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Episode 228

Zach Spafford: Hey everybody and welcome to Thrive Beyond Pornography. I'm your host, Zach Spafford.

Darcy Spafford: And I'm here today too. Are you? I am. I'm so excited. Heh heh heh heh heh. I'm glad you're excited. Hopefully Other people are excited. I hope so too. This live studio audience is really going to enjoy this.

Zach Spafford: You're like, wait a minute. They do a live studio. No, it's just you on your podcast, listening to us. Hey, don't forget that this week starts group coaching. So if you want to get group coaching for this year and you're like I need something to get me started, to get 2024 to be the first year that I don't get bored for the whole year.

Group coaching is a great way to start. It's very inexpensive. You can go to thrivebeyondpornography. com slash group 2024 and sign up. I'd love to see you there

Darcy Spafford: this podcast is going to be a quickie, a quickie, a quickie, not the kind of quickie you think, but it's going to be a quick podcast because at the start of the new year, we wanted to give you and your spouse an actionable skill that you can begin to practice to renew your marriage in 2024.

Zach Spafford: One of the most difficult parts of a marriage is the tension between belonging to our spouse. and belonging to ourselves. On one side, there's this desire to be on the same page and comfort, meet your spouse's needs and be an indispensable part of their lives, right? And on the other side, there's this need to be your own person, not always servicing your spouse, willing to own positions that your spouse may not like or agree with.

That's, that's a pretty tough balancing act, I think.

Darcy Spafford: Yes. How many of us? We just want harmony in our homes so much that we will just get with the program, even if we don't necessarily agree with it, because we want to be on the same page as our spouse, or maybe it's we want to keep the peace, or we put our spouse and our kids needs before our own in order to feel needed and wanted in our relationship, or even that we have value and that we're, we're worthy and we can justify what it is that we want and desire.

This tension naturally exists because we choose to be in a relationship, and it's one of the greatest sources of conflict within marriage. One of the skills that we teach couples in our program is called hugging until relaxed. While couples practice this exercise, it helps them to see how comfortable Or how uncomfortable they are within their relationship, and it also gives them the space to practice quieting their minds down while still engaging in a close, intimate way with their

Zach Spafford: partner.

We learned this skill from Dr. David Schnarch's book, Passionate Marriage. He also describes how to do it in detail in his book, Intimacy and Desire. And this skill is essential for renewing your marriage and building it into a stronger, more resilient relationship. That can weather any kind of difficulty that life brings, including a struggle with pornography. It's pretty difficult to master this particular skill because it's very disquieting. It's very uncomfortable and it's going to reveal a lot about what's going on for you internally.

It's also going to reveal a lot about your spouse, but it is a very simple task. It's a very simple skill.

Darcy Spafford: It's, it's interesting, because you said it was a very difficult skill to master. Yeah, I think so. And in my mind, I'm like, what do you mean it's a difficult skill to hug your spouse? Like, don't we?

Zach Spafford: Everybody else is thinking that. What do you mean?

Darcy Spafford: Yeah, don't, don't we hug each other all the time? And isn't a hug relaxing?

Zach Spafford: I can tell you that early on in our marriage, hugs were not always relaxing. Early on in our struggles, Probably till the last five or so years, hugs had sometimes an ulterior motive behind them, and they never were as long as hugging till relax.

I

Darcy Spafford: would agree with that. All right, so let's start with how you do this, and then we'll talk about why it is that you would want to do this. So first, you're gonna stand facing each other close enough to hug. I know you guys probably didn't know that step. Then the next one is you're gonna hug your partner.

The third thing you're going to want to do is focus internally on yourself and what's going on for you. So you're going to want to start observing your mind, listening to your thoughts, and really paying attention closely to your internal dialogue and what is going on for you. And then the last thing you're going to want to do, and this is where it gets kind of hard, is you're going to want to quiet your mind down.

And quiet all the anxieties that you might be feeling in your body and just relax. And that's where the relaxing part comes in on the title of Hugging

Zach Spafford: Until Relaxed. So that's it. Stand, hug, observe, quiet. Those are the four steps. Very, very simple instructions. I think where this becomes difficult is In the second part of the name of this, hugging, super simple.

To relaxed, not quite so simple. And I think that this is really going to start revealing a lot for you. This is about a 10 minute exercise. So 10 minutes, maybe 15, if you can't get relaxed by 10 minutes. For some of you, this is going to be heaven. Some of you are going to be like, Hey, my spouse, they are finally going to pay attention to

Darcy Spafford: me.

They're touching me. They're close enough to me that they can touch

Zach Spafford: me. Some of you will start wondering when it's going to be over. What you're looking to do is to be able to handle yourself and not get lost in anything that might be making yourself or your spouse anxious. You want to observe your own mind.

You're going to watch for any insights as to what's going on for you. This is about being present in your brain and being present with your spouse at the same time.

a chan...

Darcy Spafford: you do this experiment, it will provide you and your spouse the chance to practice observing and handling your internal dialogue while still choosing to be close to your partner and be an intimate contact with each other. One of the most valuable things we see this experiment doing for ourselves and our clients is that it gives us the opportunity to really practice calming ourselves down when there's something that we're upset about.

And like, let's be honest, we all get upset and there's not a marriage out there that doesn't have conflict in it. This is a great exercise for learning how to handle that. If you are engaging with this practice on a regular basis, the odds are that at least some of the time that you are doing this, there will be conflict between the two of you.

