I just wrote this advice into my own journal , but felt it might be worth sharing as a success story and advice too. This advice is really only suitable for married guys or guys in relationships with a SO.
Last night was another wonderfully successful congress with Mrs Rider. No signs of ED and everything functioning as it should. I am truly amazed at how things have turned around for me since finding YBOP and Reboot Nation.
I was a guy who had suffered through years of cronic ED and the associated performance anxiety that goes with it. I intuitively knew that my porn use was the problem, but I didn’t understand the brain part of it until I came here and got educated!
I had tried quitting so many times and failed each time feeling defeated and useless. I can’t express how strong an overwhelming sense of hopelessness I felt each time I failed. There were times where I had seriously thought the only way I could possibly escape this was to end my own life. I seriously hated who I was and I hated that I couldn’t stop.
Today I am amazed at how quickly I have turned all that around. Thanks to the information I found on here and on YBOP as well as information other kind people shared with me I have managed to stay away from porn easily.
I truly believe the most important aspect of my success was that I put my focus on restoring and improving the intimacy in my relationship with my wife. I focused on learning ways to build intimacy in non sexual ways and then practiced those techniques and watched our relationship blossom.
Building intimacy and honouring my wife became the focus of my reboot. You see, I wasn’t just giving up porn anymore, so my mind wasn’t focused on things like how strong the urge was or how I as going to beat it. I was working toward something much deeper and more rewarding. My fight was no longer about giving up porn.
The interesting part was that because I wasn’t in a fight with porn I didn’t have very many urges to deal with. I’d made the realization early in my reboot that “porn was not an option” and I have stuck with it. Sure I had thoughts and urges for the first few weeks, but at that time I was also seeing the benefits beginning to show in my relationship with Mrs Rider from of the non sexual bonding techniques we were sharing. That encouraged me to stay focused on improving our relationship and thus I was not focused so much on beating the porn.
As I said before the key for me was that I was no longer in a battle with porn, I took my focus and put it to better use elsewhere.
The fun part about the non sexual bonding techniques is that they inevitably help build desire for your partner, not that I ever lacked desire for my wife, it’s just that my desire couldn’t always translate into an erection because of the way porn had fucked up my brain.
Three weeks in and things were really beginning to noticably change. My body was responding far more normally to intimacy, though we had been intimate several times earlier on in the reboot and had success there too, but not without some hit and miss. By three weeks we were really enjoying our intimate times together and it has only continued to get better since.
So my advice to you married guys and guy’s with a SO, is to think about making the focus of your reboot about improving the intimacy within your relationship. Don’t make it about fighting porn, fighting urges or getting better erections. Look at focusing on the quality of the intimacy within your relationship and just trust the rest to nature.
LINK – Focus on your relationship and Not your battle with porn.
By rider654321
INITIAL POST – New member 40 +plus years a porn addict
I turned 50 last year. I began masturbating at around age 11 when I became aware of the pleasant sensations emanating from my groin area. As a young boy I can vividly recall rubbing my body against the bedspread on my bed and becoming aroused by the sensations. I had no idea what was going on, but I did know it felt good.
At around 13 I saw a few girlie magazines the other kids at school had. One kid actually had a stack of them (Playboy and Penthouse) and began his own rent and swap business, and I became one of his customers sneaking the mag home and hiding it somewhere my parents wouldn’t never find it (or so I thought). I can still vividly picture the images I saw way back then today almost 40 years on.
Around 14 I stumbled onto other magazines my Father had hidden in the garage. Ribald and Bawdy I think they were called, and I know that’s when my life long addiction to porn really began.
I would do or say anything to escape going on family outings just so that I could have the house to myself for a few hours. As soon as the family was gone I would go to the garage and get the magazines and masturbate multiple times. Back then 3 or more times a day was not unusual if I had the privacy and time, and at least once every night in bed thinking about those images or watching something on the TV in my room. I recall watching the series about Caligula just for the nude scenes.
At 17 I met my first girlfriend and that lead to my first sexual encounter. Even back then I was aware that real sex was nowhere near as enjoyable as the masturbation and fantasy sex I was having alone in my head. I had no idea why that was back then even though my future wife and I were still enjoying a lot of regular sex together. But it was never enough for me on its own.
Most Friday nights were our night to go out. It was usually dinner and wine and always finished with us having sex in my car before dropping her home. Even then when I’d get back to my place I would masturbate again before going to sleep.
Even being at work didn’t stop me masturbating. I did an apprenticeship in a mostly male dominated environment and there were always men’s magazines in the toilets. Every time I’d go there I’d masturbate myself to a quickie and head back to work as if nothing had happened.
