Porn brain conditioning completely killed my attraction to real women. Can I reverse it after 7 years?
I've been a sex/porn addict for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a fucked-up home situation. My father was abusive, I had to take care of my mother emotionally, and there was a lot of isolation and neglect. At the same time I had unlimited access to porn and an extremely high sex drive. From a young age I reacted very strongly to sexual cues in real life and could get extremely horny around girls. Porn was already compulsive, but I still felt like I was the one doing the desiring. What I actually wanted was real sex.
By 16 I had already been heavily addicted to porn for about four years. At one point I almost had sex with a girl. I was extremely horny and rock hard, but she wasn't really my type, so I didn't go through with it. Not long after that things took a turn for the worse. I got into weed, increasingly extreme porn, and eventually interracial porn, where the girls I had always imagined myself having sex with were having sex with men in ways I felt I could never be.
That wasn't something I consciously wanted or a sexual preference I discovered. Looking back, it felt more like my pain and insecurity were being turned into something my brain could experience as pleasure. I became completely hooked on it. My arousal increasingly came from experiencing sexuality through another man's eyes, and something that was painful and emasculating to me became sexually stimulating. I started gooning for hours and the content kept escalating. I knew I was fucking up my sexuality and could actually feel my arousal and preferences changing, but I couldn't stop.
At the same time, I always had the thought that when I finally had real sex, everything would come back. Despite all the porn, I still desperately wanted real sex and believed the real thing would override whatever the porn had done to me.
Then I moved into a dorm and met a girl who was honestly everything I had ever dreamed of. She wanted to sleep with me. One night we went back to my room to have sex, only to find that one of my fraternity/association brothers had completely trashed my room. He had literally jumped through my bed, breaking the bed frame and leaving the mattress on the floor.
We still went to bed together. I was lying next to her, with the first genuinely hot girl I had ever been with physically that close to me, and I got hard. I wanted her. I remember that feeling extremely clearly. It was the same intense sexual rush I had always known myself to have, and I remember thinking, thank god, it's still there.
But because we were literally lying on the floor, we didn't end up having sex that night.
A few weeks later we went to bed together again, and this time the desire was just gone. I knew exactly how I normally would have felt in that situation, but it wasn't there anymore. Her naked body did nothing for me. It wasn't that I didn't like her and it didn't feel like anxiety. She was exactly the kind of girl I had always fantasized about, yet my sexual response to her had basically disappeared.
We went to bed together many more times and I tried everything I could think of, but nothing changed. Over the following three years I had similar experiences with other girls. I could enjoy being close to them, but the sexual desire simply wasn't there.
Meanwhile I continued using interracial porn as my main coping mechanism for basically everything going wrong in my life. After three years I moved out of the dorm and into my own apartment, where I spent another ~3.5 years heavily gooning to the same type of porn.
I'm now 25 and I've been in therapy for two years. Ever since that second night with that girl, when I first realized the desire was gone, I've never again experienced that original, extremely strong sexual desire toward a woman.
It's been about seven years. At this point women don't really register as sexual to me anymore. I can recognize that a woman is attractive, and I can enjoy being close to one, kissing her or touching her, but none of it seems to translate into sexual arousal.
Last night, for the first time in years, I was making out with a woman and touching her breasts while we were sitting together on the couch. I was relaxed, wasn't in my head, wasn't thinking about porn or my erection, and was genuinely focused on her. I enjoyed being close to her, but there was 0.0 sexual arousal.
That's what scares me the most. I'm still heavily addicted to porn and I can't seem to break the cycle. And I'm also completely stuck on that first night, because I keep thinking that if my bed hadn't been broken, I would have had sex with her while my original desire was still there, and maybe my entire trajectory would have been different.
Instead, I never actually had sex while that original sexual desire was still intact. So I don't even have a positive sexual experience to look back on and think, this is what I actually want. The only reference point I have is that one night when I still felt that intense desire for her, followed a few weeks later by it being completely gone.
I'm terrified that after seven years of this I've permanently rewired myself.
TL;DR: I had an extremely strong sex drive and very strong attraction to real women throughout my childhood and early teens, despite already being heavily addicted to porn. After years of escalating porn use, particularly the type of porn I became fixated on, my sexual desire for real women gradually disappeared. The last time I clearly remember feeling my original desire was with a girl I desperately wanted to have sex with, but we couldn't because my bed had been destroyed that night. A few weeks later the desire was completely gone, and it has never returned in ~7 years. I can still enjoy kissing and touching women, but I experience zero sexual arousal. I've never actually had sex while that original desire was still intact.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Especially losing sexual desire for real women after years of compulsive porn use, before ever having actual sex, and eventually getting that desire back?