A lot of what you’re working through wasn’t just handed to you by the internet. Some of it came from the man who raised you, or didn’t. Whether he was present or absent, warm or shut down, the pattern he modeled is part of the template you now operate from. Most men don’t examine this until they become fathers themselves and realize they’re reaching for defaults they didn’t choose.
If your dad was emotionally unavailable, you may have learned to retreat when things got hard. If he used substances or screens to cope, you may have inherited that coping strategy without realizing it. If he was absent entirely, you may have built your masculinity from scraps — movies, older cousins, friends’ dads. And if he was a good man who just didn’t know how to talk about sex or emotion, you may have grown up in a silence that porn eventually filled.
None of this is his fault exactly — he was working from his own inheritance. But naming it helps. Because the thing you’re breaking now is not just a habit. You are breaking a chain of men who reached for something to make the pain smaller, and passed the inability to cope directly to the next generation.
You are the break in the chain. That is not a small thing. It is the work.
What you’re breaking is not just a habit — it’s a chain of men who reached for something to numb the pain.
Write down one thing your dad modeled well. Write down one thing you want to do differently. You are allowed to hold both.