Thrive Beyond Pornography

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Choices – the way forward.

Finding your way is a matter of choices and making the ones that you believe will bring you the most happiness.

So, I often work with young men who are just about to graduate high school and, for members of the church of jesus Christ of latter day saints, that means that they are getting ready to choose whether they will serve what we call a full time mission.

That means that they will spend 2 years away from family, away from girlfriends, away from college studies and sports and they will go out to a place they are assigned and share the gospel of jesus Christ with complete strangers, sometimes in a language that they will learn that they have no experience with.

When I was young boys went at 19 and girls at 21, now those ages are younger, boys can now go at 18 and girls

A lot of these boys are struggling with anxiety, with pornography, with knowing if they will be the missionary they need or want to be.

Just a note about my show notes. they are essentially the outline and notes that I use to do my podcast. I don't edit them once I finish the podcast, so they are here for you as is and to give you a little glimpse into my mind as I do the show. They aren't a word for word transcript.

Enjoy!

I had a conversation with someone just today about the choices that he is making and why he is holding back from moving forward with his life because of the overwhelming feelings that he has. He said to me, Its hard to find motivation to go to school when you don’t know why you are going.

Which lead him to feel overwhelmed and then led to various types of buffering and avoiding.

What I’m not saying is, just go because you should or because someone else says you should or because you think you are supposed to or some other external reason. 

As I was talking with this young man the question I asked him was, why are you choosing to stay home? 

That took him back a pace, because it wasn’t that he was actively choosing it, it was that he was not choosing anything. 

Now, this wasn’t about him serving a mission but in a way it is the same conversation. 

Inaction is a choice, but often we don’t think of it that way. we think of it in terms of not yet choosing. 

But in reality we are choosing, we are choosing the status quo. 

What is happening with this young man is that he feels stuck, overwhelmed and generally unhappy. 

Some of you are thinking, yeah, because he isn’t choosing the right thing. He isn’t doing what is right and so he is not happy.

But think about what you are saying there. You are essentially saying that we don’t choose the thing that we are told we should do, go on a mission, go to college, then our happiness will be in jeopardy.

By that logic most of the world is simply unhappy and can’t have joy. 

The real reason for this sense of overwhelm is his thoughts, what he is making his choice of inaction mean and his lack of ownership.

We already talked about his thought and his feeling. In the conversation he also told me that if he doesn’t go to school that will mean that he can’t get a good job and provide for his future family.   That was what he was making it mean that he doesn’t have motivation.

But the flex point, the place where the rubber meets the road is the lack of ownership. 

The truth is, regardless of whether he goes on a mission or goes to college or whatever, unless he decides the path he wants to take, he will stay unsatisfied and continue to choose thoughts that overwhelm and hold him stuck. 

He didn’t go on a mission, not because he chose to do something else or chose to stay home, he didn’t go because he outlasted everyone else in the game of ‘when are you going to put your papers in’. he didn’t declare his choice, he simply chose inaction and the world passed him by.

Now he is in the same place with his schooling.  Somewhere in him he believes that going to college will benefit him, but he hasn’t made the choice to do it or not do it. He is simply waiting for the people around him to stop telling him what he should do. 

That’s a terrible strategy for life if you want to be satisfied with what you are doing.

And by the way, satisfied with what you are doing and the path your life is taking is part of my definition of joy.

when that is how you choose to act you are acting in the only way you know how to control the situation, simultaneously you are expecting life to come to you and put you on the path that you want with no personal buy in.

If this is you, let me give you 4 easy, simple things you can do to move forward.

Then I will tell you the story of my own struggle of whether or not to go on a mission. 

First: choose to decide knowing that it will be the right thing. 

Second: make the decision and stick with it for a set period of time – 1 week, 1 month, 1 year

Third: Tell 5 people that you love the most your decision and ask them to help you follow through and to support your decision for just 1 year. 

Fourth: be willing to be wrong

I walked into the church building not knowing if I wanted to be a missionary for my church.

I had grown up as a member of the church of jesus Christ of latter day saints and I was the 4th child in my family.

My oldest brother served as a missionary in Portugal. He had a distinguished career as the elder who fixed all the bicycles in the mission. He served faithfully and came home a better person.

My brother just older than me served in the boise Idaho mission and is a keen scriptorian. Discussing a gospel topic with him brings out the best in you and in your understanding of God and others around you.

My oldest sister who is the number two child in the family went on a mission after both of my brothers to chile in the Santiago south mission where she learned to love Chileans more than she loved any people before. 

