How my porn filter helps me - CG's story

CG frankly describes his experiences of living with a porn obsession, and how a filtering solution certainly helps:

It's good to find this site. I am a 43 year-old male, and have been addicted to pornography for about 28 years. Its hard to say exactly when it started, but probably around the time I discovered my Dad's porn mags - something I never told anyone and which was never discussed between him and me or anyone else - and which also happened to be near the time my parents' split so I would use porn to cover my loneliness and anger and as a way to 'get away' from life.

I think my addiction is pretty bad and I have wasted many thousands of hours (tens of thousands?) viewing porn and maturbating all through the day and night. Although I acknowledged it as an addiction about 15 years ago, it has been a constant war during which I have lost many, many battles. Undoubtedly, the switch from magazines to internet use has also been a very difficult one to combat and I have only very recently made some progress in beating the terrific temptation that is internet porn (see below).

One of the worst times in my life was about 5 years ago, just after I got married and then our first son was born. There were lots of stressors in my life at that time: job-loss, new marriage and child, three house moves and then my mother became terminally ill. My porn use reached terrific proportions - about an average of 8 hours a day and night or around 60 hours a week. Looking back I don't know how I did it, I was utterly exhausted and miserable, and, frankly, very unstable and pretty close to cracking up. The worst thing of all was the self-loathing, and even horror, it brought me as I had to have a lot of contact with my baby son, whom I adored. With the hundreds of powerful images constantly playing in my mind I felt horrible that I had to be around him, change his nappy, hold him. I just wanted to get away, not to touch him.

I don't know if this aspect is talked about here, but the only saving grace in all this is that I thank God I do not have strong perversions when it comes to porn. I certainly do not judge those who do, and the internet must be a nightmare for them, but although my porn addiction is miserable and powerful, at least I do not look at illegal or really horrible things involving pain, abuse etc. Had I this further problem I think I would have simply walked away from my new family, so horrendous would have been the gap between whom I wanted to be with them, and who I was. Even so, it was a bad situation, and I am now haunted by the strange vibes my lovely son must have got from me during the first two years of his life. Things have gradually got better, but I still fall often and then I hate to be around him, although I do not have much choice as I help out a lot at home. I can only hope to God that I have not harmed him emotionally and that one day I will be able to talk about this with him honestly and openly in a spirit of love and understanding.

Which kind of brings us to now. I have given up on the 'therapy' route. Several attempts made me cynical and sceptical. I never managed that 'new leaf', that 'make the right choices' approach. Perhaps I am too weak but my addiction feels deeply chemical now and - as I'm sure has been remarked elsewhere on your blog - the difficult thing about porn or sex addiction is that it is an extension of a completely natural, indeed lovely thing: sex. So the only thing that works for me is to take away the major source of the addiction; to take away the possibility of viewing websites or downloading stuff. This way I can 'manage' the addiction and reduce it by about 90% - which feels OK, although I have had to accept that I will never get rid of it altogether. I'm not sure what other readers will feel about this, but it is certainly one way to go, and certainly a big improvement on how things were. And I have found the recent Cyberpatrol really superb for this. (This is in NO WAY some sort of promotion! There may be other equally good products out there, but I have not investigated them.) The old CyberPatrol was good but the new technology they now have is even a step up. One can search for a long time and find nothing at all - everything is blocked. That kind of take the edge off searching and you get your 'fix' searching (talked about elsewhere on these pages) without actually viewing stuff, which is good for me as I cannot feed any urge to masturbate without any images at all to keep up the stimulation. And then one gets bored much more quickly when it is clear that continued searching will not give any results.

To set up the system I make all the settings in the software, including specialist key words etc and then throw away the password. Of course it is possible to get back a password, but you have to write to their product support in person via some sort of noticeboard, and as I have now told them that I use Cyberpatrol to control 'my own inappropriate internet use' it makes it much harder (in a good way!) to write to them and ask them for the password. Basically it would be clear to the technician, whom you address by name, that you want to get inside your own programme to look at porn, and that a) takes the fun out of it, b) makes one think twice about what one is doing! As I say, it is not perfect, but it is an improvement, and that, in the context of my life of porn addiction, is very positive.

So this is my story so far - or a small part of it, although it is long enough! I really feel I have lost a lot of my life to porn. I could have learnt at least one other language in the time I have wasted (!) and I feel I have damaged myself and possibly loved ones through this addiction. But it is a fact and I must deal with it as best I can. I hope all of you out there can take something from this, and if my technique for blocking the worst porn excesses which you suffer from proves useful to you, then I am grateful.

I completely agree about the benefits of using a filtering application or service. It helps to manage the searching instinct and enables us to use the internet with less risk of slipping into old habits.

As you say, filtering isn't the perfect solution. It is possible to override the filter (though programmes like the one you mention certainly make is a lot more hassle), or we sometimes find ourself ourselves playing a frustrating game of 'trying to beat the filter' with elaborate Google searches. Filtering alone doesn't address our deeper motivations to escape into porn either.

But it does indeed help, and it's one of the steps that I recommend in a recovery plan. Thank you CG for sharing your story and advice.