Thrive Beyond Pornography

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1.     Choose love

So often those who are dealing with spouses that have chosen addictive behavior feel like we are supposed to punish their behavior.  In doing that, we lose the perspective of love that we once had.  

Choosing love doesn’t mean that you need to allow your spouse to abuse and overrun you.  It also doesn’t mean that you give in to the demands of a spouse who is manipulating you.   Choosing love does mean that what you say, what you do and who you show up as come from a place of love. 

In place of saying things like, “I hate what you are doing in our home and what you have become” you can say, and mean, “I love you. This behavior is not ok.”

Choosing love is for you.  It is so you can be the person that you want to be in the moment of your interaction.  It is so you can lead your relationship by example.  

Being the  person you want to be in your relationship will help bring your entire marriage up, not just changing you but also, indirectly changing your partner.  

Love is what you experience toward another.  Other people don’t feel your feelings.  You feel them. Which means, how you feel is how you act and how you act creates your results.  

Choosing love does not mean we allow others to break the boundaries that we have set within the relationship.  If you have set a boundary that for 48 hours after your spouse looks at pornography sexual intimacy is off the table, then hold firmly and lovingly to that boundary. 

Be clear, keep it simple and love without condition.  

2.     Give up the need to be right

a.     No real benefit to being right

b.     Need to be right is misguided

c.     When you do, tension will dissipate

What has being right ever given you?  Has being right ever taken something from you?

In a loving, committed relationship being right at the expense of the other person doesn’t bring us together, it usually creates an unnecessary wedge.  

My parents have this running bet.  Any time one feels they are right about some inane thing and the other is not relenting, they will say, “I’ll bet your $300”.  No one keeps score, no one knows who is ahead, no money is ever passed to the “winner” because there is never a winner. It is their way of saying, “it doesn’t matter, let’s move on”.  

When it comes to pornography use, you may believe deep down that you are right about what is happening. You may “know” that if your partner would just stop doing x or start doing y that they would be able to move forward and stop regressing to unhealthy buffering with pornography. 

The question you have to ask is, “is being right making my partner change?”

The answer is invariably, “no.”

I’m also not saying that you have to be wrong.  You don’t have to give up on your opinions or act as though your position is unimportant. 

If you love the person, being right doesn’t make them love you more and doesn’t make you love them more. 

Give up being right and you will find yourself free from so much conflict. 

3.     Stop trying to control the other person

a.     We want others to do things

b.     Adults get to behave however they want

c.     We can’t control others without creating problems

d.     They do what you want because they don’t want to deal with your upset feelings

e.     “I should just let them do what they want and behave how they want”

f.      They are going to do what they want anyway

g.     Setting boundaries is what you will do when someone acts in appropriately

h.     Screaming and yelling and freaking out is not  

Have you noticed that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t control the behavior of others?  

As a pornography user my wife was in charge of so many aspects of my life.  She was my monitor for my computer use, she held all the passwords to my accounts, she would double check my text messages, she set up the restrictions on my cell phone.  

Yet, I was able to look at pornography when I chose to.  Sometimes it was more difficult than others, but still

4.     Take 100% responsibility for your relationship

a.     Take responsibility for how you feel and act

b.     Do not take responsibility for how they feel or act

The thing about relationships is that they are 100% between your ears. So, the key to taking responsibility for your relationship is understanding that you get to choose how you want to feel about the person you are married to.  I read the book The art of possibility and they talk about it in terms of being the board.  If you are familiar with board games, in that you are a piece or just one player.  When you become the board, you choose to be responsible for everything that goes on in the game.  Not that you are to blame but it comes from a perspective of choosing to recognize that when you are responsible for what goes on in your life and then you get to choose how you want to move forward. 

This is different from blame, which is often how we manage our lives. 

Car accident example. 

I could have chosen to be the victim

Sometimes I did

Could have blamed him, 

Did blame him

Blame the church

But eventually I had to take responsibility for my happiness and recognize that I had choices and I chose to stay, chose to love, chose to be the board

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Every time I meet with a client I hear something along these lines. 

I try to stop but I just can’t – I have been fighting through this my whole life – My whole world is burning down because of this addiction. 

I am keeping it at bay, but I want to be free from this.

This is the place most of us go to when we try to stop a habit in our lives.  

Most of us try to use willpower to change our habits

In fact, I get comments like this on my Facebook page all the time. 

They say things like, “just stop it” 

Maybe you’ve heard something similar from a friend, spouse, bishop

This kind of language is the language of going into battle.  

It is that keeping it at bay and believing you could lose everything as another client put it that is hindering your progress

That is not going to get you all the way there.  

So many of us have put our fullest attentions and greatest efforts into quitting pornography only to be drawn back into it after a period of sober living. 

That is because we used willpower to fight what has become our most difficult habit.

Willpower is a recipe for short gains, long term struggle because willpower is a trap, great book “change anything” talks about this in depth .

It talks about how we may have half a dozen things influencing us to continue a habit while employing just one strategy to negate it.

The book also demonstrates that it is not about some innate ability or capacity that makes us stronger than our friends or peers. 

