The Power of Visualization (Getting Rid of The Addiction.. Gently.)

Well.. here we go again. Relapsed. No excuse fellas, no excuse at all. Yes, it's a stressful period allright.. which doesn't help. So yes, I had another orgasm, and I could barely recognize myself while I was doing the thing. I was sweating, my breathing was shallow.. damn, I was more like an animal. Such is the power of orgasm addiction. The third/fourth day is always the most difficult.

I wish I could run an examination on my brain to see the chemicals feasting up there.

Anyway, I learned another trigger and understood a couple of interesting things. Allow me some ranting.

Thoughts precede actions. Well, duh. Ok, To be more precise, visual thoughts of future actions give the conscious mind a goal to pursue. At least, that's how it works for me - I do realize that some people may have different triggers, such smells or sounds or a combination. For me, it's mostly visual.

If an image of a woman pops out inside my mind and I focus on it, the normal course of action is to have an orgasm, because that's my conditioning.

So I made an experiment. I purposely opened a porn movie on a x-tube site, and waited until I got mildly aroused. Then I rapidly substituted the mental image with a neutral movie - myself configuring a computer modem. I concentrated as much as possible, actually imagining the single actions, and feeling my arms touching the cables, typing into the keyboard, and so on.

It worked. Within 10 seconds I lost the erection, and the image was gone. In short, I was able to influence my body by diverting my thoughts in a controlled way towards a neutral image. There was no "willpower" involved - just the initial intention. I worked with the natural processes of my brain, not against them.

I did it almost 10 times this day, and it always worked. I may as well be onto something here, because the 3-4 hours after an orgasm have always been terrible so far.

I must also say that I kept myself occupied with writing and planning some projects. But the technique was useful whenever my mind drifted.

Right now I feel like I am doing two steps forwards and one step back, but that's progress anyway!

Square One.. again. Oh, well.

Day 2

This is the second day, and it went definitely better than I expected.

Of course, I had my series of triggers and some of them were.. let's say, sticky (no pun intended). You know, the kind of images that stick into your mind and gradually hijack it until it's too late. But this time I knew better - and I neutralized them all by actively thinking something else. That doesn't work just on porn!

In my case, I find more beneficial to think about movies and not still pictures. I would see myself doing something - talking to people, approaching women, building stuff, and such.

The key is to remain focused on the movie for at least 20 seconds, until your attention shifts totally to it and you are in the present moment - which is exactly what you feel when you are watching a movie.

Of course it wasn't always a smooth ride. Often the pictures kept intruding, literally interspersing themselves between the frames of my mental movie.

I feel that this is normal. My mind is resisting because it is still wired to the old behaviors. What the heck are you visualizing? I want some booty!

When that happens, I simply ignore them and focus on bodily feelings - for example, if I am visualizing a mental movie where I am talking to a woman, I shift my internal perception from third person to first person view (I see stuff through my eyes) and do something like touching her on her arm, at the same time paying attention to the feeling of her smooth skin, the warmth of her body and the pressure on my fingers. I also throw in some audio.

This always worked. My next step is to make the visualizations actually constructive and not only neutral.

For example, I could visualize possible outcomes for some situations, so that I will not be unprepared when I encounter them. Or mentally explore some business ideas. Or visualize myself being more sociable, meeting women and such, while at the same time devising a plan to actually transpose that into reality.

Overall, this seems to work pretty well. Of course, we are still on Day 2 so it's too soon to judge the long-term effectiveness, but the prospects appear to be encouraging.

Day 3

Strange day, difficult to define. I had an orgasm in my sleep, so intense that I actually woke up. Does that count? I mean, I didn't masturbate. I didn't looked at porn. It didn't happen by my own volition, but I discharged nonetheless. It rarely, if ever, happened. At least I don't remember.

In any case, I would consider this day a success or at least neutral, since I was able to fight every image popping up in my mind consciously and successfully.

What do you think?

