Slowly stop masturbating

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DylanLinggir

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I’ve been masturbating from the age of 16 and doing it without knowing it is a sin!

Doing it 4 times/ week on average.

Feeling guilty towards God after doing it is always there.
So, now i am nearly 20 and decided want to stop after knowing it is a sin!

I am doing it this way;
  1. REDUCE/CUT the average, from 4 to 3 times, then from 3 to 2 times and finally stop.
  2. Involve in college activities regularly, spending lesser time alone in room.
  3. Of course, PRAY!
So, the main question is: Is this the right way i’m doing it? or Is there any recommendations from you?
  • This kind of way really helped me. I’ve been reducing it to once per week, next goal: twice per month! May God help me to accomplish my goal!
 
I usually like to go “cold turkey” in making significant behavioral changes in various areas of my life, not just masturbation, and if it doesn’t work maybe come back to a less sudden way. I guess if I were going to the gym I’d start gradually but we’re talking about stopping something, not starting something. It just seems if I’ve decided a different way is better, I should quickly say goodbye to the past and plunge ahead!

fwiw

Alan
 
My personal opinion is that you should just stop completely. If you know it is a sin, why are you planning to keep doing it? That just doesn’t seem right to me. You’ve realised it’s a sin so you should stop doing it at all. Resolve fully to stop and give yourself over to God and let Him protect you. If you fall, pick yourself up again and resolve to stop ever more firmly.
 
Thanks for your opinion! 😉

I am trying to stop immediately! 🙂
  • but it is hard to stop immediately if you are at the early stage of stopping 😦
 
Do not “try” to stop --rather stop. Repent. Firmly resolve not to do such.

Avoid the near occasions. Pray.

If you later fall. Repent. Firmly resolve not to do such.

Pray - turn to Jesus the Good Shepherd…tell him you love him and are sorry and seek his face…
 
DylanLinggir said:
Thanks for your opinion! 😉

I am trying to stop immediately! 🙂
  • but it is hard to stop immediately if you are at the early stage of stopping 😦
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I sympathise with that but letting yourself continue will only separate you further from God and deprive you even more of the graces you need to stop.
 
Well I would point you to Matt Fradd’s CD “taking down Goliath”. He talks about his addiction porn, and offers some good tips on how to stop. It’s good to make goals but the goal should be to stop cold for a certain amount of time, and when/if you can succeed don’t celebrate by masturbating. Believe me this is my biggest chink in my armor. I struggled with it for about as long as you have and longer because I’m 23. I started by trying to go for a week and then stepped it up, did I fail sometimes, HECK YES. Did I stop trying NO, I wen to confession and started the clock up again. It’s been about 2 months, maybe longer since I last looked at porn.

A thing not to do is to try to become immune to looking at it. I tried once and I would last a day, then fail the next. Put filters on your computer, and just don’t click allow, for porn sites, yeah I can disable my filter, but I keep it on because once it blocks the site, I just go away from it.

Read books by Jason Evert, and Be a Man by Fr.Larry Richards. Also don’t stay on the computer to long.

There will always be the tug, and I don’t think that will ever go away. The female body is too beautiful. But we have to rewire ourselves. So our hots, and neutrals and grounds are wired to God, we just can’t flick the switch and expect it to stop.

This might be a scare tactic here, but I’ll say it anyway. Do you want your future wife to walk into a room to see you masturbating to some digital video, of a woman who is not your wife. She is supposed to be the only one you have eyes on, the only one in the universe that gets your heart. The only person you love more is God. Pray for God’s grace and strength and pray for the women who are in porn videos.

I hope this helps because i’m fighting the same fight as you.
 
I was in your shoes not too long ago. I can tell you that the reducing method does not work. You will just be counting down the time until the next time you allow your self to do it again. It actually strengthens your attachment to the sin it seems, rather than destroys it.

As hard as it is, especially at first, cold turkey is the way to go.

Good luck and God bless.
 
