Okay, so I used to be somewhat involved in these forums. I posted one story here several years back that a few people liked. Then, about three years ago, I lost my job after getting caught looking at pornography (my former employers were very strict about that), and in hopes of convincing my former employers that I wasn't a predatory deviant, I went to rehab for sex addiction.
With the benefit of hindsight, I am mostly glad I went to rehab. A lot of my behavior back before rehab wasn't healthy (lots of cyber-sex on Second Life, a bunch of attempts at romantic relationships that weren't based on mutual attraction or respect, and my tastes in porn were getting increasingly dark), and I feel that it's probably better that I became aware of that shit while I was still in my twenties, rather than being forced into an epiphany years later (most of the other guys were a lot older, and had racked up some truly astounding levels of bad behavior.) So over the past two years, I've seriously cut back on consumption of porn, and it's been a very long time since I've done any cybersex, and I've pretty much avoided dating, and I regularly attend meetings of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. For the most part, I feel a lot healthier than I did before rehab (which is not to say that I believe that everyone here needs or could benefit from rehab; I'm only saying that I did. I'm aware that that might not be a common sentiment around here.)
That said, my creative abilities have stagnated. Before rehab, a lot of my art and writing were fueled by eroticism, and now that I'm trying to avoid the erotic, it's hard to find anything that fires me up in the same way. Plus, I've always had insecurities about my writing abilities, and now the concern that writing might feed my old behaviors just makes those doubts worse. Recently, I've begun to feel that I'm holding myself back, and it seems like the only good ideas I've had involve writing sex scenes. On the other hand, I know myself well enough to know that if I start going there, I'll probably end up looking at other erotic stories for inspiration, and that might lead to looking at porn.
So I guess the question is, well, first of all, has anyone here had some sort of similar experience? And two, is there enough difference between writing erotica and looking at porn that one can do the former without doing the latter?