Thrive Beyond Pornography

Abdication v delegation

I’m releasing this while I’m walking down a slot canyon somewhere in southern Ut so if you want to get together with me while I’m here, feel free to message me on Instagram zachspafford.theselfmasterycoach I love angelicas, the peruvian chicken place or even the Indian place. 

On Friday two weeks ago I was in my weekly meeting with my friend Jody Moore, talking about interrupting mirroring and anthropomorphizing and all the fun stuff that we coaches talk about behind closed doors and as the discussion progressed a really interesting topic came up.

We were talking about abdication vs delegation.

This is something that I work on with my clients all the time.  Although I wouldn’t have called it this until we discussed it the other day. 

All of us do some form of either of these at various times. 

So, what is the difference between abdication and delegation. 

When it comes to how we interact with our agency this distinction can really make or break your path back from an unwanted habit. 

Our oldest has been learning to drive and as a result I have been learning to relax.  

As I have been learning to relax I have been thinking about this relationship between abdication and delegation as it relates to my son and as it relates to our habits. 

A couple of Sundays ago the oldest half of my kids and I went to church and left the younger ones at home with mom. 

My oldest got in the driver’s seat and we headed off on the 8 minute drive.  Along the way he made a wrong turn and I gave him direction on how to get back on track.  

As he drives, I pay attention to what he is doing with his hands, his eyes, his feet.  I help him with proper technique and sometimes I even yell stop when I think he’s going to hit something because he is driving too close to it. 

All along the way I am still taking responsibility for the path we take and even how he drives.  

Let me tell you about a different driving experience.  On the way to Utah Darcy and I took turns driving.  

While she drove I would try and get some sleep because I knew that it would be my turn soon enough because we were going from Milwaukee to st George a 24 hr trip that we wanted to do in one shot.  

As she drove I rarely paid attention.  Obviously, I would sleep at certain points so it was entirely her responsibility to get us from point a to point b. 

I took no responsibility for how she changed lanes, where her hands were posisitioned or whether she was watching the road.  

Abdication is giving up the responsibility for the decision making. 

Delegation is retaining responsibility for the decision making. 

Each has it’s place in our lives. But what I find when it comes to certain habits is that we are often abdicating when delegating would yield better results and more closely yield the outcomes we are striving toward. 

When I talk to clients, often they have abdicated their agency on certain topics.  Pornography is one of them.  

We think, I can’t ever look at pornography because it is unacceptable. Or with weight loss, we think, I can’t eat certain foods because they will make me gain weight. 

What we are doing when we do that is relinquishing our capacity to choose and allowing our lower brain to drive decisions based on the motivational triangle rather than what will be fulfilling for our long-term happiness. 

Listen to the following phrases, “I’m powerless against my addiction” or “I can’t stop using pornography” or “I shouldn’t look at pornography”.

Each one of these phrases places the responsibility for pornography viewing outside of our immediate control. And therefore outside our responsibility to choose.  

I’m powerless against my addiction talks as if pornography can walk into your living room tell you it’s there and that you’re going to watch 

I can’t stop is an interesting one, I always ask, what would you do if your wife walked in. 

I shouldn’t look refers to some rulebook that you have to follow and negates the power of agency and your part in choosing who you are and what you want.  Coffee is a great example of this for members. 

This place of abdication is a hard place to live from because the language of it tells us that we are out of control, incapable and weak. 

Whereas the place of Delegation sounds very different.  

When I view pornography, it is because I have made the decision to do so.

I can look at pornography, but I choose not to. 

Pornography is something that I have chosen to keep out of my life because I want it that way.  

In each of those phrases I hear someone who is taking full responsibility for the behavior they are dealing with.  

Interestingly, I also hear that perfection isn’t required.  So many of us believe that if we make the mistake that we should beat ourselves up over it.  

But taking responsibility for the behavior doesn’t mean you have to go medieval on yourself when a mistake is made or you stray from the path you’ve chosen.

It means that you are ready to get back in and correct the course, pay greater attention to the path you are traveling and understand the best way to teach yourself and learn from your mistakes.  

Abdication lets you act as though this isn’t something you can manage.  Delegation allows you to try new ways to let your brain run the habits that you have without giving up full responsibility for the outcome. 

