What is Reddit's opinion of Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Oof, my thought is that he NEEDS to be in therapy with someone who can help him unpack a lifetime of childhood trauma that has led to an unhealthy coping mechanism and addiction. I'd also recommend he read Eddie Capparucci's "Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Affects Your Sexual Addiction". I think he'd get a lot out of it.

SAA and SMART Recovery are both free support groups he can join if therapy is not accessible right now. SAA is 12-step, SMART is not.

Additionally, if therapy is inaccessible at the moment, it is vital he be engaging with recovery materials outside of the support groups. Porn Free Radio and The Porn Reboot podcasts are both worth the time to listen to, Fortify offers some good science-based recovery help, and Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction is a really good book. If you cant afford the book you can check if libraries near you have it available.

I agree with the other commenters-- his behavior is abusive, manipulative, and very much gaslighting. Don't confort him when it happens. You're reinforcing that this is an effective way to manipulate you and to get out of him having to see the consequences of his actions. If you mention you're hurt and he starts to get upset or put you in a situation where you're being manipulated into caretaking him, just physically leave the room instead. What he's doing to you is not okay.

Unfortunately, I am just as shallow into this battle as many people here. A different comment mentioned a book (https://www.amazon.com/Going-Deeper-Impacts-Sexual-Addiction/dp/B084Z66BZR), that I have begun reading on my kindle this morning and it made me acknowledge something I already knew. Porn is just the false comfort that you seek when things plague and ail you. 90% of people are not just "default perverts," they simply use porn to cope with their issues. Stress, exhaustion, loneliness, anxiety, depression. Porn is just that little or lot of dopamine to help you feel better in the face of those pressures.

When I was much younger I would indulge in video games as a defense mechanism to deal with unwanted emotions. The escapism that it provided allowed the troubles of the world to melt away. Last night I went to the gym on a 5 day streak, feeling on top of the world. Came home and played some games with friends. Then I tried to go to bed, I watched some youtube and when I was about to fall asleep I had rampant OCD, exclusively sexual in nature. Gay thoughts that wouldn't allow me to sleep, I am straight and believe myself exclusively straight, but a lack of experience with women and a ramping of fetishes and kinks has left me undeniably confused. Foolishly in my delirium I sought to "put myself to the test" and get a dildo and a fleshlight to "compare" and "put this horrid sexuality battle to bed." I looked around on amazon for an hour at different toys and my anxiety rose as the dates for delivery said "Jan 12th, Wed." I figured the anticipation would cause me so much stress that it would be better to leave it be, waiting a week to "test my sexuality" sounded like a nightmare become real. I had told myself that 2022 was going to be different and I wanted to remain steadfast, but I kept nagging myself about how I "basically had already relapsed" I looked at toys for too long to consider myself simply inquisitive. I convinced myself to try and get back on pornfree. I opened up my reddit app and tried to navigate through my subreddit list when my dealings from a week ago in "anonymous mode" reared their heads "Recently visited subreddits" listed several of the porn subreddits that I had relented to so many times in the past. I told myself it would be better to use my imagination than to relapse to porn entirely. I MO'd with so much pride that I had overcome my impulses, but my brain kept egging me on that I had already relapsed, and I was lying to myself that I hadn't and to just concede for the night. So I did. Shameful and guilt-ridden I indulged, and then I spent another 30 minutes following the PMO with a substantial headache, conflicted and confused, angry and upset that I let myself fall pray to it again. My brain twisting in circles around every inadequacy and insecurity. I finally slept after a long time, but it already left its scar again. As I wrote for my last sentence in this post, I know that failure is only achieved upon accepting a loss as the end, but it definitely feels terrible today nonetheless.

It was far too late for me to jump back on the computer, I was exhausted from the gym and then culturally it just felt wrong to play at midnight on a work night. The distraction I have relied so heavily on to mitigate the porn cravings, video games, wasn't something I could use to overcome that urge in my sleepiness.

The only genuine advice I can give you is face yourself in the mirror. Both literally and figuratively. Figure out what remnants of your past still cause you trouble and strain, and attempt to wholly eradicate them. Memories and experiences from my past haunt me, painfully persistent. During my ignorant and immature youth I had told two separate girls, neither of which were intimate friends, on separate occasions that I would "think of them while masturbating." Though I can't imagine they pay it any mind now, some 12-14 years later, it still causes me tremendous amounts of shame. There are several other instances of similar missteps that weigh heavily on me, however those are more personal and substantial and I wouldn't dream of referencing them on anything except a throwaway account.

