Porn feels like my kryptonite - C's story
Hi... This is a very odd thing for me to do, but I figured it couldn't hurt. I'm 20 years old and have had an addiction to porn/masturbation since I was 13; and ever since then I've beaten myself up every day. I've trudged through my life with this guilt on my shoulders, and I no matter how much I want to be rid of this shit SO BADLY, it seems like it's my Kryptonite.
I still live at home with my family (they don't know of my addiction), and the urge only comes when everyone's sleeping (how convenient right). Other than that it's the last thing I want to do throughout the day.
My father suffered from porn addiction also, and it nearly tore my parents marriage apart, but somehow he found a way to escape it. I'm in love with my girlfriend of 3 1/2 years, and the fact that I still suffer with porn kills me because I know it's killing her. She knows I have this problem... but we hardly talk about it because I get so frustrated with myself and the guilt.
I'm afraid my life is speeding down the lane my dad went through, and it's the last thing I want for my life... but here I am talking anonymously online because I can't shake it. And it's irritating because it seems like the simple thing to would be stop, but it feels just out of my reach. I know I'm not the first one to go through this. So if anyone can offer any sort of advice or help I would be unconditionally grateful.
Thank you C for sharing your frustrations here. I know... typing such a personal account into a form on a remote website feels like a strange thing to do. But hopefully the feedback you receive will be of some help, and setting down your thoughts for an external audience is a useful exercise in itself. You've already displayed a great deal of honesty and self-insight here.
Anyone who has struggled with a porn habit will know the immense feelings of guilt that accompany the ritual. And it's possible that because of your father's experience, the guilt and shame feels heaped upon you even more. Knowing that your father managed to overcome his addiction is a signal of hope, but it also leaves you despairing over why you can't repeat the success.
With any unwanted habit, guilt forms a large part of the trap. It eats into our self-esteem. Our self-talk says 'I'm such a hopeless, addicted lowlife, I may as well do it to myself again'. Deep down, we don't feel worthy of breaking the habit.
So a good starting point is to completely realise that you are not the habit. Begin to visualise the habit as something external to you; something you choose to do for some reason. But it does not define you, and you have the freedom to choose other, more positive ways to spend your time and get your needs met.
In fact, rebuilding your self-esteem isn't achieved solely by not watching porn. Positive feelings about yourself emerge naturally when you engage in life in a meaningful way. When we engage in activities that have real value to us, and when we are thinking of others instead of ourselves, we feel the best about who we are. This is the key to building self-esteem and moving on from old, futile habits.
So how do you go about all of this? When we feel locked into habit, we are in a state of ambivalence; torn between two polar emotions about us and porn. On the one hand, "I want the buzz of watching porn. It turns me on". And on the other, "I really don't want to watch porn. It wastes my time/kills my relationship/gives me porn goggles/whatever". This continual state of inner-conflict eats us up horribly.
Here's the key: motivation outweighs ambivalence. Really understand why you turn to porn, and just how bad the fallout always is. Maybe make a list, review it often and keep it somewhere close. Fully accept the reality of breaking the habit and moving on to brighter things. All of this builds motivation, enabling you to tip the scales of ambivalence once and for all. It's about getting self-aware, and learning tactics for dealing with those cravings in the moment. In time, you'll be able to notice old urges and simply let them fade away.
So... lecture over :) I wish you every 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 C, A couple of
Hello C,
A couple of things jump right out ( right into my mind) at me when reading your piece. First of all I think its very common to first discover or come into contact with pornography around 12,13 or 14 (14 or 15 in my case) this is not very surprising because this is around the time of puberty.
Secondly, puberty leaves young people quite vulnerable to the pull of porn because people of that age are just discovering a wider sense of the world around them, they are very curious obviously because they are becoming sexually aware for the first time.
Thirdly, puberty can be a very upsetting & distressing crazy mixed up kind of time, porn could be a way to attempt to handle a lot of the distress & pain involved with growing up and trying to come to terms with big changes.