“…people (often) believe that their ability to make good choices stems from nothing more than their willpower – and that their willpower is a quality they’re born with or they’re not – they eventually stop trying altogether.  The willpower trap keeps them in a depressing cycle that begins with heroic commitment to change which is followed by eroding motivation and terminated inevitably by relapse into old habits. Then, when the built-up pain of their habits becomes intolerable, they muster up another heroic but doomed attempt at change.”

Willpower is what we think we lack when we tell ourselves that we just didn’t want to quit bad enough

Willpower can only take you so far because your brain is not designed to use willpower for lasting change.  

Willpower is strictly a short term tool

The problem with willpower is that it is a power of struggle.  

When we use willpower we are simply fighting, battling out against the one person we can’t beat, ourselves. 

There is this new will smith film called Gemini man where I think that is essentially the premise of the film.  

That resistance, that battle, that warrior mentality, it is costly in terms of energy. 

In change anything, the premise of the book is that you can change anything you want in your life, if you have the right skills. 

In my individual coaching sessions I teach people a lot of skills. The webinars I do, are about teaching people skills. 

Today I’m going to teach you the first of three essential skills that I will be teaching live on June 17.  If you are interested in attending that, please go to my website, zachspafford.com and click on free coaching call. That will take you to a zoom registration page where you will get all the info you need to join the call. 

If you want to stop using pornography, you need to know how to do these three things. I only have time for the first today, but this skill alone will make a huge difference in your life. 

One of the most important skills you can learn is how to say, “no” to your urges to go down the rabbit hole.  

Think about how you say no, when you really mean it.

Especially with something that might frustrate you.  

If someone is repeatedly trying to get you to do something that you don’t like, you say, “NO!” 

There is abruptness, there is a clenching, there is a tightening against the thing you’re saying no to. 

That doesn’t feel good. 

Saying no doesn’t have to be a battle. 

I like the phrase, I can, but I choose not to. 

How different that is and feels makes a big difference. 

This takes practice. 

This is not the language that we use when we are fighting our pornography use. 

We use battle language. 

We fight because we think it has power, 

But urges don’t have power

Let me explain how your urges don’t have power. 

They don’t have a force of their own.

Food is a really good way to analogize to pornography because, unlike drugs or alcohol, food and human sexuality are innate. They are with us from the beginning and the process is one of understanding how to properly regulate the flow and usage of the two, rather than avoiding it altogether. 

So if you think of your favorite food.  One of the things that I am not sure I could live without in this life is rootbeer floats.  I am very good at them.  I make amazing floats, I drink amazing floats, I never say no to a rootbeer float that shows up in my life. 

If you want to poison me or drug me, hand me a rootbeer float. 

I have tasted all the types of rootbeer I have come across. And I know which types of rootbeer go best with which types of icecream.  

But here is the thing, my urge to drink a rootbeer float has no power the same way my urge to use pornography has no power. 

I use this analogy in my coaching, which I heard from another coach.  I ask, “When you have the urge to drink a rootbeer float, what do you have to do to get it?”

Sometimes, they will say, I just have to go drink one.

Then I say, is that it, is that the only step here?

Then we go to the very first step. 

First you have to get up from where you are. Then, assuming you have what you need in the house, you have to go to the kitchen and get a glass.  Then you have to get a spoon.  Then you have to go to where the rootbeer is and get that.  Then you have to go to where the ice cream scoop is and get that.  Then you have to go to the freezer, which for us is in the basement.  So, go down the stairs, open the freezer, get the ice cream and go back up the stairs.  

Then I usually ask, So now you have everything all in one place, have you had your rootbeer float?

The answer is no. 

So, I say, ok, now what do you do?

Then they say, Well, I scoop some ice cream into the cup. Then I open the rootbeer and pour some into the cup as well.  I like my rootbeer blended into the ice cream so then I pick up the spoon and stir the two together. 

Have you drunk the rootbeer float yet? No!

What’s next?  Well then I pick up the cup and I bring it to my mouth.  

Still haven’t drunk the float yet. 

Then I pour my first mouthful into my mouth, still not drunk yet. 

Now I am an enjoyer of RBF so, I savor it in my mouth for a moment or two. Then finally I swallow. 

Do you see how many steps there were?

Do you see how all along the way, there were a dozen or more moments, points of consent to the urge?

At any moment there was the possibility of saying no. Stopping the process, all the way up to the moment that I had the float in my mouth and before I swallowed, I could have spit that out and said no.  

In the long run you can’t just rely on willpower.  How many of you watching this have resisted and white knuckled it until you couldn’t any more?  We all have if we have had some decent period of sobriety without these new techniques I’m going to teach you. 

This is the process of teaching your brain to be curious about what’s happening in your body and in your brain to understand those urges and help your brain see them as unnecessary.  

Your lower brain thinks pornography is necessary.  That lower brain of yours tells you that this is pleasurable and its going to help you avoid the pain of this moment and that the cost is so low as to be negligible and all of that means that this activity will keep you alive.  

But it isn’t going to keep you alive.  Pornography isn’t necessary for your survival.  Even if your lower brain pretends it is. 

So is it a problem that you have an urge to view pornography or to escape your feelings because you are lonely or frustrated or upset or even that you are aroused?  No.  

