Becoming a thriving couple becoming individuals who are thriving on our own and hopefully you guys have been doing the same for yourselves. So we want to focus on. And and this is the second thing that you'll probably notice as we go forward. Is you know we're going to continue to focus on individuals who have struggled to overcome pornography. We are also going to integrate what was once separate coaching for individuals to couples and those in relationships. Who want to not just eliminate a pornography struggle from their lives. But really begin to move past that and begin to thrive and begin to create growth and intimacy in their most valuable relationships. Darcy and I have worked on that a lot ourselves we we found that. And and I've said this to so many people as they've come through and done a consult with me or just talked to us in random places at random times because people stop us and they're like hey you talk about porn all the time. Yeah, absolutely. Um and I've said this so many times it's when the couple. Really does the work together is when the relationship moves forward the most effectively and it's also when the person who struggles with pornography is able to move forward most effectively. It's when the person who doesn't struggle with pornography who may feel wounded and.

Oftentimes the word betrayed comes out and they are trying to find a new reality that they're proud of we we want to help both those people we want to help spouses. We want to help the person who struggles. So that's why we're changing. From from the self-mastery podcast to thrive beyond pornography. Additionally, we are going to change some of the things that we do in our coaching our coaching will now offer more to both spouses as they work together to move forward. Through and then beyond the struggles that have been keeping them from thriving. So if you've been listening to our podcast long enough. You've probably noticed that we don't just say hey remove pornography and everything's going to be amazing. And one of the things that we realized in our own journey was that just stopping the behavior of Zach turning to pornography did not necessarily create the thriving marriage that we wanted the intimacy and the connection. And the sexual relationship that we wanted. It was a great thing and it was exciting when he did stop turning for pornography but it it wasn't the answer to creating the thriving marriage that we wanted to yeah it didn't help heal.

Everything that needed to be healed and it didn't give us necessarily the tools to actually enjoy each other to not make it problematic when something went wrong and to you know, keep from creating long-term rifts in our in our relationship. So what's this look like for you. Well we're gonna keep producing all the same great content that we have. We're gonna continue to be here every single week. We're gonna work to integrate the relationships into each podcast that we produce and and that we offer sometimes you're gonna hear Darcy. Alone and sometimes you're gonna hear me alone and sometimes you're gonna hear us together. But our main message is going to be more focused on the marital relationship and thriving beyond pornography. Yeah absolutely and if you're part of our membership. You're gonna get. More access to the resources that we're going to create for spouses and of those who struggle with pornography to help if you're part of the membership you're going to get more great resources to for spouses. Of those who struggle with pornography to help you not just move through the difficult and often challenging work that you're going to be doing to overcome the difficulties. The pornography has contributed to your relationship but we're also going to help you by providing resources.

To help you begin to thrive in your marriage and as an individual beyond that pornography struggle if you've been listening for a while you might have gotten to a place where you're feeling like I've got a pretty good handle on my actual pornography struggle. But you might realize that. There's areas in your marriage that are still struggling despite your ability to have a relationship with pornography that's more in line with who you want to be and who you've essentially committed to be in your marriage. Yeah and I and I think this is really important because. You know I can't tell you how many clients have come to us from other coaches from other programs from other systems where they said you know I got a handle on pornography and then my marriage didn't get better and that made it so that pornography continued to be. Ah, resource for me to deal with my feelings to deal with what was wrong in my relationship to deal with all of the difficulties that you know we just don't have a lot of coping skills to manage through so this is about not just eliminating 1 particular issue from your life. But it's really about.

Moving beyond that issue and into a place where your marriage is so much better and if you're struggling with pornography if you're the person who struggles with pornography you know in our in your coaching with me and in coaching and the membership. Not only are we going to keep working to eliminate unwanted pornography. We're not gonna we're not gonna leave that by this wayside. But you will also begin to have resources that are going to help you thrive both in your marriage and as an individual beyond this pornography struggle. So next week we're going to have all new production values and we are going to start a 3 part series that will begin with our story. As you've never heard it before we're so looking forward to this Darcy and I have been working together to make this happen for a long time and we are really excited to offer this new direction to you all our listeners and we hope that you will share this with others so over the past. About 3 years well it it's been 3 years yeah it's been 3 years said where we we started this podcast mostly it was Zach doing this. It was mostly Zach's business and I was kind of like the sidekick hey Robin yeah to my and. I'm ready to step in and not just be a sidekick I want to be an active participant in our coaching practice. Um I'm really passionate about helping wives get to the place where they're not only just thriving there. But.

I'm really passionate about helping the wives get to a place where they're not just surviving every day but they're truly thriving in their lives and we've kind of made this shift because. That's what we're most passionate about we are most passionate about the marriage relationship. Um, and our upbringing. You know there's been a lot of discussions around pornography destroying marriages and we we. That's our goal like our goal is to help end that struggle and really create strong healthy marriages Even when Pornography is an issue. Yeah and when Pornography has been an issue.. There's a lot that goes on both in the in the minds of. The spouse and in the mind of the person who is struggling with pornography and we want to help go through that with you and create not just a marriage but a thriving happy marriage not just something to endure but something where you can have joy and passion. And compassion and love and Intimacy. So Our hope is that if you are someone who's struggling with pornography and you're married that this can be a podcast that you and your spouse can listen to together or maybe you listen to separately and then you come together and discuss what it is that you hear.

We want this to be a great resource for married couples who are struggling with pornography and if you're in that process and maybe your spouse isn't ready to have this conversation start doing this work yourself regardless of what side of it. You're on and as you do that work your spouse will begin to come along. We know that for a fact because that's often been the path that each of us has had to take separately one of us would move forward while the other one waited then the other one would move forward while the other one waited and in our experience over these last three years Zach has coached hundreds of men. And there's been a couple handfuls of the wives who have worked with me and we found that when both the husband and the wife are working together and both committed to this process. It goes a lot more smoothly and. Couple seem to get to a better place in the end. Yeah, they really do get to a better place and I think that is the key we want to get your marriage to the place where you are so proud of it and so pleased with your lives that you would never go back. And when you look back and you see what progress you've made. You can be super super proud of it and you could share it with everybody around you all right? My friends we're so looking forward to this journey with you. All we're grateful for your listenership. We hope.

We pray that you will share this with someone who needs it because it is so so much it it shows your love when you offer this to someone who does need it and we love to help as many people as we can. So thank you for listening. And we're looking forward to seeing you next week bye still

He was talking about how he had become bored while he was studying and the thought crossed his mind to google something that he could tell at the time was a distraction from what he would ideally choose.  He just wanted a little high, just wanted to kill time with something interesting, as he described it. I wanted something more subtle. 

Then he moved from there, out of curiosity googled, “do people walk around naked at home?”

So, he asked me, “Is there anything that I can do, even when my brain is being subtle, is there any tool that I can catch myself?” Knowing as he mentioned in his voice memo, I would suggest that he listen to my course video “the truth, the justification, and the lie”

Then he said, “Is there anything that I can do to get rid of this right away?”

One of the things I do in my individual coaching is deep dive into what is going on in the 30 or so minutes before we choose pornography. 

For this client, his brain is being very subtle as it offers him something that will be highly appealing at the moment.  

What is happening for him in that moment is that the habit running part of the brain has received a cue, that subtly begins the response process, in order to create a highly appealing reward.  In episode 69 I dive into how our brain can create new habits. 

One of the keys that this client and everyone who is working to eliminate a pornography habit from their life must do is create and practice new ways to respond to cues.  

I know that sounds overly simplistic, even if it is true.  

Those who join my membership and those who get individual coaching with me work on some very specific techniques to retrain their brains to respond to the cues we receive in order to avoid the rabbit hole altogether in the long run. 

Before we change our habits, we have to be able to recognize when our brain is being subtle and start identifying where we are playing into its desire to feel good now rather than deal with what’s uncomfortable. 

I think there are a few questions I might to ask that might help decipher between the wholesome passing of time and the start of the rabbit hole.

It’s also really important to ask these questions with the same curiosity that you are bringing to the questions that are working to pull you away from your values.  

1. Is what I am currently doing on the internet something that I would be comfortable and confident doing when I am at my best and living my values?
2. If I were to ask myself on my best day, considering my current relationship with pornography would I encourage myself to search away on the current topic or would I be able to see that I might be approaching a line of what I would feel was contrary to my values?
3. If I look into my past have there been similar instances like this that have lead me down a path that I am wanting to stay off?
4. If I were on the outside looking in would I be comfortable with the person I am currently being?

Thrive Beyond Pornography

If you are listening to this podcast, you are probably like everyone else on the planet and have chosen to do something that feels good right now at the expense of sleep. 

I know I’ve done it.  Whether it is watching one more episode of that binge-able new tv show until you look over and its 4 am or knowing you are so tired but you just keep scrolling social or crawling into bed, feeling ready to sleep then, your mind offers you that “you’re alone” and “you might as well get away for a bit.”

These are all real-life examples from my life, Darcy’s life, and the lives of my clients.  

And if you are human, as imagine there is an example like this in your life that makes you wonder, “Why did I choose that instead of sleep?”

For many of my clients, the hour before bed is a regular time when they choose pornography. 

Today we’re going to look at why that may be and give you some really clear, actionable tools to put you in a position to make the decisions that meet your values when confronted with the urge to view porn before bed. 

It can feel easier short term

• It’s easier to do than quieting our mind
• It’s easier than laying there restless
• It’s easier than tossing and turning
• It’s easier than transitioning to the next thing
• 
  

It can be engaging

• Curiosity is probably one of the key reasons our brain engages us in pornography viewing.  What does this person look like nude?  Who is this person?  How can I see more of this person?  
• Problem-solving is one of the most powerful things our brain does.  When it comes to viewing porn or binging screens late at night, the problem solving feedback here is twofold.  First, it is solving for anxiety by avoiding it.  Second, it is solving for our desire to know as much as we can.
• Learning is an outgrowth of curiosity and problem solving and our brain feels justified in learning everything it can about the world around it.  
•   
• 
  

It can feel great

• Dopamine, 
• Arousal
• Escape from responsibility
• 
  

It has been shown to help sleep quality

A study reported that 65% of participants who had an orgasm before going to bed reported better sleep quality. 

in order to attain high-quality sleep, our bodies should be able to enter a state of relaxation and calmness.

Cortisol is a stress hormone that prevents that. It’s often associated with our body’s fight or flight response, making our bodies feel more alert and restless.

Fortunately, research shows that masturbation and sexual intercourse inhibit this stress-inducing hormone's production.

Cortisol is also often associated with a slew of health problems, from high blood pressure and fatigue to decreased bone density, so it’s always ideal to have a low count of cortisol in your body.

• (https://primemensmedical.com/blog/does-masturbating-make-you-tired/#:~:text=But%20here%20comes%20the%20kicker,bed%20reported%20better%20sleep%20quality)

I’ll link to that information in the notes. 

I want to be clear, I’m not advocating viewing pornography and masturbation in order to improve your sleep.  What I’m offering is an understanding of why this habit may have formed and why you may be engaging in it as you do fall asleep. 

This is about realizing that you might be using orgasms to manage stress and cortisol levels. Fortunately, these are not the only ways to manage your stress, cortisol, or sleep patterns.  And just knowing what you are facing gives you a lot of power to make changes and change patterns. That’s why we have the membership, so you can figure out what is happening and resolve it, even if you can’t see it yourself at first.

I know that for me, there were many times that I lay awake at night, and the thought would come to me to view pornography so I could just get to sleep. It was probably most often on business trips, during which I rarely slept well.  But it did occur at home as well on nights when I found it tough to sleep and on nights when I didn’t find it difficult, but I just didn’t want to have to go through the process of falling asleep. 

I wish I had understood this earlier on in my life so I could arrange for my brain to create new ways of dealing with my stress and sleep struggles.

These reasons are some of the likely ones that I’ve come up with.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Feel free to email me at zach@zachspafford.com

So, what can we do to resolve these issues so we can deal with those late-night, pre-sleep urges to manage our discomfort through pornography?

Create a sleep Routine

The first thing that you’ll want to do is create a sleep routine.  

This is a matter of intentionally laying out how you would like to go to bed.   Creating a wind down that already incorporates some of the habits you have now and augmenting those habits with new items that will help you maintain good sleep structures for yourself.  

An example of this might look like, right now, I brush my teeth, get into bed, and scroll my phone until I fall asleep.  

A new sleep schedule might look like, brushing your teeth, putting your phone in another room, taking a few minutes to meditate and laying in bed until you fall asleep.  

At first this will be excruciating!  I know because I’ve done it.  But over time, as you do this, you’ll find that it starts to gear your mind up for sleep and falling asleep becomes easier and easier.  

It is also a simple process, so for those of you who have a sleep schedule that varies, the activities you put in place to gear your mind toward sleep are not dependent on a specific time of day.  

Get Regular Sleep

When we have a sleep routine that helps us engage our brain in a process of falling asleep each time that is really helpful  The second most helpful thing that we can do to lessen the impact of urges to view pornography at bed time or when we are sleepy is to get adequate sleep. 

If you are sleeping less than 7 hours per night, you are likely not getting adequate sleep and impairing your capacity to make good decisions. 

Create Intentional Joy 

One of the main reasons people choose to scroll endlessly, stay up late, or view pornography is that when the day is done, they want to take time for themselves when they have not been fulfilled.  

