Last updated on September 17, 2020
Question:
I have a masturbation addiction that I cannot get rid of. Help, please? I cannot resist masturbation at all! When I’m aroused by something new, I always feed the thoughts because I have a feeling like “I don’t want to waste this chance to get horny by this thing or girl, etc.” I can’t stop. This has been my daily routine for the last three years. The cycle:
- I encounter something that arouses me
- I feel like I want to masturbate to it, feeling like it’s an opportunity,
- I try to resist, but I’m always all like “Oh, maybe just this one last time”
- I feed my thoughts.
- I jack off in private
- I feel guilty all the time.
I even have a routinely prayed sorrow prayer after every single masturbation session.
Answer:
This is a really common question because people assume that masturbation is wrong. It can be used wrongly, such as lusting for sex outside of marriage or looking at pornography, but God never states that masturbation itself is a sin. See Is masturbation sinful or not?
It sounds to me that you aren’t learning to control yourself. Just like when you get hungry it doesn’t mean you have to eat right then, just because your penis gets erect, it doesn’t mean you need to ejaculate.
I think part of the problem is that you don’t understand what is going on with your body. The desire for sex is built into every human who has lived past puberty. For men, the desire is connected to the amount of semen you produce. You have two seminal vesicles, near your bladder, which produce semen constantly. These glands have a limited amount of storage capability, just as your bladder can only hold so much urine. As the seminal vesicles get full, hormones are released that increase your desire for sex. If you try ignoring it, you find sexual ideas constantly intruding into your thoughts. Eventually, something has to give. For some boys, the result is a wet dream where they ejaculate while they sleep or as they start to wake up. For others, the urge to ejaculate is strong and they masturbate. A few manage by sheer will-power to not do either, but eventually, an ejaculation will happen at the least expected time.
What you are missing is nothing is being “wasted.” Your need to ejaculate remains and will get stronger as your seminal vesicles continue to fill up.
A problem arises because ejaculation feels good and so some guys get into a habit of masturbating even when they don’t really need to, just to get that pleasurable feeling. But to trigger an ejaculate, the body needs to be in a state of arousal and if the seminal vesicles aren’t close to full, it is more difficult to trigger ejaculation. Hence, boys turn to pornography and other things that generate lustful thoughts to get themselves sufficiently aroused in order to ejaculate. But it is these things that are sinful. This seems to be the trap you’ve fallen into. You imagine yourself having sex with someone you’ve seen to get yourself aroused. The problem is that you are not married to that person, so what you are imagining is committing fornication, which is the sin of lust.
If you simply try to not ejaculate, the result will be that your body will fight you because the body needs to ejaculate. That is why you keep losing this battle. You set yourself an impossible goal of not ejaculating. Each time instinct takes over and you blame yourself for not being strong enough; instead of seeing the truth, that your body needs to empty the seminal vesicles once in a while.
What I suggest is that you simply accept that a part of being male is that you need to ejaculate once in a while. When the urge gets strong don’t go looking at pornography or allow yourself to engage in daydreams about sex. Instead, use masturbation to empty your seminal vesicles. Since the urge is strong, it won’t take much to trigger ejaculation. The result is that you are managing your body’s needs while maintaining self-control over your actions and thoughts.
The next step is to realize that you can manage your body. I want you to pick just one time per day to masturbate. When you realize that you are no longer going nuts between times, I want you to try going one day per week without masturbating, and then two days per week. If, when you try to masturbate, you find that it just doesn’t work, then you know you are doing it too often. Wait another day or two to try again. Eventually, I would like you to get to only masturbating every two or three days. What you will find is that you’ll start feeling more in control of yourself and when you do masturbate it will feel more intense and satisfying.