A fellow struggler reaching out

Thx Rosa!

Hi @Staringupfromthewell and welcome to Talking Sober! :wave: :innocent:

I lived with a porn addiction for about 20 years. It was just terrible. Everything about porn and masturbation is terrible. You’re alone, you’re wasting time, you feel regret, you put your relationship at risk - all of that and more.

Porn and sex addiction often appear together. (Personally I would argue they’re the same. I don’t like drawing a line between porn and sex addiction because they’re both about living in some fantasy world and being unfaithful to your partner. Being faithful and being loyal require a level of discipline that is incompatible with sex or porn use outside the relationship.)

You are not alone in recovering from this.

There are dozens of threads about people recovering from porn / PMO (porn-masturbation-orgasm) / sex addiction - these are the ones tagged with “PMO”, “porn”, “pornography”, “sex-addiction” for example; there are other tags but those cover most of the threads - no doubt you’ll find stories here that sound familiar to you:

https://talkingsober.com/tag/PMO

https://talkingsober.com/tag/porn

https://talkingsober.com/tag/pornography

https://talkingsober.com/tag/sex-addiction

For partners of someone living with a porn addiction, it is heartbreaking. They find out their spouse wasn’t “working” on the computer / phone (or whatever other ordinary activity) but was instead watching porn. They feel deeply hurt and betrayed. The commitment you made to each other is shattered, because the porn viewer chooses porn over partner. Many choose to leave their relationship because the emotional burden is too much to bear. (One reason for this is that it is never a partner’s responsibility to be the one holding you accountable. It’s unfair in a marriage / a partnership which is supposed to be a partnership between equals, mutually supporting and respecting one another. The emotional weight of holding someone accountable in this circumstance is incompatible with marriage/partnership, because it’s no longer mutual support: it’s one person who is profoundly betrayed - to the point where years of their life are called into question and where they cannot imagine trust - being asked to provide support that is agonizing, every moment feeling hurt.)

In my case my marriage survived my porn addiction and continues to be strong today but that is the result of years of counselling and effort. We have done marriage counselling for more than five years now; and when I attended a sex addiction recovery clinic in my city, my wife attended the group there for partners of sex addicts in recovery, which helped her get empathy and support. We also each have our own counsellors, who we see individually. We budget for this, the same way we budget for groceries: it’s essential to our life and our health.

I am sorry to hear this. It is understandable but it is still heartbreaking.

My first recommendation: visit a sex addiction recovery program or clinic, and get a counsellor, and start unpacking what’s behind your behaviour. (Be sure you have a counsellor who’s familiar with sex addiction recovery; if you’re not sure, ask for suggestions at a sex addiction recovery group.) Talking Sober is a great space but in my own experience, what I learned at my sex addiction recovery group and from my work with my counsellors (I’ve had several) has been what gave me the specific insight, and the person-to-person accountability to be able to turn things around.

There’s a good list of sex addiction recovery groups here:

Second, learn about sex addiction and sex addiction recovery. Patrick Carnes has researched and counselled extensively on this topic. (In my sex addiction recovery clinic we used his books Facing the Shadow and Recovery Zone for our group work.) There are many interviews with him on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=patrick+carnes

He also has written books on the topic:

https://www.drpatrickcarnes.com/books-videos

The most important things are A) do this for yourself, not for anyone else (successful recovery has to be about being your healthy self, for its own sake, because that is how you keep it going through the challenges of life); and B) persist: do not give up, keep walking forward one step at a time.

Keep us posted!

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