I know lots of moms, dads, students, and employees work tirelessly to do all the tasks they need to accomplish in a day, only to climb into bed feeling drained and frustrated that they will need to just get up and do it all again tomorrow. 

This is a key reason why we choose these ultimately unfulfilling but immediately gratifying activities. 

When we don’t really have anything to look forward to, it can create a vacuum where we feel like it is impossible to live a rich, full, and meaningful life.  

This kind of energy and sense about our lives can lead us to do what feels good and easy in the moment rather than living with purpose. 

If you want to reduce the number of times you scroll endlessly or choose pornography, create an intentional plan of how you can live more fully.  I know this can feel really difficult and there are a lot of reasons to put off doing this.  I promise you, if you will seek to do the fun things, the things that bring meaning into your life so that when your head hits the pillow, it can think about the joy you bring into your own life, you’ll be less likely to choose pornography.  

Small Gains, over time

None of these things will solve the whole problem.  And none of these things in isolation are the silver bullet.  Over time, by adding to your process incrementally, you will find that the compounding effect of each of these techniques will move mountains. 

Adding these techniques to other things that I’ve taught through the podcast and in the membership and individual coaching will help you reach your goals.  

Most importantly, this understanding and these skills will help you Overcome Pornography Forever. 

So today we are going to talk about two ways to ensure that you never fail again when it comes to overcoming pornography. 

A guy that I was working with told me the story of when he was doing a physical challenge of some sort, I think it was a multi-day race, and he stopped at a home that was part of the race support.  I heard this story a long time ago, so the details are a little fuzzy for me, but the message is clear.  

He goes into the house, they point him to a bedroom and since it’s the end of the day and he’s been racing all day, he goes in, faceplants into the bed and goes to sleep. 

Fast forward to the next morning and his wife, who, for some reason didn’t sleep in the room with him, comes in to wake him up.  As she does this, she notices that the wall above my friend’s head is a mural of a naked woman. 

I imagine some of you are right now thinking of your partner or yourself and wondering how much trouble that guy was in.  

Turns out he was in quite a bit of trouble. 

His wife was quite furious with him that he had slept in that room and let him have it. 

So my friend defends himself by saying that he had no idea, he had just come into the room, it was dark, he hadn’t even gotten undressed, that he had just slept in the room without even looking around because he was so tired from the race he had been running. 

This is key number one making your journey to overcoming pornography forever fail-proof:

Learn to recognize what is problematic and what is incidental. 

Too often, we become hyper-sensitive and hyper-focused on the ways in which pornography intersects our life and this intense management of the thing we want so badly to avoid creates a reality where we are more likely to notice it, and often, we beat ourselves up over it reinforcing a negative reality. 

Just the same way you notice every car on the road that looks like the one you just bought, your brain is constantly looking for ways to reinforce itself.  This happens in ways that are positive and valuable and it also happens in ways that reinforce negativity in our lives.  

In the case of my friend, the fact that there was a mural of a naked woman on the wall above his head was a non-issue until his wife made it into a big deal, reinforcing a number of negativities that seem inescapable.  

I don’t know what her thoughts were, but I imagine she felt like we can never get away from this, that no matter what, we always have to be diligent, and maybe any trauma that she experienced was being dredged up and relived in that moment.  

For him, it might have been that he will never be able to do enough to stay away from this, that even when he isn’t doing anything, he still gets in trouble because of his past behavior, and maybe even that his wife will never get over this and that it is a hopeless issue. 

Think about what you’ve felt over the time you’ve struggled, what would you have thought or felt.  I know that I would certainly have felt attacked for something I didn’t do and that I had no control over.  

If you want to overcome pornography forever, you need to be able to triage what has happened in order to understand if there is something more to do. 

In this case, there really wasn’t anything to be done.  My friend had no idea the mural existed, and as such, nothing happened and there was nothing to learn from the experience.  

This, in a lot of ways, could be summed up as stuff happens, and making it into a bigger deal than it needs to be won’t make it better. 

The second thing that you can do to never fail again as you overcome pornography forever is to learn from each time you choose pornography. 

I know that seems simple, but it’s not and I’ll tell you why. 

First, people do not like, in fact, they hate, confronting when they act incongruously to their values. 

Second, we like to move on quickly and put it behind us. 

Let’s talk about those two reasons why we don’t like learning from our mistakes really quickly.  

You’ve probably noticed that when you go all in on something and everyone disagrees with you that it is really hard to back down.  Well, the reason that is tough for most of us is that it makes us feel like we’ve been wrong and no one likes to be wrong.  When we don’t live our values, we see it as wrong and we don’t like admitting we’re wrong. Not to others and not to ourselves.  So that is what is going on when we work really hard not to confront our behaviors that don’t align with our values. 

The second reason I mentioned there, we like to move on quickly has to do with the first as well, but there is a nuance there.  Running away is a standard move in keeping yourself safe in unpleasant situations.  The move on from my own mistakes move is a lot like running away, but in a mental version. 

One of the key modules I have in the membership and in my individual coaching is called Learn Something, Move Forward. 

In there, I give you a step-by-step process, to help you focus in on what happened, why, and how to create a game plan that you can practice and execute the next time you are faced with the same or similar challenge. 

In fact, If you write me a review for the podcast and email me when you’ve done it, with a picture of the review, I’ll send you the video and workbook so you can use it for yourself.

Learning from our mistakes means that we never fail because we never give up and we got something of value out of the moment. 

Saying that you’ve failed is like telling a baby that is learning to walk that if they fall down, they are a failure.  

You wouldn’t do that.  You’d be a monster if you did that.  Just imagine standing over a baby and shouting at them that they are a horrible failure for falling down when they are trying to learn to walk. 

Now some of you might be listening and saying, “but my husband or I am not learning to walk, we’re making choices and choosing poorly.” 

To which I say, ok, you might be choosing poorly, but, based on your track record, does it look like you have all the necessary skills, tools, habits, and processes to make the choices that most closely align with your values in this space?  If you’re listening to the podcast, the answer might be yes, but only because you’ve been listening to this podcast and doing what I’ve taught you. 

More likely, especially if you are new, the answer is no.  This means, that much like a baby learning to walk, you are in the process of getting together the requisite skills, tools, habits, and processes to be successful.  

So, do yourself a favor, stop standing over yourself and yelling at your unskilled mind, telling it that it's a failure, and actually start learning from these interactions.  It will make your life much more successful.  

Learn to see what is problematic and what is incidental and learn from your mistakes.  

That is how you never fail ever again.  

At anything, by the way. 

Here is a story that we are all familiar with, that we all believe is true, and that we inflict on ourselves when we think about our pornography struggle.  

The story begins with us seeing the hero of the story at their lowest point.  They are being crushed by the world and see no light, no end to their suffering, and no way to rise above the challenges that are before them.  

In this struggle, they come across a single truth, weapon, or skill that opens possibilities to them, creates a path forward, and allows them to triumph. 

While I struggled with pornography, I found that this is how I thought of what I needed to overcome pornography forever. 

I thought, if Heavenly Father can just give me that one tool, that one skill, or just take this one thing away from me, then I would be immediately successful and clearly win this fight. 

I don’t know if you have thought of your porn struggle in this same way, but this was my mindset for a very long time when it came to pornography. 

I’m sure, that like Saul who saw Jesus on his travels and was renamed Paul, there are people for whom extraordinary shifts occur in moments and then, forevermore, that newly minted being of awesomeness is plagued no more by their trials. 

I know, for me, that this wasn’t the case.  

I found that really overcoming pornography forever was about three things. 

Regularly refocusing, habits around my urges, and experimenting with totally new ways of thinking. 

In the process of overcoming pornography, I found myself regularly discouraged when a setback occurred or a process that I had put in place seemed to fail. For a long time, this lead to an out-of-control spiral and frustrating despair. 

Each time made mistakes, I had to dig out of that hole and refocus and redouble my efforts.  

The clear lesson for me around this is, that you don’t have to wait until you make a mistake to refocus.  

If you are working to overcome pornography, setting regular checkpoints, working with a coach, or regularly evaluating your progress, process, and potential is something you can set up before you make mistakes. Adding key touchpoints to help you evaluate and adjust will yield high levels of self-awareness and pivot points that allow you to move toward your values.   

These regular refocus sessions, whether you are doing them on your own or with a coach can help you clarify where you stand, what you are doing well, and if there is an area that you might want to improve.  

If you are thinking about overcoming pornography forever from a strategic perspective, checking in with what’s working and setting time to evaluate it is a perfect start to getting you where you want to go. 

You might have a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly refocus session set on your calendar where you celebrate your wins and see how you want to focus your energy for the next period. 

Speaking of how to focus your energy, one of the key components that you’ll need to focus on is how you are habitually dealing with urges.  

Willpower is a regular go-to when we engage with our brain around urges.  

But if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you know that willpower fades and is never enough to totally eliminate pornography from your life. 

Creating and practicing new ways to deal with urges seems really simple, I know.  When it comes to the things you are most effective at in your life, you have created habitual ways to engage with them. 

I’m reminded of Phil Mickelson and Michael Jordan and Tom Brady.  

Each of them has risen to the height of their sport.  But how?

By doing the same things, over and over and over and over until it was habitual, not reactionary. 

My favorite example of this is the well know “Flu Game” during which Michael Jordan, struggling with what he speculates was food poisoning from the pizza that he ate the night before, put up an astounding 38 of the 90 points his team scored that night. 

Michael performed as well as he did because he was able to engage habits that he had built through countless hours of practice.  

When urges confront us in our day-to-day life, the way we react to them makes all the difference.  

If the way we react to them comes from a place of habitual performance, honed through dedicated practice, our urges become less about a struggle and more about just letting our habits take over and guide us to success. 

You can learn all the right habits in the Self Mastery Membership or through individual coaching.  Just sign up for a free consult at https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithzach  

Figuring out the right habits and how to practice them the way Jordan did free throws or Mickelson does putts isn’t something you have to do alone.  

Lastly, experiment with totally new ways of thinking. 

This is really experimenting with totally new ways of thinking and doing.  But you have to think it before you do it.  

A lot of us are doing the same things, over and over but not getting the results that we want.  So, like the idea before, we are letting a habit take over our process.  The question you need to be asking is, is this process actually resolving my issue, or does it keep leading me back to results I don’t want?

Let me point out that there is a difference between not being successful because of ineffective habits, skills, ideas, or actions and not being successful because you have not yet integrated the right habit fully enough to be effective.  

A good way to know if you haven’t yet integrated the right habit is to see what the conventional wisdom is on that habit and ask if that technique is working for others.  You can also ask yourself, does this process make sense in the totality of my understanding and has it yielded any sort of value?  

When I worked through the 12 steps, there were some things that just didn’t make sense to me.  One really big one was how you are asked to admit that you are powerless.  

That idea really struck me as not terribly helpful in the totality of what I was trying to accomplish.  How could I take responsibility for my actions and start making different decisions if I was powerless against an external force? That’s the way I thought of it, but that may not be the way you think about it. 

And really this step is about that very thing, experimenting with new ways of thinking and see if they make sense to you. 

See if the idea, the process, or the mechanics of what you have been thinking make more or less sense. See if a new, different, or off-the-wall idea that you hadn’t considered can fill a gap in your process.  

Also, see if someone else is being successful with new ideas.  Try them.  See if you can become more successful than you have been up to this point with those ideas. 

When I worked through my own struggle, I often had to throw out old ways of thinking and create new ones. 

The old adage that if you want different results, you have to try different things is also true of the way we think and feel.  

Putting our thoughts, feelings, and actions together differently than we ever have before will yield different results. 

As you work through your own struggle and start down the path of Regularly refocusing, creating new habits around your urges, and experimenting with totally new ways of thinking you don’t have to do it alone or ask people who have never done the work.  You can work with a coach who has traveled that path himself and helped hundreds of men and women do the same. 

I’m here for you.  

When you’re ready, make an appointment at zachspafford.com/workwithzach and I’ll walk you through this process personally. 

Pornography is a participation trophy. 

On the podcast we don’t do a lot of porn bashing, mostly because when people come to listen I feel like they already have a really keen sense of shame and know full well that watching porn is not their ideal way of engaging in life. 

And a concept that has been bubbling around in my head for a while is how effective pornography is at engaging people.  

Let me tell you what I mean.  

First off, I think its really important to recognize that validation is one of the most highly sought after interactions a lot of us chase.  We look to others to validate our views, this is why we see the ever narrowing of our social media spheres of influence.  We want the news programs that we watch to validate our sense of the world.  We want our politicians to validate our sense of fairness or that the other side is doing us wrong.  

Closer to home, we want our partner to validate the view we have of ourselves as a good spouse, a good parent, and a good lover.  Why else would you ask, “How was it?” after dinner or dessert?  

We want validation for a number of reasons, most important among them, it feels good.  

This is part of the reason why, when we ask our spouse if they want to make love and they say no, it can be some of the most disorganizing, frustrating, and invalidating words our spouse can say. 

When they say no, however they say no, it can feel personal, causing us to worry and feel like we aren’t enough, even that our spouse has rejected us.  

So many of us feel even worse because we might have put in all kinds of effort to make the rejection less likely by cleaning the house, putting the kids to bed, or whatever we think might keep our spouse from being able to say, “Yes.”

