The other women I met occasionaly were psychos with more problems than I had myself, but I helped them with *their* problems because I was too nice and dumb, then I realized that this wasted my time – why should I help a girl that did not want me with her weirdo boyfriend and sexproblems??
Or I chased (in my thoughts) women without interest in me, falling in love, getting rejected (after two years of painful desire) and hurt.
[In this case porn helped me once: I asked this woman out, the first time ever in my life, got rejected and after returning to my home, my kidneys hurt, my heart raced, mit lips dried out and burst in 5 seconds after closing the door, I had cold sweat and I was nearly too weak to stand or sit -> I had an adrenalin overdose and fapping nulled the hormone levels. The kidney pain was bearable after that, and lasted for another day; I was exhausted and went to sleep. For one week after that my mind was finally free after two years of self-induced slavery and pain; then I got depressed because I realized again that I was alone]
I could not explain to me, why it was so hard/impossible to have a girlfriend, while every other guy had one. I don’t look bad, am too nice to be true (yeah, that is bad, I know) and have so much to offer. I suffered deeply because I felt terribly alone. Well, I hated parties (and still do so), so I never went to one and was not interested in other places or activities, where I could possibly find a nice woman. Everything seemed to be so dull, except the next ten movies in my queue.
Additionaly, I suffered under severe pressure from my studies and barely, barely survived the basic study period – literally: I was suicidal and extremely depressed. The innocent question of my mother when I was going to meet a girl nearly destroyed me. Maybe she sensed something was wrong and wanted to help with the obvious information, but that was salt in my wounds and I never wanted to talk to my parents about this. I have a good relationship to them, but I just don’t want to talk about these things. Talking to friends is a lot better in this case.
I asked myself every day why I should not kill myself this time and mostly did not have an answer to this question! Every day was the worst day of my life. I only felt good (or at least less bad) with porn and spent more time on the quest of searching the next good movie, while my growing movie archive became more and more boring.
After finally having success in my studies, I lost all the pressure and after I moved out of the dorm whithout seeing the woman every day whom I so desired, I was able to get rid of my depressions and felt very good, though I still had concentration problems in the lectures and it felt like there was a big ball of cotton within my head.
The only good time was learning for the final exams now because I was forced to learn so much stuff that I could not think about other things like women or porn.
By accident I found the “your brain on porn six-part series”, watched it… and it blew my mind. I analyzed my situation and saw now that I was addicted and that all my problems basically had one source (guess ^^).
I previously had recognized that my porn consumption was somehow not good for my concentration and caused me to sweat more than normal, but I did not listen enough to these thoughts.
But after seeing the series and recovering from this new insight I took action and deleted my porn collection, swearing to stop this nonsense. The first three days were painful. You should know that until that new era, the first thing I did every morning was turning on my computer and PMO for some hours instead of doing useful things (like learning, eating, showering, cleaning my room) and now I couldn’t because everything was gone. If I did not delete everything, I wouldn’t have made it past the first day.
My experiences during reboot Deleting my collection and attentively watching the computer doing it was an interesting feeling: Some weak voice inside me screamed “what are you doing?” while some sort of relieving emptiness filled me. I somehow knew that it was over.
It also felt like the computer needed very long to delete all the files, so I could sort of celebrate the moment ^^
I lost something (a very important, long and sometimes very nice part of my life that will never come again) but had high expectations from this sacrifice.
The first three ways I was very tempted to search for a replacement of my beloved stuff, but I was able to resist. I then visited my parents for some days, which is one of the places I did not like to do it anyways; and they have a very slow internet access too 🙂
After the first week it was very easy to “survive” (not literally this time, the suicide crap left me after I moved from the dorm) for another week and the results were remarkable:
After 3 days, then 7 days, then 14 days without PMO I felt changed. I knew that I had a long way before me but that was very promising:
No sweaty hands+feet I had all the time, the cotton in my head went away, I had fun looking random women on the street in the eyes; I had even fun to watch some leaves on a tree and sit in the sunshine!
I also wiped the dust from the instrument I played for over 10 years and continued to play; I played up to two hours a day which was much more than I ever did in the past (0-15 minutes). It was fun, I could see progress and it had the same effect as learning: My mind had no place for porn, women, pressure, only for music and me. After a month I reached the level where I stopped so long ago, even learned more and gave my family a nice private concert; they were impressed.
I reached one month without PMO and now also my environment changed: My parents acted differently (more cheerful) when I was around, they even invited me to dinner in a restaurant without reason. While we ate our meals, I recognized two young women on a table across the room, checking me out – excessively! I ‘checked back’ and was very pleased as this has never happened in my life before. I had no interest in doing more, the situation was improper anyway. After we finished and walked out, I watched them still gazing at me through the window, this was so very awesome and enough for one day for a 30+ year old unkissed guy 🙂
In that time I also had very strong errections in the morning. With porn I lost much sensibility and had problems to get hard without porn, especially to that level I had now for free. This was also a very pleasing improvement, though a littel useless and potentially dangerous (edging).
