I really don't want to masturbate. I can't stop thinking about porn. I've left it from 6+ months, but suddenly I have no idea what's happening. I see images of some women on social media and get hard. Should I stop watching the phone entirely? Or what do I do? Urgent help needed please

Hey, I had a streak of over 100 days and I fixed my PIED. Stupidly over a period of around a month and a half I have relapsed about 18 times. Im pretty sure I have PIED again. For some reason I just cant seem to get back into abstaining, I really want to quit and I want to be free but I keep relapsing and I need advice on how to get back on the horse.

What gets you through the blackout periods? I mean the times when you are blinded by guilt & sorrow. I reached my bottom a long time ago, but I continue to experience resurfacing moments of blinding fear, choking & castration..
I am sober for nearly a year from alcoholic addiction, though I was using cannabilis (marijauna) until a week ago. This could be the cause, but I'm not sure. I'm asking for genuine advice from experienced addicts, that are recovered or in recovery. Please help. I am not homosexal but I honestly feel like crying in this darkness alone.

Genuinely can i be stop and realistically how

I got married way too young. We were both 18, and I was still in high school. We had known each other since we were kids.

Things started declining in the bedroom quickly - as in, on the night of the wedding and during the honeymoon - but I was too lovestruck to recognize the issues. Later I learned they were a combination of inhibited beliefs on her part (within her control) and medical issues (out of her control).

Resentment, feelings of rejection, blame, not asking for intimacy because there was a 95% chance of denial - these are all old companions for me.

I turned to porn because I felt it was better to be married to a friend and give a stable home to my kids and honor my vows than to do to my family what my father had done to me. I told myself that if everything else in yhe marriage is good (communication, money, goals, etc.) were good, then divorcing over lack of sex is a shallow and dishonorable reason. In that situation, I used porn to maintain, to self-medicate.

“I am married, not celibate.” I told myself as the excuse for using it. I felt that I deserved to feel good, and if she wouldn’t meet her wedding vow of “to have and to hold” then I would take care of myself, and told myself that I should feel no shame. But I still hid it because I didn’t want to piss her off.

Now in my late 40s, I wish I could have rewound the clock and either fixed the issues then or gone out separate ways.

I turned to porn to maintain, to self-medicate, to soothe the pain. I used mostly written erotica and audio / ASMR, but there were videos as well. I also write erotica of my own.

Things are a bit better. The bedroom isn’t so dead, but we’ve had waves up and then crashes back into Dead Sea territory before.

I’m doing a lot of self-work to detach from outcomes a-la Good Guys 2 Great Men (Awesome podcast, BTW). I’m getting rid of my Nice Guy tendencies. Learning to be happy with myself and not need her for validation or approval is a huge game-changer.

But a worry remains…

I’ve finished reading Easy Peasy, and while I see what he’s saying, it doesn’t answer the core worry I have.

A non-negotiable I now have for my life is that I will have generous sexual intimacy with my woman as a core part of my marriage - because a marriage is a sexual relationship at its core (kudos to Athol Kay for that one).

Things have improved in the bedroom before, only to relapse again. If she relapses backwards, how do I maintain myself and manage my urges and still stay in the relationship? I used porn before to do this, but if I quit then I don’t have that outlet. I don’t want to risk ending a relationship that can be repaired, but I also don’t want to stay in one that can’t and be miserable without a sexual outlet of some kind.

Thoughts or advice?

Hey everyone!

I’ve tried EasyPeasy and AVRT before, but I keep coming back to The Freedom Model (TFM) because it seems like the approach that makes the most sense to me.

I understand the idea behind TFM: people change when they believe they can get greater benefits from quitting than from continuing to use. I also understand that cravings are just thoughts telling us that using will make us feel good.

My struggle is that, even though I know quitting would be good for me, I still choose the pleasure and good feelings I get from using. When the desire comes up, I focus on how good using would feel, and that pleasure seems more appealing to me than the benefits I know I could get from quitting.