This desire for validation, especially the validation that I’m ok or I’m enough then shows up sometimes as neediness.  I have a client who would view pornography and then after he viewed pornography and told his wife, he would mope and pout until she would have sex with him.  He connected her having sex with him as a re-validation of himself into a person that was worthy of participating in their life.  

As I’ve thought about pornography and it’s capacity to draw people in, although this is not the only reason people view porn, it seems to me that one really clear reason why people choose pornography is that it always validates them. 

Think about it.  No one ever goes to google and types in a search only to have the system say, “Oh, not tonight, I’m just not in the mood”.

Pornography is, especially in today’s day and age, always on.  It always says, “Yes”. It is willing to try out anything you might want to try.  It like the things you like.  It believes in what you believe.  It wants to please you.  The face it makes is always one of desire for you.  

You see, porn is like the participation trophy of emotional and sexual interaction.  

You didn’t really earn it, but you got it anyway.  

The difficult reality is, when we are willing to face up to who we want to really be, most of us don’t want participation trophies.  

Most of us want our lives to be a mix of real desire and honest growth.  

Neither of which come at a command, but are earned with effort, over time. 

Then when we got married and my pornography problem kept going, I used to think that if we had sex that day, I wouldn’t turn to pornography.  

Then if we had sex that day and I chose pornography, I used to think that our sex life needed to be more interesting before my porn struggle would end. 

There are a lot of reasons why people choose pornography when they are morally opposed to it.  Many of those reasons stem from trying to resolve an issue that is difficult or painful.  Often they either do not have the tools to resolve these issues or that they are unskilled or unpracticed at using the tools they do have. 

WIthin the Self Mastery Membership we dive deep into the tools you need as well as help you hone those tools to make them effective in your day to day life. 

When I believed that sex would solve my pornography problem, I failed myself by believing that the answer to my struggle was outside me. 

I believed that Darcy would solve my problems.  I believed that God would make me stop somehow. (Agency tells us He won’t) I believed that if I had my needs met often enough and well enough that I simply wouldn’t have more desire than to be with my wife.  

The idea that external forces will help us resolve our pornography problems is the same idea that keeps us from solving our pornography problems.  

The more we believe that someone or something outside of us has power to solve for how we feel or what we need, the more we will believe that pornography can help us solve for how we feel or what we need.  

The idea that Darcy could make it so I wouldn’t want porn is the same concept as porn could make it so I wouldn’t struggle with my difficult or painful issues.  

When Darcy can make the bad of porn go away, porn can make the bad of loneliness go away. 

Placing our ownership of what is going on for us outside of us, in the hands of a person, a substance, an electronic dopamine machine like video games, or in pornography only aleviates the struggle for a short time.  Then, we have to face up to both our choices and our previously unaddressed difficulties. 

So, if sex won’t solve your porn problem, what will?

I’ll give you a one word answer that you may not want to hear: YOU

You are the only person who can solve for how you feel, why you choose porn, and learn the skills you need to practice in order to leave it behind. 

I can teach you those skills, you can learn them through individual coaching or in the membership, but you have to be the one who takes the steps to make it happen. 

Heavenly Father could create the perfect conditions that would make your life perfectly simple and easy to live, but you have to be the one who exercises your agency around pornography. 

Your wife can have sex with you every day, three times a day, she can be understanding of your issue and not make you feel shame or guilt when you choose porn, she can be emotionally available and alway meet your “needs”, but you have to be the one who owns your emotions, experiences your frustrations, and resolves them internally before they become so overwhelming that you feel like you have to escape them.   

This is why more sex won’t solve your porn problem.  

You have to hold on to yourself and create the sense within yourself that you are capable of solving the problem, learn the skills and utilize them, and stop relying on externals to manage you.  

This is why I don’t encourage accountability partners, too often we think of them as external checks on internal choices.  (they can be effective if used as a way to become known more fully)  This is why I don’t recommend internet or device filters for adults.  Too often we use them as external puzzles to be circumvented.  This is why, no matter how much sex you get, it will not keep you from looking at porn.  

If externals, like sex, had the power to keep you from choosing porn, there would be a lot less people choosing porn.

Here’s what you do about it instead. 

First, take a look at all the reasons you choose porn.  

Get familiar with them, understand how they keep coming up, and get open feedback on them from those close to you who are willing to honestly discuss them with you. 

For me, stress was a huge struggle.  Talking about my stress with Darcy helped me understand where it was coming from, how I was contributing to it, and how often I would need to deal with it. 

Second, learn key strategies, skills, techniques, and processes that you need to become proficient in to mitigate, eliminate, or endure those reasons that you choose porn.  

I often say this during my initial coaching sessions with people. “I’m going to teach you how to get good at feeling bad”.  If you want to resolve your struggle with pornography, feeling good is not going to help you.  Desire to feel good is the reason you’re probably turning to pornography.  

If you want to talk to me about how you can get good at this, set up a free call with me by going to zachspafford.com/workwithme and scroll all the way to the bottom.  It will be the best 30 minutes you spend on pornography ever.  

Learning to get good at feeling bad, I realize is a terrible sales pitch.  But if rings true because if we want to have joy in our lives as Lehi described in 2 Nephi 2:25 we need to get good at dealing with opposition to joy in our lives as Lehi indicates just 13 verses earlier in that same chapter.  

The third and final thing that you need to do is practice.  

Malcolm Gladwell is an economist and writer who is famous for coining the term, the 10,000 hour rule. 

If you want to become excellent at something, whether it is sports or business, singing or the piano, there is a process to getting there that requires about 10,000 hours.  

Please don’t let that number discourage you. It’s likely that most of the hours you need are already racked up and waiting to be leveraged.   

You can start today by devising a path, create a plan of doable steps that you can execute on but that expand your capacity.  Some of the things you need to do are already things that you do, but that need to be honed.  Some of the things you need to do you already know about and need to be learned. Some of the things you need to do are things that you will discover you didn’t even know anything about but that will be key to your longterm success. 

I can promise you this.  If you will 

1. Take a look at all the reasons you choose porn.  
2. Learn key strategies, skills, techniques, and processes that you need
3. Practice resolving why you choose porn through what you’ve learned

It will change the trajectory of the struggle you’ve been engaged in and help you finally overcome pornography forever.  

If you don’t know or don’t see the reasons you choose porn, please set up some time to meet with me.  I will help you figure this out.  

As we say in the coaching world, it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle and you are no exception.  Sometimes, we need someone who is skilled at seeing things we can’t see and who will teach us how to observe and address it. 

Looking honestly at yourself

• Could you honestly commit to eliminating your coping mechanism immediately 
• Instead of looking to give you a right answer, because that answer looks like it will give you peace of mind, it is about being able to 
• Instead of expecting your partner to give you the right answer because it might make you feel better in the moment
• Become willing to hear the honest answer without losing yourself and becoming disregulated. 

Creating realistic expectations reduces the possibilities that you are setting your partner up to make lying to you his safest move

Don’t make their behavior about you - 

• This is difficult and they do impact you
• It may hurt when your partner doesn’t live up to your values and your shared values
• 
  

Be willing to be wrong

• Reevaluating your understanding of pornography 
• Being willing to address where you are not being or have not been kind in the relationship
• Become willing to see how you’ve been untrustworthy in the relationship.  
• It might be good sense for your partner to not share what is going on for them around pornography 
• What you do when you learn the truths and realities of your spouses struggle impacts their decisions, sense of self, and their sense of the relationship
• This is not an excuse for their choices, it is an awareness of your impact on them as you are becoming aware of their impact on you. 

Become willing to hear the truth of where your spouse is in their journey

• Not internalize it to mean anything about you
• Be capable of choosing to be near your partner even when that truth is not what you want to hear

You become more trustworthy, which sets up a framework where openness and honesty are not simply expected but more likely.  Because your partner becomes more aware of your capacity to hear their open, honest reality.  And you become more capable of confronting their reality without needing to cater to their struggles or enfold into their anxiety.  

Here is the truth of it. You can not make your wife trust you again. You do not have control over if your wife trusts you. All you can do is be someone who she can trust. Don't commit to things you can for sure follow through on. Be honest. Each of these revolves around an honest presentation of yourself, but probably not in ways that you have ever thought of before.  

1. Let go of the outcomes
2. A lot of us have been working to manage our partner’s feelings 
3. This is something that is trackable and leads to a fundamentally dishonest way of interacting
4. Client - when I speak with my wife, I’m often looking to figure out a way to present my side in a way that is least likely to have her blow up or get upset
5. 
   
6. Say “no” to your spouse when it is your true position
7. Be willing to tell your partner “no” rather than trying to find the answer that will keep the peace, make her happy, or keep you from getting in trouble.
8. example
9. Darcy: Your partner knows when you’re telling them what they want to hear. 
10. They may like it in the moment, but it’s a hollow victory
11. Our kids do this as well, they tell us the answer they think we want to hear. 
12. Clean rooms
13. Be more circumspect about what you tell your partner. 
14. Don’t just say yes, because you think it’s what your partner wants
15.  Be careful in agreeing to a plan of action because you feel like you are in a one-down position of having messed up. 
16. Becoming willing to disappoint your partner if it is the more honest position
17. If your partner asks you to never look at porn again saying “yes” even if that’s what you want to say, might undermine the trust in the relationship. example
18. 
    
19. When we say “no” from an honest position or disagree we are letting go of the outcome and offering our partner an opportunity to hear us being real with them.  
20. They are also going to be presented with an opportunity to grow through the process
21. 
    
22. 
    
23. Integrate your private self with your presented self
24. Say what you are doing and do what you say. 
25. For instance, if you say you’re leaving work at 5 o’clock then you do so.  
26. This is like doing what you say, but I want to emphasize the cost 
27. Often we can rationalize not doing it. 
28. But, can you do it regardless of the ratio nalization.
29. Become committed and take action in the direction of your values.

1. be willing to reevaluate, renavigate, and restate your position
2. 
   
3. Example
4. 
   
5. Hear what your partner is saying and make the argument for them about your behavior
6. This is a process of self-confrontation and winning strategies in your arguments
7. Self-confrontation - episode 127 
8. Hearing what they have to say and understanding their perspective on how you are showing up
9. Being willing to see your behavior objectively and without the need to defend it. 
10. I feel valued
11. We can work together

His book, No More Mr. Nice Guy is a guide to men who have struggled to get what they want in “love, sex, and life”. 

I’d like to share one of the key concepts from this book and a caution as you begin to integrate the ideas the book offers you. 

First, what is a “Nice Guy” or as Dr. Glover nice guy syndrome?  It is essentially this.  Nice guys are men who, at the expense of their own happiness and from a position of hiding real and important parts about themselves seek the approval of others. 

They do this at work, they do this in their church callings, and they do this in their personal lives, particularly as part of their marriages.  

What this looks like is often saying, “yes” to things that they are not fully on board for, in an effort to gain the approval of those around them.  Their boss, those they attend church with, and especially their spouses.  

This may not sound problematic, as being a person who serves in their community is often a well-regarded thing.  But this overwhelming need to seek the approval of others at the expense of one’s own honestly held position can create a problem called covert contracts.  

Covert contracts are actions that we take in order to obligate others to take actions that validate us without their consent.  An example of this might look like a spouse doing all the right things around the house, doing the dishes, cleaning up the house, getting the kids to bed and so on, in order to get their partner to have no possible excuse to not have sex with them.  

At it’s core, a covert contract is a manipulation of those around you, in particular our spouses, into giving you validation through things like sex in a quid pro quo that the other party is not fully agreed to.  

For some of you listening to this, you might be saying, “Well, how else am I supposed to get my partner to have sex with me, she always has some reason why not to, unless I maneuver her into feeling like she has to.”

When we create these covert obligations, in the long run, we end up alienating our partners, and get less of the things we want, including intimacy and sex.  We are essentially manipulating our partners for coerced validation at the expense of self-validation and their desire for us. 

What I find here is that many men feel like getting some sex, even bad, servicing-based sex, is better than no sex.  

What we fail to see, from that perspective is, that the servicing sex that we end up getting isn’t fulfilling, but we can control, to some degree, when we get it.  

That control is the thing that you and your partner will eventually push back against and may create damage to your relationship that is difficult to reconcile in the long run.  

By the way, both men and women do this.  My mom once told me that if she wanted something from my dad, she would have sex with him and then ask him about whatever she wanted.  He was much more likely to give in to her position if she did that.  

So, how do we stop creating covert contracts?  

I’m going to give you two things that you can do.  Part of the process of leaving behind covert contracts is letting go of the outcome. The other part is becoming more desirable.  

Let’s start with being more desirable.   

Most of us, if we take a few moments to examine our lives, can see a number of things that we would like to change or improve about ourselves.   Those of us who engage or have engaged in covert contracts are often, fundamentally dishonest about what is real and truly going on for us internally.  Meaning, we don’t really tell our partner what is true, we often tell them what we think we want them to hear.  

This is a difficult issue for many of us. Because we can get things from others if we tell them what they want to hear.  We can get a lot of validation and gratification at very little immediate cost if we withhold our true position on issues that are big and small.  The problem with this is that for your partner to desire you, to really want to create intimacy and have the kind of desire for you that we all really want, we have to be willing to disappoint them and suffer rejection from them.  

