Episode 212

Title: Thriving Beyond Pornography: Overcoming Three Key Challenges

Host: Zach Spafford

Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to "Thrive Beyond Pornography." I'm your host, Zach Spafford. Today, I want to delve into the three major hurdles people face when trying to leave pornography behind for good. It's a critical conversation because many of us believe it's an insurmountable task. But by breaking it down, we can gain control and make significant progress.

Challenges Breakdown:

1. Understanding Withdrawal: Breaking free from a porn habit isn't easy, but it can be simplified. It's crucial to recognize that facing discomfort is part of the process. Research shows that when aligning actions with one's values, discomfort arises naturally. Learning to cope with these feelings is key. Mindfulness and practicing discomfort can be highly effective in this regard.
2. Identifying Triggers and Temptations: In today's world, triggers are everywhere, from advertisements to social media. Recognizing these triggers and developing strategies to navigate them is essential. Understanding what leads you towards porn is crucial. Ask yourself why certain images or situations draw you in. For many, it's often in the 30 minutes leading up to the choice.
3. Confronting Guilt and Shame: Many individuals grapple with profound shame and guilt regarding their porn use. Addressing this is vital in overcoming it. After a porn choice, take time to reflect on your emotional state. Be clinical and objective in your analysis. Clarity in understanding the situation is key to learning from it and tackling the underlying issues.

Conclusion: By addressing withdrawal, triggers, and guilt/shame, you're on the path to overcoming porn struggles. Make these processes habitual, and you'll find yourself leaving pornography behind in a way that may surprise you. Remember, you have the strength within you to overcome these challenges. You can do this. Thank you for joining us on "Thrive Beyond Pornography." Take care, and I'll talk to you next week.

 Full Transcript

Hey everybody. Welcome to thrive beyond pornography. I'm your host Zach Spafford. And I want to talk to you guys today about the challenges of quitting porn. What are the three biggest challenges that most of the people that I work with have in actually leaving pornography behind for the very last time?

And this is, I think, a pretty important conversation to be having because most of us think, well, It's a daunting, it's an unachievable task. It's unattainable. This is something that has been with me for my whole life and I just can't do it. But I'm going to break it down into three basic things, three things that if you can get a handle on these, and I know you can get a handle on these because I teach people how to get a handle on these things.

Then you will actually start to leave pornography behind in such a dramatic fashion in a way that is just all of a sudden it's like, Oh. My brain doesn't even offer me porn anymore. So that's what I really want you to see. I want you to know that you can do this. And I'm going to talk about three very, very important issues, right?

So let's start by acknowledging right from the start that breaking free from a porn habit is not. Easy. It can be simple, but it's not necessarily easy. And it's essential to recognize that these are, there are going to be hurdles that you might face along the way. And I want you to think about this in terms of if I can learn to overcome these hurdles again and again, simply habitually, then my brain is actually going to just stop offering me porn because it doesn't really need it anymore.

So the first thing. That is one of the biggest hurdles in leaving pornography behind. Some people would say it's, it's the withdrawal. It's the, how does it feel to stop choosing porn? Just like any change, giving up porn can lead to feelings of irritability, restlessness, unease. These can be intense and can make the process difficult, but I want you to be really clear about this.

There's a difference between what we all think of as withdrawal and What is going on when we're dealing with leaving pornography behind? So the research on this is pretty clear. My friend cam Staley in his research on his doctoral studies, you can actually go look this up. If you go, uh, if you type in act for overcoming pornography, there's a research study that you could find with, uh, Dr.

Cam Staley is one of the authors, but he did it under someone else. And. In his research in his doctoral studies, he found that the experience of those who choose to stop viewing pornography when it goes against their values. So people who have a value of not viewing porn, but they have been choosing it and now they're choosing to stop those situations basically equate to an increased awareness of the normal discomforts that you might find just being a human.

Meaning those who've chosen to view pornography when it falls outside their value structure and then stop choosing to view pornography to more closely align with their values, they start experiencing the discomforts that they would normally have endured had they never chosen porn in the first place.