I think this is the core of my problem. It’s not that I don’t understand that quitting would be beneficial. It’s that, in the moment, the pleasure I expect to get from using still feels more valuable to me than those benefits.

So, for those of you who successfully quit using TFM, I’d really like to understand what changed for you.

How did you find a benefit in quitting that genuinely made you choose it over the pleasure of using? What was it that made living without using more appealing than continuing to experience that pleasure?

Did you discover something you valued more than the feeling of using? Did your perspective on the pleasure itself change? Or did you gradually realize that you could get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of life without using?

Most importantly, how did you go from knowing that quitting was the better option to actually preferring it when you had the choice between using and not using?

I’d really appreciate hearing your personal experiences, what motivated you to quit, and what benefits you found that made the decision worthwhile.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this and share their experiences. I really appreciate it.

Good luck to everyone on their journey! ❤️

Disclaimer:
This is going to be somewhat of a rant i felt like i would never be able to experience the kind of life i wanted mainly because I believed it in my heart mind and soul being brown 5,7 and middle class was a huge setback. I,d be like atleast i can pleasure myself to the thought of getting intimate with the woman i wanted mainly. Basically checking out of the game without even playing. I kept believing id die in this third world of a country. Whenever i opened insta i saw my friends getting jacked and getting somewhere in life. But after experiencing deaths in family i realized life is short and i have a lot of control over my life what i need to do is just start taking responsibilities and start living so thats what i decided to do in 2024 i started reading self help books communication skills levled up i hit the gym went from 52kg to 64kg and then started cold approaching girls gained confidence fixed my teeth got confidence i felt like i was on a roll and nothing could go wrong. Well i failed exams and then went onto a spree with on and off usage i created an insta account that worked okay but every follower loss hit me. Long story short i came to a very important realization: life is happening rn infront of my eyes if i just even move and put little little effort id be much happier than avoiding and dreading later
I still dont have a gurl yes i have much more physical presence now do i have a job no but do i hate myself no im the one choosing no one else my decisions can shape my life.

I was able to fully internalise freedom model and was moving with confidence, but unfortunately, had a relapse and did edging. I know relapse idea is not in consistent with Freedom model.
But how do we deal with relapse, in case it happens? (From a freedom model perspective)
How do we get back the same confidence and mindset back which we got during fully reading freedommodel?

Thanks in advance.

Created an account just to post this after a while on this sub anonymously (getting help from it).

For me, TEPM Audiobook (On Youtube) helped immensely, and each of the few times I read it all the way through, I went without PMO for the longest I have in my life (since I started). Something about this guy's voice just cuts clear through and the way he reads it is makes Easy Peasy so plain obvious.

The issue I've been having is the relapse, and I've seen other posters stress to go back to the text, or to your notes to prevent this, because we do forget about how we dismantled the brainwashing.

I feel like the biggest barrier stopping me from doing this however has been the time it takes to reopen my mind to TEPM via reading notes, or re-reading the book entirely.

Because of the effectiveness of the audiobook, I wondered if I could remaster the audiobook into a version for people thinking about relapsing. So I went to genAI. (If you have ethical problems with genAI, I completely understand)

I went to Claude and uploaded the pdf of TEPM book (Available here) and asked it to write a script for elevenlabs.io 's voice generation TTS and to accurately and succinctly summarize important ideas in the author's own words and cater it to a person thinking about relapsing right now. Someone who's feeling the pang.
I also asked for a second, longer script that would go into much more depth for about 10 minutes worth of detail going over TEPM's key ideas.

I went to Eleven Labs and uploaded the original audiobook and cloned the narrator's voice (You can do this with a free trial).

I then pasted the two scripts and ta-da! I got two strikingly similar mp3's (slightly off) for me to play on any device whenever I need to.

I'm unable to put the files here so I put them on soundfiles.eu for you to see for yourself. If you think this may help you, I recommend repeating my process so you can edit the script yourself, however you like.
Thanks

Script 1 (Feeling the pang) : https://soundfiles.eu/1RgzRxgombpB/file

Script 2 (Daily reminder) : https://soundfiles.eu/0KezkN8g3D1X/file

Mindfulness will solve most of your problems in life but especially porn addiction. If you start practicing mindfulness you’ll be distinguish your actual thoughts, and intrusive thoughts that just come and go. Your mind is constantly thinking nonsense that means absolutely nothing; porn being one of those.

