You have to be OK with the idea that you will never watch porn ever again in your life. If this idea gives you anxiety or makes you cringe, then you don’t have the ‘Porn is NOT an Option’ mindset yet

Gary Wilson

As addicts we need to educate ourselves on the science of addiction to make progress as individuals, the shame and self-loathing that comes with porn and sex addiction can leave your entire identity in pieces on the floor. I can’t even look at pictures of myself now without thinking is that even me?

I am angry with the double life I was leading, don’t misunderstand me here, I would function well with my 9 to 5 life, I would make sure I catch up with a small group of friends, I pursued fitness goals and devoted a lot of time to understand the plight of oppressed minority struggles but lacked the ability to pause and look in the mirror and start with improving the guy staring back at me.

My trigger would often come when I was alone and overtired, for years healthy sleep had eluded me, I have never quite kicked the night owl routine of my youth, and here lies the problem, whenever I had a compulsive binge, I would edge and not even finish sometimes as I wouldn’t even be aroused, I was chasing the rabbit through wonderland but deriving no pleasure from it, completely numb to what I was seeing.

---

As time went on I would feel more release in deleting the porn I would collect like I was closing the lid on the laptop under the delusion that I had the high ground and was walking away, in control.

I would wonder why I would get cramps and feel I had a bad stomach, I have since discovered this was likely to be caused by the edging sessions placing a strain on my prostate.

When it came to real opportunities with my loving partner, I would often suffer from Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction (PIED) and Premature Ejaculation (PE) and this would just fuel the anxiety over real sex, I knew I wanted it, but the fear of the pain of not being able to perform made things worse.

---

The brain is like a chemical factory and the ever-increasing pursuit of novelty with internet porn can rewire the way our brain works. From my early exposure to pre-internet porn, I can now share with you that my curiosity soon overwrote my normal interests, I mean, what 15-year-old lad in the 90s would have got hold of pregnant porn, fisting, and double penetration videos? I was already a veteran of hardcore and getting porn in the 90s was so much more difficult.

I feel for lads now who have never known a world without high-speed 4k porn on tap. We have never had so much extreme material just a few search words away right in our pockets, so it is no wonder that we just do not have the data on this issue for the much-needed recognition to be given. It is sadly still some way off with the American Psychological Association (APA) and in the UK there seems to be more growth of understanding, but this is not something that the NHS can assist in and I saw private therapy with a specialist as the only way to go.

This is an interesting video to give some insight into what goes on with our brains while we are hooked on porn.

There is also an extra part with some tips on how to overcome your porn addiction, which may help in creating new healthy lifestyle behaviours.

I find that hiking, running, climbing mountains and camping can all get me out in nature and give me some much-needed time away from the constant connection to technology, in starting this blog I saw an opportunity to put tech in its rightful place, as a tool rather than a master. 

To build on the information in the videos above, there are also a couple of books pictured below that I can recommend to arm yourself with the knowledge and understanding to finally live a better life.

I wish that of all the things I have googled and searched for online, that I had searched – help me, I am a porn addict, but then hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I think childhood trauma or emotional loss is the universal template for addiction

Gabor Maté

---

I am a Sex Addict and this is my first blog post. Recovery feels like a mountain but I can’t go back.

I want to take the time to explain that my addiction has always worked in a cycle, deeply buried and hidden from the world, I conflated deceptive secrecy with personal privacy and I lived a double life hidden from loved ones and family.

It was as though my brain was a partitioned hard drive, on one side lived the version of me that has always been outgoing and seemingly confident, a version of me that would often be projected through the medium of social media and interaction. The colleague, the friend, the partner, and the uncle.

On the other side of the partition was the closed curtain, late-night porn-binging obsessive-compulsive.

An addict with conflicting operating systems is destined to crash and need a complete reboot. To understand such personal destructive behaviour, you have to trace the cord back to the wall.

---

Paula Hall is a leading therapist in this field and explains the OAT model

Opportunity

My problem with pornography has been with me for as long as I can remember. I am of an age where my first encounter was through magazines and VHS tapes.

At the age of 12, a scrunched-up nude picture under the bed was swapped out by my parents for a black bag full of top-shelf magazines. I always thought I must have had cool parents, but I see now this was not helpful to healthy development and my needs for healthy boundaries and safeguarding were not met. I might have run with this and taken it to places I never meant to but this was my origin.

Attachment

I never felt an attachment to a father, my biological father was someone my mother had to escape early on in my life, he was a physically abusive man, and my earliest memories were of fear and domestic abuse.

Later in childhood, my stepfather was more inward and quiet. I would spend so much of my childhood trying to figure out why he was in such a mood. Communication and acceptance were always something I strived for and only now do I understand that my identity had been sculpted on the pursuit of this unrealised status of legitimacy through a longing for some sense of adoption.

Trauma

One of the exercises through my private therapy was to establish a timeline of trauma in my life, this might be broken down into two types, “big T” Trauma and “little t” trauma. Only when I went through this exercise did I see just how much I had experienced and the common thing I did, was to box it up and say to myself no time for indulging in self-pity, and have to get on with things.

Alongside this timeline of trauma I also established a timeline of my porn & sexual behaviours, the porn & sex journey had peaked at similar times to these traumas, and I often previously felt that masturbation and pornography were like some sort of self-medication.

---

Understanding your path is vital to the acceptance stage of this, what this looks like for you will be unique to you.

As Paula Hall says in her video, Opportunity is just growing exponentially with technology, and in my personal experience, my habits evolved and escalated as technology advanced. I often feel like I wish I had existed in a time when such novelty didn’t exist. Watching TV the other day I felt this clip resonated with such feelings.

So today take the time to deep dive into your own attic, what have you boxed and boarded up?

Have you been self-medicating the whole time?

In a world that says “It’s just porn” I will use Basecamp Recovery to share my experiences and lessons, I intend to show that pornography is not only a cause of erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation, but the ever-increasing need for dopamine can ruin your life unless you arrest your fall.

A hijacked reward system can turn your whole life upside down.

For me to get through life intact I now have to devote my every day to the idea of no longer being a blind consumer of pornography. I hope others will join me.