Learn Something, Move Forward

Taking stock of lapses by learning something and moving forward is the only way to put it behind you.

Each time we do the thing we promised we would never do again we tend to beat ourselves up. We often treat it like we are never going to get past it, we think we are lost, unworthy and powerless.

That wallowing and self pitying approach keeps us from learning. It keeps us from figuring out the next thing we need to learn to move forward with life in a way that creates the person that we want to be. 

The moment you let yourself be the object of your own pity and scorn you've lost the opportunity to learn from what happened and you're likely to make the same mistake in the future. 

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

― Thomas Edison

This is where the purposeful practice of Learn Something, Move Forward comes into play.

When mistakes occur, because they will, take the time to learn from them. This practice is one of self reflected love. Viewing our mistakes the way our parents would have viewed our stumbling baby steps as we learned to walked. With eagerness for us to learn and grow. Not with scorn, derision and shame. 

In my program I often have people work through one of the many micro courses I teach to learn something and move forward. 

Often their response is, “I know that I’m not supposed to use pornography already” or “I already know that I want to stop this habit.”

What they are looking at is the end result, expecting that they already know everything they need to know about the way they are thinking, how they are processing their emotions and how they are required to behave so they can feel worthy, strong and lovable. 

Let’s take the example of a baby learning to walk. 

8 kids

Baby sees running, starts to run and falls on face and cries

No inspection of movement,

No testing of skills

No trial and error

Just “I’m supposed to be able to run”

Falling on face and crying

How long would it take for that baby to learn

What will that baby miss

How will that baby learn

Questions you can ask yourself. 

What did I view and how long that wasn’t planned? 

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What was the Situation that started this lapse?

What was the feeling or desire I had?

What was the thought that caused the desire or urge? 

Did I try to resist or did I just react? 

Did I try to allow the urge? What worked and what didn’t? 

6 

What did I learn? 

What will I do next time? 

How can I let this go now? 

How do I want to feel about this moving forward? 

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How can I tell that I’m ready to change?

Costs outweigh the benefits. 

-       Buffering provides something

-       Acknowledge those benefits.

-       How do you want to feel when you think about pornography

-       “Client said, I want to feel disgusted.”

-       That doesn’t acknowledge what pornography has done for you

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-       That also doesn’t acknowledge what it is costing you

-       It is just a judgement that makes you feel disgusted because you like pornography

-       So, honestly acknowledging the costs and the benefits of use will allow you to make the cost benefit analysis 

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Wanting vs commitment

-       For the better part of 25 years I wanted pornography out of my life.  

-       I pleaded with Heavenly Father to take this problem away from me

-       For lots of years it was just a want, the way a little girl wants a pony.  

-       I would ask and think that I just deserved it because I asked for it. 

-       .  

-       It wasn’t until after we got married and Darcy found out about my pornography use that I really got committed. 

-       It wasn’t until it was costing me my self confidence and I was desperate to stop feeling like a terrible person who was never going to get rid of this problem that I started to take action. 

-       I started with bishops, who were great and loved me. 

-       They didn’t have the answers, they were there for me to confess but not to give me tools. 

-       They sent me to counselors who were there to hear where I was and witness my struggle and validate my feelings, but didn’t have any answers, didn’t have any real world idea of how I was doing and why I was where I was.  

-       They just told me I was an addict.  

-       So that lead me to the twelve steps… which was full of earnest men, trying to move forward with their lives. 

-       but  that time only served to reinforce that I was “powerless against my addiction”

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-       Then when we had the twins, I took a step back. I saw that none of this had gotten me where I wanted to go.

-       So I committed to figure it out by looking into my own mind, true principles that I could see from a gospel perspective and all the things I learned that made sense from what I had done before. 

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-       This is what being committed looks like.  

-       Trying.

-       Trying again, 

-       Trying something new

-       Trying something different

-       Trying anything I hadn’t tried before  

-       Trying things that were harder than anything I had done before

-       I spent $40,000 and learned enough to become an expert in a field that I had begged heavenly Father to take out of my life. 

-       And I kept trying until I succeeded beyond anything I could have imagined. 

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How much power does pornography have?

So many of us want pornography to have no power over husbands, over our children, over our own lives.

