I just passed 1 year this week. I don’t have a lot to say except that it feels great. Two years ago this month I finally put myself through professional therapy because I could see that stress and emotional pain led me to pmo and I was hurting my marriage and life. I did therapy a year till last June.
I stopped pmo in Dec 2015 but had one relapse last year on June 4th right after I quit therapy. It hurt so bad to relapse after almost 6 months. But I told myself I had to learn how to live on my own again without the constant (and expensive) support of a therapist.
Well I think I’ve done it. Feels amazing to have gone 12 months with no real issues. PMO free and having the best sex with my wife we’ve ever had. Yeah I’ve accidentally clicked a few nsfw links but I click back out and move on. The bigger victory is that I know how to manage my emotions and I learned how to admit to myself that I was in pain and ask for professional help.
Anyway, I love all the constant encouragement from this sub. It’s awesome to laugh and get inspired by the memes.
Keep fighting fellow ‘nauts
It’s a marathon not a Sprint. If you really want it, you’ll make the sacrifices to live free.
In my case, getting married yet still looking at porn was killing me on the inside. It just didn’t feel right to me, like breaking my vows to forsake all others. After a long road I put software on my phone and computers (work and home) and gave her the ability to see everything I look at online. That helped motivate me the most probably. I want her to be the only woman I fantasize about and I want my future kids to know what commitment and real covenant looks like.
The therapist worked with me by continually asking me “what are you feeling right now?” As I stopped to actually let myself feel emotions without judging whether I should feel those emotions (I easy dismissed emo pain as me not being strong enough) I learned to talk about my life and realize how deeply I was affected even by simple things people would say.
Now I use an app called imoodjournal that prompts me once a day to journal by asking me “how are you feeling right now?” I take a minute and journal.
I should also add that I use cold turkey (a desktop app) to shut off chrome and IE at 11pm. I realized that nothing good happens after 11 for me. I shut my phone internet off at 9pm using an Android app called screentime. My wife has all the passwords.
Using software to create a wall I can’t breach is a system that works for me. It took me a long time to find software I couldn’t get past. But now I don’t even want to. Sleep are real sex are better than late night PMO.
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