But me, I had not known that I would serve a mission. In fact, I felt like my bad habits, including pornography use and masturbation were things that would mean that I couldn’t go on a mission.

I also didn’t know that I wanted to teach the gospel to complete strangers. Partly because I didn’t’ know if I thought it was the truth. 

I had done seminary, early morning bible study for highschoolers, held in our basement. Seminary teacher was my good friend David stuart.

I would roll out of bed at 5.59 and 59 seconds and go down in my pajamas so that I could have the chocolate milk and donuts that he would bring.

It wasn’t for the lessons, though he was a good teacher. I was not a good student.

It was because I respected him and knew that he loved me like a son.

I went to church with my family for my entire life. My dad is a staunch believer in doing the right thing and being right about it. So we never did anything halfway at our house. We were members of the church of jesus Christ of latter day saints and members of the c of j c of lds go to church every Sunday for 3 hours and then we come home and we eat and take naps. 

Not sure if that last part is really what everyone does but that is what we did.

My dad is also a staunch believer in naps.

Each week when we had youth night, we called it mutual or young mens night and sometimes we did combined activities with the young women, I would go. Mostly because I wanted to but sometimes because I was told I had to.

I didn’t always get along with my youth leaders. One brother in particular who’s name I have forgotten but some of my friends from that era will probably remind me after listening to this podcast, he was particularly difficult for me to get along with. 

I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me – at least I didn’t think so then. But he was, in reality a decent guy who was just doing his best to deal with a kid who was difficult to manage because I loved mischief.

I also had leaders Like my dear friend Shawn Stephenson. One of the greatest men I know. A good man, with a good heart, who could see past all the non-sense of a teen boy and just love him for who I was.

But none of that meant that I really wanted to serve as a missionary for my church because I didn’t know how, I wasn’t sure of the message, and I didn’t think I could toe the line as a good missionary. 

There are all the rules and all the people telling you what to do and really what not to do and I have never liked any of that sort of thing. I like to discover for myself the best way forward. If there is a rule that I don’t agree with, I will either skirt it or I will try to change it. I don’t believe in nonsense like, just do it this way because we say so. 

I believe in finding the best way, the right way the most efficient way forward. And I didn’t know if being a missionary was that way. 

I had even gone to the church college for second class students, which at the time was called Ricks College. A great place to get a decent education for rock bottom prices. But even there I was really bad at following the rules. 

In fact, had the school administrators known all the things that I had been up to in my short stay in alpine chalet, where I was roomates with my cousin, they surely would have kicked me out, because the rules are very strict. 

I was there, standing in the foyer of the church building where I had gone to church for the last 5 years and I didn’t know.

It was the proverbial fork in the road. I saw both directions. 

I would like to tell you that I had some grand religious experience and that revelation changed my life that day. 

I will tell you that I went into an empty classroom, shut the door and prayed to know if the church was true and whether I should go on a mission.

in that room that looks just like all the other rooms in every other church building in all of the world. I feel like I got the answer I needed that day,

And the path forward became clear to me. 

And it is the principle that I learned then that has made all the difference in my life. Moving forward is a choice. One that we can make prayerfully, but also logically, even when we skirt the rules a little and aren’t the kid we are supposed to be. 

I saw my future more easily, and while I would continue to make many mistakes over and over and over for many many many years, I could see the direction I wanted to go. 

Not the direction that I was supposed to go, because that was not how I did things. 

I came out of that room a changed person. I knew that I would serve a mission. I knew that I would figure it out as I went along. I knew that my path was one that I would choose because it was what I wanted.

And I am grateful for not knowing the end as I stood at the beginning. Because that meant that I could make it my own.

I was having a conversation with a fellow coach friend of mine

She had walked in on her 16-year-old son using pornography

We got to talking about how she reacted and how finally she said to him ”I can’t keep you safe”

The truth is that we can’t keep our loved ones from doing any of the buffering that they choose to engage in.

In fact, I had a dear friend who for the last decade and a half have a weekly habit of Viewing pornography.

He is an extraordinarily smart person who has all of the filters that you can imagine set up to keep him safe. And for a period of time his wife was the only one with access to the passwords required to get past those safeguards

I have never seen so much security or safeguards set up to keep someone from viewing pornography. It was elaborate, comprehensive and cumbersome. 

Except my friend was, as he would say, “constantly checking to see if I was safe by testing the limits of all the blockers on all the devices in the house.”

