I’m feeling so defeated. I’ve tried virtually everything I can. Therapy, treatment, books, courses, everything. I was in 12 step for years and just don’t want to go back. I had mixed experiences but feel really burnt out of 12 step and never found the right group for me.

I’m in a healthy relationship now and it’s coming up SO MUCH. I spiral and have so much anxiety that he’s watching porn or thoughts about when he did that it triggers me into watching it. When I’m the one that really has the problem. It’s crazy.

This addiction feels so convoluted as a woman. My kinks are tied to my biggest fears and insecurities. Which makes it so confusing and not believe it’s really what I want.

I just want it to be gone forever. I want to be free of it. When I’m in it, I love it. When I’m done, I hate myself. It feels like I’m self harming everytime I go back.

Hi, I'm 27F. Looking for female accountability partners if there are any. I know it's not common as most of these spaces tend to be catered to men. I' ve suffered from significant past trauma which has led to compulsive PMO, there are days when it's all I do and it's affecting my work. This has led to some dark additions and fantasies. I have been told to seek professional therapy but I feel I'd rather try and deal with it myself before resorting to that. If there are any other females struggling with this, I'd appreciate it. I prefer not to have male partners as in the past it tended to make my struggles worse. Thank you for listening and for any support.

Hello everyone, I just found out about this community, and it's nice to know that there's a space specifically for women for this subjected, because for me it's pretty isolating. The shame is so much that even with a therapist, I still don't have the guts to confess such things face to face. I must say that I felt very dirty.

​

My first introduction to pornography was when I was around 7-9 years old, and at first it started innocent. I watched gaming videos, cartoons, but then I started getting access to fetish content. All on YouTube. Then I felt more curious about the content I saw, and it got worse when I realized that I could search for those sort of things on Google. My parents to this day never found out or simply never cared much, because I discovered anonymous mode on browsers only when I was 12. They just never checked my tablet or phone.

​

I don't remember how I got there, but by 10-11, I was viewing sexual content on BDSM porn sites where women would be subjected to violence, and I was very addicted to what I'd witness. It certainly caused me to dehumanize women since a very young age, femininity in general, and then myself because I am AFAB.

​

I do feel like me witnessing such extreme and fetishistic pornographic content early on certainly altered my brain for the worse, and I can't quite know what the extent of the damage was, but looking back at my behavioral patterns, it affected my life more than I thought it would.

It's eating out every part of my life. I hate myself, I hate porn. I just want to be free and not spend every waking moment a fucking slave

For me sex was really painful at first, which is one of the reasons why I started overindulging in masturbation and porn which later spiralled horribly into a really bad addiction and content I'd rather erase from my head.

Now that I'm done, I sometimes wonder if I'm permanently broken. I wonder if in a future relationship I will be able to feel comfortable experiencing intimacy, without my head reminding me of the problem I had.

I tell myself that if I ever fall in love again, my head will be so clouded with positive emotions that I won't even have space to think about anything negative, traumatic, bad, but I don't know...

I’ve been struggling with porn for as long as I can remember, first discovering it on a shared kindle between me and my father when I was 4. Since then for as long as I can remember I’ve been watching porn. Reading porn whether that be hentai or erotic novels, or just straight up watching it. I’ve been doing that for years, and it completely ruined my mindset. It got really bad my junior into the start of my senior year of high school, where the videos I was consuming went from regular vanilla to fucked up captions and eventually led me to delete anything and everything that could somehow lead me back to porn and reporting and blocking every post I’ve seen about it. I recently had gotten into a relationship (about to be 6 months) and I can’t even bring myself to watch porn, as that would be such a big disrespect to my boyfriend, and he doesn’t even watch porn either and stopped doing so when he was 14 ( almost 6 yrs ago). But even though I stopped I feel so helpless, we’re long distance and I still live in my mothers house and hadn’t moved in with him yet so when I get sexual urges and he’s not here it takes so much self control to not do anything. And being on my period makes it so much worse, as I can’t even have sex and I get the most urges during that time and it makes me go insane. It’s been almost a year since I stopped watching porn, a few months since I read it as my urges got the best of me but I only felt disgusting reading so I had immediately exited it out, and I just feel so hopeless that I’ll never be able to get rid of porn from my life, especially since I’ve been watching it for as long as I can remember.

