18+ I'm a week clean from porn but I still feel really dirty for ever watching it. The amount of fucked up shit I've probably seen without realising is horrible and makes me wish I never started watching animated porn. It's gross that I was exposed to it at such a young age and became so desensitised to all of it. I just hope Im not quitting too late and that I'm actually just a really bad person who doesn't know it yet.
a week is truly something to be proud of especially if you were watching those types of videos on a regular basis. so again, if nobody else has said it today i'm genuinely so proud of you! ocd loves to make you believe you're too late or like you've messed up way too much but don't feed into the doubt. you're trying now, right? that's what counts! my ocd does that too, makes me feel like a bad person and that i just don't know it yet but whenever it tries telling me that i just roll my eyes and verbally say "yeah, whatever you're one to talk." or just something snappy back before moving on, there have been several times where my ocd thoughts stop like they're stunned i actually snapped back instead of letting those thoughts control me and make me feel bad about myself. i'm sure you've heard this before but genuinely try not taking the thoughts seriously, they begin roll your eyes and say "i don't have time for this." and then get busy, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but it's worth a try, right?
Thank you, I really needed this. Its just a shame that I only realised this year just how damaging porn is, I usually tried to avoid anything that I thought seemed problematic but in the art space so much of it was and I think I've been traumatised because of it. I woke up this morning and felt sick because of the OCD, and I tried not to do any physical or mental compulsions, but I ended up doing them to calm down. Your reply has definitely helped though. I'll give your advice a go next time I'm spiralling! I hope you're doing alright as well! You've definitely helped me this morning!
@NamedUser it definitely can be extremely damaging especially when it's viewed when you're young. i'm going to assume you were younger when you began viewing it because i'm pretty sure i read you say that somewhere on here, i apologize if i'm wrong though. when you hit a certain age you become naturally curious with that sort of stuff, i certainly was for a while but i read/wrote it more than anything, i wouldn't say i was addicted to it but i am ashamed about it. when you start getting into that cycle it's hard to pull yourself out even as you get older because it becomes an addiction in a way but you also have familiarity with it but that also comes with guilt. what you viewed then doesn't define you. will you get the urge to view that stuff again? maybe. but think about how far you've come already!
@ilovecats :) Yeah I was exposed to it when I was very young, around 10/11 and since it just became the norm. I don't think I started feeling proper guilt about it until I was late 18/early 19 when I started questioning what I was watching. The thing is most of it was fine, or at least okay, but there were times that I don't think I fully comprehended what I was seeing, especially when I was still young. I know this is very common for a lot of people, especially nowadays on the Internet, but I just find it so disheartening to know that it is as common as it is. As for writing, I know a lot of people who have read and wrote weird/cringey things in the past and honestly from what I've seen, it's very normal. Obviously if you feel shame, it shows you've changed and you should be proud of that! But anyway, thank you for this, I did end up having a good day today so that's definitely helped with me spiralling. And I will do everything I can to continue to stay clean!!!
@NamedUser same thing with me just with my writing. so with my writing it was actually a compulsion starting when i was about 15, i was writing down some of my bad thoughts but in story form. i didn't like it, it was weird and most of the time i stopped writing them when it got really weird but still i feel guilt. i'm not a therapist so please don't take this bit seriously but i'm curious if your habit of watching porn was a compulsion like testing thoughts and all that. with me the writing was a compulsion but then when i stopped doing it i began to panic about my morals which ocd latched onto which honestly sounds a bit similar to your situation. what it also could've been is just genuine curiosity before ocd even began showing signs and then at some point you felt weird about what you were seeing and ocd decided to jump in. again i'm not a therapist so i am not diagnosing or anything all i'm saying is our situations sound similar and that's sorta what happened with mine.
@ilovecats :) Yeah I used to do something similar to that when I was into journaling from around 15/16 ish. So you're definitely not alone in that. I think porn may have been used as a compulsion, but obviously I didn't know that then as I had no idea I may have had OCD. I mostly used it to escape from stress and anxiety and all those sorts of things. Of course I regret it now, but I can at least acknowledge that I never knowingly sought out anything bad, because I didn't want to see that sort of stuff. I will agree, our situations definitely seem similar! It's just so unfortunate that so many of us have and are going through this
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