The problem comes when you say no to the urge. 

In that moment is the moment we usually go to battle.  

So, instead of going to battle, and clenching and being abrupt and fighting the urge, I simply say, I can but I choose not to. 

Which is my favorite way of saying no, 

Because it accepts my agency and owns the agency that I have, but it also declines the invitation.  

Saying no doesn’t have to be a battle.  To be successful at overcoming pornography use, taking your brain away from willpower and struggle and bringing it to calm and reason yields a result that is so much more successful. 

The skill here is learning to say no, without the angst, without the fight, without the battle. 

Like when your daughter asks if she can drive the car.  You wouldn’t get upset, you would just say “no, honey, 4 year olds aren’t allowed to drive cars.”

That is the same feeling you would bring to this no.  Love and understanding for the person you are and why that urge might be interesting. 

The skill to stop and say no is one that can be the beginning of your personal empowerment in the process of deconditioning the urges and habits that have been holding you back from becoming the person you want to be. 

It is the perfect replacement for all that willpower you’ve been using to fight with yourself in a never ending battle of strength that you can never win.  

Overcoming pornography use isn’t about willpower. It is about finding the right tools and becoming proficient practitioners of the craft of self mastery.  

Come to my free webinar on June 17 at 8 central 7 mountain, I’ll be teaching this skill and the two other skills you need to eliminate the urges you have to use pornography. 

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Pain now or later. 

Almost every time I get a new client the first thing that they learn is that they have been putting off their pain.  

Each of us has discomfort that we deal with on a regular basis.

Pain comes in lots of forms, some more painful in a moment than others.  Some are physical pains like going to the dentist and others are emotional pain like loneliness.  

The thing is, that when we avoid painful things in search of short term happiness and pleasure, we are usually setting ourselves up for long term pain that is worse and more damaging than the pain we were avoiding. 

A perfect example of this happened to me at the start of this covid quarantine. 

Darcy had noticed that one of my front teeth was looking funny, which it turns out was a cavity behind a filling that had come loose.

Immediately I thought, “oh, how much is this going to cost.” Being an entrepreneur I pay all my own dental bills.  

You can see my dilemma, put it off, don’t deal with the cost of fixing the tooth now and keep my, what turned out to be $300, or pay for it now, get into the dentist even though there is this new order to stay home and they aren’t seeing anyone for hardly any reason. 

There were a lot of good reasons to stay home, there were a few good reasons to go to the dentist. 

Having worked in a dental office, I have seen first-hand what happens when someone neglects dental work.

Anything from needing heavy duty cleaning with a machine that basically jackhammers your teeth with sonic waves all the way up to pulling everything out because not a single tooth has enough integrity to stay in the mouth without the possibility of getting infected. 

Had I left it for a couple of months until things opened up again there very well could have been the need to put a crown on it or worse, do a post replacement of the entire tooth. 

Which would have cost a lot more money. 

A lot of what we do in life is a trade off.  

We work out knowing that a little pain now will help us be stronger in the long run. 

We get shots knowing that the vaccines, steroids and even pain killers that hurt some going in, will help us avoid worse, even excruciating pain in the long run. 

When it comes to pornography use and the struggle that you have been dealing with for years, ask yourself, am I willing to take a shot now in order to avoid an even more painful future.  What’s the value of that to you?  

What’s the cost of continued therapy sessions for both you and your spouse before finally resolving this issue?  What’s the cost of all the time you’ve spend doing something that is tearing at the fabric of your self-confidence?  What’s the cost of sleeping in your car because your spouse has asked you to leave?  What’s the cost of the hurt you are putting into your relationship and the trust you are breaking because of pornography use? What’s the cost of a divorce?  What’s the cost of living separate lives?  

Just like dental work, working on our self is something that if you don’t get in as early as you can, the cavities in your capacities can fester, grow and get infected.  

The emotional pain that you feel when you are frustrated, stressed, lonely or even just bored are all types of immediate pain that if we choose to ignore it, we are creating a long-term pain that will eventually become unignorable.  

When I was deep in my pornography use, there was this huge gap between how I felt and how I wanted to feel. 

I struggled so much to feel wanted and loved and worthy that I would have done anything to get those emotions in my life.  But, like so many of us, I didn’t know how. 

I thought that when I was lonely that no one wanted me.  What I didn’t realize is that my thoughts were the cause of my loneliness. 

I’ll never forget this at my Grandma Spafford’s 90th birthday party we were all gathered together at the cultural hall of her church building on 400 East and 100 South in St George, UT and I was standing there by her and asked, “Isn’t this amazing, all these people here to show you how much they love you.” There had to be a hundred or more people there, lots of family, but lots of friends as well.  

I looked at her and she said to me, with tears in her eyes, “oh, I don’t think people like me.”

How tragic. That has stuck with me for the better part of 20 years.  What I didn’t know then, but what I see so clearly now, is that her thoughts were the source of so much pain. 

Just like mine were in those moments when I was struggling to succeed at quitting pornography. 

The problem is, that without a coach, it is really hard to see how our thoughts are keeping us from dealing with our pain in the present and taking us off into the momentary pleasures of pornography use, overeating, and social media zone out. 