What do I mean?  If we just go along with our partner on everything they ever want and we never disagree with them and we never tell them what we really want, especially if the thing we want is directly contrary to the thing they want, they will not trust us and they will likely get sick of us.  Have you ever had a friend who was so hard up for friendship that they never had an idea of their own, they just wanted to follow you around and do whatever you wanted to do?  Are you that friend?  It’s fun for a while because that person is easy to get along with, but eventually, you get tired of them and they become a bother because they don’t bring anything to the relationship.  They are like water in a cup, they just take whatever shape you are and that doesn’t push you or contribute.  It’s boring.  

I’m sure you’ve also had friends who push you and make you think and help you grow. But sometimes they believe differently than you do, and you tolerate that because they contribute to your life in meaningful ways.  

It’s easier to do that with your friends than it is to do it with your spouse.  

But being able to disappoint your spouse, in meaningful ways and for well-considered beliefs is more important than you might think.  

You have heard me talk about this before on the podcast, but I don’t like having pets very much.  I tolerate it, but if it were up to me we wouldn’t have pets.  Darcy likes them and she got them.  She was willing to disappoint me because she has a sincerely held desire to have cats.  

Now there are limits and you have to feel these out and work through them.  It isn’t one of those things where you go and create disappointments because you stop being overly nice and you decide to become mean or intransigent and unwilling to compromise.  It is a process of feeling your way through it.  Being solid in the person you are, while being willing to choose closeness with your partner. 

One thing that I did that changed the dynamic of our sexual relationship was I stopped saying yes to duty sex or servicing sex.  That was something that was really difficult and disappointing for both Darcy and me.  

You might think that it wouldn’t be difficult for Darcy but it really was.  One reason that it was difficult was that she could no longer utilize sex as a way to control me.  That’s right, I said, Darcy would sometimes use sex to get me to do things that she wanted done.  So, when I would say no to sex meant to service or manage me, even when it was sincerely offered, it was disappointing for Darcy because it took a tool out of her toolbox.  It also required her to reflect more earnestly on how and why she wanted to engage intimately and sexually.  

For my part, it was disappointing because I realized that she didn’t really want me, she only wanted to control me and help me control myself.  But, if you have a pornography struggle, you know that your partner can’t control you.  And, significantly, she can’t help you control yourself.  

Being willing to disappoint your partner by being open about what you really want is a muscle that, if exercised regularly, will become one of your most powerful allies in creating real intimacy and desire in your partner.  

When I stopped saying yes to sex from a servicing frame, which always felt wrong, I started to show and say what I really wanted.  I started to become willing to wait for Darcy’s desire to come up and for her to choose me, not just service me.  

There were disappointed moments for both of us on that journey.  In the beginning, Darcy didn't believe me when I would say, “If you're not into it, I’d rather do it another time.”

In the years since I started doing that, Darcy’s desire for me has become a driver of our intimacy in ways that make me so happy.   

To be clear, this is different than the immature position that we often see in pop culture and movies where playing hard to get will eventually reel your partner in until they are doing everything you want.  That is just the Mean Guy version of the same manipulative tactics.   Getting your partner to do what you want by ignoring them, pushing them away, and making them work for your attention is just as manipulative as covert contracts.  In both cases, your partner will tire of the games and want to distance themselves from you eventually. 

The second way that we can begin eliminating covert contracts also has to do with making yourself more desirable, but by letting go of the outcomes. 

Letting go of the outcomes means choosing closeness with your spouse and not needing them to respond in a certain or specific way.  

The interesting thing about this is that you might end up doing the same things, like washing the dishes, cleaning the house, and putting the kids to bed.  All things that might have been done previously to lift burdens from our partner’s life in an effort to obligate a specific response in the bedroom.  Now, however, you do them without seeking that specific response or expecting to be rewarded for your efforts.  You do them because you are a partner with your spouse, you want them done, or you have committed to doing them.  

Being able to let go of the outcomes is about changing the meaning behind your actions, possibly more than it may be about changing your specific actions.  

What you do is important.  Why you do it is key.  

Back and foot rubs are a good example of this in my life.  If I wanted sex, I would make sure that I gave Darcy foot rubs in the morning and back rubs in the evening.  It was essential to our sex life and it was kind of a currency. It meant that if I did enough foot or back rubs that I would get sex. So, I would, resentfully many times, massage her working up enough credit to get what I wanted.  

While I still rub Darcy’s feet and back, I do it less often and only when I want to because I want to. The why of my actions has stopped being about getting rewarded and is now, in this area at least, only about my desire to give to her. 

In coming at it from a place where I’m not working toward a specific outcome, I place myself in a position to be desired for who I am, not what I do for others.  My actions come from a place of self-validated choice to choose my partner rather than seeking for her to validate me and service my wants. 

It’s subtle and, just like in working through covert contracts from a position of being more desirable, we’ll need to work through it and feel our way.  

A good question to ask yourself is, “What am I trying to get out of doing this?” If the answer is anything other than the satisfaction of doing it because I want to or I choose to, then you might want to take a step back, reevaluate, and maybe choose not to do it, or choose to do it but know that you’ll need to work through the emotions and difficulty of eliminating any expectation from your spouse to validate you for doing it.  

It made me realize that one weekend's worth of work is often what we think lasting change looks like.  But in truth it is more like this: 

Last year we bought a house that we love, right next to the house that we used to own here in St George. 

When we bought it, we had some pretty big ideas about what we wanted to do.  We had a vision of what this property would look like when we had finished.  

We got to work, I cut down 20 or so cedar trees that were shedding harsh, thorny bits all over the yard.  We took out about 10 evergreen bushes that were both ugly and prickly.  We built a wall so our yard would extend 5 to 10 more feet in the back. I started to lay a stone path in the backyard so we could have a nice comfortable place for the kids to play.  

Then a back injury I received while playing football on Thanksgiving 2019 flared up and everything stopped. 

During that period, the yard didn’t change much, but my concept of what the yard needed to look like and how I wanted it to change did.  As I waited for my back to strengthen and heal, I kept thinking about how I wanted things to look in the yard.  

Things that I thought were certain changed and morphed and became something completely different.  As that evolution happened, I found that there were some new and awesome things that I loved about the way I wanted to do the yard.  These were things I didn’t even have any idea about when I started the process of updating the yard.  

While the new yard is far from complete, It is well on it’s way.  

For many of you, the process of overcoming pornography will be the same.  

As you listen to these podcasts and work on the things that you learn, you’ll have an idea of what it means to execute that skill.  Some of you will ask questions about it during open coaching in the Self Mastery Membership, others of you will discuss it with your partner, and some of you will think it through and just do it.  

As you go through episodes, ideas that you have will fade and you’ll move on to new concepts, adding them to your mind and letting them become a dominant force as you work to eliminate this unwanted habit.  

You may even stop listening for a while, stop doing the work, and stop trying the skills because a particularly difficult setback has made it tough to continue.   

All of that is ok.  What I hope you will remember is that, if you will come back to it when you’re ready, you will keep growing, keep succeeding, and eventually overcome pornography forever. 

That may sound simple or even naive, but it is the way I’ve seen things work for so many men and women.  They learn, they grow, they stop, they restart, and they do it again.  

Overcoming pornography is doable.  I hope you see it.  

The man I was coaching said, “when That guy asked that question, it was as if he had been reading my mind.”

This is the amazingness that comes from being part of the membership. You get to hear the questions you didn’t even know how to ask, asked for you!

This moment was when I decided that I needed to answer that question for you all, here on the podcast.

As part of the coaching I do, often we talk about shame and how to manage and deal with it.  

The question we’re talking about was part of this discussion about minimizing shame in our lives. 

The question was, “what is a good way to not let myself feel so much shame when I act on my urges?”

First off, let’s talk about why we feel shame. 

Knowing what shame is gives us the ammunition we need to actually end it.  

Shame is often contrasted with guilt.  

The thing about guilt is that it can be a powerful catalyst for change.  

Guilt is about learning that what you have done is not what you would like to have done, had you been able to.  

I’ve heard it said this way and this definition works for me.  

Guilt comes when I understand that what I’ve done is not right for me. 

Guilt comes when I’ve acted incorrectly, based on my own sense of right and wrong and according to my agency within the framework of truths I hold. 

As brene brown put it, guilt is I did something bad. 

Shame on the other hand, is not about a behavior, but about our sense of who we are.  

Shame comes when when I believe that what I’ve done makes me bad, irredeemable and unacceptable. 

Shame comes when I’ve acted contrary to my framework of truth knowing that I’m discarding my own sense of what is right and wrong and feel incapable of exercising my own agency. 

Again, going back to brene brown, Shame is, I am bad. 

So “What is a good way to not let myself feel so much shame when I act on my urges?” 

Here are 3 things that you need to do to eliminate shame when you have acted on urges that don’t fit your idea of who you want to be. 

First, you need to decide that this is an opportunity to learn

Learn something move forward.

Second thing you’ll need to eliminate shame when you’ve acted on your urges is talk to someone you trust.  

-       Create intimacy

-       Practice openness.  

-       

Third thing, understand that you are enough.

-       Atonement

-       

Each of these things will help you eliminate shame and understand that you are not bad. 

Hopefully they will serve to strengthen your capacity to exercise your agency, accept responsibility for your actions and shape the person you want to be. 

Before I forget, this week I have a free masterclass set up for you on Wednesday at 7:30 PM MT.  We are going to be learning how to drop the porn struggle.  Be sure to register at zachspafford.com/freecall

How to become an expert on yourself and why it matters if you want to leave pornography behind 

When I am talking with clients and reflecting back on my own experiences there are a few common themes I see.

How much time do you spend focusing on things outside of you trying to control your results?

How might things change if you stopped focusing on things outside of yourself and instead turn your focus inward on what you do have control over?

Part of the reason that we all struggle with anxiety, whether it is pornography related or not, is that there is a near-universal sense among us that something outside of us is causing our pain.  

When we struggle, especially when that struggle involves other people, we tend to label them as the problem.  While it is true that, by virtue of being a human, others, especially our spouses, can be part of the problem, it is much more important to recognize our own role in our anxieties and why they exist.  

We say things like, “if only my wife would have sex with me more.”  Or, “I wish Sharon in accounting would dress more modestly.”

What is happening is that our anxiety around being a good person, finds a place outside of us to focus and makes that the problem.  Once that occurs, we no longer own our agency, we’ve given it away, often to someone who has no idea they have it.  

While this isn’t the only reason people choose pornography or struggle when their spouse does, it is one that I want to talk about today.

I also want to give you one simple exercise that you can use to begin leaving behind your external focus and refocus on yourself as the owner and agent of your own happiness. 

When we are anxious, there are basically four responses that are available to us.  You’re probably familiar with fight and flight, but there is also freeze and worry.  

Worry is probably the one that comes up most often when we are talking about anxiety around pornography.  For men and women who choose pornography, we are worrying about how we are going to keep from viewing or choosing pornography.  For women and men who are supporting someone who chooses pornography, they are worrying about how they can keep their partner from choosing pornography in the future.  

This endless cycle of worry and imagining new worries is keeping us from engaging directly with actual, reality based struggles that we are facing.  

I think, this worry cycle also puts us in a place of victimhood.  When we label the source of our struggle as some external individual or force that we don’t have any power to control, we become victims in a perpetual downward spiral of victimhood, trying to control, and failure that leads to repeating the process. 

This is us, investing a lot of time and energy and not getting what we want out of it. 

For pornogrpahy users, we invest in programs, plans, and giving power to others, only to find that when the urge comes and we are on the path of finding porn, we find it.  

For spouses, we invest in thinking up ways to manage our partner’s internet, working to distract their eyeballs, and worrying excessively about the next time they might fail us, because we can’t control them. 

For pornography users, we also spend a lot of time working to manage our spouse’s perceptions of us.  

All of us understand that the behaviors of our spouse are part of the problem because they are really important to us and their behavior impacts us.  

What we forget is that their behaviors are not the cause of our problems.  The cause of our problems is that we aren’t very good at dealing with our own anxiety.  

In other words, acting like our spouse is the cause of our problems is like acting like the policeman who pulled us over is the cause of our problems.  While he may be creating a painful moment, he didn’t create the problem. Be clear, that isn’t to say that we deserve how our partner is behaving, it is just a metaphor about where our focus needs to be. 

So, instead of giving away our agency to others, here’s what you can do to refocus your efforts on yourself.  

Instead of asking yourself, Why am I so anxious?, instead ask, “How do I manage my anxiety, and how effective is it?

Or, rather than, “Why doesn’t my wife/husband understand me?” try, “What part am I playing in the way my relationship is functioning?”

Questions that focus on what I’m doing, thinking, or feeling are going to help you focus in on yourself.  

This isn’t going to solve the problem right away.  It isn’t going to fix everything overnight. 

What it is going to do is to reframe the conversation for your mind and begin to place it’s amazing problem solving focus on the right thing. You.  Things you can do and things you can change. 

We’ve talked about experiential avoidance or buffering in episodes 5, 6, and 135.  I’ll link to those episodes in the show notes. 

Humans have a unique ability to problem-solve. From the very beginning of human existence, we have learned how to survive in the world. 

ONE OF THE 3 THINGS our brains are designed to do is avoid pain. If you have listened to this podcast from the beginning, this is not a new concept for you. If you think back thousands of years ago when we had to hunt and grow our own food, and physically provide safety and shelter from the elements of this world avoiding pain was a very essential part of everyday life. Over the years we have learned that avoiding pain helps keep us alive! In the physical world, this is VERY important. Imagine if your house was on fire. What would you do? 

