its ok to fap

That’s like saying it’s okay to eat to people who overeat on the daily

The problem isn’t masturbating.

Everything is a problem if you’re doing it compulsively or mask something else.

Masturbating can surprisingly help with restless leg syndrome but doing it in work might be a problem.

So you understand that the problem isn’t doing the thing, it’s something else, and doing the thing is only bad because of that context. Then you ought to understand that treating the context is the solution, not insisting the person just not do the thing.

I do understand that, perhaps more acutely than most as I’ve had countless destructive “hobbies” (my god hobby is the softest word I could find here) that I used to mask the underlying issue. Heck I’m still not sure I know the underlying cause but I have translated those destructive things with positive ones but the goal is the same. This is all to say I’m well versed in addiction, compulsions, and poor mental health.

With that in mind I would say that sometimes you have to stop the thing you’re doing, let’s say masturbating here, so you can get your body back to baseline before you can even begin to work with a therapist or do some introspection.

I’m not saying we should demonise masturbation, just accept that for some people they may need to stop doing that for a period whilst they then fix the other shit they got going on.

I’m in my forties and really never been happy and had a shit childhood that is still the cause of the way my mind bullies me to this very day. I’ve tried therapy before but when you’re in the midst of masking all your shit with other shit you really can’t make any progress in my experience. What I’ve done now is spend several years working on myself and replacing negative addictions with positive ones. That afforded me the will power to begin to remove the substances and other coping strategies. Now I actually feel I’m in a place where I might benefit from some EMDR or trauma therapy.