Then, when we come back to our self, we still don’t feel wanted, loved and worthy.  In fact, we probably feel less of each of those things and we feel worse for having done something that we might have said, “I’ll never do that again”.

The new video I’m working on for my clients is part of a concept I learned from another podcaster. 

In it I teach the key processes I use to help people deal with their emotions as they come up.  

Which is a skill that I think so many of us men have been conditioned to ignore because we have been taught that our feelings don’t matter. 

We just need to suck it up and move on. 

Be a man, we’ve been told

You just need to push through and get ‘r done.

Rub some dirt on it and get back out there. 

All phrases we have heard in our lives telling us to set aside how we are feeling.

I’m not saying you have to lay on the floor and cry, though you can if that helps.

But I am saying being aware of your feelings and allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable is a skill that we don’t really cultivate in our culture.

 Unfortunately, that is the very thing that handicaps us when we are working through our pornography use habits.  We think we can just push it down and fight it off and keep it at bay.  

I can tell you from personal, long standing experience, when we push away our feelings through buffering, we are creating a long-term effect that is more harmful to ourselves and others. 

The old adage, no pain, no gain has a ring of truth at least in this arena because if you try not to feel your pain, you will never be able to grow past it and become the person you want to be. 

If you want to learn more about this, I am holding a webinar on how to deal with your urges on June 17 at 8 PM.  You can register at my website zachspafford.com by clicking the “free coaching call” link at the top right of the page. 

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Why we use pornography even when we don’t want to.

When we try to control our feelings the results begin to overwhelm us. 

The paradox of control

On a personal level, it refers to the phenomenon by which the harder a person tries to control something, the more difficult it becomes to exercise that control. Examples that are often given of this phenomenon are: (1) the harder you try to fall a sleep, the more difficulty you have actually falling asleep; (2) the harder you try to stop thinking about something, the more you think about it; (3) the more you try to control negative emotions such as fear, the more powerful those emotions become.

There is another paradox involved in this phenomenon: we get a sense of well-being when we feel we are in control, yet we do not actually have the power to control very much. The question then arises, why one or why the other. If we cannot have control over very much, why do we get a sense of well-being when we have the illusion of control? Conversely, if we have a sense of well-being when we have the illusion of control, why is it so difficult to actually exercise control? The two things seem to work against each other, and therein lies the paradox.

On the interpersonal level, when we try to control the behavior of those around us (or the things that happen to us), we find that our attempts rarely succeed.

Only when we stop trying to exercise control that we are able to get the results we desire. 

The paradox here lies in the fact that in order to exercise control, we have to stop trying to exercise control. 

I like to illustrate this with sand.  If you have ever picked up a handful of sand and tried to hold it you know that the tighter you squeeze the more the sand just falls through your fingers.  Eventually you will hold a tiny amount in your hand but the rest will just fall away because you can’t get a good grip on it.  

On the other hand, if you scoop up a handful of sand and just hold it there, letting it rest on your hand, you will find that you can have a lot more sand in your hand with very little control.  

In connection with the paradox of control, it is sometimes said that we cannot control what happens around us, but we can control how we respond to what is happening. If we shift the focus from external control to internal control we will get better results. 

That is, if we come to terms with the fact that we do not have control over the external world, we can have better control over a given situation by controlling the way we react to what is happening to us in that situation.

This is especially true of the wives of pornography users. 

If we are looking for inner peace and to feel in control, exercising control over the way we choose to think about the situation, which gives us control over our emotions and our actions is the most effective way to get to the peace, love and self confidence we are all looking for. 

What is, not what should be

All good stories start at 330 am right. September 15 2001, just a few days after the September 11th terrorist attack, my missionary companion, the other two elders in our apartment and I were sound asleep in our seventh floor flat two blocks from the piazza garibaldi train station in naples Italy. 

On the minds of each of us was this great tragedy that had just changed the face of the world and as we slept we subconsciously thought of all the loss and fear and hatred and pain that were at that moment permeating the lives of americans 8 time zones away. 

A rainstorm had been pounding the city for hours. 

Deep in sleep four missionaries heard a desperate thunder banging through our apartment and in our slumbering ears our 60 year old landlady crying “fate presto!” “Come quickly!”

As our feet hit the floor, something was clearly wrong. Where there should have been only tile, there was water. 

At the door, our landlady begged us to shut off the water, which she was certain was coming from our apartment. It was, after all full of boys barely old enough to vote, so obviously they must have broken something. 

Stepping out and standing on the landing of our top floor apartment I could see a cascade of water, careening toward the earth and crashing at the bottom of our large stairwell.

The door to a second apartment opened to reveal our neighbors across the hall bleary eyed and confused. Offering no answers, we all looked at the third door on this level. An empty apartment that had been unoccupied for as long as anyone could recall. 

I tried the door. Nothing. But I could clearly feel the flow of water gushing between the door and the floor.

The landlady had no key as it was a private apartment. From the landing there was no way in. 

The balcony of that empty apartment and the adjacent missionary apartment was separated by a stone wall with only one way around it. Over the edge of the wet balcony with only a slippery rail seven floors up to hold on to.   

