Yeah, sugar and refined grains are poison. Best to avoid them.
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23 days. Fought a really tough period, feel like I’m starting to break through some layers of the sickness of my addiction and generating a more conscious headspace… if only one less compulsive brain cell at a time.
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Just checking in. I had a slip and im on day 2. Figured id check in and try and maintain momentum. Trying to push past the stinking thinking and stay in the present. Hope yall have a happy halloween.
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Evening all,
I posted back on here a few months ago but fell away from regular updates and fell back into my addiction. I have a lot going on in my life right now but even with all that PMO is the one thing I’d really like to change about myself. I don’t expect it to change me fundamentally as a person but it is the main thing I don’t like about myself.
I’ve been following the Easy Peasy method which worked for a while but I again fell back into back habits, bad thinking.
I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection and whilst Easy Peasy was not a success for me I learnt a lot about my triggers, I understood a bit more about why I relapse and the two main enemies, the dopamine kick and the brainwashing.
I’m back here not looking to start again but to build on what I have learnt so far and have some accountability for my actions. I am a PMO addict and I don’t trust myself to do this alone.
I have made great strides in a lot of areas I have been working on, my anxiety, my self esteem and recently focusing on the present. What I need to do now is take things one step at a time and work on some good habits for those moments I’m at my most vunlerable to my addiction.
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Easy Peasy has been a great resource for me. But ultimately, my subconscious addictive self didn’t take it all in. So yeah, I relapsed too. Did it make sense? No. Did acting out make me feel good? No.
But my subconscious addictive self said, “Hell, Yeah!” I was being tricked again, but my addict wasn’t believing it.
The vast majority of our decisions are not made by the conscious, but the subconscious. And it usually does a very good job. For to be consciously aware of every decision I make would be too exhausting throughout my day.
But my subconscious has a defect, a bug. In terms of lust, It gathers information all around me, misinterprets it. And spits out a conclusion, a calculation that is absolute crap.
And when my subconscious acts against my conscious decision to stay away from PMO, that’s when the war in my mind starts and the cravings get intense.
Easy Peasy did a lot to dispell the fallacy that acting out made me feel good. I can no longer say, “Acting out makes me feel good, if only for a season.” Instead, I have to admit that my subconscious was tricked into thinking that porn had value, even though I know it’s worthless. Having that knowledge is not completely futile. Cutting down the enemy to size has still been helpful. And it’s provided me hope that I can overcome this.
It’s just that, by itself, it wasn’t enough. I still needed more. So I’ve been accepting that my powerlessness is still a factor. No matter what, this messed up, perverted mind of mine has no chance of being trained to stop being so perverted. And it’s cornered me to take a good hard look at my broken relationship with God. I don’t have any human, worldly wisdom or weapon that’s going to guarantee anyone out of this. All I know is that God is bigger than all of this. And it’s time that I stop living life on my own and accept God’s plan for my life. He’s the shepherd. I’m the sheep. Not the other way around.
As God as my master. I’ve decided to relinquish my freedom to walk in my own flesh. To try to walk in my own wisdom. Because if I do, my perverted, subconscious flesh has consistently proven and demonstrated to me that it cannot be trusted.
As God as my master, (and He’s a good master) He made it aware that it’s not enough to just stay away from porn. But by abiding in Him throughout my day, I’m not to give in to my subconscious flesh’s desire to entertain any lust and fantasy. Yesterday, I chose not to look at any woman, other than the 1% that come into my circle, such as my family, coworkers, etc. But for the other 99% of the women in my field of vision, they’re not going to talk to me, they’re not thinking about me, they’re not even looking at me. So why do I need to look at them? I already know that that they’re beautiful. I don’t need to prove that to myself. I can actually see them better if I don’t look at them. A whole lot better. And if I do look, my perverted mind goes from zero to pervert in less than a second. So I keep them in my peripheral vision. And if my eyes inadvertently stumble on a woman, then bounce the eyes. (Fred Stoeker Every Man’s Battle). And doing all this in a spirit of prayer. Because nothing is a substitute for the presence and power of God in my life. If my thoughts are on God, then my thoughts will not be on lust. If I don’t think it, I’m not going to crave. And if I don’t crave, then I won’t cave.
And what am I missing out on by choosing to eradicate all lust and fantasy in my life? Having a zero tolerance policy on it? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Thank you God, for the wisdom from Easy Peasy.
