Porn addiction leaves me feeling confused and lost - V's story

Submitted by a reader on Tue, 30/03/2010 - 09:54

a reader's picture

My name is V and I have been looking at porn since the 9th grade. I was off and on then but remember getting my first catfight videos from the Internet and watching them. It was the first time I ejaculated, I didn't know what happened. I continued on looking at porn and before you know it at a high school age I was using credit card numbers from my family to buy subscriptions. When I got caught by my cousin, it was the worst feeling in the world. Because somebody had stolen her credit on top of my subscription. I also got caught on the internet by my parents. Having my parents catch me was pretty embarrassing.

I still kept at promising to be more stealthy and I was. I continued looking at porn all throughout college, even in the dorms with my roommate in the room often times. Regular women began to lose their attraction because they did not have the perfect look. I ended up moving out on my own and cut my social attractions to a minimal. I sunk into porn more and more. In the last year I would go to the school using my sister’s laptop, and be at the school all in the open. My laptop got a virus from porn and so did hers. I had to get hers fixed and she almost lost important documents. Libraries, student unions, office buildings, etc. It didn't matter where. As long as I got the rush of looking at the screen caps and then hearing the download make the sound. It was like a date. I would get my best food, have some alcohol, get excited, jack off then pass out. It was such a ritual.

I didn't even bother talking to women because I knew porn was at home. Well as things got worst for me, I looked at porn more. When I had the internet at home, I would look at it for more then three hours a day. Recently, it had started to become boring and when I busted it was lackluster. So I knew it was time to quit. I begin the process of looking at softcore porn and lesbian porn. But however I had some homoerotic thoughts last week and one ever now and then in the couple months before. I have been going crazy ever since. Recently I have calmed down, but those thoughts still come back.

From reading, it is a form of hocd. Because of the panic of this it also came out that I was looking at porn to my family, I was asked to get a therapist. Now I sometimes have the fear that people think I'm gay which is a part of hocd. I haven't been able to get hard since that week, and been depressed ever since. I also haven't looked at porn since that week. I haven't looked at gay porn ever, only the one time when I was going crazy to see if I was. I don't knock people who do. I'm far away from a judge.

What is happening? I feel confused and lost because in my whole life I've never had this happen to me. Look at what I have done to myself, my self worth and self esteem.

Hi V,

Thank you for sharing your story here with such honesty. This is an absolutely spot-on description of the tangle of emotions felt by so many of us.

A definition of addiction is repeated anticipation and acting out of the ritual, despite being aware of the problems it causes in our lives. Embarrassment, feeling crazy, hiding from other people, "worst feeling in the world". Even when watching porn becomes boring, it still feels so impossible to get off the ride.

Remember that it's a natural, healthy instinct to seek pleasure and avoid bad feelings. And it's too easy for a porn habit to hijack this instinct. What starts out as excitement and escapism becomes a dependency, often at an early age.

The addiction process can be reversed - that's the best news. A self-help recovery plan will help you to see things in a new light, from learning techniques to overcome urges to shifting your focus to what you want from life. I hope you continue to get support and inspiration from this site and all the recommended resources, and wish you every success in breaking free.

Hello V,

Ahh!! many elements of your story sound so familiar to me from my own past and from my own struggles with porn. I started using porn when I turned 14years old which was a long time ago & a time well before the internet was invented. So back then the only source of porn was magazines. I grew up in a dysfunctional family, & I was a rather shy boy, I didn't feel very good about myself as a person because I felt fat & ugly. Porn was something secretive to indulge in behind closed doors because I didn't think any girl or women who even look at me let alone be interested in me. Sadly, porn only makes matters worse if you are already feeling insecure or in a quandary about aspects of your self identity.

Getting to the point of finding porn boring is in my opinion a very positive sign (signal), it shows you have reach the point of knowing porn is a waste of your time, energy & money. Trying to avoid porn as much as possible is also a good strategy because the more time & space ( create a gap) you can make between porn the more easily you will come to see that using porn is actually (as paradoxical as this sounds) a choice and a choice eventually you will have control over.

**In my personal opinion getting free from the siren pull of porn involves a combination of a) self help methods and b) good counseling or therapy. c) self selected internet filtering can be a BIG help in keeping you (and me!) porn free in the future. I use OpenDNS which offers a free account and once you have registered you can set up content filtering including porn. Or another program that offers a similar content filtering system is K9 web protection.

Good luck & Best regards Alex.

reply

V, I'm so sorry that you find yourself in this situation. It sounds incredibly painful and confusing. I hope you're able to find all the help and support you need to get through this.

reply

"As long as I got the rush of looking at the screen caps and then hearing the download make the sound"

I went through a phase of compulsively downloading videos and the collecting instinct became a big part of my habit. I'd see the screen caps and had to have the video - a massive rush. When I went to actually watch what I had downloaded, it never lived up to my expectation. Boring, samey. I would watch the first and last few seconds, and pretty much skip the rest. Yet I still had to collect all this stuff. I wonder if you felt like this?

reply

YES! collecting porn images and porn DVD's was a big part of my old porn habit too. I wasted an enormous amount of money and time on this. In the end with a lot of determination and courage and help & support I managed to dispose of my collection, which when I had done it felt like a massive burden lifted.