In a moment ‘I put on my raincoat, went onto our balcony and climbed to the flooding one where I found the only drainage hole blocked by a wayward mop and a random piece of plastic.’

Crisis averted, time to clean up.

Sometimes I have conversations with spouses of pornography users who come to me at the moment of crisis. They have just found out about the pornography use of their spouse. Many are distraught, unbending and unable to look at this as anything other than betrayal. They believe that their marriage is over, their spouse is broken beyond repair and that they are a failure. 

They are focusing on what should be and not what is. 

Let’s talk about the differences between how we act when we focus on what is vs what should be.

“What is” creates possibility.

“What should” be delays possibility.

A high school graduate might say, “my gpa will get me into these colleges, I’m ready to make a choice”

Or  when the think about what should be, they might say, ‘my gpa isn’t good enough to get into the school I want. I wish I had studied harder.’

A business person might say, ‘our sales were 93% of target, let’s evaluate our process to see if there are any adjustments we can make for the next quarter’

Or ‘if only I had made one more sale. I missed my bonus, this is the worst, I should have worked harder’

A pornography user might say, ‘I see how I have behaved, I understand the choices I made that brought me here. I am going to learn as much as I can from this.’

Or, ‘it just happened, I don’t have control over myself and I’m an addict.’

Making decisions from a place of fear. 

What is fear and why do we often make decisions from a place of fear rather than from a place of abundance?

Fear of missing out

Not having enough

Failure

Not being conservative enough

How is fear different than caution and how can we tell the difference?

What is it about making a decision from a place of fear vs abundance that makes our lives better or worse?

What is good about fear?

What can be bad about fear?

If you knew this was going to work, what would you give up to get there?

Matthew 13:44 – the man who sold everything and bought a field. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

He didn’t think, what if someone discovers it before I get back?  what if I can’t raise enough funds?

The reasons we use for a lot of our behavior are often contrived out of nothing.

Book – the art of possibility talks about “experiments with people who have suffered a lesion between the two halves of the brain have shown that when the right side is prompted, say, to close a door, the left side, unaware of the experimenters instruction, will produce a reason as to why he has just performed the action, such as, “oh I felt a draft.”

…It’s all invented, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us”

I don’t know how the experiment conducted, possibly through visual input to one side of the brain or a physical stimulus that only would show up in one side of the brain and then the other side creating a reason for it.

Why Would my Husband Lie to me? And other questions Wives ask when their spouse uses pornography.

Over the last couple of weeks my wife and I have had a number of conversations with a new client and his wife.

They had enrolled in my 13 week course and after one session she hadn’t felt like she had seen any changes.

This was hard for her because she was dealing with so much pain, so much frustration and so much heartache that his recovery from pornography use was eating away at her. 

She described him as unemotional, uncaring and disconnected.

Their story is so similar to so many stories that I decided to share with you some of what each of them are asking for themselves and for each other.

Let me just give you some background. I have known this couple for almost 20 years. About 2 weeks ago she reached out to me on Facebook and asked me to call her about her husband and my business. They decided to enroll in my course because they felt it would give him the best chance to change and become pornography free. 

As we spoke on the phone she told me of the difficulties that he was having. He had been laid off due to Covid-19, he was using pornography and he was hiding extra cell phones around the house. 

To her the biggest issue had been that he lied. 

He had lied to her and he had lied to their children.

She loves him and wants him to get better.

For his part, he is an amazing man who has done so many amazing things in his life. He has always been there for his kids and his wife. He works hard. He doesn’t want pornography to be what he does to feel better but he also doesn’t want to feel so bad all the time. And right now he feels like he has a lot to feel bad about.

Their story is not unlike my story or the story of so many people who struggle with addictive behaviors. So, let me share with you some of the questions that she was asking, some of the questions he was asking and some of the essential information I shared with them and would recommend for anyone dealing with something like this. 

“Why would he lie to me?”

Darcy

-      In the thick of it the lying hurt more than the pornography use. 

-      I also didn’t understand why zach would lie to me.

-      When truthful I would react poorly

-      Angry, cry, call names

-      Throw things, threaten to leave.

-      His brain wants to do tree things

-      Pleasure

-      Pain

-      Conserve energy.

-      Honesty causes pain

-      For me

-      And for him

-      His lying is him trying to protect his feelings and mine.

-      Lying from kids perspective.

-      Not get in trouble

-      He’s lying to avoid pain

-      It conserves energy because avoiding external consequences

-      Lie because we don’t want to hurt others feelings

-      Hey guess what so and so said about you.

-      

What would you tell a wife who is being lied to on how to handle this situation?

-      Remove the emotions

-      Look at the facts

-      When your child is doing this it isn’t to hurt you

-      Same true with your spouse

-      They are just trying to deal with their own emotions

-      Don’t accept/believe that you are to blame

-      Also, not yours to fix

-      Foster an environment of equality and dialogue

-      Love

-      

“How long will it take for him to get better?”

Zach –

This is really different for every person. I hesitate to say, it depends on how hard he works as well because this is a muscle that everyone needs to exercise and people start in different places. For some this is the thing that starts an uninterrupted, successful, permanent change. 

For others, this is the beginning of a clear path to freedom and worthiness that begins here and ends far in the future.