As someone who is somewhat technically savvy I felt blocked at every turn just to use certain websites that would normally be allowed, like google. 

This master planned internet access security would likely keep almost anyone safe. 

Not my friend. And for that matter, not anyone who really wanted to choose pornography.

The reality is that, regardless of what buffer we choose, food, porn, drugs, alcohol, social media, no one can keep us safe is we choose to seek it out.

This was true for me as well. 

My wife was the gate keeper of my phone’s access to pornography for a long time. 

I asked her to block the internet on my phone so I couldn’t get on at all. She was the only one with the password. 

It wasn’t able to keep pornography out of my life. It was only a temporary barrier to immediate access.

Until I found a way. Until my friend found a way. Until my friend’s son found a way. 

Each of the stories has the same thread of reality running through it. 

In each version there are ample blocks to immediate access. 

There are hurdles to be overcome and access is monitored by a central figure, a trusted wife or mother.

In each version, there are individuals who, morally, believe that looking at pornography is contrary to their overall happiness.

In each version, the pornography users are trying to lead a life as clean as possible.

And in each version, they are able to surpass the barriers to entry in an effort to satisfy their urge to view pornography.

Why is that?

Before we get into the why, I want to say something about these roadblocks that we construct to keep our families safe. They are good, they are necessary and they need to be built and maintained. But, as you will understand as we discuss the rest of the podcast, they will never be enough to keep your family 100% free of pornography.

So why? Why is it that we will go to such great lengths to access our drug of choice? Whether it is pornography or food or social media or video games?

Lower brain = eons of evolution = survival

So that is the challenge. That is what you are up against. 

So what can you do? As a wife, husband, father, mother, individual, child, grandparent faced with a world where you can no longer just shut out the influences of the outside world and there are an ever increasing number of ways to bring them in and have them at the dinner table.

1. First, you need to define what it means to be safe.
2. Ask yourself what you are shooting to achieve .
3. Create a plan and execute on it.
4. Involve experts
5.  Be flexible and prepared to adjust
6. Decide that any failures of the system are opportunities to learn
7. Learn from those opportunities
8. Second, understand what the people you want to help want
9. Ask your kids what they are aiming for in their world. 
10. Be willing to lose a battle.
11. Be capable of responding rather than reacting
12. Keep consequences natural and maintainable.
13. Third, have consistent and persistent conversations
14. Discuss expectations
15. Ask pointed questions
16. Be able to hear the truth without losing your cool
17. Discuss your learning opportunities with those in your circle.
18. Seek mentors that have been where you are and heed their advice as much as you can and is meaningful for your situation
19. Fourth, be open about your own struggles.
20. Each of us has burdens to bear – share yours with your family
21. Fifth, Trust in agency.
22. Believe that you are doing your best and so are all those around you.
23. Believe that whoever is using is not doing it to hurt you or themselves.
24. Also, believe that the user has agency and they are the only person who can exercise that agency

#theselfmasterypodcast

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The first thing you’re going to do to reduce buffering is to allow urges.

-      Allow vs eliminate

-      Allow vs indulge

-      Urges come no matter what

 The second thing you’re going to do to reduce buffering is to make all of your decisions involving your usual buffer with your higher brain.

-      Plan it

-      Schedule it

-      Discuss it

#theselfmasterypodcast

My wife was out of town, it had been a hard day at work, my business wasn't doing well, we were on the verge of financial ruin, I was lying awake in bed and I was going down that familiar path to pornography use.

Before I talk about how it all ended, let's talk about what pornography use is for most people.

There are addicts, those people who, without regard for the consequences and unable to function without it, use substances, including pornography to get through the day.

This is probably not you.

This is probably not your husband.

This is probably not your wife.

The usage of pornography in your household is probably what I call "Buffering".

A buffer is something that reduces friction between two items.

It lessens the impact.

It cushions the blow.

A buffer is something that helps us transition from one thing to another with as little discomfort as possible.

Most people don't know they are doing it, buffering.

A lot of us do it when we move from one normal situation to another.

We pick up our phone to see what is on social media rather than standing quietly on the subway.

You probably have an uncle who does it while standing in the grocery line by talking to absolutely anyone about anything, regardless of whether he knows the person or not.

When you grab a quick snack as you come home from work, rather than waiting for meal time.

Buffering is a normal part of everyday life for most people.

Why do we buffer?

We buffer because it seemingly makes things easier

For one reason or another, we are using the buffer to provide us with a quick chemical hit in our brains.

Serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine all things that make your brain "feel good", at least in the short term.