Fourthly, you have very accurately made the connection between your fathers behavior and his porn habits and your own (like father like son?). YES! its important to see you don't have to make the same mistakes your dad made in his intimate relationships with women. You are NOT your dad and you can make different positive choices in relationships, say with your girlfriend for example. Please try and talk more with her about your feelings I'm sure that could be quite positive, the more love you receive & give the better the intimacy, the better the intimacy the better the sex. The more your intimacy needs & love needs are met the less you will need porn to fall back on.
**Happy people don't need porn!!
Finally, I think you should stop beating the shit out of yourself, stop seeing yourself as a bad person for viewing porn & jacking off lots. Just because you viewed porn DOESN'T MAKE YOU A BAD PERSON!! (like the person not the behavior or the pattern). Try to ask yourself why you feel such a strong need for porn, in my case I used porn when I couldn't handle difficult feelings, so I bottled them up or blocked them out (numbed them out) with porn.
Porn itself is actually a
Porn itself is actually a neutral entity just like money is a neutral entity. Its how you make your money and how you spend your money that matters most. So porn is the same, its what you do with porn and how you use it and how that impacts upon you. Porn itself is only a means to an end, although many people might disagree with my opinion I see that using porn is actually a choice, we choose at some level to use porn and having said that we can also choose NOT to carry on using it too.
**Simple law of the universe if something makes you feel bad then stop doing it, make a different choice?
**Porn is a rather masochistic kind of sport or past time. Porn is just a form of self flagellation. And having said that we can stop doing that too ourselves if we want too.
I chose to start liking
I chose to start liking myself & loving myself & respecting myself a hell of a lot more by letting go my porn habit. It was quite a stark & simple choice for me stopping using porn was about choosing to love myself and to face my own pain & grief. Since allowing myself to grieve I haven't been driven by porn or needed to use porn. The only time any slight pull for porn comes back to rear its ugly head again is when I am feeling insecure or unable to deal with difficult feelings. I've had my fair share of slips & relapses but currently I'm totally porn free and much much more happy with myself as a consequence.
God this blog speaks to me.
God this blog speaks to me. As someone else who discovered porn in my puberty all of the above could be about me and 100 million other men I'm sure. Porn has seen me out of 4 relationships. Alex your comparison with money is 100% true.
What is porn for? **Use
What is porn for?
**Use porn as comfort
**Use porn to block feelings of anger, rage, dis-empowerment & emotional impotency, disappointment.
**Use porn if you hate yourself, using porn is like taking a whip and whipping yourself.
**If you want to feel terrible about yourself as a man, boy, as a human being YES! use porn.
**Porn gets in the way of living a rich life and being fully present in the here and now of the moment, porn stops you being fully aware.
**Porn is a paradox because superficially porn appears to be one thing but in reality it is almost entirely the opposite of what you think it is. Porn is highly contradictory & confusing too.
ULTIMATELY!! if we use porn we only hurt ourselves nobody else.
I'm new To all of this forum
I'm new To all of this forum stuff but I just want to let this out. I didn't know I had a problem until recently when my girl friend of 4 years threatened to leave me. Now I look back and I can see that it's been there since I could remember. When I lived at my moms I had stacks of porn magazines that I kept hidden from her and no matter if she found them I always replenshed them ( I was only 16). Then it got to the point where I was going to friends houses and taking their porn movies home, I also did his to my father. So after that I moved in with a room mate who had direct tv and I had racked up a 100 dollar cable bill just in porn. Now for the last 4 years I have been with a beautiful woman who wasn't aware of my addiction ( nor was I until she pointed it out) and now after repeated incidences of her catchng me she's starting to think about leaving me and she's carrying my child. What do I do, because even though I'm telling all of you this I'm not feeling any sence of relief. Someone please pat some sites that helped you.
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