I travelled a lot for my work in my late 20’s and 30’s and stayed away overnight regularly. My porn addiction was so strong by then that each time I was away it included a stop at the newsagent to get some magazines and a jar of lube and I can’t explain how strong the desire was to get to my hotel room and be alone. Those nights away I would be awake almost all night masturbating repeatedly, only to destroy the magazines on the way home. I repeated this behaviour over and over for years.
I even found a motel owner who rented x rated movies (under the counter). I would even make up false job reports just so that I could travel to that area so I could stay in that hotel. Sometimes I’d arrive at the motel t midday and check out the following morning not having slept a wink. I’d spend the entire night masturbating to those movies.
To cut what will be a very long story short my wife and I were together for 28 years. We built a home, raised a family and ran a successful business together. Basically we had it all to everyone looking in from the outside, but my porn addiction was always there in the back ground, my mind was constantly soiled by the myriad of sordid images I’d exposed myself too, and it began getting in the way of our relationship more and more.
In my 30’s I began to suffer from what I realised was porn induced ED. I knew I had to give it up and I tried so many times. I’d last a week, sometimes more but I was always pulled back by the addiction and that always ended with a binge, after which I hated myself.
After the invention of the internet it was happening more and more as my access to porn got easier. My addiction and PIED ultimately destroyed my relationship. the constant failure to perform left my wife feeling unattractive and resentful. I’d try to explain that its not her but me, but that never made it any easier.
Knowing how much it affected her emotionally meant I felt more and more pressure to perform each time we did try to make love, and that pressure always lead to failure. Soon we were going months without sex even though there was still lots of affection in our relationship.
Eventually I discovered she was having an affair and was making plans to leave me. I found a bunch of emails on her computer one day after she hadn’t logged out from her account properly. The content of those emails told the truth about how much she hated me and how she felt about our sexless marriage, and reading her sexual descriptions of the things she was doing with him and looking forward to doing with him next time they would be together were a gut wrenching realisation of how devastating my addiction to porn had really become.
I am completely ashamed to say that it took me loosing everything to realise how big a problem my addiction really was.
We separated, had to sell my house and close the business. My life was turned upside down and so was the lives of my now teenage children, all because of my addiction. The children continued to live with me and my wife was clear that she was on a new path of sexual discovery and making up for the time she lost, and that despite loving the kids she didn’t wish for the children to be part of her day to day life. Oddly enough I felt guilty for what I had put her through and the perverse nature of my addiction was that I began masturbating thinking about my wife being with her new lover as I slept alone in our marital bed.
I became severely depressed and had a lot of suicidal thoughts. I can’t express the sense f self loathing I had for my addiction and for myself. I had tried to leave my addiction so many times, but like any addict I’d always go back.
Fast forward 6 years I have remarried to a wonderful woman and my life is great. Except I’m still addicted to porn and it is relentless. I still have PIED and have progressed to using meds to help keep my erection. They only work once I am aroused though and I usually have to think about some porn scene I have watched to get that initial arousal happening. Ejaculation through normal sex takes me a long time to reach, but it is more pleasurable than when I masturbate. The one upside is I do last a very long time, but sometimes I just can’t reach an orgasm.
My job operates from home so I have unrestricted access to porn anytime the rest of the family heads off to work.
I honestly don’t know if after 40 years of watching porn I can ever beat this addiction? Since finding this site I have a better understanding of how badly I have damaged my brain and what will be required to stay on a path to healing.
I have read about the neurological pathways that get built inside our brains, and I imagine my pathways must be more like major concrete highways after all these years of abuse.
I love and adore my current wife and she has been understanding of my ED. Though I have sensed a change in her warmth towards me in the last 6 months. She almost never initiates sexual contact any more, though we still share a lot of day to day affection and have sexual relations at least once every week. Because my ED impacts on penetrative sex our sex life has essentially become the giving and receiving of oral sex to get us both to an O, as penetration is a challenge with ED.
I take responsibility for the mess I am in, and I don’t blame anyone but myself for the heartache I have caused myself though out my life. After finding this site however I am more optimistic than ever before that I might have found a way forward. I know that I have to change for everyone’s sake. I know I am emotionally shut off deep inside. I know I don’t feel the full range of human emotions that are possible. I know that I am desensitised to most sexual touch.
I am truthfully mortified and disgusted at the reality of myself as a man. The online friendships I encouraged and participated in, convincing myself they were “never really” cheating. The fact I have to stumble though awkward ED affected sex with my wife one night, but can then be rock hard masturbating 5 or 6 times the following day to porn?
I am over all the secrecy and lies. I’m over trying to always hide behind a mask making sure my internet history is clear. Hiding files in amongst files.
The one positive I do feel is that I chose to delete every single porn file I had saved and closed all of my porn site accounts 4 days ago, and began to research help for porn addiction which has lead me to this page.
I’m sorry my intro has been this long. I wanted to be as honest as I can be for once. I would really like to hear from others who might have suffered from a long porn addiction and who have recovered successfully from it.
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