Yet, so many of us allow pornography to have so much power over us. 

Why?  

Let’s just talk, for a minute about the attractive capacity of pornography. 

Let’s be honest – the human body is beautiful, arousal feels great, climax is enjoyable. 

When we see others doing something that is beautiful, arousing and enjoyable even outside of pornography, that fires all kinds of empathic receptors in us. 

As humans, part of this group of creatures that our Father in Heaven has put on the earth to learn and grown, empathy and mimicry are key components of our survival and success.  

We are also creatures of comparison.  We look at someone and we think about how we compare to them.  Are we taller or shorter, better looking or not as handsome, stronger or weaker, all of that is part of the game our brains play to determine if we are sexually compatible with or mating rivals with others.   

Add to that the human sex response, which is one of the strongest drives within our system, and you can see how pornography might draw you in and keep you entertained for a long time.  

When I think of all the things I just mentioned and how so much of our biology drives us toward this highly pleasurable, highly rewarding, low cost option, it’s no wonder that the statics show that in one study of 18-35 year olds over a six month period, 98% of men and 73% of women reported internet pornography use.  

That is astounding.  I would hope that the figures are lower among LDS Men and Women, but without data on that, I’ll just say that these figures give us a picture of it’s overall usage within society. 

So what does someone get from viewing pornography. And again, my goal is to be clear and honest about what I perceive to be the realities of the issue.  Just as we discussed on my podcast “get on the map” you need to know where you are so you can get to where you want to be. 

From my perspective the number one and most significant reason, and possibly the only reason many people who have a moral objection to pornography viewing continue to view pornography is, pornography relieves uncomfortable or negative feelings. 

I want to note that I saw a post on social where a wife was saying that the husband was viewing pornography occasionally but that they were unclear why he kept going back to it.  It was something they had tried to figure out, but had no success doing.  This is why coaches often say, it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle. 

This is one of those things that demonstrates to me why everyone should have a coach.  Tiger Woods has a coach, Tom Brady has a coach, CEO’s, business leaders, world leaders and presidents all have coaches because they want to be the best they can be.  And even the most brilliant among us sometimes has trouble seeing how our swing might be adjusted, how our actions might be improved, and how our thoughts are creating a result that is no longer serving us.  

For those men and women who are dealing with pornography use that they would rather not have in their lives, most often they are doing so as a way to address the feelings they are untrained in dealing with.  What I mean by that is, all of us have coping mechanisms that we use to feel more at ease in various situations, some of them create long term positive outcomes and others create long term negative outcomes.  

For most pornography users that I work with, they feel the momentary and immediate relief created by arousal and as a result their immediate discomfort abates.  While simultaneously setting themselves up for unpleasant conversations with their spouse, decreased trust in self and belief in self, and increased negative emotions. 

So, pornography is a huge draw biologically.  It also has significant capacity to help us manage immediate discomfort.  Those are the reasons why we perceive pornography to have power. 

Now let’s talk about the reasons pornography is completely rejectable.  

Some out there would like me to say, “it’s disgusting” or place some moral judgement on the behavior and on those who both create and view the material.  

I’m not going to do that.  The reason I’m not going to do that is because my goal here is to help people who want to stop the behavior in their own lives.  I have never, not once, met anyone who positively responded to shaming in a long term, sustainable way.  

And here I take the example of the Savior into account.  How did he treat anyone who sinned?  The woman brought in adultery for example.  There were no protestations of innocence.  She did not say anything to indicate she was unaware of the rules, so I think it is safe to assume that she had, in fact, had sex with a man outside of the marital covenant.  

The men who had brought her, their purpose was to make an example of her to the community and make Jesus condemn this woman to certain death by stoning.  That’s right, these guys wanted to throw actual rocks at this woman in an effort to deter her and others from this behavior.  

Jesus, rather than participate in this farce of justice seeking instead said, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. 

I won’t cast stones, being all too aware of my own weaknesses.  

Now, let’s talk about how we can choose to reject pornography, notwithstanding the considerable reasons it has a draw on our attention and our physical desires. 

First, decide what you want your moral line to be.   

Going back to the couple who were having trouble figuring out what kept drawing the husband back into viewing things they had chosen to see as unacceptable in their marriage. 

