I am £50k in debt.. mainly on porn - D's story
Where do I start..... I first discovered porn at about 12 when I stumbled upon my dad's magazine collection. This sowed the first seed. I wasn't an avid user of porn.. until I left home at 19. I then started buying magazines... you name it I subscribed to it.
I then met a wonderful girl when I was 25... this seemed to stop me using porn. Everything was great, we got married and I was blissfully happy. Suddenly I lost my wife to cancer... I was 36. Within weeks of her passing, my porn use started again, the internet opened up a whole new world.
I started doing everything... buying porn, downloading porn, chatrooms, stories.. basically anything I could get my hands on. This went on for about 3 years. I then decided to move house... hoping this would break the connection. It did for a while... but now I am back to where I was .. in fact worse than ever before.
To give an idea of where I am at now... I currently have over 3000 dvds... I have bought 2 external hard drives, to store all the extra porn that I have downloaded. You will not believe how many porn sites I have bookmarked... it is in the hundreds. I am 50k in debt.. mainly on porn. I just can't get enough.. every morning, and I mean EVERY morning... it is the first thing I do when I get up.. masturbate watching porn. Most weekends I watch porn for hours on end.
My social life has suffered.. hardly go out... why should I when I have got porn to satisfy me... I have even got a database of all my dvds and fave 'stars'. Just so I can add to my collection as soon as a new one comes out.
I have read many of these stories, and I can relate to them all. I can fully understand why it is very difficult to break this addiction, because that's what it is.
Whether I am ready to stop, I am not sure, but I am hoping this is a first small step to recognising that I have a problem.
I am 41 and addicted to porn.
Thank you D for describing your experience with such affecting honesty.
There's a fair amount of discussion on this blog and beyond about how we define a problem porn habit. Addiction, obsession, compulsion... it's a valid yet knotty debate. But your story underlines just how draining and consuming a porn habit can be, regardless of which label we apply.
As you say, breaking the habit can seem an incredibly daunting prospect.
Having read some of the stories and posts on here, I hope that some of the suggestions for breaking free will prove helpful. You've probably seen discussion about porn addiction as a coping mechanism, and the constellation of factors that can underlie the cravings.
The impact on our social lives can be immense, as it almost seems that nothing in the 'real world' can compete with the buzz of porn. And we do develop obsessive routines that accompany porn viewing; I've spoken with other guys who meticulously index their porn collections or invest in costly technologies to amass even more porn.
I'd like to add that no matter how long you have endured the habit, or how intensely, change is certainly possible. It is a process of taking small steps forward at your own pace, and you have done exactly that by posting here.
I hope that you will continue to drop by, and wish you every long-term success.
Porn Game Over is Jason's self-help plan for quitting the habit. Click here for a fresh approach to internet pornography addiction...
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Hello D, Gosh! I can
Hello D,
Gosh! I can really really relate to a lot of your story, I really know how intense using pornography can become. I was so touched by your story. Please can I make a suggestion to you D? & I really hope you don't think I'm being judgmental here, that's not my intention at all. But D have you ever considered that just may be there could be a connection between your wife's death & your obsession (addiction) & use of porn??. Of course I cannot know with certainty but D it sounds so much like you have buried your grief over your wife & that your use of porn is a method of numbing out that unresolved grief. I really really do feel for you, I lost my dad suddenly back in 2000 so I know what grief feels like, I know that porn can be an extremely effective anesthetic and this sounds alot like whats happening here D. I wonder if some kind of face to face counseling or therapy might be helpful? I know that if you use porn a lot you can end up feeling rather disconnected from others, from simple human contact. I often felt like I lived on another planet from most people, often what I needed was a hug & some kindness ,etc. I needed to reconnect with myself & my feelings & with other people. Porn can leave us in such a lonely space. Don't become a space man D try to get your feet back on the earth so too speak!!.
A PORN COLLECTION PROBLEM &
A PORN COLLECTION PROBLEM & WHAT TOO DO??