I will say, in some sense, he will begin to be better nearly immediately. Beginning to understand that pornography use is probably a habit and not an addiction, seeing that feelings hold the key to our actions, and learning that the thoughts we choose to believe are changeable will give a pornography user immense power to stop engaging with this vice.

“What should I do to help him?”

Darcy

-      Don’t try to take on his recovery

-      Leave the threats out of the discussion

-      That doesn’t mean you don’t set appropriate boundaries, revisit episode 10

-      Or jody moore has a great podcast on this https://jodymoore.com/236

-      Be fair and don’t make it about you.

-      Just like if your spouse had an eating problem, what they are eating isn’t about you it’s about their need to feel good and choices to avoid emotions

-      Get a coach, there are resources on our website, free mini session

-      

“Why is he doing this?”

Zach

-      Higher brain

-      Lower brain

o  Conservation of energy

o  Seeking Pleasure

o  Avoiding pain

-      Agency

-      Thoughts create our actions

Agency –

Dr Ronald E Bartholemew https://rsc.byu.edu/authors/bartholomew-ronald-e

-      You need 3 things to have agency

o  The knowledge of good and evil/right and wrong

o  Consequences

o  The ability to choose

-      When we say “I can’t” or “I should or shouldn’t” we are actually abdicating our agency – which is what Satan would want

-      As Latter-day Saints, we are often faced with people saying “you can’t drink coffee” or “alcohol” or something like that. 

-      How would you respond to that – likely you would say, “I can but I choose not to.”

-      Now imagine saying to a group of sisters at a relief society gathering, I can look at porn if I want to. – very different feel.

-      

“As the person trying to stop using pornography, what do I say to my spouse?”

Darcy

-      I would want my spouse to be 100% committed

-      Take ownership

-      Be as truthful as they can

-      Respect boundaries

-      Do what they say they are going to do to the best of their ability

“What happens when my spouse messes up again?”

Zach

-      So we have a protocol for that within my 13 week program

-      Write it down and move on

-      Be aware that this is a process

-      Keep in mind that this won’t happen over night.

-      No one ever hated themselves skinny/sober

-      Love

Should I stick by my spouse?

darcy

-      

-      The sun is setting and the kids are out making the gleeful noises that signal an amazing day is ending.

-      It’s about bed time and I am sitting down to record

-      Thinking, what is the skill the thing that my audience needs help mastering this week? 

-      What can I bring to them.

-      That they might have joy – 2 ne 25

-      Opposition in all things 2 ne 11

-      Taking new meaning

-      Ask clients, what percentage of life should you feel good?

-      90%, 75% 60/40

-      Major reason we fall into buffering or addictive behaviors – avoiding negative feelings

-      Avoiding feelings leads to doubling down on negativity.

-      Lonely leads to drinking, pornography whatever,

-      The lonely doesn’t really get addressed and in the end it doesn’t go away

-      Then after the temporary pleasure fades, the loneliness comes back and

-      On top of that we add guilt

-      So now we’ve doubled the pain

-      Problem is we can make it even worse.

-      We can double again and choose to think, not, “ive done something I don’t want to do again and I will take responsibility for it and stop”

-      We some times choose to think, “I’m bad, broken or irredeemable” which is shame,

-      So now we’ve tripled our pain.

-      

-      On the flip side, when we have great things in our lives happen, we look for problems.

-      Or we diminish the value of our accomplishments or our contributions in the world

-      

-      

-      4 ways to create joy in your life.

-      

1.    Seek the good in your life

a.    Consciously observe the wins in your day

                                                       i.    Dinner table question

b.    avoid seeing problems where there aren’t any

c.    Believe what you want to believe about yourself

d.    

2.    Become willing to feel your feelings all the way

a.    Practice

b.    Self confidence

                                                       i.    Feel any feeling

3.    Remember you are learning

a.    Ability to trust self

4.    The atonement has bridged the gap, you just need to get on the bridge

5.    

-      Guess you could say that in a way man’s purpose is to feel the depths of sorrow and the loftiness of joy, each to their fullest

-      As I listen to my kids playing on this spring evening I hear joy in their voices

-      Kids are really good at taking the moments as they come.  

-      Every time I recognize that, it’s a renewed lesson that becoming who I choose to create is an intentional return to the principles of the gospel, including to become as a little child

-      

-      

-      The more accountability we take for our experience here – what happens to us, what we create, what we see as external or internal struggles – the more choices we have

o  This is about ownership

o  Ownership creates power and choice

-      This isn’t about what you’re not

o  Come from negative place

o  Not strong enough

o  Not smart enough

o  Not disciplined enough

o  That is all blame and fault finding

o  Blame and fault finding are shame based

o  

-      Here’s the real difficulty, sometimes we judge ourselves for the things that we are taking accountability for

o  Then we look to see how we can deflect that judgement

o  When we beat our self up that often leads to deflecting which doesn’t feel good

o  This goes wrong in the way that people/humans don’t like to be blamed or at fault so then we look to explain away the results in our life

o  She didn’t meet my needs

o  This just showed up on my screen

o  There was a link in my feed

o  That food wasn’t supposed to be in the pantry

-      You try to deflect judgment

-      In the process of deflecting judgement, you relinquish accountability.