Day 5

Apparently, things are going much better than I expected. The last 2 days went supersmoothly - I had the occasional porn image/movie popping inside my mind, but it was rapidly replaced by substitute images. In 5 days I learned a lot about myself and about this approach. I already wrote this in a comment in another thread, Marnia asked me to copy it here as well.

First of all, it's easy to fall into passivity. It's like going from a pool of quicksand to a rut. Better than before, but you are still not going anywhere. The presupposition was that the brain follows what it pictures, so if you picture a porn image, the associated behavioral response is chocking the chicken. But the point is: if you neutralize the porn image.. what are you going to do? Staring at walls? Neutral images elicit neutral responses.

In fact, for a while, I simply steered my behaviors toward a filler behavior. I watched YouTube Videos, navigated the web, read novels, and stuff like that. Pure passivity. Better than masturbation but still, my life wasn't going anywhere.

So, doing an activity is paramount. However, the activity should be something requiring concentration. It won't work with routine stuff because your mind wanders while you perform repetitive and well-known tasks, and you would think about smut, sooner or later.

A lot of people talk about meditation. My 2 cents, coming from experience, is that meditation works only if you are already very well grounded. If you are not, your mind may wander anyway. Usually meditation entails picturing stuff inside your mind, and some of that stuff may elicit porn images. The more addicted you are, the riskier. You never know what you brain associates inside - an innocent picture of a dog may remind you of "doggy style", which reminds of the obvious sexual position, which elicits a picture in your mind, which elicits an arousal response. Not good.

I found very beneficial doing an activity which keeps me in the present moment and avoids daydreaming and internal chit-chat. Works for me. I usually draw, write, play chess, program and stuff like that. Internal dialogue may be neutralized with music.

These activities are still not strictly productive (at least not in the modern economical sense), but I consider them transitory. As soon as I figure out some kind of long-term life project, all my brain will go into that. And during my free time, I will hopefully Karezzing someone.

Day 7

Back to Day One? Probably. Let me explain. Just for the sake of experimentation, I decided to scale my visualization experiments and see if I could remain calm and still while watching a porn movie. I was optimist since 7 days passed smoothly.

Well, it was a quite strange experience. My body kept still, my hands were still, my mind was fairly clear. However, the influx of images was too much I guess, and they started intruding in my mental movies. After a while, I got an erection. I totally ignored that, continued to keep my body still, and my hands in a relaxed position. The pulsing sensation in my lower parts continued and escalated for some minutes. After a while, for the first time in my life, I got an orgasm without touching myself at all. And it was a non-ejaculatory orgasm as well. I just got the sensation, which even stronger than I remembered, but no fluids.

I really don't know what to think. First of all, I made the mistake of getting too cocksure (no pun intended ) just after 7 days of success. I guess my mind wasn't yet clear enough to sustain that, actually the very opposite - so much that he didn't even need manual stimulation to orgasm!

But it was a great learning experience as well! The visualizations kept my mind clear, and gave me control over my body. I mean, a porn movie going, an erection, throbbing sensations.. and still, I managed to keep my body still and my mind distracted. What was happening was mostly background stuff.

There was a reason for my experiment. The reason is that I don't want to be scared by porn, or by erotic images, because we live in a society where they are most prominent - and I suspect that with even faster connections, cheap computers, permanently-connected cellphones, and especially the new generations growing up considering all this stuff normal and desiderable the trend will only escalate, and most certainly not subside. Some social scientists even argue that public sex will become common and eventually accepted just like kissing. Can you imagine that?

And on a smaller scale, when you get together with your buddies and got an internet connection around, it's almost customary that at some point of the night someone will have the great idea to watch some online porn, followed by witty fratire commentary. I want to be able to handle that. I don't want to hide my head under the sand like an ostrich and become a buzz killer, so to speak.

So, that's it. My updated approach is more or less the same, but this time I won't make any experiments of sort and avoid porn completely for at least one month. I am not stable enough yet.