So, in effect, there are no withdrawal symptoms like those that might be endured when you have substance abuse. But what? Has been found is that this normal discomfort that we start to, that we have been avoiding all the feelings that we've been avoiding the discomforts that we've been avoiding the stresses, the loneliness, all that they, you have to deal with it.

You have to endure them and that's uncomfortable and it's probably a bit worse in the beginning in part because we don't have a habit of dealing with these discomforts in a systematic way. So how, what do you do with these discomforts? What do you do with these symptoms? This, this sense that you have that you might be withdrawing, right?

One of the most effective techniques is to become more mindful and practice feeling those feelings. So whenever you have these feelings, or even when you don't have them, but you have a little bit of time on your hands and you want to. Practice being able to feel uncomfortable, whatever the discomfort is that for me, it's loneliness.

I don't like feeling lonely and I don't like feeling stressed. So those two are things that I practice. So I just sit down in a chair and I sit there and I think of a stressful situation or I think of when I'm alone or what loneliness looks like and I practice feeling stressed and I practice feeling lonely and I use some of the mindfulness techniques that I teach in my course and Using those, I become more habituated to dealing with feeling those discomforts.

The more you can be mindful in the course of these uncomfortable feelings, the less likely you are to choose to violate your values to avoid them. And if you get good at feeling bad, the truth is that you'll feel bad less. Right. The, the sense of the bad feeling will be less impactful. I know, especially when I stopped asking Darcy for duty sex, and I was really trying to hold onto myself in those conversations of what it looks like to be intimate with my partner, I found.

That I felt rejected when she would say no, even if she wasn't really rejecting me, what she was just saying was, honey, I don't feel like it tonight, but I found that I still felt rejected the more I was able to sit with that discomfort, the less that rejection impacted me to the point where didn't really feel like a rejection.

And I'm not saying that all the stress in your life will ever go away because it doesn't. There are always going to be stressors. There's always going to be new things that come up in your life. Year in and year out, people's lives change. So what you'll find is that new stresses come and old stresses become less meaningful.

But the more you are willing to feel bad up front. The less your brain will say, Hey, let me avoid that bad feeling by choosing porn. And that's a really important thing to recognize the less you'll be tempted to avoid your feelings. And that's really the key here is when you're good at feeling bad, you don't feel like you have to run away from the bad feelings.

So speaking of The triggers and temptations that come, that's number two on the list of the things that are most difficult to deal with when you start leaving pornography behind. And the truth is the modern world is full of triggers from advertisements to social media. It is important to identify the triggers and develop strategies to navigate them.

So it's There's a couple of things, right? When I think of temptations and triggers, I think of two different items. One is when your, when your brain and body see pornography, if that's a problem for you, what you need to do is you need to start asking yourself, why is this a problem? So if you see pornography or if you see someone who is attractive to you and that takes you down the rabbit hole, you want to start asking, okay, why, what's going on there?

Why is this a problem? Why does my brain want to travel this path? When it goes against the way that I want to think about my life. The next one is the one that I deal with the most with people. So number that first one is one that happens. I'm not going to say it doesn't, but I think for the most part, most men aren't walking around going, man, that girl's hot.

When I get home, I'm going to look up a girl who looks just like her. Most men aren't doing that. I don't think. That, that hasn't been my experience with my clients or with myself. So it could be that that's what you're, what, what's happening for you. If that is, that's not a problem. And again, I would just point back to, let's ask why, what's going on?

What am I trying to do? When my brain is offering me that the second version of this, when I think about temptations and triggers. And I would imagine that that first version of temptations and triggers probably fits fairly well into this idea as well is I think of what's going on in the 30 minutes of time before a person chooses pornography.

This is the question that I actually ask my clients quite a lot when we analyze a lapse into pornography, I say, what was going on for you in the 30 minutes or so before you started on the path to pornography? And their responses are the key to what triggers and temptations they're actually enduring.

If you look at this same timeline as Carefully as you can and objectively review your thoughts and feelings, you're going to find you're likely to find that the actual thing that your brain wanted to avoid or get away from that led you, your mind to suggest a path to pornography is in that 30 minutes.