Women were checking me out everywhere, e.g. in the shoe store and I liked it. Maybe they did it all my life and I did not recognize it? Damn, I was so blind!
Then a little fallback happened, because I edged after six weeks. I edged 15 days in a row, then had to O. Interestingly, I felt absolutely *nothing* as it happened. It was like spitting out after brushing your teeth, totally numb and meaningless.
The next day, I O’ed again. This time it felt good (but not very good).
But I reminded me not to fall back to old habits, so I stopped it and held through for 21 days, then O’ed again. Then only was able to withstand about 1, 2, 3 days only (well, I found 2 Movies that I saved at another place and forgot about them).
This made me a little angry, all this progress for nothing? I deleted the last remains also.
After that I succeeded 2×13 days, 4 days and less. I disliked my weak will every time after I O’ed, so I tried to embrace this feeling and remember me every time I was tempted. I also began surfing for pictures, because a fun site I regularly watch sometimes shows a sexy image, that tempted me, so I installed a porn filter in my browser. Well, I am a computer scientist, so a self-installed filter on my own computer is no baffle, but it introduced some extra steps that made surfing slightly less easy, which mostly was enough to stop me from clicking some pictures.
As the filter began to block sites with no porn in them (false alarm), I finally uninstalled the filter.
After about 100 days since I began with my new life, I was curious and tried to download some videos again. You may think that this was a bad idea but in my case it wasn’t: First, the downloads were so slow that I had to wait minutes or even hours for a movie, I deleted most of them before watching or completing them (so I cheated my cheaty little brain ^^) and as I watched (or better: uninterestedly skipped) them, I felt nothing but disappointment: It did not turn me on, it was totally artificial and weak. It was the same stuff I always watched in the past, so I knew I made huge progress already.
I would not advice anyone to try the following, but in my case it was a very good experience:
I experimented some more and went through the site, where I once got my stuff from. There were 499 uninteresting/disgusting/artificial/horrible movies and only one interesting movie: it was very natural, relaxed and sort of a girlfriend experience and for what I can tell, not fake (except from being porn, which obviously is not real in any way). I watched it without doing stupid things in the meantime, just got innocently excited about the dialogue, environment, facial expressions, body language and so on. This is what I would like in real life.
I learned two things from this: First, the disappointment while skipping through porn and failing to get it in a fast rate was a strong experience that I can turn into an advantage (even my dumb brain should know now, that porn is not interesting ^^) and second: there are nice things waiting in real life, propapbly much better than I could imagine 🙂
So I invigorated my will to ignore porn in any form, feel good about my progress and not O’ing anymore. Another month seems like a piece of cake now; and the best thing is: I invited a friend I nearly lost contact with; she is friendly and nice, I make her laugh and she turns me on now… I don’t expect sex, but I am excited to hang around with a normal woman, talk, see a movie, just have fun; who knows what will happen 🙂
A bright future I know there is more progress that can be made, like talking more to women on the street: I had a situation at the bus stop; two nice women were standing there and talking about literature as I arrived and checked the table for the next bus. After 10 minutes the one asked the other “will there be a next bus or are we just standing here around?” They recognized me standing beside them, checked me out… and I (aka great jackass) did not tell them about the next bus though I remembered exactly… maybe I was too tired because I walked several miles just before or was still too fascinated about their literature talk (yes, I was eavesdropping, bad me ^^) and I guess it would not have hurt me if I just joined the conversation with some questions about the books they discussed. Soon… step by step, unlearning dumb things and learning things I should have learned 20 years before 🙂
And the depressions + suicidal moments? LOOONG forgotten! (well, basically before I began to reboot, but they did not come back either)
And if hell exists: I am not afraid of it after all that wasted and hurtful 20ies; bring it on! 🙂
Some Tipps
- Delete your collection _completely_, witness this action and experience this sacrifice
- Visit/Move to a place where you are not tempted if you’ve got a hard time.
- Talk to someone you trust, like family, friends.
- Watch how you change and how your environment changes, enjoy this.
- Keep track with a check list, don’t erase everything if you O, begin a new row and try to reach the old records
- You edge, you lose. Maybe it needs days, but you will eventually lose and O.
- Distract yourself: work, play an instrument, study. While you do this, enjoy your progress there. Show your skills to other people (little family concert, talk about what you made/learned)
- Enjoy every success in your life, regarding to rebooting or not. Small success counts!
- Help other people, e.g. with charity work. Helping psycho girls with their psycho boyfriends is not charity, ignore them. Well, if their life is worse than yours, gain strength of that thought 🙂
- Ignore women that are not interested in you, they are not worth your time and thinkingpower
- Talk to random people with some intuition and non-fake interest; but don’t expect anything because you might never see them again (e.g. bus stop) or you will find a very special person; if you don’t talk to them, you will never know.
- Enjoy being you (btw: this is one important thing for finding a relationship, I read ^^)
- Flirt using eyecontact and let them check you out. It is fun and may lead to more. Or it doesn’t, then it was still fun 🙂
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