1. Physical
I didn’t really have many physical symptoms for PMO addiction, just some minor things. I didn’t have PIED or anything like that. The first is that anytime after PMO my back would hurt, even if I had done it laying down in bed putting no strain on my back. So my back has been feeling much better. The second (sorry to be graphic here) is the my left nut used to hang super low after PMO… scary low! lol. Like i used to see it and think i should go to a doctor, but then I would think about having to tell the doctor about my addiction and would never do anything about it. Since quitting, things are sitting much better down yonder, I don’t notice it doing that at all – even after sex with my wife.
2. Mental
This is where I have seen the most change. My attitude is waaay better. I used to have crazy mood swings for a few days after each PMO – i would become irrationally angry at my family, followed by intense self loathing because I knew I was causing all this. I also notice just having a more even attitude and state of mind from not dragging my brain through the dopamine rush and crash cycles. I used to look at myself in the mirror and think to myself how much of a hypocrite and loser I was after PMO and now I feel great about myself.
3. Relationships
Most important is my relationship with my wife. I haven’t written much yet in my journal about this, I will at some point, but my wife doesn’t know that I have had this problem during our marriage. I had told her about it when we first got together but she just thinks it is something I struggled with in the past. One time we were talking about porn, and she said that she doesn’t even consider looking at nude images to even be porn – at least not in the same regard as the more intense stuff – she said that porn is watching sex videos… which I had never done, for some reason I was always able from stopping myself from going down that path, and just stayed with looking at nude images or videos… anyway that’s a little bit of backstory for me – but what all of this caused is that I lost the desire for sex with my wife. We would have sex – but not super often (once every few weeks) and it was normally when she initiated it. For me, I was content to just go “flog the dolphin” (a hilarious expression I saw another rebooter use on here) anytime I was getting horny. Over time I lost attraction to my wife – which is crazy because she is so beautiful, she’s literally stunning. After reading YBOP I finally realized why this happened, it was because with porn my brain was getting the massive dopamine rush from the novelty of new images and with my wife I was always seeing the same “image”. This also helped me understand why I wouldn’t PMO to the same images of super attractive women online – I always had to fine something new. So years of neglecting my wife’s sexual desires, and my crazy mood swings from PMO, resulted in an unsatisfied marriage. We’d have good times and good days and were overall happy, but there were so many things that were wrong (because of my dark secret) that as a whole it just felt like things were headed the wrong direction in our relationship. So the biggest change for me through this reboot is that I have rekindled my love and attraction for my wife – it honestly feels like what our honeymoon should have felt like – we are way more in to each other – in more ways that one lol. Our marriage feels 100 times better than it did just a few months ago. I still have work to do, she doesn’t know about my history with this addiction, and I will tell her soon, I actually started writing a letter to her that I want to give her explaining everything that has happened… I’ll write more about this another day.
Anyway, I’m sure there are more benefits but that’s all the time I have for today.
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