Porn addict in a downward spiral, need advice

I'm sorry to hear that airwolffan, but at the same time I am grateful for your warning. Sorry if that sounds selfish of me, don't take it like that, but only recently has the reality of my past actions began to set in and drive me to want to seriously push towards a change. I've been fighting this addiction since 2010, and whenever I would give up, the beast (what I call my addictive voice) would always take over and convince me that porn was okay, that it was all okay, that I was normal, that everyone uses porn. This delusion left unchecked, I began to take pride in my collection, starting from a mere 8 GB of downloaded tube site-quality stuff to nearly 11 TB of 1080p porn that I had pirated via torrent on a private tracker. I've spent over $800 dollars on external drives, $100 on live webcams, and over $100 on sex toys and lube. Not to mention all the time of my life I've wasted on this crap. Every summer vacation. Every day after school. Well into the night. Early in the morning on the weekends. And my beast thrives while deep down I suffer, the real me choking, gasping for air under the smothering darkness of sexual addiction. When the cp urges came to me they nearly doubled my suffering because now my mind saw society calling me a monster, a basement pedophile, even though no one knew my secret. Recently, as I have pushed the boundaries to the illegal it seems as if the world is abandoning me and I am a lost cause, merely another f****** disgusting pedo who needs to rot in jail for his sexual attractions, but I don't want to be that. I just want to be normal. I want to live a normal, happy life. Yet, my beast insists that this cannot happen unless I have more porn, more files, masturbation on a regular basis, unregulated sexual thoughts, no remorse, the desire for casual sex with anyone and everyone, etc.

I thank you and the others on this forum for supporting me through this. I will check out the book you mentioned, hoping it will continue my difficult push against this.

I get totally where you are coming from, I the same as you want to live a normal life and be the person I was most of the time. Its hard accepting you have a problem and even harder dealing with it. Like I said I'm in a situation that has now changed my whole life around and would do anything to go back and change it.

I don't want my post to sound dramatic but I just want to be able to help other people not make the mistakes I have, reading that book was a real eye opener for me, another book is called "the porn trap" again a worthwhile read.

If you are in the UK then call the Lucy Faithful foundation, you don't have to give any personal details and it is confidential,if your elsewhere have a look around there must be other organisations that can help you.

It is great you realise you have a problem, you just need support in facing it head on, it is almost impossible to do it alone, it is a shame there is no one you can confide in that would be prepared to help you.

Good luck.

-- Thu Aug 01, 2013 9:19 am --

I just want to add that for some people a little legal porn is fine, for others porn is a no go area, once you are in a downward spiral like the OP then you can't handle porn in a responsible manner and the best course of action is to avoid it altogether and get your life back on track.

Not to keep driving the same point home, but yeah, with the new technologies in jpg facial recognition that the I.C.AC., Google and Yahoo, etc are implementing currently over the internet, it really has now become a matter of "not if, but when" in terms of getting a knock on your door and being taken away by local or federal law enforcement......most important (along with everything else), whatever you do moving forward, don't share, transmit or distribute your beloved stash over the net, or you will really screw your life up for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for all the advice thus far. I'm back home now, and I had some serious doubts about letting my stash go. In order to deal with the nagging voice in my head telling me to keep it I had to masturbate beforehand. I know, not a constructive thing to do, but I was afraid I'd get stuck with the addiction mindset again otherwise.

So far I feel pretty good about the whole affair, like a cleansing has taken place. However, I am not even close to being free from danger yet. My plan right now, as I said previously, was to take this whole addiction slowly and not try to rush right into total abstinence. As for the first step, no saving of any porn files whatsoever, including favorites. This is going on the assumption that I have some form of OCD compelling me to save absurd amounts of porn. I think if I keep this urge in check, I'll be much better off, even if I have to surf tube sites now and then.

I have a few concerns though: mental blocks that I can see coming both from experience and thoughts I am having at the moment. These may be discussions in themselves which require another thread. Anyway:

The process of trying to beat my porn addiction causes me to feel asexual, and thus, at a loss. This feeling is only made stronger by me being 18 and a virgin. Even though it may not be true, I feel like most guys my age have had sex before, and not only have I not yet had sex, but now I am trying to avoid sex. I feel like I am wasting my youth away: becoming old before my time, if that makes sense. I have visions of people my age partying and hooking up while I try to avoid sexual release. I want to stop porn, but don't want to feel asexual. These feelings leave me confused and lend me to give up frustrated and angry at the world.