There is no cutting down. Been there. Cold turkey, friend. I’ll have been free of it as of this Easter Vigil. My addiction was pointedly worse than yours, if I only did it once a day than I considered it a victory. I tried the ‘reduction plan,’ but be honest, that’s just an excuse for failure. Divorce yourself of unclean images. Learn some meditative prayer because your subconcious will torment you and you will need God’s Grace to overcome this. I had to give up certain forms of music which I associated with the feeling of orgasm. I hope that isn’t too graphic. You can stop, but only cold turkey. Protestant or not, confession helps, it makes you accountable. Contrition is required, understand why the sin of the flesh is wrong. Ian Maxfield has a podcast that deals with porn, the EWTN document library has many programmes, free, for download. The protestant church has many resources, I know of one podcast, Straight Thinking, which deals in an episode with brain chemistry and porn addiction. Pray. Above all. Jason Evert has a lot of material, which can be reached from EWTN.

Go to www.ewtn.com and go to the Library header, go to audio documents, the website will instruct you from there.

God bless you and keep you,
 
I wonder how many responding here are women? Is the struggle as difficult?


  1. *]My advice is to identify the moments of greatest temptation: Early morning? and devise a strategy.
    *]By all means avoid visual stimulation.
    *]Do not be obsessed with this particular issue. When it happens it happens - learn humility. Acknowledge how weak and helpless you are.
    *]Meditation and contemplation heal your memory which contain the wounds of erotic images.
 
Michael_Mayo said:
I wonder how many responding here are women? Is the struggle as difficult?


  1. *]My advice is to identify the moments of greatest temptation: Early morning? and devise a strategy.
    *]By all means avoid visual stimulation.
    *]Do not be obsessed with this particular issue. When it happens it happens - learn humility. Acknowledge how weak and helpless you are.
    *]Meditation and contemplation heal your memory which contain the wounds of erotic images.
Click to expand...

  1. I’m a woman. And of course it is!
 
DylanLinggir said:
I’ve been masturbating from the age of 16 and doing it without knowing it is a sin!

Doing it 4 times/ week on average.

Feeling guilty towards God after doing it is always there.
So, now i am nearly 20 and decided want to stop after knowing it is a sin!

I am doing it this way;
  1. REDUCE/CUT the average, from 4 to 3 times, then from 3 to 2 times and finally stop.
  2. Involve in college activities regularly, spending lesser time alone in room.
  3. Of course, PRAY!
So, the main question is: Is this the right way i’m doing it? or Is there any recommendations from you?
  • This kind of way really helped me. I’ve been reducing it to once per week, next goal: twice per month! May God help me to accomplish my goal!
Click to expand...
Been there done that. Satan has a way to keep the sin going on. I even started saying it was good for my prostate health. Not! I kept going to confession telling the priest it was for blue balls. I was only trying to re leave pressure. Satan keep on, and on, and on. The Holy Spirit prompted me to ask my priest up front, out rite, if it was a mortal sin. The priest said, “YES IT IS ALWAYS!” Got me a Brown Scapular. Got enrolled with it. Asked Jesus for forgiveness. Ask Mary and the Holy Spirit for help. I’m now going on about a year with out masturbating. One thing you have to remember is Satan is going to mess with you. That’s what he does. The Big Lair! He wants your soul. He’ll do anything to get it.

Good Luck!

God Bless You!
 
Resolve to repent and quit immediately, as the others have said. If you do slip up in the future just know that it was a mistake and that you MUST resolve to never do it again. Do everything in your power to stay in a state of grace and to avoid sin. If you are overcome and fall to sin though, note the progress that has been made, tell yourself you will strive to never let it happen again, and ask God to help you with your struggles.

As mere mortals we constantly fall short of God’s grace, but we shouldn’t settle for falling short.

Ite in pace,
Joshua
 
Michael_Mayo said:
Stupid question?