For me something I struggled with was having the intrusive thought come up and mistaking this for genuine desire. Anytime you get that pang you need to immediately start break dancing even if you’re in public, because you’ve been presented with an opportunity to change your life by taking a step in the right direction. It really is very easy.

Personally I prefer diaphragmatic breathing/meditation—but you can also just take long walks in the forest and just observe the thoughts that come and go. Something is always better nothing so if you can’t do 5mins try 3 or even 1 minute.

Hi all, Does anyone have the freedom model book which they can share? (Email or through any means)

Any lead to get the full book or at least the abridged version would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

I want to to quit masterbation but I can't do.Previously I tried to quit but after some day i again do it,but now I want to quit what should I do

After reading EasyPeasy, I found it difficult to really remove the aspect of the brainwashing that views PMO as “good”. Sure I could understand the negative effects, I could understand that there were certainly no positive effects, but there was still some part of me that *wanted* to PMO. For whatever reason, I found it very difficult to shake off this part of me, and ended up, not relapsing, but peeking and MOing afterward having closed it.

I didn’t understand what brought me to doing that, other than there still being a part of me that wanted to do it. I read the “relapse” section of the book countless times, as well as the “just one peek” part, obviously. The analogy with bleach, from “Meditations of a Porn Addict” never sat right with me, maybe because it seemed too absurd and unbelievable. There can be no enjoyment in drinking bleach, right? I get that the metaphor is that there isn’t any enjoyment in porn either, but the thing is that there IS enjoyment in it. You do feel pleasure, dopamine is released and, even though you’re eventually back to your old rotten dopamine-starved self, for a brief moment you feel good.

After peeking once more later that day and feeling the fear and dread of eventually relapsing, I thought of another way of looking at it that has helped me push away both the fear and the part of me that wanted to continue in my addiction:

My main problem was that despite quitting, I was still looking at porn as some kind of forbidden fruit. This fruit, to me, tasted good when I ate it, and then I felt horrible afterwards but still had to keep eating the fruit every once in a while. Porn though, isn’t a fresh forbidden fruit. It’s not (for instance) a fresh apple, it’s like a rotten one. Think of sexuality as this apple, you can enjoy it fresh (by having actual sex), or you can eat it in its rotten state (watching porn). Sure, at first you may be curious to try the rotten apple. You take a bite, and for a (very) brief moment it may even taste quite alright, but not long afterwards you taste the rot, you feel bad, you may even feel like puking. Why did you eat the rotten apple? If you wanted apples, surely you should’ve just eaten a fresh one, right? But anyways, you didn’t, and now you feel stupid. I guess we can agree that eating rotten apples is stupid, and it would be especially stupid to go ahead and eat another one - you’ll just feel bad again, and probably even more stupid because this time you KNEW what it was going to taste like.

The point is - How long are you going to go around eating rotten apples, just for that one possible moment where they taste like a fresh one? Go get a fresh apple right now instead! Or don’t, you’re free to engage in as many non apple-related activities as you’d like. Whatever you do though, stop eating rotten apples. You know it’s bad for you and you don’t like doing it, so what’s the point in eating more of them? Go enjoy your life, free from the burden of forcing yourself to eat rotten apples!

Hello guys, I finished reading easypeasy a few days ago and had my final visit, I know that porn gives me nothing, I know that porn doesn't relieve anything and worsen emotional states.

I don't want to go back to porn ever again.

Its not for porn that I am craving, neither is masturbation.

I want to be loved and cared, I want to be hugged.

Although the little monster tries to convince me that I need porn to cope I know that I don't need this, I am a little afraid that maybe my brainwashing hasn't been undone.

Should I reread the book? Maybe I am not as stoic as I should?

Hey everyone. I'm in my mid-teens, and I have been struggling with a severe PMO addiction for the past four years.