I have always been very uncomfortable around girls, sweating whenever I pass a girl my age in public. I try to avoid eye contact if possible because it makes me uncomfortable. To make me feel worse, I always end up staring at even the younger girls, around 7-12 years old. This makes me feel guilty, like I'm not worthy of any human interaction. Perhaps it is because of these feelings, and because I feel like I "will never get laid" as someone told me once, that I have tried to build up my own sexual fortress for myself with my porn collection. When the addiction presents itself the most, I used feel a great sense of pride in my collection. I used to think such thoughts as "forget women, I have my porn at home" and "my right hand will be my girlfriend tonight", etc.

With porn now removed, I am forced to take a look at my sexuality and I don't see one. It is distressing, and I need help going from here.

I had this exact problem when I was 18; I began looking at porn when I was about 13 and by the time I was 18 I required huge quantities of ever-increasing porn to satisfy me. You may be surprised to know that almost all porn addicts end up downloading large amounts of child pornography even though they are not pedophiles; it is the extremity of the porn that feeds their addiction, not its actual content.

I had an epiphany when I was 18 - I deleted 520 gigabytes of porn (there was no easy cloud storage or 1 TB drives back then) and finally kicked the addiction.

It was damned hard. I did a lot of research on addiction, and discovered that a child's brain exhibits high neuroplasticity; if you consume an addictive substance such as porn when you're a child, your entire body wires itself so that only the same intensity of the same material will satisfy you. Right now your body's reward system is literally wired to make you feel good only when you download huge amounts of extreme porn.

The solution is also damned hard - you'll need to exhibit an iron will, delete your pornography and keep yourself off downloading a single image for at least a month. Your brain screams out for the addictive substance during that time, if you're anything less than unwavering in your conviction you'll lose all your progress.

If you need a first step towards deleting that porn, have a good long think about what it is you're deleting; your porn collection doesn't represent any amount of work, it's just copies of files that still exist. It's genuinely is completely worthless, and as long as you can tell yourself that you should be able to muster up the willpower to get rid of that useless junk. And it is useless. All that porn is useless. You don't need a single image.

I have no residual urge to download porn. It completely vanished. I haven't downloaded porn in at least 3 years.

whizzy wrote:With porn now removed, I am forced to take a look at my sexuality and I don't see one. It is distressing, and I need help going from here.

I suggest posting and getting support in the OCD forum.
These posts may help with the anxious/obsessive thoughts about your sexuality:

obsessive-compulsive/topic103176.html
obsessive-compulsive/topic79246.html

(There are probably lots more relevant posts; they're just 2 suggestions.)

It may be this anxiety is what drives your compulsion to download porn. But you are not proving or answering the question of your sexuality by downloading porn. It is a way to escape feeling your anxiety but not to resolve it. That may be why you feel the need to keep doing it. The anxiety is always there, so you keep going back to downloading porn.

ScienceAndCake wrote:
I have no residual urge to download porn. It completely vanished. I haven't downloaded porn in at least 3 years.

This is very reassuring to hear someone had my exact problem and got through it. May I ask, though, if you still look at porn, as in, access it, or masturbate? I am wondering if I can just stop the downloading compulsion, which seems to be causing me the most trouble, while still using porn. I really feel like adult porn is okay and masturbation is alright if it doesn't take too much time. For this reason, I have had a rough time trying to quit the material entirely. I always ask myself: whats the point if I can just keep it under control?

Platypus wrote: The anxiety is always there, so you keep going back to downloading porn.

I feel like this is the case indeed. The question is, though, is my anxiety within reason? Do I have a legitimate reason to feel anxious, or is it just OCD?

I read the post you linked and I could relate to a lot of the symptoms. The treatment strategy was to acknowledge any obsessive thoughts as irrelevant, not try to block them or fight them. It's ironic because you will probably hear the OCD in my voice when I ask you if my thoughts are normal. So I shouldn't be worried about being a virgin? I should just let it ride and be okay with it? Should I be ashamed of feeling attracted to girls I see in public, or staring? Maybe I should just let the thoughts and urges ride and not pay much attention to them. It's hard, though.