There's a good chance that somewhere in that 30 minutes, your brain was like, Hey, let me. Tell you what it is that I'm trying to avoid. You want to look at that time and go, what is it that I was trying to avoid? And your brain will, your brain will offer it to you. Sometimes it takes a coach to dig into this with you.

And if you need that, you can sign up for a free console that zacksbaffert. com slash work with me. And we can talk more about how you can get coaching that you need, but more often than not if you're willing to observe your mind objectively and say out loud what it is that your brain was doing, you're going to start to find the issue.

You're going to start to see why it is that your brain offered you porn. And when I say your brain offered you porn, it's very rarely like, hey, let's go look at porn. Well, maybe not very rarely, but sometimes it's not as direct as that. I have a client who will choose porn whenever he feels inadequate, and he is pretty smart, capable guy, you know, the conversations I've had with him I've really enjoyed, but whenever he feels like he isn't enough, his mind is gonna say, it's gonna offer him porn.

I say that, like, it's like, hey, let me, let's do porn, but And it sounds like this for him. You should be doing more with your life. You should be further on in your career. That's what his brain says to him when he starts to feel this inadequacy. And I'll admit, these are subtle ideas and, you know, it's not like, it's not like there's a guy with a bullhorn in his ear going, you should, that's not how it is.

It's much more that your brain kind of registers these feelings and thoughts, and unless you're willing to stop and watch your mind, like kind of a third party who might be a little bit disinterested, but they're willing to help, unless you're willing to stop and watch your mind do it, you're probably not gonna see it as clearly as this.

And one of the reasons we don't like to watch our minds and carefully analyze what they're offering us is because we feel shame. That we're doing these things. And this is actually the third item that makes quitting porn difficult. We feel guilt and shame over our behavior and we want to distance ourself from it as quickly as possible.

So when your brain is in this. State of discomfort in your brain says, Hey, let's go watch porn. It doesn't, maybe it's not quite that abrupt or maybe it's a little bit more subtle than that, but it's something along those lines. And then afterwards you feel guilt and shame. And what you want to do is you want to distance yourself from that mentally and emotionally from that behavior, those actions.

So. What that might look like is you don't think about it and if a week later you don't know what happened mentally and emotionally in the 30 minutes before you chose to view pornography, then you're not being curious about it and you're, you're probably ashamed of the behavior. Many individuals feel a deep sense of shame and guilt about their porn use.

And this can be a significant emotional barrier to overcoming it because you're not addressing. The underlying issues you're not learning from what happened. So this. Key period of stepping back and addressing our choices is essential to overcoming that shame and guilt. I would highly recommend that if you can, in the 30 minutes after you choose pornography, take some time to reflect.

Think about what your emotional state was. Why are you feeling that way? And it really, it doesn't take 30 minutes. You probably do it in five if you get Well practiced at it. But the more familiar you become with your underlying issues, the, you know, the guilt and the shame, the more likely you will be to be able to address them meaningfully and upfront before your brain starts offering you porn.

So part of that means talking about what happened in an honest, almost clinical way, instead of saying, Oh, I watched porn. I can't believe I did that. I'm an addict. We can take a step back, observe what happened and talk about it. In a way that clarifies the actual facts, the more clarity we have about the situation, the more likely we are to be able to learn from the situation and figure out how to address the issues before they get to a point of no return.

Now, what do I mean by a point of no return? So if you listen to my podcast, you know about the truth, the justification of a lie, when your brain is offering you the truth, the justification and the lie. Between the justification and the lie is not the time to try and step back and observe. The truth is probably, just right as the truth is coming at you, is probably the very best time to step back and observe and clarify what's happening.

And the more clarity we have about the situation, the more likely we are to learn from the situation and figure out how to address the issues before they get to, before we get to the, the lie, where, so if you're not familiar with the truth, the justification, and the lie, I'm just gonna tell you real quick.

The truth is, when your brain says, I deserve to relax, or I need a break, or I'm just gonna go watch some TV, or I'm gonna just scroll for a minute, okay? Those are the truth, because nobody who doesn't know anything about your situation, they wouldn't... They wouldn't second guess you. They'd be like, whatever, no big deal.