Looking at your phone gives you a "hit" that makes your brain feel a little better.

The problem with seeking short term hits is that you sometimes end up postponing discomfort now for discomfort later.

When you grab a quick snack every time you go from a meeting to your desk and then again when you go from your desk to a meeting will add up over time and probably make you obese.

When you buffer with pornography, in the short term, there are not a lot of overwhelmingly negative effects.

But over a long period of time, those effects are well documented.

In your thoughts about pornography, none of that really matters.

What matters is whether you decide that pornography use is ok for you and your family.

I suspect that you are reading this because, although you have a moral objection to pornography and your stated values say that pornography use is not ok within your household, there is still someone using it.

Buffering with pornography, like buffering with food, shopping, video games or any other form of self comfort is something that you can stop doing.

You just need the right set of tools.

One of those tools is understanding what buffering is, how it is changing your brain, and how you can see it coming before you start down the path of using.

Looking at pornography is one of the most popular buffers in the world.

It is readily available by the light of an ever present army of personal electronic devices.

When people buffer, they are using the buffer as a way to lessen the impact of discomfort.

Unfortunately, what often occurs is that the buffer becomes the default go to in order to temporarily avoid what is happening in the moment. A moment of discomfort becomes a binge on something else.

About half of our lives are uncomfortable.

Sometimes we feel discomfort because we are simply moving from one part of life to the next....

#theselfmasterypodcast

I started attending 12 step meetings in 2007.

I also went to meetings sanctioned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which I am a member.

Those Church sanctioned meetings were full of guys that were pretty similar to me. No one had committed a crime (I don't think) in pursuit of their sexual desires, but none of them seemed able to overcome their pornography use either.

So every week for a number of years I would sit in the meetings, I would say, “My name is Zach, I’m a porn addict, it has been x number of days since my last relapse.”

If you have ever been to these meetings, the people are earnest, the topic is serious, and the goal is the same for everyone.

12 step programs are the most recognized and ubiquitous type of sobriety focused recovery systems in the country. Judges assign people to attend them. Families swear by them.

I found a list here of 32 programs in addition to Alcohol Anonymous. Five of these had the word sex in them.

So why, according to Lance Dodes, MD and the Sober Truth, do these meetings only have a 5% success rate?

Now, granted, the Sober Truth is targeted specifically to Alcoholics Anonymous, but the “12 Step Program” has been taken and morphed to work with narcotics, pornography and food addictions. I don’t have data for those programs, but I think it is safe to say that the data is likely to be similar for similarly structured programs.

For me, I worked the 12 steps as best I could, in concert with my bishop and stake president, and had regular meetings with a counselor. All of the world was pulling for me and I was pulling in the direction I was told I should go.

Once I had been going to meetings for a few years, I thought, I should be able to go longer than I am. I should have more sobriety. I shouldn’t be relapsing like this.

I felt completely alone.

The truth was, that even though I, like hundreds of thousands, even millions of people before me, had gone through the steps, worked each of them to the best of my ability, apologized, asked for forgiveness, shared the program, done it all, I was still doing what addicts call white knuckling it.

I was still living in a place where I was not succeeding to my definition of success. Maybe I wasn’t using as much as I once had, but each time the urge came, I was still bearing through it with all the pain that comes from having a kidney stone. I was always just on the verge of going back.

Back to pornography, back to lying to my wife, back to hiding from my church leaders, back to buffering my life away with my drug of choice so I didn’t have to deal with my feelings.

Some of you might be saying in your minds, “oh, then you did it wrong” or “then you really weren’t sober” or some other version of blaming me for not getting it right because I wasn’t doing it right so I have no right to complain. That’s not an atypical response from those dealing with addiction and advocates of the 12 step program.

In fact, Dr Dodes talks about this in the Sober Truth. He quotes AA’s Big Book saying, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program…”

Dr. Dodes concluded, as anyone might, that “the program doesn’t fail; you fail.” Emphasis his.

So how could anyone who has gone through a 12 step program ever step forward and say, “um, sorry guys, this just isn’t helping me”?

The...

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So many addicts are hindered by their view of failure that it actually creates greater difficulty in overcoming their pornography use.

As a coach I teach my clients that thoughts are one of the biggest factors in how we feel and act, leading to the results we create.

When they view pornography, fall off plan, eat more than they thought they should, they view that as a failure and can often fall into a self-defeating spiral of feeling bad and buffering.