I often talk about agency in terms of the three main components.  To have agency you have to know what is right and wrong, you have to consequences and you have to have the capacity to choose. 

Let’s set aside those last two and talk about what is right and wrong.  For many people viewing pornography is ok.  For many others it is not.  

1.     When it comes to the power pornography has over you, you must first decide what, for you is right and wrong.  

Are bikini pictures ok, but nudity is not.  Is a sex scene in a movie you are watching with your spouse ok, but solo watching is not. 

For me, my line has really been, if it is arousing media, print, pictures or videos I avoid it.  

What I’m saying is, you have to choose the line.  Your line. Not the church’s line, not your wife’s line and not the line of anyone else. Your line. 

Obviously, you may want to choose a line that closely mirrors that of the church or of your spouse or someone else.  

But whatever the line is, it has to be yours. 

Let me give you an example.  For me, I always had a line that I wouldn’t pay for pornography even when I was choosing to use pornography regularly. 

That line was my own, because I chose it.  

We do this in all sorts of ways in our lives.

Some people don’t eat broccoli, that is a line they draw in their lives.  My wife doesn’t eat meat, I think she’s weird because just the word bacon makes me want to have a BLT. But that is her line.  

2.     Once you know your line and you have clearly defined it, experiment on how you can stay on the side you want to be on. 

For my line, any arousing media, it wasn’t easy to figure out at first because I was not in tune with the way I was feeling.  I had to practice being aware of the feelings I had going on in my body and the subtle difference between objective and curious.  Objective lead to understanding, curious lead to one click too far.  

On the journey to self mastery, I found that it was important to be careful of what curiosity would end up at, usually disappointment in myself. 

Where, objectivity and understanding rarely led to that next click because I wasn’t looking to see anymore than I already had.  Being objective about what I was seeing allowed me to notice that what I was seeing wasn’t going to lead to anything on my side of the line I had drawn.  

Experimenting through objectivity allowed me to assess what was happening, what would happen and what had happened without judgement.  I looked at facts and worked to set shame aside.  

This allowed me to understand the process that I was using to avoid my emotions and then begin to reassert my agency in choosing to feel stressed, lonely or upset rather than avoid them with pornography or any other buffer. 

This is the part that you are going to need to be willing to fail at and understand that there is a likelihood that things may get worse before they get better.  Just like when a golfer adjusts their swing to improve mechanics, oftentimes they get worse before they get better, you will probably experience the same. 

Don’t give up, don’t let your spouse derail you (because sometimes they want to because they want to see immediate results) and don’t waste the learning process by thinking you have to start over. 

Start from where you are and try something new.  

3.     Pornography never shows up in your living room as a naked body and tells says, “we’re here and you’re going to watch” which means that you have to give consent all along the process. Which means, you have to practice saying no.

In the program I do I teach people a simple three step process to processing urges. 

Urges are just powerful emotions that are driving us to do something. that something often feels good. 

I use rachael hart’s Stop, drop and breath and I talked about this particular skill on my podcast Willpower is the wrong tool

I’ll link to it in the show notes https://player.captivate.fm/episode/60c4b417-5156-4da3-bd32-13e40dc3c708

The problem that most of us have is that we fight our urges.  We fight that thing that we think is just showing up in our lives.  

There are a couple of problems with this.  

First, fighting takes up a lot of mental energy and it doesn’t feel good.  It requires you to battle it out with the one person that you can never beat, yourself. 

Second, when we fight we are setting up a situation where there has to be a winner and a loser.  The win/lose equation that you create is your higher brain vs. your lower brain.  Well, your lower brain or your lizard brain has one overarching responsibility, to keep you alive.  So, in the battle between existential fulfillment based on moral principles and keeping you alive, guess which one is going win out 99% of the time?

You might say, but pornography doesn’t keep people alive.  Try telling that to the part of your brain that only functions in terms of how much dopamine it gets, how to keep you from getting hurt, feeling bad, or dying, and how to save as much energy as possible.  Pornography hits all three of those criteria pretty hard.  It’s a low cost way to fulfill basic biological urges within the sex response, which is a high dopamine activity and when you’re doing it you don’t feel sad or lonely or frustrated because you feel aroused.