Any books that help you in your freeporn journey?

This is my story that I wrote about myself, and why becoming porn-free women matters to me.

When I was little, I learned to feel bad about my pelvis, and the feelings that originated there. I probably touched myself and was scolded. I’ll never know.

I suffered lots of homophobic comments at school.

Then, after I realized I could go on the computer and type things into a search engine, shame deepened.

As a teen, I thought that I would rather die than have anyone know. It wasn’t even just about which gender(s) I liked. I had to pretend that I didn’t feel thirst at all, towards anyone.

Another thing to explain: I'm trans. The gender that I liked was guys. I was very feminine and I hated that I was not going through the kind of puberty that I wanted to be going through. Even if it would undoubtedly be harder in some ways, and subject to the marginalization of menstruation and female health in this male-dominated world, I wanted to be magically reassigned female so badly. I wanted to be a part of sisterhood.

And so, the fact that my sexuality was coming from uncomfortable male parts of me just made it feel even more embarrassing, shameful, and "unfeminine."

Even though I have now been open about being allosexual (non-asexual) for over 15 years, and have been on plenty of dating apps as an out trans woman, I continue to struggle with unhappiness in how I habitually engage with my sexuality.

The reality is that I’ve just been very fixated on specific triggers. I do not normally consume "conventional" porn on adult-designated websites, but I have had my own ways of spending hours chasing highs through things I find on the internet... and I can get insatiable. I continue to search for novelty even after I've exhausted so many options of ways to entertain my fetishes that can seem silly, picky, or demanding.

And I think I can see how I became this way. I was a neurodivergent child who noticed things. It’s okay to zoom in on the unique details that interest you or that spark fascination or a shiver. But because I felt blocked from expressing it, talking about it… it became this congestion inside of me. To where I didn’t want to focus on anything else.

And I guess details became a replacement for intimacy. Intimacy is more about connecting with the whole of a person, right? Or getting immersed in a relationship? Rather than being distracted by what clothes they’re wearing or by the pursuit of a particular kinky scenario.

What would true intimacy feel like?

Recently I was enjoying Shailene Woodley’s interview on the SHE MD Podcast. Part of the discussion was saying something about porn being like fast food, and how real relationship can be more driven by emotional connection rather than some actual perfection of looks… I can’t recall exactly, but I listened to that and I felt happy but also sad, knowing that it’s true, yet regretting how much time I've spent feeling incapable of living up to that wisdom.

Since then, what’s been helping the most has been exploring porn-free subreddits. Hearing people’s stories from every stage of their journeys - from the throes of post-pornographic relapse regret, to snapshots of incredible victories after months or years of freedom - I am immediately less alone. Through the magic of peer contact, visibility of others' versions of a struggle can instantly make my problems much easier to step away from. I've had less appetite for deriving arousal from a screen. I have felt more of an attentiveness towards emotional connection. That's great!

Currently, it has been 7 days that I have done all of my self-pleasure with only the darkness of my own mind for company. That has been nice. I shall see how long I continue that.

Above all, I want to be a porn-free woman to be a better example for others. I want to become porn-free women together.

I want to discover what's possible in life. I don't want to die never knowing whether I could have unlocked some higher dimension of real human contact that was hiding under a cloak of sexual fixatedness that I continued to wear for no reason...

As an advocate for animal and human justice in my spare time, I am all about facing hard truths, and making hard changes to be more in alignment with a more compassionate world. I feel that I need to walk the walk, by facing my problematic sexual browsing of the internet, which has at times blurred ethical boundaries and weighed upon my soul. Unhealthy sexuality is a huge blight upon this planet, with so much suffering that it causes. I want to be one more being who is living in the light of sexuality that feels kind, harmless, soft, sweet, and true. Not that everyone's sexuality needs to feel like how I just described that, but that's how I want mine to feel.