I remember high school last year I would be obsessed with this one girl's cleavage (yes you can laugh). Every year it was the same thing. Whenever I walked into a classroom my eyes always sought her out, then her chest. If she wore a t shirt, then I would be sort of sad for the rest of the day, not depressed, just a little disconcerted. But when she wore something low cut like a dress I could not stop thinking about it all day. I would actually plan out how I could catch her at a time while she was leaning over so I could see more. When I got home I always felt a little funny all day, like butterflies were in my stomach. The same would happen if I girl happened to talk to me, even if it was just small talk. I would always end up over-analyzing the thoughts.

So basically should I be like: 'whatever happens, happens. nothing more, nothing less'. Is it that simple? But then we get into the issue of acting on your obsessions. What if I watch porn and the obsession to masturbate to a 12 year old girl comes? Obviously I can't act on that one, so I have to resist the compulsion but accept the obsession? Would not the act of resisting intensify the urge and thought?

whizzy wrote:The question is, though, is my anxiety within reason?

Rather than worry about whether it's reasonable, why not look at it a different way: Is your anxiety helpful or beneficial? If your anxious feelings are leading you to feel bad or to do things that you don't want to do, then maybe it's worth addressing. (Regardless of whether those feelings are reasonable or unreasonable.)

whizzy wrote:So I shouldn't be worried about being a virgin? I should just let it ride and be okay with it? Should I be ashamed of feeling attracted to girls I see in public, or staring? Maybe I should just let the thoughts and urges ride and not pay much attention to them. It's hard, though.

I'm far from an expert on beating OCD (that's why I suggest posting in that forum ), but I think what you are describing are sensible goals to work towards. Worrying about being a virgin, or that you're asexual, or that life is passing you by, is unlikely to help you. If, for example, you are attracted to girls you see, then worrying about it does not change that fact. If life is passing you by, then it is happening whether you worry about it or not.
I agree though that it is hard to change. (So don't be afraid or embarrassed to ask for face-to-face help.)

We don't know what the future holds. Maybe in 10 years’ time you will look back and think, 'Damn, I could have been having so much sex when I was 18!' Or maybe you will think, 'I'm proud I didn't have sex until I was older.' Or maybe you won't have strong feelings either way. We don't have crystal balls to see into the future. You can only make decisions based on how you feel and what you know at the time.

whizzy wrote:What if I watch porn and the obsession to masturbate to a 12 year old girl comes?

Maybe you could consider the different things you could do in this situation, and then which particular option would be of most help to you. Remember that it's not about proving or disproving any worries. If you feed the obsessive thoughts, they're unlikely to go away.

Whoa dude, okay. Take it from me (someone who has struggled on and off with porn and CP addiction on and off for several years and is now free from it for the most part).

You seriously need to reevaluate your life and the time you spend on it. Trust me, I've been there and I know it's hard. I used to save a bunch of images and videos, not so much as you, but it was to the point I got paranoid about CP enough to start wiping my hard drive completely and between the couple times I did that to the point I realized I was spending hours searching for porn, it's less of a sexual addiction and more of a case of digital hoarding and psychological obsession.

Now, I at most spend about an hour on regular adult porn looking up specifically what I like and that's it. The meds I'm on also help with the obsession and tone down my sex drive quite a bit, which is great for me because the only reason I was prescribed Paroxetine was for panic disorder.

My suggestion for you is definitely seek out help, maybe join a support group for pornography addicts. Your OCD plays a major role in it, same with CP. Trust me when I say that it's a psychological obsession, because I'm the same as you, half the time I wouldn't even masturbate to it, it was just the rush of seeing something taboo and the feeling of watching it.

Which is so weird, but once you look past your sexuality and realize it's a psychological addiction, really step back and look at what you're doing, it's easier to move on and rid yourself of it.

I'm not saying you can't relapse cuz I did several times, but I don't download porn anymore because when I do, I rarely watch it. Now I just bookmark things and every now and then I delete my bookmarks. That helps too. But don't turn into a digital hoarder.

I honestly think with support and maybe meds and counseling, you can get past it.

Hoping the best for you. Find a better hobby, go for a walk, make music. Hope this helps. Just get out in the real world and do something constructive =)