Rather than fight with your lower brain you have to allow your urges to exist without acting on them.  You have to see them without seeing them as the enemy.  You have to observe them without engaging. 

You have to become the narrator of your own wildlife film. Observe, narrate, never engage. 

Saying no is both saying it with words and with relaxed, consistent willingness to feel urges, knowing they can’t do anything unless you consent.  

That is where the real power lies.  In your own capacity to just be without having to do. 

Seeing pornography as a thing that has a power of attraction and you have the power of rejection sets up a simple set of questions that you can use to place your higher brain back in charge of your decision making around it. 

First, What side of the line is this on?

Second, do I already know how to stay on my side of the line?

Third, do I have to act on this or can I just allow it without doing anything?

Questioning your thoughts and urges calmly and without judgement will allow them to just leave when they are not really as useful as they seem to be at first. 

Questioning the thoughts and feelings that you have, allowing them to exist without fighting them and recognizing them for what they are, suggestions from your brain will show you that pornography doesn’t have power over you, but that you are consenting to its influence in your life. 

I hope that doesn’t come across as harsh or judgmental. I hope that within that statement you find the hope and freedom that is available to you when you correctly understand the influences in your life and treat them according to what you want and not what they might want for you. 

If you’ve ever been to a 12 step meeting you’ve heard the phrase, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m an addict”.

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Almost everyone I’ve worked with thinks they’re “addicted to porn”.

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What if, instead of believing, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m an addict” we believed something else.  

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I used to think that I was addicted to pornography, there was something in my brain that made it so I would return to pornography because I was “powerless against my addiction”. 

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I hated it.  

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I felt like I was trapped, incapable of real change because I would always be an addict. I felt like I would be forever at the mercy of this problem and I would always have to be on the look out to keep it at bay. 

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It was exhausting. 

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Eight years ago, after we had our twins, giving us six kids seven and under, my wife said to me, “I need you at home and if all these meetings you are going to for 12 steps and counselors aren’t making this better, I would rather have you here to help me with the kids.”

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It wasn’t a demand, but it was pretty close.  

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As I looked at the previous years and took stock of what I had learned and the progress I had made, I knew I had plateaued.  

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Now was the time to try something new, something different, something that I didn’t know how to do and that I had never done before. 

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I took a step back and started to look at my brain differently. I started to ask myself questions about what I was thinking and believing and doing that was keeping me tied to pornography viewing.

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In that work, something occurred to me.  

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At every meeting I had ever been to with the 12 steps the prescribed phrase to introduce yourself to the group is “I’m an addict”. 

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But not everyone uses that phrase. Some say, “I’m a recovering addict” and some say, “I used to be addicted.” 

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I realized that what they were really saying was that being an “addict” means I’m stuck, a victim, unchangeable. 

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What if you could believe, “I used to look at pornography, but now I don’t”?

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Your brain will find evidence that it true. Your emotions will drive actions that make it true. 

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Most importantly, you’ll begin to become free. 

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#realrecovery

This episode we talk about the most important turning point in our relationship.

How things changed for my wife in a way that allowed her to be there in a moment that previously would have been a blow out fight.

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Get on the map

Free webinar on Sunday Sept 13 at 830 Mt time. 

When I lived in Alaska my friends and I loved to go out into the woods and camp

I loved the ferns. I loved the birch trees that had such great bark for starting fires. 

I loved four wheeling and snow mobile-ing with my friends.  

But, on occasion I would go out alone.  I would test my capabilities. I would camp on the side of a mountain alone.  

In those moments I needed to rely on my ability to read a map and orient myself on the map. 

One of the most important skills in reading and following a map is knowing where you are. 

Knowing where you are is the very first thing you must do if you want to end up getting to where you want to go. 

If you don’t correctly identify your position on the map you are trying to follow, you will invariably end up in a place you were not intending to go. 

The same is true of pornography use 

In fact, just this week I had a conversation with someone who enrolled in my individual coaching program who was very frustrated because he had done so much work, put in so much effort in so many important and critical ways. Yet, he didn’t feel like he was succeeding. 

As we spoke it became clear to me that he had not yet admitted to himself that he had been using pornography because it had helped him deal with his stress and with his loneliness. 

That’s right, I said it helped him.  In those moments when he had been stressed, it had provided relief.  In those moments when he had been lonely it had given him a break from his feelings. 

