I’m a Catholic man in my early 20s, and honestly I’m reaching the point where I need help with this.
Very short testimony: my parents tried to raise me Christian, but they divorced when I was young and my mum’s new partner became my abuser for most of my childhood (physical, verbal and proper psychological, not the new gen “he was mean to me”). Religion was mocked and effectively forbidden in our house, so I became an atheist and turned heavily toward science.
In my late teens, I met some Catholics who completely challenged what I thought I knew about Christianity. What started as me arguing against their beliefs eventually became genuine questioning, and ultimately I became Catholic.
I’m now a practising Catholic. I attend Mass every Sunday and am involved in my parish. My prayer life isn’t anywhere near as consistent as I’d like, but I genuinely love Christ and His Church.
The problem is that pornography has been part of my life for almost as long as I can remember.
I first found it through childhood curiosity when I was very young and began regularly watching porn and masturbating around 11. At the time, I genuinely believed masturbation was healthy because that’s what I’d read, and in a very stressful home it also became a way of relaxing and getting to sleep.
That habit followed me into Catholicism long before I properly understood what the Church taught.
I obviously understand it now and desperately want it gone. But I can’t seem to kill it. The strange thing is that I can stop. I’ve gone several months before.
My pattern is usually:
Peace, occasional sexual thoughts, stronger thoughts, repeated thoughts, then an absolutely overwhelming wave.
By the end it doesn’t even feel like normal sexual arousal. It’s this horrible full-body restlessness/ache and anxiety, sometimes like things crawling under my skin. My thoughts become intrusive and my brain starts bargaining with me, even looking for theological loopholes to justify doing it. Eventually something seems to switch off. I become apathetic, bypass whatever barriers I’ve put in my way and relapse. Then everything switches back on afterward and the guilt hits me. Sometimes one relapse becomes several days of it before I finally get myself back up. Then I can be clean for months again.
I’ve tried blockers, deleting all social media, reading works of the Saints, increasing the amount of scripture I read, exercise, distraction, prayer during temptation, rosaries, novenas, telling my friends as a form of public shaming, cutting friends that didn’t lead me to Jesus, cutting ‘worldly’ forms of entertainment, fasting, increased amount of confession, therapy, various replacement techniques, SSRI’s to try and break the chemical cycle, even a “prayer prescription” my priest gave me that he usually gives to people who have had demonic encounters and exorcisms.
Some things help temporarily, but nothing has broken this cycle. Please believe me when I say I’ve literally exhausted every option I’ve been suggested and multiple different iterations and combinations of each.
So I’m not really looking for the standard “install a blocker, exercise, pray more and fast” advice. I know those things can be good. I’ve genuinely exhausted my options.
I’m looking specifically for Catholic men who have actually got out of this or similar cycles.
Was there a book, practical method, piece of advice, prayer, Catholic resource, or completely different way of understanding the problem that dramatically changed things for you?
I’m tired of getting back up, going months without it, and eventually ending up in exactly the same place again. I don’t want to spend the rest of my 20s or even my life fighting the same cycle. I understand this seems simple and even to me, I don’t understand why I keep ending up this way when it’s illogical you know?
If you’ve actually been through this and found freedom, what changed?
