[29 M] Kelvz' journey

[Special_Bird]

Get up again brother

Remember to block those thoughts before they take hold in your brain. Even if you are fighting them all day, do not feed them, it will only lead to a relapse. Instead, block the thought by focusing both your mental and physical attention on something else, whether an object in your mind or a real event going on in front of you. Personally, I prefer to utilize the variation of this strategy called the X technique. I’ve written about it before in my 90 days clean post, so I’ll pull it back up for you below.

@Special_Bird

If you run into a conventional trigger (i.e. a raunchy photo, a scandalous ad, a hot scene in a movie, etc.), you may not have the time to write down an argument, plus it might have not turned into an urge yet. To prevent it from getting any bigger and taking space in your thoughts, you can employ the technique. I was first introduced to this technique by @Forerunner but it is also explained in-depth in the book Power Over Pornography which I have listed at the bottom of this post.

Essentially what the technique is is a way of cutting a trigger off at its root, before it grows into an urge. When you see a trigger, the picture and thoughts about it tend to stick in your mind and won’t go away. To get rid of these thoughts, everytime the picture pops back in your head imagine a huge red X in front of it so that you can no longer see it. Focus your attention on the X. Then continue on with whatever else you were doing, meaning shift your physical focus to something else (i.e. back to your homework, back to the movie you were watching, back to the game, etc.). For urges that keep coming back, imagine an exploding X in front of them.

At first, the technique may seem ineffective, like even when you imagine an X, the image just comes right back. That is because your mind is weak, keep throwing that X in front of it, keep focusing on the X and whatever else you were doing before the trigger. The first few times, it will take a lot of back and forth fighting before you conquer it. In fact, for my first few times, it took all day or until something outside of my head actually distracted me.

Don’t let this hamper your progress man, as I said before, take this as another chance to learn and improve. You got this!