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As I’m reading Jim Vander Spek’s book, Overcoming Lust, I’ve come to terms with the fact that it was futile of me to try to control my outward behaviors such as porn and MB without paying attention to my inward heart. My eyes and mind have been out of control, and without direct intervention, abstaining from porn and MB was not going to magically take away my lust and fantasy.
In fact, I discovered that when I abstained from porn, my lust and fantasy increased. That’s because I was trying to compensate for the lack of dopamine.
I’ve now been rereading Easy Peasy again. But this time, I’ve substituted the word porn, with the word, lust. Because lust is no different. It has no value. When I lust and fantasize, I’m only left with the desire to lust and fantasize more. And I’ve been praying a lot. Because the task of removing all lust and fantasy in my life seems too daunting of a task to do on my own. I’m learning that my broken relationship with God played a big role in all of my struggles. God brought this all to my attention when I was 20 years old, convicting me, and I worked to rid myself of it. Over the past 3 decades, I lost a lot of battles to lust
A LOT OF BATTLES!
I’m at day 31. Did not give in to lust or fantasy so far today, or yesterday. I’m finally experiencing more victories than defeats with lust and fantasy. And I feel freedom. I will be victorious. I will conquer.
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I have been asking similar questions of myself this year. In particular I’ve been asking what difference there is between lust, and arousal, or more precisely, how I can practice arousal in ways that are healthy, ways that are about healthy growth.
God created me with an instinct for sex. The instinct for sex - which includes desire and arousal - is woven into the natural order of the physical world, of which I am a part.
The practice of marriage is a spiritual act, which is woven overtop of the physical. The spiritual is the world to which the physical grows, in the same way as the womb (and the world around the womb, nourishing and sustaining it) is the world in which the new life grows - it grows towards the physical. The spiritual is the world to which we grow, and to which we are born after we die physically.
So, if desire is part of physicality - if desiring something, desiring to connect and to be joined, is part of physical life - and if the physical world is my classroom, my space for learning and spiritual growth, then the question I have, the challenge I am given, is how to foster arousal within the marriage environment.
It is no small task, but I believe it has to be possible.
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Hi @Matt, what do you mean with this (could you elaborate?)
Lust is in my opinion linked to addictive behavior. The healthy basis of a good relationship is intimacy on different levels (e.g. emotional, physical). Two people discovering their sexuality guarding each others boundaries might contain lust aspects as well. Involving others or projecting porn into it might soon become toxic, at least in my opinion.
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I think there’s a difference between unbridled lust and healthy desire / healthy arousal.
“Unbridled” is key here: the problem isn’t desire in itself. The problem is when it crosses my healthy boundaries.
My personal boundaries are:
- No porn. Porn is very often exploitative and manipulative of people, both the performers and the audience members, which is unethical; and even if I limited myself to porn that was produced with scrupulous attention to mature, informed, and ongoing consent; performer safety; and fair compensation, it would still be crossing a line into voyeuristic sexual behaviour, which is a personal red flag, for me.
- Sexual activity and arousal, for me, is about connecting with my partner and discovering pleasure together, so partnered activity is my goal. This is founded on emotional respect and intimacy, so I need to make that part of my daily life. It is also about playfulness and exploration: arousal - interest - involves exploring what is pleasurable and keeping an open mutual communication about that. I’m working to shake up the scripts we’ve been stuck in, to find new ways to connect, to discover myself and my partner and what we can enjoy together.
I generally avoid the word “lust” because it has a lot of baggage. I prefer the word “desire”. I think cultivating healthy desire - and all the foundational work that implies - is good for a relationship.
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Tnx, geus we’re on the same page then 
. I stumbled a bit on “instinct for sex”. Which for me could be an excuse to keep the backdoor open for the addictive sides of it.
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I don’t know if I directly answered your question above 
Ok here goes:
“God created me with an instinct for sex” - obviously there’s a religious / spiritual angle I’m coming from here, the sense that I am myself a creation; that my life exists in a larger fabric of spiritual learning and growth; that my life is about more than physical things. That is key to my personal perspective.