-      Here is one of the secrets that I want you to take away from this, You can be accountable without judging. 

-      There are two words that you can eliminate from your vocabulary to help you do this.

-      Should and Shouldn’t.

-      You’re a human, you’re going to make mistakes

-      Saying I should have done this or I shouldn’t have done that

-      I should be more

-      I shouldn’t be so bad

-      I shouldn’t have slipped up

-      Taking should and shouldn’t out of your vocabulary all together will help in this process of taking accountability without judgement.

-      You aren’t perfect, I’m not perfect, no one is.

-      Take accountability without taking blame.

-      Let’s talk about areas where we can take accountability

-      There are three areas

-      Some call it the cognitive triangle –

-      Brooke Castillo calls it the Model

-      – most of us just know it as the things we have control over in our lives -

-      Thoughts, feelings and actions

-      Elder Uchtdorf had a great Instagram post where he was writing on a sheet of paper just a quick reminder, it seems

-      I have control over my: Thoughts, Feelings, Actions.

-      So, 3 questions: Why not always take accountability for these three things?

-      How do I take back accountability for these three things?

-      And why will that help me have greater self mastery?

-      Let’s quick define Actions:

o  Every one of my clients comes to me with one of two problems

o  I’m doing but I can’t stop

o  I want to start doing but I can’t

§ I’m using pornography and I can’t stop

§ I want to stop overeating

§ I want to get more things done

§ I want to stop sleeping in so I can get my exercise in

-      This is all stuff we do or don’t do

-      The question that I always ask when someone comes to me with something like this is “why?”

-      Why can’t you stop doing this?

-      Why can’t you start doing that?

-      Here’s what they tell me

-      “I don’t know”

-      “I’m an addict” or I’m addicted

-      “I’m lazy or undisciplined” – client who is a pilot…told me this

-      I’m just not a morning person

-      Here’s the problem with each of these answers

-      they are completely disempowering. 

-      They sound like they are “aware” – I’m an addict for example – except that tells you nothing about why you aren’t stopping, all it says, to our brains is, You’re broken.

-      There isn’t any accountability in these phrases either, which makes us powerless to change the actions we are describing with them.

-       Either the person is denying accountability or they are shaming themselves for their choices

-      Let me go back to those two questions, why can’t you stop or why cant you start? 

-      The answer is always, because of how you’re feeling. Every time.

-      What I’m doing when I ask my clients these questions is checking to see if they are aware of the emotion that they are feeling when they are doing things they don’t want to or not doing things that that want to.

-      Most of the time, this may not surprise you, especially when you think about the men in your life, they have no idea what their feelings are.

-      As a coach, I help people identify these emotions.

-      Why do we use pornography, because we feel lonely or sad or an urge

-      Why do we overeat? Because we feel nervous or bored

-      Why do we play games on our phones instead of getting our project list done? Because we feel anxious or overwhelmed

-      This is something that I learned in sales a long time ago, emotion creates action

-      So, if I wanted someone to buy, I had to find the emotion that would move them to action.  

-      Every action we take is preceded by emotion, sometimes big sometimes small, but always an emotion.

-      Identifying the emotion that we are feeling before we take action unlocks a window into the why that is driving us.

-      And doing it without judging ourselves is essential to keeping that window open.

-      A lot of us judge our urges, or our feelings and say we “shouldn’t be feeling lonely or I shouldn’t have an urge to look at pornography or I shouldn’t be overwhelmed.

-      Or I should be more committed or I should be past this

-      Doing that just closes us back up and makes understanding and then changing impossible.

-      And this requires real compassion for ourselves.

-      And it also requires what I call wildlife narrator observation of our own brains

-      David Attenborough

-      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3OjfK0t1XM

-      Being that, let’s call it chill about what is happening let’s you start to figure it out, rather than spend energy on what isn’t, should or shouldn’t be. 

-      From that place you will patiently and kindly see how you are getting where you are

-      That will give you immense leverage, when you are ready to completely change your behavior

-      But knowing, that no one is making you eat the chocolate cake

-      No one is pushing you toward pornography use

-      No one is keeping you from doing your list of projects

-      That your own emotions are driving these actions is essential to breaking free from them

-      And also, understand and recognize that you are doing all kinds of useful action in your life. 

-      And the nice thing is that you get to be accountable for that too.

-      I was discussing pornography use with one of my clients who felt like he was just engulfed in it all the time

-      This is a successful man with a busy home life

-      So we broke it down – I asked how many hours a week do you use?

-      He said on a bad week 3 hours.

-      So I did the math, there are 168 hours in a week. 

-      What percentage of the time was he doing things that weren’t pornography?

-      98.21%.

-      I said, even if you were using pornography 3% of the week you would still being doing great things 97% of the time. 

-      Take accountability for the good things you are doing, because, they more than likely outweigh the things that you aren’t doing

-      Think about what they are – church callings, work accomplishments, things you are getting done –

-      You are probably pretty amazing. Pay attention to that and remember that the things you are not yet achieving don’t define you.

-      Since our feelings create our actions, let’s go ahead and take a look at those as well.