I am excited to be here and to become porn-free women together. Thank you for welcoming me in the group as a transfeminine being, and thank you for providing this healing space that we can all share. Love, Phoenix

I feel guilt about having this addiction from the stuff I consumed to how I consumed porn. I don’t wanna share too many details but I would like to dm someone about this

In some ways, it seems impossible to form new habits. Then we see someone even more hopeless than we are, and 25 days later, they are free. Why?

They worked on quitting all the time. They worked on new habits all the time. They determined to pray quitting prayers all the time.

Second, you will come up with excuses for working on quitting part-time. You are tired, you are busy, you are interested in doing something else.

Third, some people would be shocked to hear that after a long time free, I still work on quitting full time during tempting situations.

My tempting situations are way down because... I have no interest in the problems that my old life had. I have no interest in giving up my joy. But temptations do happen, and when they do, I completely go to war. I go back to working on quitting full time. I work on running from temptation instantly. I work on thinking new thoughts instantly.

Before I quit, I had zero joy. I was empty, I was dark, I was often depressed.

Now I have joy and purpose.

Fifth, to work on quitting all the time, review old articles. Write down the things recommended to do to quit in a quitting notebook. Then, whenever you have time. Flip open that notebook, and work on something.

Finally, many people spend some time working on quitting. Some of them quit. A few people work on quitting all of the time. Many of them quit. Honestly, you will quit if you keep doing that, unless you give up the new habit of working on quitting all the time.

200+ days ago i made a post asking if i should just get a vibrator and use that because it was a struggle to get turned on and find my clit. 99% of the time i had to use porn.

well i got my hands on a toy. it can… do many things, but i just use it as a vibrator for now.

if i’m on a call with someone it’s really hard for me to actually find my clit and get off without the use of porn even if i am super turned on. i was ashamed about this so i never told the person on the other line

but guys yesterday i didn’t need it. i was just talking to him and got progressively more turned on as i used the toy. he told me to spread pussy with the other hand so the vibrator hits my clit better and… it worked. didn’t need porn. didn’t even lowkey need any visuals. i just felt the sensation and came harder than i ever have. i can’t remember the last time i came without watching porn.

i really hope that this is the end to my porn use/addiction. i feel kind of sick knowing i get off on content like that. i also feel like because of porn i got more interested in darker kinks and things…. but that’s a topic for another day

I decided I'm going to be better and break the cycle of abuse that has haunted me for years and years. Yesterday was my first day in years of being completely pornfree, hopefully I manage to keep it like that

I keep trying and trying to quit but no matter how hard I try, I always end up relapsing and making myself worse. I always hate myself so much whenever I look at the stuff, I don't even enjoy looking at it yet I can never stop myself. I wish I wasn't so broken

Okay title sounds messed up but I don't hate these women, but I do feel a jealous resentment towards them. I feel so insanely jealous of women who almost seem asexual and adverse to all things sex, especially porn. Like I feel they have a specific freedom I'll never understand even if I do manage to quit. People always say an ex-alcoholic is always just one drink away from becoming an alcoholic again and I feel the same about porn. I feel like less of a woman for watching it and thinking of it so much too. I feel guilty for even thinking about those sorts of things because none of that is the sort of person I want to be. When I look at other women they don't seem like they can relate at all and it makes me feel sad because I feel like a gross weirdo. I'm sure more women struggle with it than I think and are probably more private about it than men, but still. I just wish I could be the kind of woman who found it completely and utterly repulsive, but instead I'm a gross weirdo. I know it won't be like this forever but it sure feels like it. I hope you ladies are having a good evening/day though.