What people often miss is that if we can take a step back and observe our behavior without judgement and without shame, we find an opportunity to learn.

Mistakes are our greatest learning opportunities. Becoming a scientist of your behavior makes you an expert that can see patterns, pathways, and potential that you don’t see when you just feel bad.

I often ask, What does victory look like?

Having a winning record in sports means that you lose just under half of the time.

The greatest sluggers in baseball only hit the ball in a third of their at bats. If you took into account the number of actual swings during each at bat that percentage would go down.

Yet, when I hear that someone feels like a complete failure for looking at pornography for 15 minutes over the course of an entire week, I wonder, is that a losing record?

There are just over ten thousand minutes in a week. That means that 99.85% of the time the person who feels like they failed was not looking at pornography.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to justify a little sin by saying, “be good 99% of the time and that’s ok”.

What I am saying is, taking stock of where you actually are gives you a better chance of moving the dial to where you want it to be.

In this instance, as in so many that I see, a small, though measurable improvement, would make a huge difference in bringing a person out of their despair and into a place of confidence in their own capacity to choose what they want.

That 0.15% failure rate far outstrips the acceptable failure rate of electronics, which is between ten and fifteen percent.

But, what can be learned from it is invaluable.

You see, what you think makes a big difference. If you think, “I am a failure” then you very likely will be right.

If you think, “I can improve myself 0.15% and be 100% clear of pornography” then you are just as likely to be right.

Look at your failures with the right perspective and you will have a wealth of understanding to improve your record.

If you would like help, or know someone who does, have them sign up for a free mini session at zachspafford.com/workwithme. It will go a long way to changing the way they look at their struggle in overcoming pornography use.

Agency is a really important part of everyday life. Many of us think of it as our freedom of choice and in a lot of ways that’s right.

For individuals who believe they are addicted to some behavior or another the phrase, “I can’t stop” is a typical refrain.

I find it interesting and powerful that the phrase “I can’t stop” is the one we use. True addiction seems to include some compulsion, but we don’t say, “my body makes me do x” or some other phrase that indicates the external forces driving us to the end result.

In terms of the Gospel we often discuss how agency is an important part of our time here on Earth. To have agency we must have three key items:

1 – Knowledge of what is right and what is wrong

2 – Consequences for our actions

3 – The ability to choose our actions

The knowledge of what is right and wrong is something that most of us have a grasp on. We usually know that certain behaviors are not good and that others are.

Consequences for our actions can come in many forms. They may be natural consequences that come without any intervention, like our conscience holding us accountable to ourselves.

They may also come from external sources, such as the anger a spouse may show because we have violated their trust.

Both of these first two items usually occur without much difficulty. The third item on the list, the ability to choose, is the place where all the friction happens. Yes, obviously, making good decisions and making bad decisions is built into our freedom of choice. But where we are going wrong, especially when it comes to addictive behavior, is when we say, “I can’t”.

I have a lot of kids and my least favorite phrase out of their mouths is “I can’t”. They say it when it comes to cleaning, they say it when it comes to calling people on the phone, they even say it when it comes to interacting with other people outside of their comfort zone. At that moment, they are abdicating their agency by abdicating their ability to choose. They are creating, within their minds a mental block over which they believe they have no power. They are creating a mental construct where they are not granted the capacity to choose to do or not do something but that they are at the mercy of external forces. Think about it, when your kid says “I can’t clean my room” and you threaten them with not being able to go out and play until it is done, even if they then clean the room they have not “chosen” it. It has been forced on them, in their mind at least.

The same thing is happening with pornography use and other addictive behaviors. We say, “I can’t” because our lower brain is running a script that our higher brain, seems unable to interrupt without a great deal of will power.

That is partly because what we have done is set a habit that our lower brain controls, by giving into urges that feed one of our primal brain’s three main goals. Those goals are to conserve energy, seek pleasure and avoid pain. Then, in a type of automatic assembly line, our lower brain gets set on a path that is well worn, starting with an urge.

When we say, “I can’t stop”, our brain wants to be right. When we keep on the path of our addictive behavior, we begin to prove how right we are to our own brain. There is a lot of complicated science that bears this out in the field of epigenetics, but for the purpose of this article none of that really matters. What matters is taking back our agency.

Agency is a tricky thing. When we choose habits and behaviors that have negative consequences there comes a whittling away of our agency. Like the kid who cannot choose to play because he chose to not clean his room. But when we choose habits and behaviors that have positive impact our consequences are just as direct but leave us with more choices. None of this is probably new to you.

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