I imagine I would make sure my loved ones were safe and run out as fast as I could. I would do everything in my power to avoid the hot flames and in doing so it would keep me safe. By avoiding the fire it makes it possible to continue living!

We tend to react to our psychological pain the same way we react to our pain in the physical world.  

For instance, You might have a stressful workday, and instead of dealing with the stress in a productive way, you might avoid your feelings by engaging with pornography.

Another example may be that you approached your spouse for physical intimacy and felt and received a no answer which made you feel rejected. Instead of feeling rejected, you might seek out pornography.

You might have a stressful day with the kids and turn to chocolate to relieve some of that stress.

Our brains think that avoiding pain inside of our head is the same as avoiding pain on the outside. When we try to problem solve psychological pain in the same manner it often leads us further down the path of discomfort in the long run. 

Every one of us has a cycle of avoidance.

For some of us, it is a cycle that circles around avoiding parts of our lives through eating.  For others, it is a cycle that revolves around pornography, and others still avoid their lives through shopping or other behaviors that run contrary to our values.

Here’s what that looks like in real-time: instead of working on your project’s upcoming due dates, you scroll social media avoiding getting started on your work and putting yourself further behind. 

Or: rather than get studying for your upcoming exams like you planned on, you open a browser on your phone and start looking for sexually explicit material.

Or, finally, instead of getting your house ready for the week by doing a load of laundry, you hide in the pantry and eat a sweet snack so your kids don’t catch you.

Darcy and I use a system called acceptance and commitment coaching, a key component of which is the word acceptance.  

Often, the main reason we suffer is that we are not accepting our lives and our unpleasant or unwanted feelings. 

This desire to avoid discomfort leads to experiential avoidance or the avoidance of the experience of being uncomfortable. 

If we really want to avoid pornography or any other unwanted habit that we have, we must accept these uncomfortable feelings and learn how to deal with them directly. 

These kinds of avoidance behaviors are like getting stuck in a roundabout where each exit point that is available to us means that we will have to be uncomfortable while moving toward our ultimate goal, so instead of getting out of the cycle, we stay put, circling around the same unwanted behaviors over and over. 

Experiential avoidance is an unsustainable attempt to avoid the experience of discomfort in our lives and, often, creates long-term negative effects. 

So, how do we resolve this issue? We start by accepting these feelings as valid and deal with them up front.  

When we talk about our purpose in life, I often think back to the scripture in 2 Nephi 2:25 “... Men are that they might have joy.”

But if we are to get the whole picture, we have to go to verse 11 where we learn that there must be “ an opposition in all things”.  Which I read to mean that there cannot be joy without the opposite, and if we are to fully experience joy, we must be willing and capable of dealing with the opposite of joy. 

In other words, we must learn to accept our discomfort and face it willingly and adeptly.  

Let me give you 3 of the ways that I teach people to accept and deal with their discomfort.

1. Get familiar with your inner experience. 
2. Become Willing
3. Define your values

Get Familiar with your inner experience

One of the simplest ways that you can get familiar with what is happening in your mind is to take 5 minutes each day and just experience your own thoughts.  I know that might sound a little weird but I mean is to take just five minutes, alone and without distractions, sit and just be present with the things your mind offers you. 

You can even use a tool called teams (developed by Robinson, Gould and Strosahl) that helps you identify what your brain is offering you. 

TEAMS stands for 

T: Thoughts - This is the judgments , rules, plans, and worries that our mind offers us on a regular basis

E: Emotions - This can sometimes be a difficult process because, as I’ve said before on the podcast, many of us feel like we are only allowed to have 3 emotions, angry, hungry, and horny.  This process is just about identifying which emotions you have and creating a vocabulary around them.  Being clear that you are experiencing these as a matter of daily life.  Once you know what these are and how to identify them, you will be much more capable of dealing with them. 

A: Actions - What do you tend to do in given situations, what urges, longings or cravings do you experience and how do you follow through with those promptings. 

M: Memories - This is where we pay attention to past memories of interactions or events and how they are affecting us. 

S: Sensations - What are the physical sensations that you have?  How do you usually deal with them?

TEAMS is a process of introspection that gives you a clearer picture of why you are choosing pornography or any other experiential avoidance or buffer that keeps you from being the person you want to be.  

Become Willing

Now that we know what is going on internally, becoming willing to deal with those feelings, sensations, urges, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is key to letting go of pornography in your life.  

Willingness is simple but not always easy.  It is the act of putting yourself in a position to try something.  I like to call it an experiment.  

I have always loved experimenting because I like finding better ways of doing things.  I never realized that this same desire to make life better in the outside world would work on the inside world as well. 

Fortunately, I started experimenting with different ways of overcoming pornography and it began to yield tremendous results. Being willing means that you engage the courage to experience the unpleasant parts of the TEAMS experiment that you just learned about. 

This willingness is an experiment in going through the discomfort we all feel.  It requires only one thing, to act in ways that take you outside your comfort zone. 

Define your values 

Lastly, as you think about who you want to be and what experiments you want to run to step outside your comfort zone, you will want to be clear about your values.  

The values that you have are the guiding principles of your life.  

Most of the people who buffer have a value of being comfortable.  

That may be a value that you can do without at this point because you’ve been comfortable for long enough. 

Now it’s time to get out of your comfort zone and grow, so one of your new values might be “Growth” or “Self-development”. 

Within the membership, we have a great module on how to create and begin following your values. It is a great deep dive into the concepts we talk about here on the podcast. 

As you work to identify your values, your actions will begin to come into focus in terms of whether they fit into your values system or not. 

As that becomes more clear, your choices become more clear, and acting in the direction of your values becomes more likely. 

These three skills, getting familiar with your inner experience, becoming willing, and defining your values are essential to help you overcome pornography in your life.  They will help you get out of the roundabout and onto the path of avoiding pornography rather than avoiding your life. 

The more angst that we have toward pornography, we think is going to create the motivation to stay away. 

But what that is more likely doing is giving it power over you.  

I think we think that if we create a harsh relationship with something, it will banish that thing from our lives. 

Often, the more we hate something, the more power it seems to have over us.  It, somehow gets to live in our heads rent-free.  

When we are angry and bitter toward someone or something, that anger won’t let us move past that issue.  

How has hating porn helped you in this struggle?  

When we acknowledge it from a place of gratitude, we can acknowledge the role that it played in our life, learn from it more fully, and move beyond it when we’ve grown past it. 

Acknowledging the role that pornography played in your life.

Acknowledging ways that porn helped you to survive when other coping methods didn’t work.

This thank you, has allowed me to claim back my choice, claim back my ownership of my life and create closure from it.

Gratitude for what it has done for us while also moving toward and choosing something that we do want, helps us move forward with power. 

It’s time to break up with porn.  

Dear porn, 

Thank you for being the trial that made me into a better person.  I know that seems strange to say, but it’s the truth.

 Because of our relationship, I was driven to be an amazing provider and hard worker.  

I’m not proud of all the things I did with you and all the ways that I used you to mitigate my short-term discomfort.  But I realize now, that’s not your fault.  That was my choice and not something you made me do. 

Because I chose porn, I had a ready system to fall back on when my ability and skill at dealing with my life wasn’t enough.  But I also used you as a crutch when I could have stood on my own.  And that’s not your fault either.  I chose that.  So, thank you for being there and helping me when I really needed to do it myself.  

Thank you for helping me learn empathy.  I’m grateful for my capacity to be kinder to those who struggle and less judgemental of their flaws.  

When I see someone who struggles with life, I used to wonder why they couldn’t get it together.  Now I realize that they are just learning, growing, and trying their best.  If I really want to help them, I can be there for them without judgment and with empathy for what they are going through. 

I also want to thank you for helping me find my purpose in life.  Without porn I would probably never have become a coach helping people solve their own pornography problems.

Here’s something that I never thought pornography would help me with, ever! Thank you, for helping me build the relationship, love, and intimacy that I had always wanted with my wife. 

Without this struggle, without pornography being the focal point of our marriage for so many years, I would not have learned to be honest and open with Darcy.  I would not have learned to trust her, listen to her, and value that I can tell her anything, knowing that she can handle it and that we can resolve it, together. 

Thank you, for catalyzing this growth and helping me learn that I would be able to trust Darcy. 

I realize that most people who don’t want you in their lives see you as the reason for their misery.  But because of you, I was able to learn how to become happy.  Not because you make me happy, but because I had to learn the skills to leave you behind, and those skills I get to use in so many parts of my life to grow and learn, which makes me happy. 

Thank you 

Darcy thought it might be cool for her to also write a thank you letter to porn.

Dear Porn,

I use to hate you! I used to believe you were going to ruin my life. I viewed you as a threat to my safety. I was angry towards you and full of resentment. I was bitter and at times jealous of you and the control and power you seemed to have over my husband. If I am being 100% honest the power you had over me too. 

Those days are OVER!!! 

Never in a million years did I think I would be writing you a thank you note or that I could even see that beauty that came out of our relationship. Thank you for helping me grow in ways I never knew were possible. Because of you, I have been able to share my story and be vulnerable in big ways. Thank you for helping me learn that Zach and I could work through hard things. Because of you, I  realize how strong I really am and how capable I am of facing the truth even if it’s not what I want to hear. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help others who are struggling. If it wasn’t for you, I would have never been able to learn and grow in ways that were hard but also rewarding. You helped me learn that all people are struggling with something in their lives. You helped me realize that I am stronger and more capable than I thought I was. Because of you, I was able to learn to take back my power. I have learned that my power is mine and I don’t have to give it away to anyone or anything. I have learned to love myself and my imperfect body because I am REAL!! I don’t have to be like you to be enough because you are not real, you are pretending to be real. I am enough because I am me! I am a real human who can love and receive love. 

I realize our relationship hasn’t always been easy but, because of you, I am the person I am today. I have learned to love others who are struggling with hard things. I have learned to see people as real people, not just the things they struggle with. 

Thank you for the time and role you played in my growth. I will forever be grateful for the challenge you brought into my life because without you my life would look very different. You forced me to snap out of my fairytale and learn to truly love someone for who they are flaws and all. I love the person I have become and the person I am growing into and I am willing to thank you for the part you played! 

Episode 89 - Emotional Debtor and Episode 100 - Pornography is not THE problem 

1. An understanding of what is happening and why
2. Can’t run away, can’t push it out of your mind
3. You have to face it
4. Ask questions
5. Be willing to confront what it is objectively and curiously

Listen to - Episode 82 - Easter, the Atonement, and Agency  57 - Learn Something and Move Forward

1. A specific set of skills
2. Let me ask you who you would rather learn from, a Harvard professor with 30 years of experience learning about business who has never made payroll, never hired or fired anyone, and never had to actually make a profit. 
3. Or a person who has for 30 years, honed his craft, made profit, learned from his mistakes, and made himself millions of dollars, employed thousands of people, and profited himself, his company, and his stakeholders. 
4. Inside my membership and in individual coaching you’ll find the skills that I teach are different than anything anyone else has ever offered you. 

Listen to episode 141 - 3 Secrets to Managing Emotions and Episode 131 - Choice Point to Overcome Pornography. 

On Friday we had tickets to see Jim Gaffigan in Las Vegas. 

I was looking forward to it.  Darcy was, too. 

Unfortunately, Jim got Covid and the show was canceled at the last minute.  

We didn’t find out until after we were down there and had dinner. 

So, we decided to catch another show.  

While I went to the bathroom Darcy and our friends picked Penn and Teller.  It was ok.  Kind of cool to see people that are famous.  

We went to dinner, we went shopping at Trader Joe’s because we don’t have one here in St George.  So, if you are listening and have any clout with the TJ’s people, please let us have one here. 

Then we went over to the Rio where the Penn and Teller show is.  We were about an hour early, so we decided to just hang out in the parking lot since none of us gamble and the inside of a casino is still a place where you can smoke in Las Vegas.  

Boy did we get a show before the show. 

To our surprise, we found that the Rio parking lot was the shuttle area for those going to an outdoor music event that features electronic dance music called Electric Daisy Carnival.  

From what I could tell this is a music festival where the women dress in their absolutely most revealing clothes and the men dress up in the same thing they would wear to go play basketball.  

This was an amazing opportunity for us to practice what we preach here on the podcast and that we help people work on and through in our membership and individual coaching. 

We would like to share our experience with you and a few tips on how you can thrive as individuals and couples when life offers you an experience like the one that we had on Friday. 

1. Just because someone is showing their body, that doesn’t mean my partner is sexualizing it.  
2. It was good to see the body objectively
3. They were just moving across the stage
4. It was a physical representation of letting something come into your mind and allowing it to move off on its own.  
5. They came and then they went one after another.
6. Really, objectively noticing but not sexualizing. 
7. In the past,    would have been a lot more on high alert
8. I wasn’t a zero on the calm level, but I wasn’t panicking. 
9. It was so absurd that we could talk and joke about it rather than making it more than just what we were seeing. 
10. 
    
