Hey guys, I'm really happy to be joining you guys here. I'm going to repeat some stuff i wrote in the accountability partner section. I have been making it about 7-8 days for the past month or two, and then relapsing. I can feel it when it's a weak day, if not in the morning, i know the urges are coming by the afternoon. And i find myself not really knowing what to do. I think it's a lack of discipline on my part. I do want to quit, its just that after a week I allow my mind to focus on other things, and my guard drops, and all of a sudden I realize that I let go of my control, and worse, missed out on a chance to say no to the urges and then shit do i feel stupid. My reasons for quitting, or, rather, what is driving me to quit: A) In the first place, I'm religious and it creates a rift in my soul between my habits and my beliefs, and I don't want that. B) I'm deeply interested in music and the philosophy that surrounds it, and I feel that I cannot express myself honestly in music while my emotions are messed up by this old addiction. I become truly disgusted with myself sometimes because music is all about humanity, at least, any music that can be called good is, and PMO is unnatural and forces us to subconsciously view our fellow human beings as tools for our selfish needs! How can you communicate honestly lile that? C) There's this gorgeous girl I want to to talk to, but I can't get the balls to do it, and, in short, I think it's because of my old PMO. I thinknit has destroyed any bravery my fairly shy self had toward the ladies. It's almost embarrassing to be terrified of a junior when you're a senior. D) Lastly, my lack of discipline, the title of this post. God, I realize sometimes how fucking lazy I am. At least it feels that way. I need to meditate on and practice the art of discipline in order to end my addiction. Perhaps this is the reason that fate had it I should become addicted, so that I, so that all of us, could learn to master ourselves.
Hey man, I see a lot of you in me actually. Except that I've been at this for almost a year now. I agree with your last point, that addiction gives us an opportunity to develop stronger willpower. I'm struggling a lot at the moment myself though, and I know that 7 - 8 day feel when you kinda feel on top of the world and then you forget to stay disciplined and end up relapsing. In my experience you have to keep yourself focused on your goal, but you also have to busy yourself. Always have something to do, always have some great music to listen to or a song you're learning or a great book to read. You said you're into music and it's philosophy, check out Effortless Mastery by Kenny Warner. It's written by a musician and it's essentially about finding the zone while playing (but can be applied to any skill) and has some great stuff on music's evolution and culture. Also, it's great to be realistic, but don't beat yourself up man! We're all pretty lazy and don't do what we think we should be doing a lot of the time. But the main thing is to enjoy yourself. And telling yourself negative things won't help your conscious or subconscious. One habit I'm trying to cultivate as a foundation for myself is the habit of finding the positive in every situation, not beating myself up more than I need to and accepting that there is some 'darkness' within me that I need to look at and correct in a gentle and loving way. It's a 'master habit' if you could call it that, and it helps me to not binge or get into a bad rut. It also means not making my addiction a barrier to everything I want to achieve. You know that girl you want to talk to but can't find the balls to. Beating your porn addiction would probably solve that, but that could be months away. Next time your on Day 5 you should go talk to her. Just say, 'Screw it, what's the worst that could happen?' and do it. It'll prove to you that you have the balls and ability to do what you want to do even when you're still addicted to porn. Because although a porn addiction is bad, it doesn't mean you can't achieve great things while addicted to it. Some great musicians are drug addicts, some great writers probably should have joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Hopefully I've given you something to think about, best of luck, gre3nrain
Thank-you! I'll look into that book, it sounds really interesting. Thanks for the advice, you're completely right. I'm going to copy and paste it to someplace. And I'm already looking for the opportunity to see this girl again. I think you've got a really great point that the addiction is just something to deal with, it won't necessarily destroy you, just like some of those great musicians and famous writers. I've been on the NoFap support system for a few months now, although I began trying to quit maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I was 12 or 13, and I started PMOing, but maybe 6 or 8 months later I discovered it was forbidden by my Christian religion. I don't think I even knew a name for PMO at first, but when I discovered the name for it, I just happened to find out that I wasn't supposed to be doing it. Now that I'm older and have done tons of research and reading and failing and self-study, I fully understand the wisdom of forbidding it. That's when I began trying to stop, but it was already pretty late; I was in the habit daily, and it would sometimes take up as much as 4 or 5 hours from a day. For a kid, that's pretty big (when you could be playing video games instead haha ). I had no way to protect myself, so I couldn't go cold turkey, no matter how many times I tried. Eventually I had a long enough spell of prolonged busyness that I stopped and forgot about it for awhile. But one day my brain remembered it or something, and I went back. My break from it was maybe 4 months long. I kept struggling ever since until I realized that I could very likely use the very same internet that tempted me to help me instead, and that's when I discovered feedtherightwolf.org last year. It helped for awhile, but I got away from it. And within 2013 I found the nofap forum because I saw some youtube videos from people who were vlogging their experiences. It's taken a long time to find a way out, and if I had known it would be so easy to start working on a way out, I would have much earlier. But it's okay; the nofap community is so wonderful and invigorating that I don't really mind the way the cards of fate have drifted.