So there are layers to me: there is a physical body, which is very much a part of the physical world, with all its pains, pleasures, and drives; and there is a spiritual / metaphysical part of me, which observes and learns from the patterns of physical life, and from that, develops spiritual insight. (For example, balance. Living life with a healthy balance. A respect for balance is a quality you can only learn from having to live in a universe with physical pleasures and pains - rest, exertion, cheesecake, broccoli - which are the physical things we have to balance to live our lives. Another, deeper example: justice. One key part of understanding justice and living justly is to have to honour diverse people’s needs, myself and others’, and it is in a material world, a world of limited time and space and resources, that we have to strike a balance for all these things, a balance that is just for everyone involved. It’s only when things are limited that we truly start to understand justice. The material world is our classroom; it’s here, in these spaces and with these experiences, that we gain spiritual insight. Eventually we die and all the physical things stay here, and what we keep with us is the spiritual stuff we’ve learned.)
The instinct for sex - the instinct to reproduce - is fundamental to physical life. (It’s actually part of the scientific definition of life.) So, I’m here in this body, which like other animal bodies in this material universe, has an instinct to reproduce. At a basic physical level, that’s a fact.
So - what do I learn from this? What’s my spiritual insight from this physical reality?
It’s kind of like eating. Eating food is a perfect example of having healthy boundaries, while also having room to explore individual tastes, individual hungers, in healthy ways. There are limits everyone has to follow: you can’t live on Twinkies alone; no one can. At the same time, you can’t not eat; everyone needs to eat. It’s a physical fact. So we strike a healthy balance. Different cultures have different ways of doing this - there’s a million ways to eat healthy food - but they all have this healthy balance in common.
What if I approach my hunger - my desire - for sex in the same way? My desire not just for reproduction (which is really only one part of the human experience of sex), but also my desire to connect, to be one with my partner. The hunger is there and it’s not going away (much like the hunger for food).
So the task - the privilege - is to explore my instinct for sex, within reasonable boundaries. And what I learn from that is the same thing as the balance of healthy eating: the pleasure of the activity comes from exploring and experimenting, with a partner who enjoys it with me. We connect over the shared experience of pleasure within healthy boundaries.
Ultimately what my instinct for sex gives me, when it’s explored within boundaries, isn’t lust, but instead a healthy, balanced, shared enjoyment.
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Missed your reply while I was typing Well - no problem, there it is anyway
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Hi Matt,
I think that’s a really well reasoned way to look at things. I’m going to take that on board and consider what it means to me and how I am going forward.
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So,
I’m in the exact same place literally to the day i was in last year. Relapsed, turned to easy peazy. Last year on November 17(my mom’s birthday) i had a relapse, started reading Allen Carr’s Easy Peazy method to quitting porn. Didn’t relapse for 5 months before i reverted back to old habits. And yet 5 months was my best streak in years. So why not go back to what worked and try to add something else. Today, i felt like a crack head. I know the rules. No phone in the bathroom. If i have to have a phone with me, i put it behind the trash can so it’s not with me in the stall, or i just dont bring it. When i left to use it, in my heart, i know what i was doing. I’ve failed so much. So many relapses. Disrespecting my wife, whom i love dearly, for images of people i would never meet. I’ve been married 20 years. Since i’ve been married, I have NEVER, not once, flirted with anyone other than my wife. That’s about the most honest truth i have in my life really. And yet, that’s not integrity when you’ve looked at how many freaking women through pornography? I HAVE TO HATE IT. IF I DONT HATE IT, I CAN’T MOVE FORWARD. I’ve only been in this same place consistantly every day since 2003. So here i am, once again, broken, and trying to pick myself up, yet again.
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5 months was an amazing achievement and to do that I’m sure you put some things in place to help you along the way. Sometimes we lose focus and drift off course and by the sounds of it that’s what you have done.
But you haven’t lost that 5 months. You’ve just hit a blip. It’s worth going back over what you did that was so effective before. Reread those sections of easy Peasy around brainwashing and the little monster. Remind yourself of those tools you already have in your locker.
At the end of the day we are addicts. Our addictive behaviour has created strong neural pathways. It is going to take time for those to start to erode.
You have gone longer than me without PMO. You’ve put a marker in the sand. Great job! Now it’s time to pick yourself back up again, reset and go again. You can do it.
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Can’t tell you how much i appreciate this. I needed that. Here’s to putting together 6 months to a year!
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I felt incredibly deflated after my relapsing. I thought with the new knowledge that I understood from Easy Peasy, my sober streak would continue. I guess there was just more to learn. It’s important for me to not throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. Even though Alan Carr refers to EasyWay as a cure, for me, I’ve just had to accept it as one of the many tools that God has provided for me to help me break free.
Keep learning, keep searching for more tools. If you seek, you shall find. I’m glad to hear you’re not giving up.
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Which of these is which, I wonder?
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