So many of us would just like to demonize pornography and users of pornography.   It is a convenient and easy story that makes it so we stand on moral high ground, seemingly above the problem. 

We say things like, pornography is just the next step toward infidelity.

We believe that people who use pornography are addicted and powerless. 

We hide it and hide from it whenever people discuss it because that kind of person is disgusting and they look at things that are disgusting and everything about pornography is disgusting. 

When this is what we believe about pornography and by extension, inference and explicitly users of pornography we are creating shame that withholds from the users and from ourselves the love that we all truly crave and wish for all of our HF’s children. 

-       Just ask yourself, where did Jesus spend his time?

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-       Moral high ground doesn’t help anyone

What I really find interesting about this is that it is not just the wives who think and believe and behave this way. 

It is the user’s themselves. 

Just like my client who had up to that point, not really accepted where he was on the map, we all try to pretend that things are different than they really are. 

We do this so we can feel good about ourselves. We do this so we can feel good about our judgement of ourselves and others. 

Strange right:

Pornography users judge themselves for using pornography the same way non-users do. 

Here’s the problem.  None of that helps you become the person you want to be. 

None of that helps you find the path away from pornography. 

None of that is even true.

All of those thoughts actually hold you back from becoming the person that you want to be, if you are the user, and can hold your spouse back from being the person they want to be, if you are the spouse of a user. 

So, what do we do? How do we properly orient ourselves on the map that leads to eliminating pornography use from our lives?

Start at the beginning.  Start by taking a clear and simple assessment of where you really are. 

I have a  free download on my website you can follow the link in the description, or you can go to zachspafford.com/roadmap if you have not gotten this already, please go to my website and get it so you can follow along. 

But lets take a few minutes and talk about how you can orient yourself properly on the map.

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Mastering pornography means dealing with discomfort

A lot of my clients come to me with this one question, why do I behave one way, when I believe I should behave another.  

A lot of you are listening to this podcast because of pornography use, but this work and all the principles apply to any unwanted behavior that you might be engaging in.  

But I’m going to use the example of pornography. We ask, “why do I turn to pornography, when I know that it is against my values, I want to stop using it, and I am causing myself so much shame because I use it?”

They never ask it like that, but essentially that is what they are all asking, in one way or another. 

They ask that because they feel stuck in one way or another.  They often feel like there is no way to quit this habit because they go back to it time and again. 

At its core pornography use is an escape from discomfort. that goes against our values, damages our sense of self confidence and leaves us with a sense that we lack control over our own behavior 

Why do we use pornography when it goes against our values? Because it helps us escape discomfort in a moment.

Why do we use pornography when we want to eliminate its use from our behaviors?  Because it feels good when we are feeling bad.

Why does our pornography use go contrary to our sense of control of how we want to behave? Because we tell ourselves that we should behave differently than we are. 

So, if we are using pornography to escape discomfort and feel good, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we should behave differently, it’s no wonder that we might feel stuck and trapped by this behavior.

We believe one thing, we do another. 

So, in order to reconcile that disconnection we have to rationalize what is happening.  Sometimes that means that we call ourselves addicts.  Sometimes that means that we say we are powerless.  Sometimes we tell ourselves that we deserve this indulgence because someone or something outside us made it our only recourse to feel good.

No matter the exact way we do it, in some way or another, in order to maintain our sense that we are a good person we tell ourselves a story that makes what we are doing somehow ok, at least for a moment.  

Then we beat ourselves up. We tell ourselves that we are stuck in this decision because we aren’t making a different decision

I had a client this morning, talking about his career said, “I know I’m not gonna quit, so that puts me in this box of not having a choice.”

His statement there is really telling.  He says, “I know I’m not gonna quit.”  Which is a statement that shows that he is making this decision.  If he had stopped there and been ok with that statement, then he would be in a position of power over his choices and fully realizing his ownership of where he is.  But the second part of his statement, “that puts me in this box of not having a choice” which he believes, makes him a victim of his own choice.  He is his own captor. 

Partly because he is telling himself a story that the decision he made is now not his.  He externalizes the cause of why he feels trapped.  It’s subtle, but if you listen closely, he says, that now he’s in a “box of not having a choice.”