Of course that leaves you with yet another difficult dilemma, the dilemma of what too do with such a massive porn collection. In my case the porn collection was much much smaller in scale than yours D but I had about 150 DVD's, at first I thought about trying to sell them onwards too someone else who might be interested in taking them off my hands for a price (any price). But all attempts at selling my collection failed miserably which seemed quite significant & symbolic at the time.
However, in the end and with encouragement from Jason here I finally decided to be rid of the temptation of these disks, I decided to free myself from the disk collection (porn) by braking each disk into quarters or more, I bagged up the end results & took it to my local defuse dump. Gosh!! it felt like such a massive burden had been lifted off me. Its very hard to put into words how that felt after-wards.
I'm NOT saying you should definitely do this (its one option) but this was right for me and it worked well and helped me lots in my struggle to be free from porn.
**I am 41 and addicted to
**I am 41 and addicted to porn.
NO!! I DON'T see it that away at all? you might be 41 years old & you might be using porn. But that doesn't make you a bad person. I don't think you are an addict at all. I would suggest that your porn dependency is as a result of not having completely dealt with the grief of your wife's death. D if you can grieve properly in your own time I would wager a bet with you that your porn usage will drop away by itself. D the porn you are using is only a means to an end, its just a way to avoid your grief in my opinion. If you were able to deal with your grief (pain) & loss the porn will melt away by itself.
Its NOT an addiction its really just a method of pain relief, its the way you are stopping yourself from facing your grief. I can totally understand this too & I really feel for you. Facing your pain is the way to resolve your use of porn.
**NOTE:- The death of someone so close to you is a massive rite of passage for anyone, the porn use is preventing you from completing that rite of passage.
Porn is NOT the real problem
Porn is NOT the real problem here, its only a symptom of a deeper issue. Porn is the means its NOT the end!!!. Porn is NOT the core problem.
The problem with porn is that
The problem with porn is that if you cannot feel you cannot heal, its a classic catch22 type situation.
hey i once lived in this
hey i once lived in this situation and i remember how painful and bad it was. i shared a house with other people who knew nothing about my addiction to pornography, but all the time my bedroom was like a sex shop inside.
i don't know how many porn videos i owned, but i spent a colossal amount of money on porn. my video tapes were all sorted by category and fetish but i probably spent more time buying new ones than watching all the ones i owned. the mailman was bringing vhs video shaped parcels on most days.
then i spent more money on a private cable internet connection and my house friends wondered why the cable had to run up the stairs and straight into my room. why can't we all share the internet here? so i lied and said that i needed it for studies and work and i had to have exclusive access to the connection.
sometimes a house friend would knock on the door and shout - we are going to the pub would you like to come along? i would shout back - no i am working maybe another time. every time i was wearing headphones and watching pornography. they stopped asking after a few tries.
on the computer i downloaded a load more porn, just collecting and collecting. i tried to stop and clean it all off sometimes but it would turn into stupid games with myself. i once spent more money on disk recovery software and then a couple of days learning how to use it and svanning my computer just so that i could recovery all the porn i had deleted. i was really desperate and it was the most important thing in the whole world.
a lot has changed and now i live with my wife but it was not a sudden change. i did not get married and change the habit on the same day. before that, i ran out of money and sold all my porn videos to a man in my same town. if i had any money, i expect i would have tried to buy them back again or buy new videos and dvds. i had to get a job. something just stopped me from living on the streets knowing that it was all because of my addiction to porn.
when i began getting money again it had to be spent of necessary things. i used to think about porn sometimes but i was working in an office now and really going to the pub with the people at work. my job got better and i feel good about my self and had more reason not to go back to the porn catalogues and internet.
also the comments by Alex say something to me because my father died around the same time. i didn't make the connection at that time, but the experience made me focus more on cleaning up my life. it sounds silly - i didn't want him to be watching me ruining my life with porn.
i hope that you do not have to lose all your money or experience a death before you change
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