It just seems to always come up as a male “problem”.
Click to expand...
I thought so as well. Maybe it is just more in the open with men, but I always assumed that females didn’t deal with the sexual temptations on quite as grand of a scale as males.

It wouldn’t be the first time I have been wrong,
Joshua
 
joshvanrad said:
I thought so as well. Maybe it is just more in the open with men, but I always assumed that females didn’t deal with the sexual temptations on quite as grand of a scale as males.

It wouldn’t be the first time I have been wrong,
Joshua
Click to expand...
Considering modern civilization’s saturation with sex, I think it would be very hard to find women who have never dealt with temptations of impurity. As a teenager, we were always reading dirty novels and magazines, and movies that had to have one or two love scenes showing nakedness. At a young age, I think about 13, I discovered with my cousin a hidden tape in an older relative’s room and when we saw it, it turned out to be pornography. I remember that these images never truly left my mind until I started seriously trying to live the faith, in my very early twenties, and then it was a struggle (especially when I really, really was into a guy) for the next two or so years not to fall into temptations of impure thoughts.

They did finally cease almost entirely eventually, and are not so easy to fall into now. I have actually learned a pattern- When I find myself having to shut out such images from my mind, I can tell without a doubt that its around ovulation, because they don’t exist the rest of the time. Of course many changes have come with that, a general detachment from entertainment and friendships has meant it’s less easy to fall into impure conversations or movies. and therefore thoughts.

So yes, I’m sure that unless a woman grew up not watching most of the entertainment and media that’s out there, most will have struggled with temptations of impurity at some point. I’m sure men must struggle a bit more because they are more directly wired/tuned to the physical, but women do too.
 
Michael_Mayo said:
Stupid question?

It just seems to always come up as a male “problem”.
Click to expand...
joshvanrad said:
I thought so as well. Maybe it is just more in the open with men, but I always assumed that females didn’t deal with the sexual temptations on quite as grand of a scale as males.

It wouldn’t be the first time I have been wrong,
Joshua
Click to expand...
Female sexuality is much more stigmatised than male sexuality. Men are presumed to be sexual beings, to an extent where sexual behaviour such as masturbation and casual sex are seen as inevitable. There’s a pervasive attitude that men simply can’t control their lusts (I have found this true of religious populations as well as secular ones) Women are not presumed as sexual beings, women are still somewhat seen as not having an inherent sexuality in the same way as men but merely as enablers for male sexuality. Especially nowadays women are expected to act in that ‘enabler’ role and expected to dress ‘sexy’ and show off their bodies for the sakes of men. Even in religious populations where this is not expected, women are still blamed for the lusts of men and often men are seen as victims and having limited responsibility for their own lustful actions. In modern secular culture, men are glorified for having as many sexual partners as possible whereas women who are even very limited in sexual partners are vilified as whores and sluts for having a sexual identity. There is still an underlying sense, even with changes in secular views of sexual behaviour, that men are the only ones who want sex and women just put it with it for men’s sake.

With such a pervasively negative view of female sexuality women are not able to be as open about their sexuality and so matters such as female masturbation are rarely discussed. It is almost more difficult for women because there is an added level of shame and the support and empathy is just not there. If a man struggles with masturbation and pornography then they are pitied but a woman with the same problem is just seen as a disgrace.
 
PerfectTiming said:
Female sexuality is much more stigmatised than male sexuality. Men are presumed to be sexual beings, to an extent where sexual behaviour such as masturbation and casual sex are seen as inevitable. There’s a pervasive attitude that men simply can’t control their lusts (I have found this true of religious populations as well as secular ones) Women are not presumed as sexual beings, women are still somewhat seen as not having an inherent sexuality in the same way as men but merely as enablers for male sexuality. Especially nowadays women are expected to act in that ‘enabler’ role and expected to dress ‘sexy’ and show off their bodies for the sakes of men. Even in religious populations where this is not expected, women are still blamed for the lusts of men and often men are seen as victims and having limited responsibility for their own lustful actions. In modern secular culture, men are glorified for having as many sexual partners as possible whereas women who are even very limited in sexual partners are vilified as whores and sluts for having a sexual identity. There is still an underlying sense, even with changes in secular views of sexual behaviour, that men are the only ones who want sex and women just put it with it for men’s sake.