We do this with pornography, we do this with food, we do this with anything in our lives that makes us feel trapped or stuck because we see it as detrimental to our long-term happiness. 

For example, “I can’t believe I ate that entire thing, but it’s just so good I couldn’t stop.”

This story tells us that the thing we ate made us a victim because it was so good.  

Take out the can’t and the couldn’t and the story becomes more true.  “I believe I ate that entire thing, It’s just so good.”

That is a position of fully accepting why we ate it and who is responsible. 

The thing was eaten regardless of the story we tell ourselves. 

The decision was made by you whether you accept responsibility and ownership or not.  

The problem with abdicating our responsibility is that now we are blaming something outside of us for the results in our life, which feels disempowering and leads us to do things that relinquish our power to achieve what we want. 

For my client this morning, after pointing out that he was the victim of his own story and that was holding him back from being the best he could be in his career, his next question was, “how do you practice and believe that thought, ‘I have a choice’? How do I stay in that mindset?” 

Let me give you 3  key things that you can do to get to a place where you not only believe that you have a choice, but that the choices you make and the life you lead is 100% your responsibility and you own every aspect of it. 

1.     Stop playing pretend with what your life is supposed to be.

a.     Take the phrases, “I should, I shouldn’t and I can’t” out of your vocabulary, they aren’t true

b.     Taking those phrases out of your vocabulary will begin to place the ownership of all your choices back where it belongs – in your court

c.     Quit looking into your past and telling yourself a story about how you would have done it differently

                                               i.     House story

                                             ii.     We say things like, had I known about this, I never would have married you. This isn’t something I ever would have chosen

                                            iii.     When we break that down – that’s not usually true

                                            iv.     Many of the women we talk to knew 

                                              v.     What trial would we choose

                                            vi.     This is really just a story that leaves us powerless and the victim

d.     

2.     Be compassionate with yourself

a.     I’m here because I chose this, and that’s ok

                                               i.     Good phrase to integrate into your beliefs

                                             ii.     You made the best decision you could make at the time. 

                                            iii.     I had to start by deciding that I am still a child of God and not irredeemable because of my pornography use. 

                                            iv.     I was in the process of learning how to deal with my feelings

b.     Only go as fast as you can go, 

                                               i.     Baby’s learn to walk

                                             ii.     We allow them be comfortable to the point that they can take the necessary risks that will allow them to first learn to crawl, then walk, then, finally, run

                                            iii.     The sooner you realise that the sooner you’ll have compassion enough to stop beating up on yourself and start focusing on the skills and techniques like the ones we teach our clients that help you stop using unwanted behaviors

                                            iv.     

c.     

3.     Stop asking why you aren’t there yet

a.     don’t beat yourself up for not being there yet

                                               i.     that creates shame and frustration

                                             ii.     

b.     Be fully present with the here and now and you will be able to build the future you want

                                               i.     Pornography use, playing pretend with our past and our future, other buffers keep us from being in the here and now.   

c.     be willing to be uncomfortable now

                                               i.     commitment, empowerment, discipline are not really comfortable feelings

                                             ii.     generals in war feel those things – not happy about the lives they will lose

                                            iii.     they are working toward a greater good and long term peace

                                            iv.     you are working toward greater happiness and long-term joy

                                              v.     Avoiding discomfort now usually leads to long-term discomfort

                                            vi.     Embracing discomfort now usually leads to long-term comfort

                                           vii.     

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Let me tell you about the day I lost my job.  

It was Mother’s Day and the person that let me go was also my best friend.  

He let me go because he had hired me to do a job that I wasn't qualified for and I didn't provide him any real value other than he liked having me around.  

Now his company was going through a rough patch and I needed to go, since I was the least useful person on his staff making the most money.  

It was a relief.  

The truth was, I had been moving away from working with him for a few months.  I was not just there to provide value, I was there to babysit my friend who wasn’t very self motivated.  

Don’t get me wrong, he had a good income and a great life and that is why he could and did hire me. 

But he also needed someone to sit next to him while he was on the computer and watch his screen so he wouldn’t look at pornography while he tried to work.  

Once I made the mistake of working on my computer, facing the same direction as he was, arm’s length apart from him but looking at my own computer and not his.  He was at a standing desk, I was sitting.  