11. Just because there is a nearly naked body, that doesn’t mean that it’s a problem. - 
12. In the past I would have to pretend that I’m not seeing this. 
13. I wouldn’t have been able to mention anything that I was seeing and I would not have been able relax at all. 
14. It was a dishonest position inherently.
15. Indicating that I was seeing it would have created greater tension
16. But there would have been a lot of tension there already. 
17. It would have been this fake moment. 
18. Then I would have waited for the inevitable questions from Darcy
19. “What were you looking at” “were you fantasizing about it” 
20. Were you wishing I wasn’t there so you could just gawk? 
21. Is that going to lead to something? 
22. 
    
23. 
    
24. I don’t have to give my power and emotional energy to the random strangers 
25. I wouldn’t have been able to be present, or enjoy myself, 
26. There wouldn't have been laughing or joking
27. This would have felt like a threat, almost like a life and death situation
28. The way i don’t give away my power is by realizing, 
29. I don’t have control over this and neither does my partner. 
30. Also, realizing that this is legal,
31. Other people find this ok, and I don’t have to be mad about that. 
32. “Ok, alright, these people are dressed for the moment” and that’s ok 
33. I wouldn’t have worn that. 
34. It was asking, how much power do I want to give these strangers that are just walking across the stage of my life. 
35. Not being a victim of the reality of the presence of others. 
36. We wear able to joke 
37. Instead of turning it into a big deal
38. We pulled up before those people were there
39. In years past we might have moved 
40. 
    
41. I’m not going to allow myself to be in trouble for something that was out of my control - 
42. In the past,   would have given my power to Darcy and the crowd and taken a one down, run away position.  
43. Instead, I made comments and acknowledged what I was seeing because I was living my experience
44. In past years, I would have put myself in a position where I would let Darcy guide the choices, and conversation while trying to manage my eyeballs. 
45. Instead, I chose to manage myself, not letting what was going on for Darcy to become paramount to my own experience. 
46. 
    
47. This is about maintaining equal status with my partner and not taking a one-down position
48. 
    
49. Watch your own plate.  -  
50. This is a dieting term, but I think it fits here. 
51. This is intended for you to be clear about what emotions you are dealing with and not engaging in guessing or worrying about what issues, thoughts, or feelings your partner is dealing with. 
52. A lot of the difficulty we see among couples is when one partner tries to anticipate and then manage the issues the other has.  
53. Instead, be aware of what is happening for you. 
54. Be willing to inspect the feelings you are having
55. 
    
56. Have the hard conversation
57. If you need to, feel free to ask. 
58. Be willing to talk about your part. 
59. You’ll need to be clear about what is going on in your mind and body. 
60. 
    
61. Acknowledge your issues as yours, don’t make them about your partner -
62. A lot of us want to say, “if only my partner would do x, then it would be better” 
63. We had a client who text us recently and said that she had been just asking her partner to be honest with her.  
64. After working through our group coaching, she said that he was now being honest, but that it was hard for her to accept what she was being told. 
65. She believed that if her husband would just be honest, she would be able to be ok. 
66. What she found was that when he was honest, doing the hard work of revealing himself to her, she was presented with some really difficult work herself. 
67. 
    

She is also a tiny human who I find fascinating to watch because she is an open book of emotions.  When she is sad she lets us know.  When she is happy, she wants to share that. When she is excited it shows on her face and in her voice.  

The other day, Darcy was with her and she became upset that she wasn’t going to be able to get to play with her friends, having thought that was an option.  

As she started to cry, Darcy just noticed out loud for her, “you must be frustrated, how does that feel? Do you want to take some breaths and come play with us when you are ready?” then went back to what she was doing.  

In the way that only a 4-year-old who is both super cute and highly articulate can, she cried for a moment or two longer, took her breaths, and came back to the fun while explaining how she had taken her breaths and was ready to play again. 

Without realizing it, Darcy and our four-year-old did exactly the only thing that we can really do when it comes to dealing with our emotions. 

In Acceptance and Commitment Coaching we call this dropping anchor.  

It is one of the most effective ways that we can deal with our unwanted or unpleasant emotions, thoughts, feelings or sensations and, quite accidentally, one of the key skills we have taught our little girl.  

Dropping anchor is a simple process and it is a component of the three secrets to managing emotions around any subject.  

One of the biggest reasons people choose pornography is because it is a way to take control of their emotions, thoughts, feelings, and sensations. 

Let me tell you what I mean by that.  If you are lonely, for example, because you’re on a business trip and your mind is offering you thoughts like, “you might as well just look at porn because you know it’s inevitable.” One of the ways that many people try to manage that, or get it to go away is either to fight with it until their willpower runs out or give into it.  

I’ve talked about willpower in episodes 38 and 134 which I will link to in the show notes.

Suffice it to say that willpower won’t get you all the way there and giving in will make it so that you create a self-fulfilling prophecy that will repeat itself forever until you learn the skills you need to stop.  We do a deep dive into this in the membership and in individual coaching, which you can sign up for at zachspafford.com. 

But what I want you to focus on here are the three secrets to managing your emotions.  So, imagine you are there in that hotel room or wherever, you can use a situation where you have given into pornography.  

In that moment with our 4-year-old, you can see the three secrets that you need to manage your emotions any time, anywhere. 

1. Become familiar with your emotions
2. Learn how to diffuse from those feelings
3. Practice your newfound skills daily

I’ll teach you what each of these are and what they mean here, and if you want to learn more, I have a free Masterclass that you can come to tomorrow night at 830 Mountain time.  All you have to do is go to zachspafford.com/freecall

1. Become familiar with your emotions - create a vocabulary and seek to notice and describe your experience. 

Start by learning about different emotions that exist. Brene Brown in her book, Atlas of the heart described a research project where she asked people to describe their emotions.  Most people only had 3 emotions. This lack of understanding is keeping us from being able to recognize what is going on for us, as well as, being prepared to deal with it

I would say that I am highly capable when it comes to fixing problems. 

But it is nearly impossible to make a plan on how to solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is. 

If you only know three emotions, and I joke with people that men are only allowed to have 3 emotions, hungry, horny, and angry, you aren’t going to be able to accurately describe what is going on for you.  

This is like trying to deal with every home repair with only three tools.  That may have worked for you for a while, but as things get more complicated, a hammer, screwdriver, and pliers might not be sufficient.  

In fact, we have a rental unit where the sink was leaking and I took a pair of channel lock pliers and a screwdriver to fix the issue and ended up needing a special tool that I’d never used before and plumbers putty.  The screwdriver and channel lock pliers were useless. 

If becoming familiar with the emotions that you have seems like a hokey or soft thing to do, then you might want to rethink your position.  Because those emotions are pushing you around and keeping you turning back to pornography precisely because you aren’t capable of naming and dealing with them. 

If you want a feelings wheel, I would be happy to send you one. Just email me at zach@zachspafford.com or you can just look it up online. 

1. Learn how to diffuse from those feelings.

Diffusion is a term we use in Acceptance and Commitment Coaching that means to unhook from an unwanted thought, feeling, sensation, or urge.  

When our thoughts push us around or drive us to behaviors that don’t meet our moral standards or values we are hooked by that thought in a similar way as a fish is hooked.  That thought, feeling, sensation, or urge can drag us wherever it wants without much hope on our part. 

The reason that idea can take us where it wants us to go, like the example of feeling lonely while on a business trip, is that we don’t know how to diffuse or unhook from that thought and make it something that isn’t part of us but that we observe objectively instead. 

There are countless ways to unhook or diffuse, from dropping anchor to NAB which I taught in a previous episode and that we learn in-depth in the membership.

Each diffusion technique is slightly different and each has it’s strengths, but learning a couple will be instrumental in giving yourself space in which to work so you can stop letting your mind push you around and you can choose your values. 

In the case of our 4-year-old, the way she diffused, with the help of Darcy was ACE, which is to Acknowledge the feeling, Connect with your body (that’s what taking deep breaths helps us do), and Engage, in this case the engagement was back into play. But in your case it might be to engage more fully in your work or the sporting event you are watching or just in the conversation you’re having with someone. I know that when I would travel for work, I would long for home, but when it came time for the actual phone call to connect with those I was missing, I would often be distracted and disengaged. 

1. Practice your newfound skills

Last, you’ll want to practice.  

The likelihood that you are going to be good at any diffusion or unhooking technique right away is pretty slim.  Just like you won’t be able to play golf like a pro the first time you pick up clubs, you’ll need to spend time using these skills regularly. 

If you would like to learn more, check out zachspafford.com/blog

Listen to more episodes at zachspafford.com/blog

I think we’ve all heard the analogy of the stage of your mind and how we can become totally free from the plague of our unwanted thoughts by just changing what’s on the stage.  

While I think this is a worthy attempt to advise and assist those struggling with pornography or any other issue, it falls short in actual practice.  

There was an experiment called the pink elephant or white bear experiment that gave us a pretty good indication of what trying to push thoughts out of your head or trying not to think a certain thought does.  

If you’re not familiar with the pink elephant experiment, let me tell you about it, from the perspective of bacon.  

I love bacon.  You have probably heard me talk about bacon on the podcast before, but if you haven’t it is one of my top favorite foods. 

The smell of it is inviting, the flavor is the most amazing combination of salty and umami, the crunch of it in a BLT sandwich is the most perfect feeling in the world.  

Now that you are hopefully fully in the grips of a desire to eat bacon, let’s try the experiment.  

Starting now and For the next 60 seconds, you are not allowed to think about bacon.  Each time you think about bacon then you have to pay me a dollar.  (Feel free to venmo me at theselfmasterycoach)  

Part of the reason you’ll need to pay me a dollar is to raise the stakes of the experiment.  The higher the stakes in this bacon experiment, the more difficult it will be for you to force your thoughts to stay away from the crispy, chewy, warm, savory bacon that you’ve conjured up in your mind.    

As you try not to think about the bacon I’ve asked you not to think about, you might find your mind wandering back to that unwanted thought. You might find that the smell of bacon in the morning greeting you from bed just pops into your mind.  You might realize that you’re thinking about your favorite kind of bacon, thick or thin, Maplewood or smoked.   Just make a tally mark each time you do think of the delicious, amazing bacon that you’ve eaten in the past, or count on your fingers each instance of all the future bacon you’ll eat as it pops into your mind.  

Any time you think about the bacon in your food and on your plate, you might also notice how much money you lose to me.  Notice how, when you lose money, you don’t like it.  So, you try harder not to think about the mouthwatering, flavorful treat that you’re not supposed to think about.  

Ok, experiment end. 

How did you do?  If you are like most people you probably found that bacon came to mind a lot more than you might have wanted it to.  

Now, you don’t really have to Venmo me, but you also might have noticed that if you took up the challenge for real and really intended to send money if you thought of the bacon, how much more difficult it became because of the loss factor. 

This is essentially the pink elephant or white bear experiment. 

In a series of experiments, researchers found that participants were more preoccupied with thinking about a white bear, despite being asked to not think of one. 

The conclusion was that trying to suppress thoughts “has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy,” which can lead to obsession or preoccupation despite desiring and working toward the opposite. 

In other words, when we try not to think of something and actively work to distract ourselves from that thing, we are more likely to become obsessed with it and it is more likely to become the focus of our minds. 

What does this have to do with pornography?

You probably already have some sense, but I’m going to share an experience I had recently with a client that shows how we tend to show up around pornography and how we can think about this issue in a new and more effective way. 

After a session, my client texted me his plan for the coming week.  This is what he said:

“What I’m going to work on:

Notice thoughts when they come along and practicing (sic) speaking to the thoughts saying: “it’s ok that you’re here.” That’ll help me remember that they’re a part of me. Ask myself “does this thought serve me?” If it does: “how?” If it doesn’t: replace it with a more validating thought. 

I’m bad at that last part… what would you do to replace thoughts that don’t serve you? Do you replace them by complimenting yourself? By doing something kind for yourself? Any feedback is great”

 If you listened to that and thought, “ok, that makes sense, that’s a good plan.” Before I overcame pornography myself, I would have thought was a good plan too!

Then I’ve got news for you.  It's a terrible plan.  And I’m to blame!

Obviously, I didn’t do a very good job explaining his new experiment.  So, I’m going to share with you what I shared with him and point out two issues he has with the way he is trying to deal with his thoughts.

The two issues in this plan are: 

1. Your thoughts are not part of you
2. Trying to replace them with better thoughts is a losing battle along the lines of the pink elephant experiment 

Rather than thinking that our thoughts are part of us, it is often more helpful to believe that the thoughts our brain offers us are like the sounds coming from a radio.  That radio is a constant in our lives and is constantly broadcasting.  The part of our brain that does this is doing its best to let you know all the bad things going on in your life.  You could call it radio Karen.  Radio Karen is reminding you of all the bad things you did in the past, she’s telling you of all the bad things that might happen in the future, and she is definitely there, letting you know about all the things that are wrong with you.  

Radio Karen (sorry all the Karens out there listening) sometimes offers you valuable ideas or thoughts, but not usually.  

So, instead of believing that the thoughts are part of you, think of them as if Radio Karen were just there in your mind, always doing her job, but not who you are. 

In doing this, you can step away from radio Karen and become an observer of her broadcasts instead of a participant.  When you are an observer, you are more likely to be able to objectively determine whether what she is sharing is valuable or not valuable. 

That part of my client’s plan was good, asking questions that help objectively determine the value of the belief that Radio Karen is broadcasting is totally valuable.  

The issue he will have is the second part, trying to replace thoughts with new, better thoughts is a lot like turning on a new radio and turning up the volume to try and drown out Radio Karen.  