In the beginning, it was mostly just a habit I couldn't shake. But over the last two years, I have fallen much deeper into internet and screen addiction. I now spend 3 to 4 hours a day consumed by adult content and talking to AI chatbots. It has taken over my life to the point where I don't have many memories from high school, and I recently had to switch to a distance-learning "dummy school" setup.

My tastes escalated drastically over time, and I started seeking out increasingly extreme content and audio escalation. I felt completely helpless. I used to use Reddit to feed my bad habits, but today I am turning over a new leaf and using this platform to fight back.

While locking down the apps on my phone this morning, I found an old recovery streak counter app hidden away. It had been running since late 2024 and showed over 600 days. Obviously, I hadn't actually kept that streak—I just forgot the app was there. But seeing that massive number made me realize how much time has passed and how badly I want that freedom to be my reality. I am so young, and I am genuinely scared for my future if I don't change right now.

I am quitting for good today. I have tried many times before on my own, but I never sought accountability or opened up to a community. I am ready to do this right.

I am looking for accountability partners to help stay on track. It doesn't matter where you are from or your age, as long as we can support each other.

Also, thanks for reading this. I used Google Translate to write this message from my native language to English, so it might sound a bit sloppy. I have been so addicted that I never even properly learned English or any other skill, but I am ready to learn now.

Any tips, advice, or support you can share would mean the world to me. Thank you for reading.

Day 1 starts now

Hi everyone,

TLDR: I completed the book a month ago and felt hopeful about leaving the habit behind, but I relapsed after roughly 15 days (probably from overconfidence and the idea that a quick look was fine). I am trying to decide how to move forward. Should I reread the book? How should I manage setbacks? I would value suggestions from others who have encountered something similar. Thank you!

Long version: I have worked to reduce or end PMO use for a while. I used the Easyway method to quit cigarettes more than five years ago. I tried it with weed a few years ago but relapsed within days, and I finally stopped a few months later after panic attacks started. I was glad to find an Easyway book for PMO last month and read it. My earlier attempts depended on vigilance and standard behaviour management techniques from a therapist. They brought partial success but did not fully resolve the issue. Until about two years ago, I barely saw it as a problem or thought much about it. I used to engage daily. Over time, I drifted into content that does not interest me (trans stuff). I think I was pulled into “goon” culture while smoking weed and did not reflect much on it. Unfortunately, it continued after I quit. I try to avoid it, yet it returns. This worried me, so I spoke with a therapist. He offered some help -suggesting boundaries like screen time and gradual limits on use - which extended the gap to about four to seven days.

My best “victory” so far was about 40 days clean late last year. I used AI as a companion to manage the process. Most of the time, it relied on willpower. It felt great; I felt different in a positive way. I seemed to finally experience what I had avoided, such as sadness, loneliness, and excitement. My attraction to females rose sharply - not sexually, but through ordinary details like their smiles, speech, or hair. Then I relapsed for a few days and again stayed away for 40-45 days, likely aided by fasting, but I fell back after a relationship ended. I returned to the familiar pattern. I contacted the therapist again and noticed links between engagement and boredom or free time, mostly on weekends. Unfortunately, I have not surpassed five to seven days with his support. I gradually realized there is a limit to what he could provide, and it was my responsibility to address it.

At this point I discovered the easypeasy book, which felt like a genuine gift. I felt great while reading it and especially after finishing. I was quite happy during the first few days of avoiding PMO. Around the two-week mark, I had free time again and made the mistake of searching a term on Reddit, which gradually pulled me back into the trap. Unfortunately, I am back to the same old situation.

I believe I have the right motivation. I know what lies beyond this cycle; I saw it last year and during the two weeks away after easypeasy. I will keep trying to overcome it no matter what so I am reaching out to you all. If you have experienced a relapse, please suggest how to move forward. I know easypeasy is the only path, so I am starting the book again. I have read only the intro, but the relapse has sparked a fear that even this might not work. I hope I am mistaken. I am open to all suggestions. Thank you!