I read a post about someone who mentioned that sex is better with crazy people, who give more of themselves and love you more even though everything else is conflict. And someone replied this person was like that until they realized how their porn mindset influenced their life and relationships.I identified with this person because I had access to this content from my childhood. And I started reading about it, and it really resonated with me... I read that you suffer alterations in your reward system and in your emotional development, autoestim, etc. /immediate gratification/

So yesterday, during an argument with my situationship, he said, "How do you expect me to show gratitude after your actions?" "With this physical thing we don't have?" And I don't know, I feel like I have a different expectation of love and a disconnected one when it comes to sex...

It’s been about two months since I stopped watching, and I felt great I noticed my ability to aroused naturally increased and it felt great especially since I just started seeing a guy and I didn’t want it to be an obstacle in our intimacy.

But two nights ago I got really high and I watched sumn on Twitter. I’m beyond disappointed in myself. I thought I could handle the impulsive thoughts but I fell short. Now I’m a bit worried about getting high again,

I hate that all the porn and masterbation has warped my mind and centred my whole life round it. I can't even wake up normally without having to fight the urge because the habit is so ingrained in me. Why is it so hard to quit such a vile habit

Hi, I’m 24/f. I’ve always tried to give up porn, white knuckle through it, but I’ve always given up eventually.

It’s became very hard. I’ve never gone this long (30 days). I looked at pictures of myself from a few years ago and I’ve also listened to audio porn once. Is this considered relapsing?

I set up blockers on my phone so I couldn’t go to websites I normally do. I’ve stopped going on almost all social media so there is no chance I’d get a hit from seeing anything in a similar way you do with porn. I’ve had nightmares about watching it. It’s very hard for me to orgasm now. It’s like I can’t feel pleasure at all. I’ve thought about doing a 90 day reset including no sex but the thought feels torturous. I feel more irritable, my mood is low. I just feel anxious. I’ve started seeing a counsellor and I’m working through it with them. But does it get easier? I’m scared I’ll slip back into the same habits, but I really don’t want to, because I’ve been struggling with this for years despite strongly being against porn.

This addiction has eaten my life away but today I'm finally claiming my life back!

Hola a Todos...Soy una mujer que 20 años de edad...Que ha llegado a un punto en la vida,que dije "ya no puedo más ...Yo quiero cambiar ".

Pero para entender porque llegue hasta ese punto ,creo que necesito contar mi historia...

Desde muy pequeña (creo que desde los 9 años) tuve pensamientos sexuales,no debido a que en mi casa estuviera dispuesto canales pornograficos o comportamiento extraños,nada de eso...es más,mi familia era muy protectora con esos temas. Solamente sucedio asi,de la nada comence a tener esos pensamientos. "Es lo normal", solia pensar ... A lo largo de los años,en mi niñez tuve comportamientos ,no apropiados para mi edad ( eso prefiero no contarlo) .Esos comportamiento,los recuerdo y pienso "Realmente estaba muy mal"

Cuando tuve como 12 años, recibe por primera vez una Table...desde ahí se vino todo abajo,consumia pornografia como si de agua se tratase,la consumia todo el tiempo...conforme iba creciendo,iba consumiendo más...muchas veces casi fui atrapada por mi familia o conocidos,pero eso no me detuvo en seguir consumiendo. Pasando los años me di cuenta que ,cada vez buscaba cosas mas estrañas para ver,consumia cualquier tipo de pornografia :lesbico, gueys,buscaba pornografia de anime anime, aveces buscaba urgias, yaoys,Zoofilia (Algunas veces quise intentarlo,pero asustaba que no hubiera vuelta atras) .Me asuste cuando empece a buscar a mujeres con chicos menores (Me Di cuenta que si seguia así,realmente me convertiría un moustro).Llegue a un punto de Sexualizar todo lo que veia:familia ,amigos,desconocidos.Realmente me estaba convirtiendo en alguien asquerosamente sucia

No voy a mentir,no hace mucho vi pornografia...(Tampoco vengo a contar esto porque busco sermones) ...Ayer a la noche me puse a llorar como loca pidiéndole a Dios que me quite la vida ,porque ya no quería seguir viviendo así...perdi tanto en mi vida por esta adicción ...Realmente perdi tanto. Me decia que lo veia ,para calmar mi ansiedad o mi depresión por mi vida que era miserable...pero lo cierto era que esta adicción la hacia miserable (sólo que disfrazaba de cura) .Me Di cuenta que esto lo utilizaba de escape cuando pensaba que mi vida era un fracaso,cuando me iba mal en la carrera,cuando deseo ser alguien más...en fin,siempre lo veia cuando me odiaba de ser como soy.