A lot like trying to not think of bacon, radio Karen will burst in there and break through and turn up her own volume to get heard.  

That is the battle that is created by trying to shove one belief off the stage to put something else on there.  Each side pushing the other just to get a few moments of your time. 

The simplest reason why pushing a thought out of your head and replacing it with a new one won’t work is the same reason that turning to pornography ultimately doesn’t help us feel good over the long run.  

People aren’t capable of controlling how we feel for long periods of time.  

We can do it in short bursts.  That’s willpower and it ties into the fight or flight system that we all have to take control in acute moments for finite periods of time.  

So, if that isn’t going to work, what is?

My client, the one who said, he was accepting his thoughts as part of him and then trying to replace those thoughts and anyone who is struggling to deal with unwanted urges, thoughts, and feelings needs to face them. Head on. Without thinking that he can manipulate or coerce his Karen out of existence.  

So, how do we do this? 

First, we take a step back and become the watcher or the observer of our brain.  No longer is everything that our brain offers us part of us or from us or about us.  It is simply something that is playing on radio Karen.  It is there, in the background, the same way a radio playing in a department store is part of the background.  

When it offers us an alert, like an Amber alert or a storm warning, we listen to it, we decide if it’s relevant, and then we go back to what we were doing if it isn’t and if it is, we do something about it. 

If we can stop believing that our brain is offering us only relevant information and remember that it is offering us mostly negative, not always useful information, then we can step back from it.  We can observe it objectively, knowing that most of what it offers isn’t relevant or useful.  

In doing so, we can engage curiosity to hear and judge what it is that our brain is offering.  

I get these Amber alerts from northern Utah. I look at them, I see there is something that is too far away for me to do anything about and then I stop looking at it and move on with my day. 

Radio Karen is like a constant barrage of Amber alerts or Storm Warnings.  Most of them don’t have anything to do with me or where I am, or what is going on in my neighborhood. So I see them and observe whether they are worth my time, then, most of the time, I go back to what I was doing.  Every once in a while, I see it and I say, this is something I need to deal with.  

But not nearly as often as our Radio Karen would like me to. 

The key here is to engage with this in the same objective way you would engage with those Alerts you get on your phone or hear on the radio. 

So, when my brain says, “I’m a victim because she shouldn’t have done that” we can take that alert and just curiously observe it.  Being curious, is this true, does believing it help me in any way, does this create the value in my life that it seems to present itself as, and so on. 

Often times the answer I give to these questions is no, but sometimes I get stuck.  So, instead of no, I say, “Maybe”.  

Maybe let’s me not have to dig into it.  It frees me from having to find the “right” answer.  It let’s the thing be without me having to refute it or embrace it.  

Using “Maybe”, or chosen ambivalence is a wonderful tool in this conversation with Radio Karen.  

In doing so, you don’t have to argue, you don’t have to battle, you don’t have to reject.  You simply render the issue a non-issue by saying maybe from calm clarity.  

If you don’t recall the talk, he offered 5 ways to Maintain positive spiritual momentum. 

The five were

1. Get on the covenant path and stay there.
2. Discover the joy of daily repentance.
3. Learn about God and how He works.
4. Seek and expect miracles.
5. End conflict in your personal life.

I’d like to talk about number 3 tonight and discuss an issue that I find keeps my clients from being able to successfully employ prayer in their quest to overcome pornography.  

I’ve made a study of prayer over the course of my life and find, sometimes, our prayers are ineffectual because we approach the act of prayer and the requests in our prayer in ways that do not conform to the purpose of prayer.  

As I struggled with pornography I often found myself praying earnestly to Heavenly Father.  When I drove was the time I often felt most able to pray out loud and listen for the answers. 

As I drove I would pour out my heart and plead for things that I was certain Heavenly Father would want to give me.  

It was a time of deep frustration because, no matter how hard I prayed, I never received the answers or blessings that I felt like I was asking for.  

It took many years of work to get to the point where I am now.  And I see prayer very differently than I did when I was a 19 year old working to get on my mission.  

In thinking back to that time, I want to share 3 ways that you can change your prayers to become more effective at engaging with our Heavenly Father in ways that, I believe He will be more able to answer you, bless you, and help you become the person you are trying to be.  

The three ways to improve your prayers to overcome pornography are:

1. Seek Understanding
2. Maintain Agency 
3. Be Willing to Try

Whether you are talking about a pornography addiction or just in general, these lessons will hopefully give you meaningful ways that you can utilize prayer more effectively to overcome pornography.  

1. Seek understanding

The first thing that I think we need to do differently is to seek understanding from our Heavenly Father.  

That might seem obvious.  But I promise, it wasn’t obvious to me and when you hear what I mean, it might not have been the obvious answer to you either. 

One of the things that I often did in my prayers was to ask my Father in Heaven to give me the strength or make my burden light, both phrases that we hear in the scriptures as important figures seek the blessings they want and need. 

In asking for these things, it felt like there should have been some inexplicable moment and then poof, my issues were gone.  

What has changed for me is that I believe that growth is our most important activity here and growth is hard to come by when poof your issues are resolved by heavenly intervention. 

While I’m not discounting the times that divine shifts are made on our behalf, I also don’t believe that the Lord is going to move mountains that we are meant to climb. 

In that spirit, I believe most of our prayers must center around learning, growing, and understanding. I also believe that words matter, what we ask for is what we ask for and we won’t be offered something else.  The Bible dictionary touches this point by saying, prayer is part of the process of getting the blessings that our HF is willing to grant but that are made conditional on our asking for them.  

So, asking for God to lighten our burden when that burden is the one that will grant us the empathy we need to become something more, He’s not going to say, “Well, you asked for your burden to be lightened, so I’ll give you something else instead.”  I think the Lord wants us to ask for what we need, but knowing what that is requires us to be willing to dig a little deeper than just, Lighten this burden or give me strength.  

Understanding what the Lord is willing to grant us is part of that bible dictionary section on prayer as well.  In there, it talks about prayer being part of bringing the will of the child into alignment with the will of the Father.  

I also don’t thing HF is going to give us a things that we don’t want.  Meaning, His blessings aren’t things that he give people unwilling to have them, like pearls before swine.  

In asking for the things we need, He won’t give us stuff that we won’t accept.  So, understanding Him, His will, and what He is willing to grant is crucial to actually getting what we want, what we need, and what we are willing to receive.  

Late one night as a was driving home from a single adult activity in the Buffalo Grove stake center in Illinois, I prayed for the strength to overcome pornography. I begged God to strengthen me the way he had Nephi.  

If I could sit in the passenger seat of that car and talk to the young man I was then, I would tell him to ask for understanding.  

I would say, “ask Heavenly Father to show you why you choose pornography even when it isn’t helping you accomplish your goal of serving a mission.” I would tell me to, “Ask for help recognizing patterns that lead me to pornography.”  I would urge me to, “Ask to be guided in understanding how I can use this knowledge to choose to leave pornography behind.”

Understanding the way the Lord works means asking questions that are bound to enlighten you in ways that increase your ability to do it for your self in most cases.  

Letting the Lord make up the difference when needed.  

1. Maintain your agency

Speaking of doing it yourself, Maintaining your agency throughout your prayerful requests, I believe, is essential. 

When I was asking Heavenly Father to take away from me the burden of what I thought at the time was a pornography addiction, I was often asking him to take away my agency. 

I would ask him to take away the desire for pornography and make it so I never wanted it.  

To have agency, you must have 3 things, we dive deep into this in the membership, but for right now, agency is, the capacity to choose, the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, and having consequences.  Without each of those we don’t have agency.  

Well, if Heavenly Father had taken away my desire, making it so I never wanted pornography he would be violating at least two of those 3 values.  In taking away my desire, He would be removing from me consequences of seeing pornography.  In making it so I never wanted it, he would be taking from me the ability to choose for myself what I want.  

I believe that part of our purpose is to learn to bridle our passions and learn from the consequences when we don’t.  

In our conversations with God, asking him to violate our agency so we can be good disciples runs contrary to the way He works. So, of course he isn’t going to do it.  

As we pray and seek the help of our Father, we must also maintain our agency.  Agency is foundational to you actually being able to leave pornography behind for ever that without it, we would be participating in the plan of the adversary.  

I found out that the Lord wanted me to be able to choose so I could own the decision and make it my own, not simply be obedient, but to choose obedience.  Without that, resentment would grow instead of confidence.  

1. Be willing to try

The last thing that I think is an essential part of understanding the way that the Lord works, as president Nelson urged us, is being willing to try. 

I’m a natural experimenter.  I have always loved trying new ways of doing things and seeing if I can’t find a way to do it better. 

When we work with the Lord, I believe the things he urges us to do is to try new ways of thinking, being, and doing.  

More often than not, when the Lord offers us a prompting, I see it as an invitation to work in a way that isn’t natural to us, but that brings us to the way He works. 

As I sought relief from my struggle with pornography, trying new things was essential.  

Here and there I would find inspiration, insight into how I could do things differently.  Many times that nudge lead me to do things that didn’t fit with more traditional aspects of the way things were supposed to be done. 

For instance, the idea that embracing agency and acknowledging that “I can view pornography” still seems pretty foriegn to many within the Church. I talk about that in my very first episode, which I encourage you to go back to.  

Owning my agency was an experiment that I think we all need to try.  In my coaching I’ve guided thousands of men and women throught the process of doing just that to spectacular results for each of them. 

Trying is key to growth.  Growth is why we are here.  That is how the Lord works and is his way.   Learning about Him and working in the bounds of His process is a beautiful and enlightening experience. 

I hope these three Keys: 

1. Seek Understanding
2. Maintain Agency 
3. Be Willing to Try

Will give you a leg up on your journey to overcome pornography. They were instrumental for me.  

He said, the work that we had been doing made him think that he was less depressed, more hopeful, no longer part of the addict class.

This got me thinking. 

When I was attending 12 step meetings and saying, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m a porn addict” the message of being an addict was clear.  Once a porn addict, always a porn addict. 

I don’t know why this ideology grew up in the 12 step system.  No matter why it’s there, being a forever addict seems to be the way that we are encouraged to think about our struggles when it comes to pornography. 

It baffles me a little because it would seem to be contrary to everything that the 12 step program would be working toward.  

This seemingly contradictory message of being a forever addict while simultaneously participating in a group that has, as its core mission, eliminating an addictive behavior from your life is, I believe one of the reasons 12 step groups fail to succeed and most people fail to actually eliminate their problems within those groups.  

Dr. Lance Dodes, author of The Sober Truth, details the evidence in his book, that about 5% of people who participate in 12 step groups are successful at actually eliminating their pornography addiction.  That is, by the way, the same percentage that occurs when you just do the work on your own and just decide to quit.  People who do it without any program, succeed about 5% of the time.  So, in terms of evidence based analysis of successful systems of intervention, 12 step programs are about as likely to help you overcome pornography for good as if you went to no one and did it on your own.  

By contrast, Acceptance and Commitment coaching has a 95% success rate at 30 days and 80% at 6 months. 

But back to the idea that Once a porn addict, always a porn addict has always been something that I bristled at, even when I was deep in the 12 step ethos.  

Why?  

I think there are 3 reasons why being a forever addict is not only a bad idea, but it is actually holding you back and keeping you from succeeding at overcoming pornography. 

1. Being an addict reduces your responsibility over your actions.

When we use addiction language we are often putting off responsibility for our actions to something outside of us. 

For instance, the phrase “I slipped this week and looked at porn.” Which is a phrase I’ve said and heard countless times.  It sets the locus of control for the actions outside of the person. 

It is even self contradictory.  The first part, I slipped, conjures up a sense that some unseen force like gravity pulled me in a direction that I did not choose.  The same as when we say, I slipped on some Ice or I slipped down the mountain.  

Gravity, regardless of your choices is taking you in a direction that you are not choosing to go.  

But then we say, I looked at porn, which looking is an action we take.  

I often ask people, when you view pornography how does it happen?  They tell me things like how they go on their computer or phone, they start with some website or another and after a few minutes they are engaged in viewing pornography. 

I have never once, had anyone tell me that someone showed up to their house and chained them to a chair, and made them watch pornography.  

We talk like we are out of control, but the reality is that we are making the choices even though we regret them later.  

That isn’t to say that there isn’t compulsion or urging in that direction, because, for most people there is.  But compulsion isn’t the same as being out of control and unable to choose.  It is that there are real, strong, and compelling reasons to view pornography or overeat or whatever you do to avoid your feelings.  

I slipped means that you couldn’t choose.  If you’ve ever walked down the sidewalk and slipped on ice, you know that in that moment, gravity is in control and has taken away your ability to stay upright.  

It seems like a relief to believe this about pornography.  It seems like a valuable way to couch the issue because in some sense it alleviates your culpability and distances you from the actions that you take.  Which is normal human behavior and can be valuable in certain circumstances.  But when it comes to the idea of pornography addiction and placing the control for what is going on with something other than ourselves, that is a losing strategy.  

Why is it a losing strategy?  Because unless can assert our preference around this behavior we will remain incapable of overcoming pornography.  

Addiction language is similar to the language of victimhood.  Being a victim when it comes to our own behavior is a really rough place to be. 

