withdrawel symptoms - who wants to share experiences

Hello,

I am 38 years old, male, and I believe that I slowly slipped into an internet-porn addiction about 15 years ago. I had several tries to quit porn, but always found myself using it excessivley again and again. Since about four years I thought I managed it but did not recognize that I just found a substitute: dating - apps and real women. I found myself searching and searching for more and new adventures, mainly connected to very thrilling practices in bdsm-context. In the end of 2019 I found myself getting panic-attacks and ended in a burnout. I had the same problem already in 2013 and this time I wanted to and did find a therapist who has the courage to really see a connection to a sexual addiction.

So I now try to "reboot" seriously in the way, experts propose. I talked with my girlfriend if it is okay not to have any sex for about three months, I quit all other sexual relationships, deleted all dating-accounts and stopped masturbation for about a month now already.

I experience intense psychological ups and down since then, that sometimes lead to feelings like the world is a nightmare or nothing makes sense any more. I thought that this is what I tried to deal with by using porn, but now I think to myself, that I never had such feelings before I started using porn excessivley about 15 years ago. I try to manage every day and keep cool by seeing these things as withdrawel symptoms.

And this is why I started this thread: maybe it might help to talk about these experiences, and if others who try to get rid of their addiction, feel similar or other things. Would be nice to read some experiences. Also in which time after quitting they started, if/when they faded away and so on...

Just to support each other. As this it not what you talk about with some colleagues easily

I became obsessed with certain actors/actresses and particular porn scenes that they were in that’s how bad it was. I would watch, rewatch, think about and recreate (in my mind) the same scenes involving the same performers over and over and over and over again until they had become so predictable that I could memorize every piece of dialog (leading up to, during and after the sex scenes) as well as recall which sex act would be occurring in what order. I could function as it pertained to work/school/everything else, but at times would feel anxious and irritable often feeling like whatever else I was focusing on was “keeping me” from my real obsession. Working on fixing things I was unhappy with in my life and promising to be a better man upon becoming an Uncle seems to have helped though not completely corrected the problem as I honestly think I may have a case of OCD with the obsessing over certain actresses and certain scenes. To me I would get just as aroused the fifth or sixth plus time I would watch the same scene (s) as I did the first time I watched it/them even though I knew everything that was to happen as well as how it was going to happen.

And you know it’s bad when you are commenting on a porn site about the “lack of realism” in a scene where two people are shown actually eating Mexican food for dinner and then shortly thereafter are getting into a lot of compromising sexual positions and doing some level of strenuous activity and no one passes gas or even has it implied that they did. Sure, they may have taken a Beno or Gas X, but even so, even if they hadn’t eaten gas producing foods prior to having sex or eaten nothing at all, flatulence would be bound to occur in that situation. And this was my argument that something that is supposed to be fantasy and escapism lacked “realism” in that regard. My point is I put way much thought into stuff like this.

I once awoke at 2 in the morning and just “had” to comment about a particular video I was obsessing over. The video if memory serves involved a woman who had begun dating again after ending a ten year lesbian marriage. She confided in the woman she was beginning to date that she and her wife “had never used sex toys or had dominate/submissive roles in their love making.” When the second woman took her into a room and showed her, her vast collection of sex toys (anal beads, dildos, strap ons etc.) she looked like she had literally never seen any of that stuff before. I just had to comment about the video requiring suspension of disbelief to really believe that.