A man describes a 15-year relationship with a niche fetish that started as curiosity and became a coping mechanism. Family conflict and homework stress drove him to porn and video games for hours at a time, which he compares to an IV drip for anxiety.
body parts growing larger, people growing larger, and I found my sexual fantasy home. It just felt good. It was interesting. It was a niche fetish. Over the next 15 years, I just exhausted all that content on the internet. There's that type of porn out there. I've probably seen a lot of it. It became just something I watched up to a couple hours every few days. Some days I had binges. And other days I had marathons. Whether or not I was masturbating, that didn't happen until about 4 years after I encountered porn for the first time. Yeah, that is how my first encounter shaped everything for me with porn addiction.
At what point did you start to feel like your use had shifted from curiosity or coping to something compulsive or problematic?
I really like this question. I don't remember the first time. Sometimes fights happened in my family. I also played video games a lot, and that was, it was fine refuge in a sense because it was pleasurable. It was an essence that felt like, oh, here's something that feels good that isn't fighting. It felt I'm showing myself I love myself. To a degree, that's true. That is what I was doing. But I didn't know the chemistry of what I was really doing to myself and how dangerous that was. I think the main triggers though were my homework. It's what I can remember. My homework was a constant source of stress. Stress. And this does tie into the family dynamics and the other things that made homework difficult to do when I got home. Excuse me, that when I got home. So there's a chain of problems here, but one that was an often trigger was, yeah, I was— I needed to do homework. I was often behind and I would get stressed and I'd look to use porn or video games to reduce that stress and would, yeah, just have it on another tab many nights and just like an IV drip whenever I needed it.
