To the communities of NoFap and PornFree:
I have been “on” NoFap since August 2012. I have something I would like to share, if you would be so kind to read it.
My piece is about how your thoughts can be impeding you rather than helping you achieve your goal.
A few years ago I quit Facebook. Deactivated my account. Today, when someone asks if I have Facebook, I tell them no, and they seem so shocked, like I am an outcast or something. “How can you live without Facebook?” – It is very possible, and it has been done. My secret is simple: I have no secret. There’s nothing I do. I just deactivated it. For the first little while, I would be reactivating the account then immediately deactivating it “just to check”. But now I don’t even consider it. When I hear “the posts are on Facebook”, I have zero interest to pursue it. I look at public Facebook pages (e.g. Funny posts) to get info from time to time, but I have no desire to re-activate my account. Once in a while (Maybe once or twice a year) a thought will pop into my head of “maybe I should get a Facebook”, but I just reject it and move on with my day, and don’t think about it any more. When I see the “like us on Facebook” symbols, I just recognize it as not being an option and go about my day. Don’t have any second thoughts.
Now imagine if I spent all my waking hours a day obsessing about Facebook, admiring how many days I have gone Facebook free, and was constantly reading the r/NoFacebook sub (If such a thing exists)?
You would bet I wouldn’t get very far.
It’s the same with porn. Obsessing about recovery, and dreaming about how good life will be after recovery is counter-productive. Saying “on this date, I will be on day x, and things will go like y, because I’m on a streak” is a destructive mentality.
I have no idea how many days I’ve gone Facebook free, or “how far along recovered from Facebook I am”, because I was never keeping track.
How many of you have heard of the social networking site “Pair”? If you haven’t, how easy is it to not use Pair? Probably pretty easy, since you never heard of it. But let’s say you downloaded Pair and you didn’t like it – would you spend all day obsessing about NoPair and how much your looking forward to a Pair-free life? You would forget about it and move on. Pair is like Facebook to me.
Stop thinking about porn. Stop thinking about NoFap. Stop counting days. Stop thinking about how great things have been recently. Focus entirely on making your life better and self-improvement. If you relapse, accept it as a part of learning, and don’t associate any feelings with it, positive or negative.
If you see a porn pic/clip/arousing content somewhere (you will unless you live in a bubble), all you need to know is that it’s simply something that is there, in that place in that moment in time. Nothing else. Don’t think about it. It’s nothing more than just something that exists, like a garbage. I bet you haven’t thought about the last piece of trash you put in the garbage (until now, that is).
Yes, porn is addictive. But if you’ve ever seen a recovered heroin addict present, he or she never says in the presentation “I spend all day thinking about heroin”. Alcoholics go to AA meetings once a week, not “let’s talk about how bad alcohol is” discussions every chance they get. From this day on, being clean is just a part of life.
Take all that focus and motivation you had before that was delegated to not relapsing, and put it in something self-improvement related.
I came on to post this, and although it may seem counter productive, I am assuming the risk and posting this to help my fellow NoFappers and PornFreers. This will be my last post ever.
Farewell, r/NoFap and r/PornFree. It’s been the best. And remember; Fake it ’till you make it.
LINK – Forget about NoFap or you will continue to fap
by Thatredditor
UPDATE – NoFap, I was wrong.
I had created this post a little over two months ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/2lxdcp/forget_about_nofap_or_you_will_continue_to_fap/ I am here to announce, that I was wrong. I was continuing to relapse at an abhorrent rate, up to and including this day (1/16).
Since it is post-relapse for me, and I am struggling to communicate, this will be a short post.
Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejyD3_gBhYw
Secondly, “Porn is not the reason your life sucks”.
“Porn is a symptom”.
I remember one of the best months of my life was when I only relapsed twice in the month. Now i’m not sure if the lack of fapping/porn>good life, or vice versa.
I was wrong.
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