-      It is really common in our society for us to say things like, my boss really upset me today

-      Or my wife made me feel so alone

-      Or my kids are so frustrating

-      Those all sound like they could be true but what I want you to see here is that they are all pointing at an external source of emotion

-      When my clients come to me and talk about their frustrations they often point to people or situations in their lives that they believe are creating those feelings.

-      My next question is always, why do you feel that way?

-      So often, they say, I don’t know

-      Our brains don’t like accountability and dialing into the source of our feelings takes a lot of work. 

-      And when we take accountability it’s really easy to beat yourself up for it.

-      But if we can own our feelings and take accountability for them we will have so many more choices as to how we can choose to feel.

-      So, what is the reason for why we feel the way that we do?

-      It is the way we are thinking

-      The way we think about what is going on in the world around us creates the way we feel about it.

-      The way you feel about your boss, or your kids or your wife all come from what you think about them and what they say

-      So when your wife says to you, I wish we never got married, or I never would have married you if I had known you had this problem

-      Those words don’t affect us

-      What affects us is our thought, I’ve messed everything up or she doesn’t love me or even, I wish we never got married, this is too hard.

-      those are the thoughts that create loneliness.  

-      Just tonight my wife was listening to her playlist and linda Ronstadt came on and I commented how horrible it was so she skipped to the next song which was cher and she sang along, “if I could turn back time, I’d run away from you”

-      and one of the kids said, ‘mom, that’s not nice” and she said, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t have married papi if I had known his family.”

-      I could have thought, she doesn’t love me or I’m not good enough or I wish she felt differently

-      Partly because I know that is really how my wife feels. 

-      But, my thought is, My wife’s love for me is separate from her feelings about my family

-      Instead of feeling that my wife should behave differently of talk about my family differently

-      Because her words about how she feels don’t make me feel sad or lonely or upset

-      My thoughts about her words create my feelings.

-      If I delegate accountability for my feelings in this situation to my wife, then I have to try and control what she says – which is unlikely to work

-      Or I can recognize that taking accountability for how I feel and choosing my thoughts accordingly I can show up as the husband that I want to be

-      When we genuinely decide to believe, I am accountable for all of my feelings and view those with compassion and patience for ourselves you can open up the ability to feel anything you want to any time you want to feel them.

-      Here another really important thing to remember, you can’t make other people feel differently than they do and their feelings are not your responsibility.

-      Not to say that we can’t be compassionate for others

-      Just means, trying to act in a certain way or say certain things to try and get others to feel a certain way   term.

-      Owning your own emotions doesn’t mean that you ignore other’s feelings out of hand, but it does mean that you can’t manage other peoples’ emotions.

-      Let them own their own emotions and you can approach that with kindness and compassion

-      In our marriage, when I was deep in the addiction cycle and dealing with all the emotions that came along with that from my wife and from myself I often did what my wife wanted because I wanted to minimize negative feelings in our relationship.

-      So If I wanted to go to a movie or shooting, two activities that she doesn’t enjoy I would ask and then if she said no, I wouldn’t go because I didn’t want to make her mad

-      But, at some point, I decided I am going to choose to go do things I want to do even if she might get upset.

-      I always considered her feelings and if I said, ‘I’m going out to go shooting” and she offered a reason that I going might impact her day I would consider it and then sometimes I would choose to go or I might choose to stay

-      But I stopped making those choices based on whether she might be upset and made them based on how I felt about it. 

-      Seems like a small thing but it actually has brought us closer together

-      When we try to manipulate the feelings of others we often end up resentful and frustrated

-      It’s a process of understanding and consideration for yourself and for others, recognizing that you can’t control their feelings.

-      Let’s take a look at the final piece of the puzzle, thoughts.

-      In my coaching practice this is one of the things that I talk about the most.

-      My clients often come to me saying, I know this is just a thought.

-      But what’s often interesting about it is that they know that the thought is optional and they could change to a different thought that might serve them better,

-      But they believe the thought so much and think that it is true to the point that they can’t imagine a different thought taking it’s place.

-      I talked about this a little last week when we talked about a person being addicted. 

-      My client believed that he was an addict and that thought was powerful enough that it was difficult for him to believe that maybe it wasn’t even important to know whether he was an addict or not. Let alone to believe that he might just be using pornography to avoid his feelings.

-      Our thoughts are often so true to us that we can’t see that believing them is holding us back from feeling good and being happy.

-      My wife has been using thought work to adjust her weight and recently she said to me after losing 12 pounds  

-      That for the two years she weighed that much all she could think was how fat she was but now, after having been 12 pounds heavier for a year and then losing that 12 pounds and being back at that weight

-      She told me she has more confidence

-      The number didn’t change, it was the same

-      Her thoughts about the number changed

-      Recognizing that our thoughts are optional and something that you don’t have to believe, even if there is a whole mountain of evidence for it

-      You get to believe whatever you want to

-      You can just choose to believe that you aren’t addicted to pornography

-      You can just choose to believe that you are going to get done everything you want to this week.

-      You can just choose to believe that you are...

Does it matter whether you are an addict?

Does it abdicate your agency?

Does that thought serve you? - Does thinking it make you more likely to stop using pornography?