And this will give you the kick in the pants that you might need to choose to be close to your partner, even in times when you're not in perfect harmony. I know for Zach. His natural tendency, if there's conflict or if I'm upset, his natural tendency is to want to run away and just stay away from me until things kind of blow over or I calm down. So this is a great way to not be able to use that strategy, that defense mechanism, and have to be close to your

Zach Spafford: partner.

Using this process opens up a window into your relationship and sometimes it's hard to see through this window So sometimes it's useful to get a coach to work on this with you And it's gonna help you see yourself and how you're operating in suboptimal ways To collude in the things that are making you unhappy, but that also may be stabilizing your relationship So for instance, I don't really like running away from Darcy as she put it.

I don't like avoiding her but It is one of the ways that I have used to stabilize our relationship in order to allow her to calm down and create space so that we could both stay in the relationship, but this process really helps us to address those things head on and Allow ourselves to stay close and stay intimate and not have to run away

Darcy Spafford: So let's talk about when we did this last week.

So we did this exercise last week before we recorded the podcast and we mentioned it a few times throughout that podcast. So let's just talk about what our experience. And doing that was, so do you want to

Zach Spafford: go first? Yeah, well for me it was just totally calming, totally relaxing, totally comfortable.

I, in, in contrast to the way that hugs often went in Early parts of our marriage where we were like, I would rage clean. And then you would come to me and you'd be like, hug me and tell me I'm okay. . Mm-Hmm. . In contrast to that, this was very, where I was just annoyed and frustrated that we were even there and you were hanging on me and trying to get me to stabilize you both physically and mentally and emotionally.

And I was like, I don't, I'm not having it. I'm rage cleaning. Let's clean the house. That kind of thing. Because

Darcy Spafford: I was looking, I was hugging you as a way to say, hey, tell me I'm okay. Yeah. Tell me that we're okay. You know, I was, I was using that as a way to try and connect in a way that would just calm my anxieties.

Zach Spafford: Right. Where last week, I was able to just stay there present with you. I enjoyed the touch. I enjoyed the contact, but I also knew that if I let go of you or fell to the floor dead,

Darcy Spafford: then I would be a multimillionaire, be a

Zach Spafford: multimillionaire. But if I fell to the floor dead, I knew you would stay on your two feet where those old hugs, if I fell to the floor, you would have just toppled on top of me.

Yes. Yeah. Because you weren't holding onto yourself and I was trying to push you away. While I was also still trying to stabilize. Yeah. Cause I would hold you and I'd be like, okay, we're done. And I'd be like, okay, I gotta go and push you off. So I was trying to stabilize you, but also not get too close, not really get intimate with you.

So that for me was a con, a beautiful contrast that I saw.

Darcy Spafford: Okay. So for me. If I'm being totally honest we got the phone out and we like put the timer, Zach was setting the timer, and for me, my initial reaction was like, I felt like a little kid.

I got a little giddy, and I got a little bit anxious, and, which is weird because I'm like, we hug all the time, and we hug for long periods of time, so why am I like giggling right now? And I think part of it was I was just, Like, okay, that's weird to be setting a timer to hug it feels so formal, you know?

But for me, the first probably, I don't know, 30 seconds, maybe a minute, I felt like I was, like, fighting back, wanting to laugh. And I was a little bit uncomfortable. And then I I just started to quiet my mind and talk to myself, like, why am I uncomfortable right now? We hug all the time.

This is no different. It's just for 10 minutes. And so I was very easily able to calm myself and just be present in that closeness, and it was nice. And I was surprised by how quickly the time went. And it was funny cause literally, one second before the timer went off, my brain was like, I wonder how much time is left on this?

And, Zach and I are both ADD so, 10 minutes, just in that calmness, that's a really long time, for us. And I think for me, one of the things I noticed, I'm not used to having my arms up above my head for 10 minutes. And so, Um, I had to reposition and move my arms and, you know, like I had a little bit of thought like, oh, what, you know, what's he gonna think if I move?

Um, but

Zach Spafford: Well, and one of the things that the books talk about and that I think is really key in this is not making what your partner's doing about you. Because when we start to make what they do about us, that often creates conflict and tension and really makes us want to separate. And part of that process of So, uh, the whole idea of us growing up was really making, me making what you did, not about me, and you doing the same on your end.

You not making porn about you, me not making your upsetness about me, and really allowing each of us to work within those parameters in a meaningful way. So, You know, this is, this was just like this tiny little microcosm of a lot of the work that we did. And that's why this is an effective tool is because it really is a tiny little microcosm of what your relationship looks like and gives you some insight into what it is that you can adjust and work on.

Darcy Spafford: Part, part of the reason why we wanted to do this work with couples and not just with the person who's struggling with pornography is because you can remove a behavior, right?

If the behavior stops, if all you do is focus on the behavior and you stop the behavior, it doesn't equate to a close, intimate marriage with your partner, necessarily.

The skills and the steps it takes to actually be known and be intimate with your partner is way more than just stopping a behavior.

Zach Spafford: Yeah, absolutely. And when pornography is a part of your relationship, so much of what needs to be done to put porn in the past is to build a relationship that you can thrive within.

And the marriage that you had before pornography was part of it is gone. So it's time to build the one that you desire, the one that you really want. And if that's something you're ready to do, go to thrivebeyondpornography. com and set up a free breakthrough session. We would

Darcy Spafford: love

Zach Spafford: to meet with you. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, my friends, try that out. Let us know how it goes. We want to hear how it goes. Send us an email, zach at thrivebeyondpornography. com or darcy at thrivebeyondpornography. com. And we will talk to you guys next week. Bye.