Hi all, been on nofap for a few years now, but only recently have i found the key to actually quitting this addiction. For the vast majority of people, the addiction is numbing negative feelings in your life. You use it to feel okay. I previously thought that PMO was the reason why i felt bad. I was wrong. I was using it to cover up negative emotions. Whenever I enter a relationship, I become extremely insecure and anxious which causes me to become depressed and nihilistic. Often it gets desperate and to get myself through it i turn to porn (and have done in the past). This time however I am not going to turn to porn and instead to therapy. I start today and am going to figure out what the problem is so I can tackle the root cause instead of numbing it with a vice such as porn. I never thought I had any childhood trauma but its impossible to tell until you really interrogate your past to understand your feelings. If you feel bad about your life in general, you NEED to fix what is causing you to feel that way. Quitting porn will just bring those painful emotions to the surface. Once you've tackled the underlying cause, quitting porn will be a lot more rewarding and significantly easier. I wish you all good luck.
I'm not sure that all addicts have underlying issues. For many people drugs, including PMO, give the best possible experience. One person will like cocaine, the other alcohol, yet another PMO, etc. And it happens that some of those people are weak and cannot resist the temptation. And among those, some have systems that deteriorate quickly and some slowly, etc.
I 100% agree with this! Every time I have gone a period of time free from PMO I found myself having to confront negative feelings like loneliness, depression, frustration, etc and I was totally unprepared to do so. Having spent a large part of my life using PMO to escape from these feelings by just numbing them out my emotional "muscles" are weak. I'm also starting therapy at the same time as I seriously start my NoFap journey, cheers to getting help!
Going to therapy to find out more about my mind is something I would like to do. I also don't believe I had a traumatic childhood by ANY means, however, some of my earliest memories are feelings of being unwanted by my family. Looking back now there was no reason to feel that way but I was very young and don't understand why I felt that way. But I would like to find out if or how my past ties into my current struggle. What is PAWS?
I don't believe I ever said they were underlying issues. Yes, things like anxiety and stress and sadness do come from the NoFAP process itself, but I think it's a strange thing to say that life itself doesn't also cause those things. We are talking about how PMO had been our usual way of dealing with those emotions in life and how it's important to learn healthier ways of contending with them. NoFAP is important but I don't think it's the miracle cure itself - a lot of hard work needs to be put in other areas of our life as well. For those of us who do suspect that there may be deeper underlying issues we've been avoiding due to how numbing PMO is, we realize that curing ourselves of our PMO addiction is just the first step. I ask that you please respect our thoughts and preparedness concerning this rather than brushing it aside, nobody's reboot experience is universal. There are a lot of people who turn to drugs or alcohol due to other factors in their life ie drinking to forget a bad experience or to avoid shame for something in your life.