Start off with a support group like SAA or SMART Recovery. I recommend you take a page out of AA's book and do "90 in 90"-- 90 support group meetings in your first 90 days of sobriety, essentially one meeting every day for 3 months. My girlfriend, a porn addict, did this for over 6 straight months and it was essential to her sobriety & recovery plan. :)

Next, if therapy is accessible to you, you'll need a therapist. A CSAT is preferable (and here's the CSAT directory for ya!) but if you can't find one you can see for whatever reason, a therapist with experience in sex addiction (NOT sex therapy) will be your next best bet.

You're also going to want to find and engage with recovery materials. I recommend Porn Free Radio, the Porn Reboot Podcast, and the book Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction as excellent starting places.

That's really great! I recommend SAA or SMART Recovery for support groups! My PA would not be sober for as long as she has been without SMART meetings. Both SAA and SMART have daily meetings over zoom, and I'm pretty sure they both have multiple meetings per day so that you can attend some regardless of your time zone or schedule.

I advise you take a page out of AA's book and do "90 in 90"-- 90 support group meetings in your first 90 days of sobriety, essentially one support group meeting every day. Path for Men seems especially helpful; my PA uses Fortify and Reboot every night to build a habit of checking in with her recovery before bed; and you should try giving the Porn Reboot Podcast and Porn Free Radio a listen in addition to your article readings. If you're interested in expanding your reading material outside of articles, Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction is a pretty good book.

Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction was a book that was HUGE in helping my girlfriend at the start of her porn addiction recovery!

To give you some ideas, here is an incomplete list of guidelines, rules, and boundaries that my PA and I have settled on for her recovery and my sense of safety/security. Some of these are subject to change over time.

• Daily support group meetings. For the first 6 months of her sobriety, she went to one support group meeting every single day. It was a mix of online SMART Recovery, SAA, and an irl group meeting. She's 9 months sober now & has cut that down to 3-4 meetings per week.

• Take notes during meetings. It helps to put down imoortant or helpful points, and taking notes also helps memorization.

• Accountability software! We use Trustablee, which is currently unavailable on the app store for some reason, but works wonderfully. It compiles regular screenshots of her phone screen that I can view at any time, monitors text on screen at all times for sex-related terms and reports on it, and screens any links she clicks. I highly recommend it, whenever it's back up for download.

• Parental controls! Her electronics shut off and are completely inaccessible without her accountability partner's password from 10pm to 6am. She also is set as a child account and so a lot of things, like apps that aren't rated E, are blocked or hidden from her.

• No social media at all and no internet browsers on her phone. If she needs to google something, she can boot up her laptop. I can guarantee that every single porn addict in this digital age has been using their phone's browser for porn. Instead of trying to find a porn blocker that would work without any loopholes on their phone-- just get rid of the browser. Stop a potential issue at the source.

• In the beginning of her sobriety, maybe the first month or two, her accountabiloty partner would have physical control of her electronics and she could only use them with supervision. It was definitely drastic and strict, but it was something she agreed to after the last D-Day where she either had the option to move out, or stay home and take recovery seriously. If anyone's PA has a massive issue with impulse control, I suggest doing this until they get better with that.

• Regular engagement with recovery material outside of meetings. Porn Free Radio and the Porn Reboot Podcast are two podcasts she listens to regularly, Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction is a psychology-based book she found extremely helpful, and Fortify and Reboot are two recovery apps she uses before bed every night to track/journal her recovery progress that day & also to create a new nightly ritual to replace the porn ritual she had at night. She also reads various studies and articles about porn addiction online!

• Therapy. Therapy therapy therapy.

• Complete and total honesty and transparency. We talk pretty much every day about how her recovery is going, any stuff she found interesting or helpful in her meetings, recovery materials, or therapy, what level of difficulty her urges had been at that day, things like that. It needs to be a constant, active conversation, on both our ends. If only one of us initiated these conversations, that'd be a bad sign. She initiates talk about it just as much as I do, and actually interrupted me typing this comment to tell me something about her recovery haha

Yeahhh, social media is 100% a no-go. There's even porn all over Facebook. If he's in recovery, he doesn't need any social media whatsoever. Those should be blocked on his devices right alongside porn sites.

Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction is a good book.

The Porn Reboot Podcast and Porn Free Radio are must-listens.

He needs to be going to support groups. I recommend following AA's unofficial rule of "90 in 90"-- 90 support group meetings in the first 90 days of recovery, essentially one support group meeting per day for 3 months. SMART Recovery is a group I really recommend, and there's also SAA if he prefers 12-Step.

Fortify app and Reboot are two apps my PA uses to help manage her recovery.

Have you two already gotten accountability apps and parental controls on all his devices?

Last but not least, in addition to all the self-help resources, he needs therapy. If he just "wants to try and help himself before looking into professional help" as a point of pride or whatever, that's horseshit. His brain will be literally rebuilding itself around physical damage & he needs therapy to not only help him stay on track with recovery, but also to guide that healing snd help set him up with new healthy coping mechanisms, help walk him through his emotions, and give him a constructive outlwt to talk about his feelings (journaling can only help to a point-- there needs to be a safe place to have a back-and-forth). Recovery needs to come before all else if it's going to work, especially personal pride. Tell him to suck it up and go to therapy.

This is all very reasonable! I think you might be asking for a bit too little, actually.

For #1, if he's taking book recommendations, Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction really helped my PA get a deeper understanding of the psychology behind her addiction. For #2, using SAA's Three Circles to define her sobriety helped us both feel more secure & have a better understanding of her recovery and way to gauge how well she's doing in it. For #3, YES, addiction thrives on secrecy. Being as open about it as reasonably possible can only help. For my PA, "reasonably possible" ended up involving her being publicly open about her struggle with addiction-- all of her friends and family know about it, and she speaks about it openly on the little bit of social media she still uses. It's definitely been a boon to her attitude and recovery, not keeping her addiction a secret anymore.

SAA is a popular 12-step meeting; if 12-Step isn't your vibe, SMART Recovery's general addiction zoom meetings are great & there's a sexual maldaptive behavior meeting on Sundays that a lot of porn addicts go to.

Pornfree Radio and the Porn Reboot Podcast are both good places to start with podcasts, and if you're a reader the book Going Deeper: How the Inner Child Impacts Your Sexual Addiction is a pretty enlightening read. If you can't afford the book, you could try looking around libraries near you to see if any of them have it. :)

Good on you for staying diligent and working out!!

1. Block porn from your phone. Block porn from your PC.

2. Follow these subbreddits: PornFree, NoFap, SemenRetention, nosurf
   I would recommend getting rid of all or almost all of any other subreddits. Your mind remembers everything and cannot selectively forget, you basically have a glass of dirty water and the only way to get it clean is be continually pouring clean water into it. You might as well focus of pouring in the cleanest water into your mind than even neutral distractions. Read a certain number of top posts a day because we all have busy lives and we can forget our weak areas and blind spots but get reminded when someone talks about having the same ones.

3. Listen to a podcast from "Fight the New Drug" everyday. It's the only podcast I know that specifically targets this subject. Once you listen to one, you'll want to abstain. They have some powerful stories there. They also made a three part documentary you can find and watch that I recommend, it is maybe 90 mins long altogether.

4. Pick up an audio book on the subject. This is the first one I have picked up and I have really valued its content:
   https://www.amazon.com/Going-Deeper-Impacts-Sexual-Addiction/dp/B084Z66BZR

5. Pick up reading, these books by Napoleon Hill are recommended by many abstaining:

Outwitting the Devil
Think and grow Rich

SemenRetention has been posting books or excerpts a lot recently, so that might be another good place to look

1. Try meditation. I have been using the 10 minute meditation routine from the side bar at r/ meditation. I also thought it is was not worth my time, but my mind is a lot more still and I can pick up on a wave off urges much more easily. And trading 10 minutes of still time for the time wasted from countless distractions is a big win. The benefits seem to compound over time but you should notice some positive things on the first day

2. Avoid junk food. I found that when I gave into junk food it was even easier for me to give into other temptations. On top of having more strength to avoid temptations you will physically feel and look better. Sidenote: I recommend avoid alcohol, ever time I wake up after a night of drinking relapse was much more likely.

I would say at least add this into your routine:
10 mins meditation
1 podcast
20 minutes of reading
Try to read 4 or more top posts from like minded subreddits a day

And take out:

Junk food
Alcohol
and or course porn