, per se……but because THE ADDICT gets tired of losing. HE learns that there is just no easy way to get us to slip. That we are ready to white knuckle and fight through ANYTHING. And once the addict realizes this, HE doesn’t want to go through the pain of continued defeat.

@cpf from NoFap

17. I was sitting in my garden drinking a fruit juice. I’d just indulged in a porn fest (even though I really didn’t want to) and was feeling… weak and controlled. I no longer felt that I had a choice. The urge came on. I indulged it. I felt shit afterward. It had become a habitual cycle. I knew that I wanted to lose this addiction, but I just couldn’t find enough reason to stop. I kept rationalizing that “a little bit won’t do you any harm.”

Deep down I also knew that the little bit was getting bigger and bigger. It needed to be stopped.

The Wasp story

UPDATE – 16 Months PMO Free, leaving a much better life

Hello Fellow Fapstronauts:
Last Friday was my 16th Month clean.
I want to share with you how happy and grateful I am every month that I get farther away from the PMO nightmare.
Every month I feel more free, and realize how stupid this addiction is.
How can we be so driven to keep masturbating like monkeys? How must be possible that we live in such a delusion, thinking that the stupid scenes we see in porn can be real? How many times we lied to ourselves, dreaming that we are REALLy having sex with that hot girl/guy, instead of realizing that IT IS JUST OUR SWEATY, SMELLY HAND?
I consider myself a quite intelligent guy. I succeeded in my professional career, in the academic arena, and I am proud to teach in one of the most renowned universities in the US (and the world). But nevertheless, I was a big idiot. I bought once and again the porn fantasy, the delusional dream. Although every time after my “PMO sessions” (long and repetitive sessions, 3-4 times per day EVERY DAY) I felt like an idiot, empty, sad, depressed.
But I was trapped in that delusion. I convinced myself that that was the best way to get out of my daily problems, that it was the best way to get rid of the stress and be able to get some sleep.
I idolized this porn scenes ad if they were gold. I spent thousand of dollar in escorts, although it was obvious they were there for the money and wanted to rush and leave as quickly as they could.
The addiction was ingrained in my brain since I was 10 years old. 41 years spent in that delusional shit.
But I do not want to look back and cry. I want to look to my future, knowing that since 16 months ago I started living a much better life.
It was very hard, I suffered a lot, but the fight was 100% worth it.
I can look to the eyes of my sons and my wife now with no shame.
I can stand up as a real man in front of my problems and never hide again behind a computer screen.
Fellow Fapstronauts: do not lower your arms, do not let the addiction defeat you. Fight back once and again, no matter how many times you relapse. Some days it gets super easy, and some says I still struggle with intense urges. But this is life, right? Some days are better than others. But nothing should be an excuse to relapse and get back to that shit.
LET’S KEEP ON FIGHTING! IT IS WORTH IT!!!
Fercho