With such a pervasively negative view of female sexuality women are not able to be as open about their sexuality and so matters such as female masturbation are rarely discussed. It is almost more difficult for women because there is an added level of shame and the support and empathy is just not there. If a man struggles with masturbation and pornography then they are pitied but a woman with the same problem is just seen as a disgrace.
Click to expand...
Well I have never been of that mindset that held on to that double standard. I view sexuality the same across the board.

My perceptions merely stem from what I have heard from males and females that I personally know. And my understanding is more based off of masturbation than it is of actually having sex. Males tend to talk about their struggles with masturbation more than women- or at least in my own experiences it appears that way.

I would agree that there is a certain stigma attached to women talking about such acts. I actually had a conversation with one of the few females that I have known to have had an issue with masturbation and she said she didn’t really bring it up to people because she felt “people would look at her as some sort of twisted pervert if they knew she was ‘a female who masturbates’”. I can see how that could be perceived, but I have never looked at it that way, myself. But I do think men are more open about their struggles with masturbation. Female or male, I just see a person who may struggle with masturbation or lust.

Ite in pace,
Joshua
 
joshvanrad said:
Well I have never been of that mindset that held on to that double standard. I view sexuality the same across the board.

My perceptions merely stem from what I have heard from males and females that I personally know. And my understanding is more based off of masturbation than it is of actually having sex. Males tend to talk about their struggles with masturbation more than women- or at least in my own experiences it appears that way.

I would agree that there is a certain stigma attached to women talking about such acts. I actually had a conversation with one of the few females that I have known to have had an issue with masturbation and she said she didn’t really bring it up to people because she felt “people would look at her as some sort of twisted pervert if they knew she was ‘a female who masturbates’”. I can see how that could be perceived, but I have never looked at it that way, myself. But I do think men are more open about their struggles with masturbation. Female or male, I just see a person who may struggle with masturbation or lust.

Ite in pace,
Joshua
Click to expand...
I think that for both sexes it is a show of strength. It takes a lot even for a man, but we kind of have an innate grind it out mind. I wonder what women go through, especially because not only do they fight the urge, but they have to do so with secrecy. I would NEVER demean a women who told me she struggled to. I only have more respect for her especially if she is trying to stop. I feel though that I m not out of the woods as far as the real hard times of struggle. sometimes I get to exposed online and see that where I am on the internet can lead me into a bad place right where the Devil wants me. I know days I will have this idea to “check” to see if this woman or that woman had any new videos up. The urge dies away away when I think of how awful and embarrassed I get at myself .

But you know what’s funny. The same reason we dive into porn is the best reason to flee away from it and that is because of a Woman, it’s kind of neat how that works. When you have a woman in your life, you have a worldly reason to flee.
 
Michael_Mayo said:
I wonder how many responding here are women? Is the struggle as difficult?


  1. *]My advice is to identify the moments of greatest temptation: Early morning? and devise a strategy.
    *]By all means avoid visual stimulation.
    *]Do not be obsessed with this particular issue. When it happens it happens - learn humility. Acknowledge how weak and helpless you are.
    *]Meditation and contemplation heal your memory which contain the wounds of erotic images.
Click to expand...

  1. Yes it is. The longest I have been able to go is two months. But I will not stop going to Confession and getting back up and trying again. I was told when I became Catholic it wasn’t a sin by a priest. When I came back to the church last June I found out it was. Now I study the Catechism and am fighting a horrible addiction. I was at 3-5 times a day, so my two months is great progress but I don’t want “progress” I want it OUT of my life. It’s hard to do. Keep me in your prayers and I will keep you in mine.
 
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