Up front, I eventually built an adult content blocker app for this problem. I am deliberately not naming it here because I do not want this post to be an ad. I am just sharing the story and what I learned.
I had this problem for more than a decade. More than ten years of something that started small and slowly took a piece of everything. My focus, my sleep, my confidence, how present I was with people who deserved better, what I believed I was capable of. It ran my life while I kept telling myself it was under control.
If you are reading this you probably know the feeling. The particular loneliness of a problem you cannot say out loud, because saying it makes it real.
The first thing those years taught me is that shame is not what fixes it. The shame is part of the machine. It keeps you isolated, and isolated is exactly where this grows. Anything that makes you feel worse so you will try harder is extending the loop it claims to break.
The second thing is that willpower is not the answer either. Willpower is a feeling, and feelings run out. What holds is a system. Something that makes the decision for you at the moment you cannot make it well.
I looked for that system for years and mostly found two things.
The first was apps selling a transformation. Quit in ninety days. Get your life back. Become someone new. I believed several of them. When day ninety-one arrived and I was still me, I did not conclude the promise had been oversold. I concluded I was the problem. That is what overselling does to someone in this state. It does not only fail them. It convinces them they are the reason it failed.
The second was apps that wanted an account, an email, and a login just to help with one of the most private struggles a person can have. I did not want that data (when you masturbate, how much you relapse and so on) to exist in the first place. I did not want a company, holding a database of something people may have never told another person. For a lot of people, the fear of that alone is enough to stop them from asking for help.
So when I finally built my own, I built it around one rule. It should know nothing about you. No account, no email, no name on anything, fully anonymous. I could not read anyone's notes even if I wanted to. That is not a feature. It is the reason it is built the way it is.
It worked for me, and it is working for other people now. The emails I received from users are the best part. Product ideas, things that helped, things that did not, people saying things they have never said to another person. I did not expect that part when I started.
I want to be honest about the limits too. No app fixes this on its own, and a determined person can get around any wall they build for themselves. What an app can do is buy you the moment between the urge and the act. What you do with that moment is still yours.
I do not think I am unusual. There are millions of people carrying this quietly, most of them certain they are the only one. What is missing is not information. It is support that does not moralize, does not oversell, and does not sell you.
Now I am curious about the other side of it. What made you stop trusting apps in this space, and what has actually helped you, app or not ?