Of course in the end I had no idea why I was collecting all this stuff, it was pretty irrational. The best explanation I could find is that collecting images & DVD's in my case was some sort of attempt to posses (own) the woman of my fantasies which is a bit silly now I reflect on it from a different place in my life. But human beings are often not rational & porn is something that triggers our irrationality. Porn is full of paradoxes I found.

reply

Or to put it another way, its "pornographic materialism" which is precisely the way the porn production companies want us to behave. They want us to be porn consumers & collectors. They want there to be a capitalistic market in porn products, indeed there is one world wide and that's how porn production companies make money & profits. i.e. supply & demand and also create that demand too and then supply it all over again. We are only the "Road Kill" of the porn industry as one person on the website once said and I think he was spot on too.

reply

I think you should not let these homoerotic thoughts get to you. I have went through such thoughts before and I feel that these thoughts are the result of pornography and the jacking off after that. This whole ritual confused me sexually, and it may be the case for you. Try not to let these thoughts define you. Try to see whether the whole ritual of porn and masturbation has caused you to think such thoughts. Don't let the shame of such thoughts get to you. Having such thoughts doesn't mean you are gay or anything. You just need to think through, when was it that you started having such thoughts? Was it after a particular occasion where you were acting out? Think about where those thoughts were before that particular acting out? Were they present? Since they were not, then you should know that pornography caused you to have such thoughts. It doesn't mean those thoughts aren't yours, and the whole degrading process of acting out even if you don't want to, which is due to porn addiction, has caused you to be confused. Don't let porn addiction define you.

reply

Thanks Alex that speaks to me. It did feel like a need to own and control. If I couldn't furnish my life with love, attention and intimacy, filling up a hard drive seemed to give me something to treasure. It is irrational though, and far from even second best.

Its embarrassing to think back about all the effort and dedication that went into the collecting habit, but so good to be free from all that now.

reply

Hello DuncanS,

YES! In reply you raise (pose) a very profound and a very real & deep question. If you (me to, we ) don't feel loved as a person deep down & if the reality of your life is that you grew up in a situation were you did not receive as much love as you needed or deserved. Then that can lead to problems later on in life, specifically to do with relationships and the giving & receiving of feelings of love, it can affect our ability to experience real intimacy.

I'm NOT making excuses here about the use of porn but I am pointing to the fact that this sense of feeling unloved can make a person more vulnerable to the false attractions of porn. YES! this is irrational but as I said before but we are often irrational. The sad thing is and again its paradoxical using porn will only make achieving intimacy & loving much harder to experience in my opinion. You "cannot have" intimacy with a porn image or porn film its impossible, intimacy is a state or condition that only exists between embodied human beings (usually only two people). You cannot have closeness with a one or two dimensional image or sex object. Human closeness is an emotional & psychic state of being & it is multi dimensional & complex, & encompasses things like attachment, opening of the heart center & so forth. These things are impossible with porn, thus porn will always leave us feeling more empty more disappointed, more desperate to numb the pain we might have to face over again. Porn solves non of these deeper dilemmas.

reply

Thus porn is Not the answer or solution to feeling unloved, or unworthy in some way as a person. Porn only keeps that wound open & suppurating. Porn will not help heal that condition.

reply

Thanks everybody for you help and support. This site is really supportive. There is no judging going on or anything. After the whole dilemna with the homeerotic thoughts I stopped looking at porn for fifteen days. I knew that the thoughts would subside after awhile, so I wasnt really worried about that. I was worried about slipping back into porn once everything got back to normal. And it has been getting back to normal, which means the porn has been slipping back in. No hardcore or lesbian. Just poses and nude modeling. Its like once you see a girl with "big tits" it just gets activated. That happens to be my thing. So its been getting a little back to normal with looking at it. Although, I must say that now I have been asking myself, What am I missing out by looking at this? And I am not so hard on myself if I do slip up and look at it. Which has been helping my self esteem alot. I also stopped searching and searching for it which has really gave me more time for other things.

I think the key is to forgive yourself and understand that there is nothing wrong with having the urges. And also to keep in my mind how you affect other people when you block yourself off in this world of fantasy. Once again thanks, and looking back on all I have done. It was something I had to go through and now I do not regret it or look back as if it was not me. Can anybody also explain what looking at porn on a regular basis does to the heart chakra?

reply

And also A. Thanks for your advice. I did everything to check and see if I was gay. And I would get all the reassurance in the world. Even my therapist was talking to me, as we went back into my past. I think when you withdraw into a fantasy world, you stop doing things normal people do like dating. So people around you begin to wonder and ask you if you are? So it begins to grow from a seed to a plant. So I think the key is to continue to discover who you are. I think this has helped me in a way because it has helped me to be less afraid of homosexuals or be homophobic. It has helped me to define who I am.

reply

Post new comment

Drupal theme by Kiwi Themes.