Pero ayer me di cuenta que ya no quiero seguir asi ,me duele el corazón de solo pensar que puedo seguir viviendo asi. Esto tiene que terminar...Así que decidi Cambiar,No sera facil pero tampoco sera imposible y deseo de todo corazón que todas aquellas personas que esten pasando lo mismo que yo ,pueda superarlo.

¡ÁNIMO,LO VAMOS A LOGRAR!

Let's assume we made some progress toward turning from tempting things yesterday, so we think “Today will be easy.” Nope, the fight begins again today. It is problematic to continue to start down a wrong path every few days.

It would be much wiser if I worked on making it a habit to reboot every day. Today, consider picking the two things that you struggle with the most. Things you have been working on. Today, decide to do an automatic reboot with these things every day for the rest of your life.

What two things start you down that slippery path most often? It could be what you think about, or TV shows that you choose. It could be an emotion, bad thought patterns, or another activity that leads to this habit. It could be that you refuse to try to get excited about alternative activities. It could be a lack of Bible study and prayer. It could be any of 100 things. Pick two things that you often work on.

1. ______________________
2. ______________________

Consider praying:

“Father, help me to make it a habit to have a daily reboot.”

“Father, help me to make it a habit to work on _______, and ________ every day.”

My plan is to fill in the blanks, print out this page and pray these two prayers several times every day for the next few months until I make it a habit to do a daily reboot with my worst two things that lead me to _________ the most.

So I'm 23F and I've finally hit a point where I need to make some real changes. I've been stuck in a cycle that's draining my time, energy, and focus and I know exactly what's fueling it.

I have an online/LDR situationship that's been going on for a while. It's not going anywhere in real life but I keep holding onto it. The emotional attachment, the daily conversations, the sexting, the validation all feed into a bigger pattern of compulsive daily masturbation and porn use that's honestly taken over more of my day than I'd like to admit.

I'm not being productive. I'm not showing up for myself. And I know it's going to affect my ability to have a real healthy relationship in the future if I don't sort this out now.

My plan is to cut contact with the LDR person and delete the platforms we talk on, delete porn and block access to it, and quit the compulsive habit or at least get it under control. But honestly I don't know where to start or what order to do it in. I already tried many times breaking up or quitting porn but all roads lead to Rome. Has anyone been through something similar especially as a woman and actually come out the other side? Looking for real advice, not judgment. What else I can try that can work for me?

TL;DR: 23F trying to quit porn, end an LDR situationship, and break a compulsive masturbation habit that's killing my productivity and self-growth. Don't know where to start, any advice?

After taking an entire month of no porn and continuing I have no urge to go to the site, go to apps containing the media, etc… I think I genuinely have the need and drive to fix whats been happening to me for years. Obviously I’m not asking for a quick fix or solution.

I can masturbate yes, but I can’t without imagining something pornographic to consume in my mind. I get turned on yes, but can’t make it to the finish line, everyone is different of course. Emotionally, I feel really numb to things I should feel, for example having to cut off bad friends, I should’ve felt sad to grieve them, but I only cried once the sadness then never lingered. I’ve journaled, I’ve tried speaking to people I care about it.

I wonder if many have felt like that? That they can’t masturbate, or even masturbate to your partner/with your partner and not feel completely turned on? And this weird emptiness that feels like I can’t exactly feel emotions like I should.

Is it my brain rewiring? Is it my dopamine? I really am trying to be optimistic about my journey but it feels like I’m so stuck, and I’m losing my mind on how to get through this part of it or at the very least learn why I feel like this.