I was working merrily along, trying to build us a new company.  

He walked out of the room, I assumed to go to the bathroom or talk to his kids (we worked at his home office).  

Suddenly his wife came storming in and said, “you need to put your computer up on his desk so you can see his monitor at all times, because he can’t be trusted.”

My friend, sheepishly, came back to his desk, right next to mine, an armlength away from me and started typing while his wife stood there with her head practically in flames.  

He had been looking at pornography right next to me.  He had been flicking back and forth from what he was doing for work and what he was doing to feel arousal.  

That moment was one of the last times I actually worked side by side with my friend.  It was probably the beginning of a rough patch in our friendship and certainly the beginning of the end of our business dealings.  

You see he had been using me, as he had been using so many other people and things in his life, to keep him “safe”.  

Once he no longer felt that I was able to keep him safe while he worked, we only worked together maybe two more times in the next 3 months.  

I had watched and studied my friend for years at this point and I knew a few things about him.  

Part of the reason I believe he had hired me was that I had been open with my struggle to overcome pornography use in my life and he desperately wanted to stop using pornography himself.  

There are a lot of reasons he probably never will. He has, by his own estimate and his wife’s, had an episode a week on average for fifteen years with little change.  

But that moment, the moment he viewed pornography while I was sitting next to him made me think of a moment in my own past that I feel so ashamed to admit. 

Until now, I’ve never told anyone, not even my wife.  

I had done the same thing years earlier, on a sleepy road, in a little duplex, sitting on my couch with my friends in the room, facing me, while I was on my laptop.  I looked at pornography while I was chatting with my friends in my living room.  

Until this moment, no one else but me knew it.  My friends, whom I love dearly and still keep in contact with have no idea.  

In writing this, I feel empathy for my friend more than anything.  

I am disappointed for my friend, not in him. 

I am sorry that he is dealing with this, not angry that he did this. 

I am sad for his family, not mad at his choices that may have jeopardized my own progress. 

I am sympathetic to his wife who doesn’t know what else to do and loves him, not upset that she yelled at me for not being a good enough babysitter.  

The struggle is so tangible for so many.  Some of you have done something similar.  Some of you have done something that you consider way worse.  

My own version of this story has a happy ending.  

That episode where I was viewing pornography on my laptop in my living room while my friends sat opposite was not some great turning point.  It wasn’t even really a blip on the radar in my overall usage.  

It is a moment that I can look back on and see the man I once was with poignant clarity.  

It is an opportunity for me to see myself in the actions of others.  

In some small way, it is, I believe, a way to understand the role of the Savior Jesus Christ in my own process of healing and repentance.  

The man I worked with is someone who provided for my family for about a year when dark clouds were hanging over us. 

He is not a caricature of that one moment. 

As none of us are.  

Each of us are complex people, capable of greatness.  We are all just as capable of making mistakes that sit with us for the rest of our lives. 

Those mistakes don’t define us.  What we do with them does. 

The moment I was let go I was relieved.  I was free to pursue my own path rather than build something that my friend wanted. 

I stopped wavering about becoming a coach.  

I set my whole future focus on becoming the number one LDS men’s coach in the world. 

I wanted nothing more than to create a system, a process, a path that other men could walk in order to finally and forever leave pornography behind.  

I went to Jody Moore’s Be Bold Masters and found a vocabulary and an understanding for the process that I went through to become free of my pornography usage.  

I had never really put into words what I did to become free of my addictive behavior.  I just did it.  Every once in a while, my wife would ask me, “what are you doing to stop?” and I would describe a piece of what I was doing, but not as in depth as what I found with Jody.  

That is why I became a coach.  I could be doing anything.  I had a successful career at a major insurance company, had been an entrepreneur for some time as well.  I have an advanced degree and love working with people.  But being a coach for men and women who struggle with pornography use is an opportunity to change people’s lives in a way that they themselves are unaware is possible.  

I see a way to change the lives of those around me.  If you are struggling with addictive behaviors, pornography, overeating, excessive video game usage let me help you.  Sign up for a free mini session and let this process change your life for the better. 

#addictionrecovery #latterdaysaintsdealingwithpornographyinmarraige #LDS

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