Um, the justification, and anybody who does know about your situation, they might, they might also agree with you, right? They probably would be like, yeah, of course you had a long day at work. Of course you deserve a break, no big deal. Those who, uh, so then you get to the justification. The justification is, I'll just scroll Instagram.

If, if the place where you usually start choosing pornography is like Instagram or something like that, you know, it's that, it's that subtle lead up. To viewing pornography and the justification fits into that space. Like for me, it would have been, I'll just read some CNN articles, right? Or I'll just watch some videos on CNN.

And that was the news was often a place where, because it always, there's always like some celebrity in the news. And so that would be the justification for me. I'd be like, Oh, I'll just read the news. Okay. And then anybody who knows you, anybody who's read in on the situation, anybody who knows what your pattern is, they would be like, are you sure you need to be doing that?

Anybody who doesn't know you wouldn't care. So that's why it's the justification. It's kind of that halfway point. And then the lie is I've come this far. I might as well keep going. That's. That's, uh, that's probably the most common version of it, but yours might be slightly different, but essentially, it's this like, oh, this is a foregone conclusion.

So why fight it anymore? So that's the, the, the truth, the justification of the lie. So addressing it before you get to that live point or even to the justification point is the best place to address it. So being able to step back habitually and deal with it at that point is going to be assistive in allowing you to really solve the problem in a meaningful way.

Again. Bringing clarity to the situation is about talking about it in almost a clinical way. I was driving home from work and my brain offered me the idea that I could choose porn when I got home. Instead of addressing that thought in that moment, so this is, this would be kind of the dialogue that you would have with yourself about what's going on, I tried to suppress it.

So instead of being like, Oh, I can't believe it. Did that. I'm an addict. I watch porn. So I tried. So then we go back to what it might sound like if you're addressing this in a more meaningful way, which is I knew I would be alone. And so I didn't want to feel lonely because I often choose porn when I'm lonely.

I want you to think about those two versions. You know, the one it's like, I'm an addict. I watched porn. I can't believe I did that. And the other, which is, let me tell you what exactly happened. What are the facts of the situation? And I want you to see how much. Less shame there is in knowing that I choose porn because I dread feeling lonely and how much power is there in being able to address loneliness head on, you know, and put that up against thinking you're an addict and how you can't believe that you keep choosing to violate your values.

So the one is full of empowerment and choosing and understanding, and the other is this dark place that we, we tend to go to when we feel like it's hopeless. So I want you to think about these two versions, and I want you to, as you think about your pornography choices, start to utilize more... Fact based language.

So you can start to set aside that shame and guilt and start to learn from the choices, start to understand, knowing how to talk to yourself and learning to make it habitual are important keys to mitigating the shame and the guilt, which then opens up a space for you to address the real issue. For my client who chose porn after he was driving home, it was because he feels inadequate or he feels lonely.

For me, it's because I feel. Uh, stressed or lonely, what that those are both things that happen to me quite a bit, but whatever it is that is happening to you, that's the thing that we need to get to, because that thing is going to be something that you can address habitually and consistently over time to mitigate your brain, even offering you porn.

So you don't have to fight with your brain because fighting with your brain is there's no. There's no winning there. So learning these processes, getting these processes in place, making sure that you have the skills to turn into habits. over time is going to be the most effective way to leave behind any pornography struggle.

So again, the three most difficult things to do when you're quitting porn is understanding what it what it's like when you don't have porn, any triggers and temptations that you have that you haven't been addressing in a meaningful way, and dealing with And mitigating the feelings of guilt and shame, if you can do those three things, you're going to be well on your way to putting pornography behind you in such an effective way that it, it will feel like you, you don't even understand why you ever looked at porn in the past.

Anyway, right. You're like, you'll, you'll get to a point where you're saying, why did I even do that? I'm so good at dealing with the, with my situation, my feelings, my underlying issues upfront now that I can't even believe I didn't try this before. All right, my friends, that's all for today. Thank you for joining us on thriving on pornography.

If you're on this path to a healthier, you know that you have the strength within you to overcome these challenges. You can do this. I promise you. I love you guys. And I will talk to you next week.

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