Does anyone sometimes wonder, how they got like this? How did they get here? How did this thinking process start happening? Never in my life I worried for a second about being a sexual deviant, or a predator, or a pedophile. This has never happened to me ever until last year. I just don't know why. My mind constantly brings me back to the past about how I sexted with girls, watched all kinds of porn, and got reckless when experimenting when I was a minor. It keeps telling me that I wanted to mess up my life. I've been trying so hard to not give into compulsions or Ruminate but this just seems impossible. I feel like I'm really going to be arrested one day or probably killed. I just can't shake these thoughts and they're really messing up the flow of my life. Not many people know about any of this but it really destroys me sometimes. These constant intrusive thoughts about throwing my life away, making mistakes I'll regret for the rest of my days, and the annoying, painstakingly annoying what ifs. I just want this to stop. I just want to tell myself that I was hooked on porn, I did make mistakes in the past, and I don't plan on making those mistakes in any way. I don't watch porn anymore and I'm planning to keep it that way. The last thing I want to do is message minors. The last thing I want to do is hurt anyone. I just want this to leave me alone. I'm constantly trying to remember the times where I didn't struggle with this and while it does feel good at times, I just end up back here.

Everything if being magnified and I can't help but think of had things in the past rather than good things

@BigGip09 You're literally describing my daily struggles lol.

@PRYM I guess everyone is going through this in one way or another. I just don't want any kind of porn I watched when I was hooked on to define me at all

@BigGip09 Especially since I don't watch it anymore and I'm against it

@BigGip09 Yeah I've thought about quitting porn too but when I just go off my imagination the intrusive thoughts are painfully common. At least with porn it distracts me enough that the thoughts are barely noticeable.

@PRYM I'm way past the point of thinking about porn I honestly hate it more than anything. It scares me too because you never know if what your watching is ethical or not and the websites escalate for you. It's fucking sick. I just don't want to be near that drug anymore. I just want to put it behind me but just as I do, OCD thinks about it 24/7. I just don't want to be a pedo or a sexual deviant at all. I hate that I keep saying this too. I never thought about these things before in my life

@BigGip09 Yeah whatever works best for you. It's not a easy decision to always decide what's too far or not. And yeah I agree the uncertainty gets to me too sometimes. That's why at least at this point I'm trying to cut back. It's hard though because like I said at least for me my intrusive thoughts get really bad when I go purely off of imagination and I have a lot of health issues so I'm home a lot, don't get a chance to really be around a lot of girls so I'm kinda intimacy starved and porn is a cheap substitution for me.

@PRYM Porn is exactly what's destroying that intimacy. I know it's what was destroying mine. It made me only want girls for nudes or sex when I was still in high school and that just wasn't right. Quitting it not only strengthened my attraction to women, but it makes you feel better about yourself. You already admit that it's a cheap substitution, which is a good start I would say. I would also say go outside a lot more because it can give you good feelings you wouldn't expect. It's good to just be out of your comfort zone. My struggles are very similar to that other guy you talked to about his POCD struggles with porn. This stuff also leaves me feeling sexually repressed

@BigGip09 Yeah I've been considering quitting porn again. I've gone at the best a month or two without it and I remember being pretty happy just didn't take very long for something to trigger me to start watching again. But ironically one thing I will say is when girls are in my life I find it really easy not to watch porn. Real life girls are significantly better lol. It's when I don't have a girl in my life that it's easy for me to get obsessed with porn. And at least for me I've rarely been one to purely pursue sex. I can barely count on one hand how many times I have but I'm also a sexual abuse survivor so that plays into my avoidance of sex.

@PRYM So far I've been about 20 days free from pornography. It's not that I even get urges to watch porn, it's the intrusive thoughts and trauma I have about them. It all started when I had trumatic troubled at home and it was something for me to escape all my problems. It's nothing but an illusion. The more I used it the more I found I was distancing myself from people, school, and my focus. It just didn't make things better. I began looking at girls as sexual objects and my mind made everything sexual. It still does but that's probably due to OCD now. I never had a relationship with a girl, and I'm honestly not sure I even want one. I do have friends that are girls and I love love love hanging out with them. They support me in the best ways possible and I really do appreciate who they are. Two have OCD and one doesn't. I just really admire all of them and they are just full of knowledge, heart, and appreciation. Porn made me think I was a lot of things. It made me think I had porn induced fetishes, think of girls as objects, think I was bisexual, etc. Now it's making me think I'm a sexual deviant or a p. Not watching it anymore is definitely. I've been having urges much less, most of them don't even exist, and I know that I won't feel better if I give into it mostly. It's not something I would want to go back to. It's not something I want to hide either, so why keep it up, you know?

@PRYM I'm also really sorry you've experienced sexual abuse. That hurts.

@BigGip09 Yeah it sounds like it's been good quitting. I might give it another shot. Because I do know porn does definitely trigger some ocd thoughts for me sometimes. Especially if I feel any uncertainty about their age even if I knew before. I'll just spiral panicking about that. And yeah I feel you, I think I've developed unhealthy fetishes from porn too. I've been watching porn since I was 12. Started with hentai and eventually moved to normal porn so to say the least I've seen quite a bit and I grew up during the time the internet was much more unregulated than it is now. It was a lot easier to come across pretty extreme content which just nauseates me when I think about it now. Definitely have a lot of guilt with porn some of it for good reasons, some of it not. I think porn use isn't necessarily bad unless it becomes obsessive which I'd say I'm bordering on. Really I just want to do anything that can get rid or at least reduce my intrusive thoughts so I can use my imagination to masturbate with. I can't even fantasize about girls I really want without my mind being like HEY I KNOW YOU WANT TO THINK ABOUT THIS GIRL BUT WHY NOT A CHILD INSTEAD? Then I can't even finish and get super depressed. And so now I feel like I need porn since I can mostly block out those intrusive thoughts though even then sometimes they take over but feeling like I need porn just to do something normal like masturbate is a really depressing feeling. And thanks for caring about SAS stuff. I know it definitely plays a part into my POCD fears. But I've been in therapy for it since it happened when I was three, so I'd say I have a bit better coping with it than your average person.