If you’ve ever tried to potty train a toddler you might have seen this.  As they start to get good at going potty on the toilet their confidence rises and they become a new person.  But if they poop themselves or pee themselves, sometimes they look to blame it on others or forces outside themselves and there is no real teaching them anything at that point.  When it isn’t their fault or on them that they are pooping themselves, then it becomes impossible to help them solve for how to go to the bathroom on the toilet.  Because they don’t believe they are in control, they can’t see how to take responsibility for their actions.  

It’s miserable to be around and it's miserable to try and get them to fix it.  

A lot of spouses and support people feel like this.  Because, when it isn’t someone's responsibility and they are, in essence, a victim, it’s really hard to try and help them because they can’t be introspective enough to see what’s actually going on.  

Teens are a lot like this, they often blame the consequences of their choices on others.  We have a son who, thankfully he’s grown out of this for the most part now, but we would say to him, you aren’t allowed to go hang out this weekend because you haven’t done your chores or your schoolwork.  His would argue, no, you’re just not letting me go, so you’re the reason that I can’t go.  

He was really keen to make it our fault that he wasn’t allowed to go out.

That is the same way we act and believe when we talk about being a pornography addict.  “I can’t stop looking at porn because I’m an addict.” is the same as “I can’t go out because you won’t let me.”

The underlying lack of responsibility impacts our capacity to deal with the issues in a direct fashion. 

As a result, we make little to no progress and stagnate into a pool of misery. 

Speaking of misery, the next thing that being a forever pornography addict creates is a need for never-ending vigilance.  

1. Being a forever addict means that you will need constant vigilance

Most people don’t have the attention span for constant vigilance.  I suspect that those who succeed with the 12 step programs and those who do it on their own are people who are capable of constant vigilance or the ability to fight a long term war with their behavior. 

I on the other hand, am not the kind of person who has a constant vigilance type of personality.  I’m distractable, curious about new things, and interested in change.  I can’t stay the same and, I suspect, neither can you.  

That need for constant vigilance is pretty demoralizing.  I’ve seen speakers talk about how they still go to meetings 15 years later and that is what is keeping them sober.  

I went to meetings for years without improvement and to think that I would need to dedicate an hour of my life each week for the rest of my life to going to a meeting, which means that it’s more like two hours with the commute and maybe 2 and a half with chatting and mingling afterward is too much for me. 

I can’t even play a full 18 holes of golf without thinking, are we still doing this? 

Being constantly vigilant is a willpower-based solution.  If you were a soldier on the wall of life and you had to constantly lookout for danger in an active and consistent way, you’d probably tire of it pretty quick. 

Then when the problem comes back, what do we do, we beat ourselves up and say, “I should have…” Paid more attention, worked harder, stuck to my routine, and on and on punching ourselves in the face because we aren’t strong enough to do it forever. 

What a miserable message.  

1. It negates personal capacity for growth and change

Lastly, the idea that if we are a pornography addict, we will always be a pornography addict, runs counter to my personal belief and, I think, the theology of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Repentance and the Atonement are a package system that has as its foundational and underlying premis that we can change. That growth is possible and even essential to our eternal progression. 

I have spoken at length about the atonement, in fact, last easter’s podcast, episode 82 which I will link in the show notes, covers this quite nicely.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/1020bc29-1296-4c23-a1b9-832afed5bd81

What I would like to highlight about the atonement is, that it provides a path and a platform through repentance to allow us the freedom to look forward without making our past our constant and oppressive present. 

Imagine if you were the same person that you were 10 years ago.  If every aspect of your reality looked the same as it did then.  All the things you’ve learned, all the growth you’ve experienced, all the wisdom you’ve gained are in your head, but you have to be the same as you were back then. 

That is what it is like without the atonement.  That is what it is like without repentance.  That is what it means to be a forever addict.  

You aren’t allowed to be different. 

That is not my idea of a way to overcome pornography or any other unwanted or unwelcome personal behavior.  

I used to pray constantly that God would take this from me.  That He would resolve this so I could be different and not have it as a stumbling block in my life.  

When I believed that was the way to get what I wanted, for pornography to be out of my life, I was unable to grow.  

When I stopped asking God to take away this problem and started seeking His help in learning from it, understanding why I was choosing it, and letting myself believe that it was my responsibility to resolve and He would atone for the mistakes I was making on my journey, then I was able to become successful. 

Only then, could I overcome pornography forever.  Only then, could I put pornography behind me. 

The idea that we are pornography addicts is pervasive within our culture as Latter-day Saints, Christians, and Americans.  

But it is a misplaced, misguided proposition that keeps us from recognizing the truth of who we are and how much more capacity we have.  

Putting these ideas behind us will open a world of possibility to us. 

If you’re listening to this podcast and like what you hear, take the next step and come to our webinar on april 20th at 730 mt, there’s a link in the show notes or you can go to zachspafford.com/freecall

The seed for today’s podcast came from a post by a guy named Kris Heap.  in that he equated success to the way that an auction happens.  

Everything we do has a price.  In order to achieve desired results in our lives we have to be willing to cover the cost.  

We pay those costs in a variety of different ways. 

Money

Time

Energy

Effort

Discomfort

Commitment

Willingness

Some of those seem synonymous and some of them have varied connotations, but whatever you want to call it, doesn’t really matter.  You and everyone you know, pays for what we get.  

Darcy’s family comes from an amazing history of auctioneers. 

What are some of the cool things your grandpa and dad and uncles were part of auctioning off?

Darcy- I sent my dad a text and asked him about the most interesting things that he had auctioned.  

Hellen Keller - we still have some of her pieces at my parents house, including this Giant Tiger scroll that is in a japanese style

Revson Estate - which was the owner of Revlon

In their work as auctioneers they saw this happen so many times.

As the price of the item goes up, fewer people will seek to put forth the cost of getting the thing they are bidding on.  

The true value of the item is revealed based on the amount the people who are bidding are willing to pay for the item.   

In our work, people have come to us and tell us that they have a pornography addiction.  

Last week I talked about why I don’t like using the term pornography addiction, but that is what people tell us, and we are happy to meet them where they are. 

In fact, last week we did a poll and about 80% of the people that responded said they felt like they were addicted to pornography or they believed their spouse is. 

In a way, that person who is talking to us is placing an opening bid on overcoming their pornography struggle. 

When we talk to people they want to know, what is it actually going to take.  That first conversation is the opening bid, and it is a pretty low one.  

What’s the cost of the conversation? Basically, nothing. A little time.

Darcy and I love speaking to people and we love sharing our story, we do it for free in fifth Sunday lessons, zoom meetings like the one that I mentioned earlier, firesides, and in everyday conversations with random people who are impacted by pornography use in their lives. 

Each of those conversations is amazing and I think it elevates awareness and possibilities for each person to a new level. 

Every time Darcy does a fireside, or speaks to a Sunday school class, she just lights up and is happy for days. 

We get an immense amount of joy out of the work we do. 

We want you to get an immense amount of joy out of the work we do as well. So, we would like to talk about the transactional cost of overcoming pornography.  

If you think back to the auctioneer, only those who are willing to pay the price receive the prize.  That is as true in commerce as it is in our mental and emotional lives.  

A contractor, like an auctioneer, often puts out bids to see what people are willing to pay to get their place remodeled.  

Remodeling pornogrpahy out of your life is like remodeling your home.  Looking at what is there, deciding you don’t like it, and figuring out, what will it take to make my life look the way I want it to.  

So, we’ve put together a cost sheet. An itemized bid, if you will, of what it will cost to remodel pornography out of your life.  

The Cost of Removing Pornography From Your Life

1. Become aware of problematic patterns
2. Learn how to intervene in those patterns
3. Build new patterns

1. Losing the unwavering validation pornography provides
2. Something that has occured to me in the last couple of months, is that pornography never says no.  it always says yes and there is some validation in that.  Letting go of that good feeling which is something subtle and a little beyond the arousal is an important key to this process.

1. Enduring the real emotions we feel
2. Openness about who we really are
3. Willingness to be uncomfortable - loneliness, inadaquacy, feeling unloved, wanting to feel loved/not just needed, 
4. Letting go of covert contracts - if you haven’t read the book, No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert Glover, he goes into this in depth and we deep dive into this with many of our clients that use these, not everyone does.  A covert contract is essentially when we do something for our partner in an effort to obligate them to do something for us, especially when that has not been agreed to by the other party.

1. Learning new methods of emotional management - dealing with urges, uncomfortable feelings, and sensations

When I was growing up and as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints anyone who views pornography is essentially labeled as a pornography addict.  

I’ve talked about my experience with the Addiction Recovery Program or ARP that I attended in both Wisconsin and California. I have talked about why I don’t believe in the idea that most people are pornography addicts.  In episode 54 I covered in-depth how believing you’re an addict is basically a self-fulfilling prophesy that creates more harm than good. 

But I want to take a moment and talk about what I believe we mean when we say that we are addicted to porn and how changing the narrative around this pervasive idea will do more good for those who engage in viewing pornography than continuing with the current narrative that they are porn addicts.  

As members of the Church, we often talk about pornography in absolute terms.  Either you’re addicted or you’re sober.

Based on the way that I have observed others discuss the issue, being a pornography addict means that you are experiencing arousal while using graphic media. This media depicts the bodies of men or women in any state of dress. They could be fully clothed, wearing bathing suits or standard underwear, all the way up to and including the most graphic sexual imagery.  

This is my observation, so, I could be wrong or misperceiving the intent of others as they speak about this.  But, I think, after having spoken openly about pornography for so many years now, I’ve gathered some sense of the issues.  

This definition is problematic, for a few reasons.  First being, this definition is so broad and encompasses so much that it would be hard for anyone who wanted to purchase a nice bathing suit for their spouse not to identify as a pornography addict because they found the swimsuit models attractive. 

This definition pathologizes into addiction the sexual arousal of a teen boy (or grown man for that matter) merely noticing the beauty of another person depicted in media. 

It makes us bad, simply for seeing something that we might find attractive on some level for some reason.  

The problem with that is, as humans, we all experience the reality of noticing the beauty of another person at some point.  I think that most people have even experienced a sense that they might want to have an intimate relationship with someone because of that noticed beauty.  

Unfortunately, when we define sexual addiction or pornography addiction in this way, it loads so much meaning onto our shoulders that it becomes nearly impossible to carry in a healthy or meaningful way.  

Please don’t misunderstand me, I want to be clear, I am not advocating for us to swing all the way to the other side and stop using judgment to determine what appropriate media we want to view in our lives.  

But, if we can redefine pornography addiction, in some small way to lighten that burden, I believe that would be the most valuable thing we could do to decrease pornography viewing in the lives of those who struggle.  

When we speak about pornography addiction, I think that we are actually talking about experiential avoidance.  I use the term buffering as well, but Experiential avoidance is the term that I think best describes what is really happening. 

I’ve worked with thousands of men and women, individually and in the membership, each of whom started to realize one thing when they dropped the idea that they were addicted to pornography.  What they realized is, that they were avoiding something and pornography was the thing that was helping them do it. 

Simple questions like, “what were you feeling in the 5 to 10 minutes before you choose to view pornography?” provide the insight that I needed and that my clients need to dial in on their mental state and understand why they chose pornography.  

The answers are unique to each individual and their specific situation, but a clear pattern emerges over time for each person.  

For me, my pattern was that I did not like feeling alone or lonely.  As a result, my brain would lead me down a path that would help me avoid the discomfort of loneliness.  

Think about your own pattern.  Does it happen in the late hours of the evening as you try to avoid feeling drowsy or tired? Do you choose pornography rather than deal with the discomfort of studying? Is your brain offering you arousal to help ease the discomfort of feeling overweight?

When pornography is contrary to our moral values and we still choose it, the most likely reason is that we are using it to avoid an unpleasant, difficult, or anxious feeling.  

There is some really great research to back up this idea.  But, this new way of looking at pornography addiction probably resonates with you in a way that is more meaningful than anything an article in the journal Science could tell you. 

I know it is easier to say that someone is addicted to pornography, than it is to say, “my husband is engaging in experiential avoidance because when he feels stressed he hasn’t learned how to properly or effectively engage with his emotions.”

This narrative change is, however, the kind of change that helps people change the narrative in their own minds. 

If the culture and people around you believe something, you are more likely to believe that thing, regardless of its objective truthfulness. 

So, let’s dissect that for a moment.  If people around me believe that pornography is everything from the JCP catalog to videos of people actually engaging in sex acts, then I’m more likely to believe it.  If people around me believe that viewing those materials means a person is addicted to them, regardless of how often they are viewed or for what purpose, then I’m more likely to believe it.  

If the people around me believe that being an addict means that I’m broken, irredeemable, or unworthy and that I will always have this addiction, no matter how long ago it was that I last chose to engage with it, then I’m more likely to believe it.  

And if I believe that I am always going to be an addict and that the rest of my life will be one of constant vigilance against an ever-present reality of beautiful people in print, social media, television, and movies then what do you guys think that everyone believes about my chances to actually eliminate pornography addiction from my life?

I would think that most people would see that as hopeless…

I certainly would.  

This, my friends, is why I push back so much when people think that a habit of viewing pornography in order to avoid feeling discomfort, anxiety, or loneliness is a pornography addiction.  

Because it is hopeless.  It feels hopeless.  It is insurmountable because bodies are not going to get more clothing, they are going to get less.  Magazines are not going to get less provocative, they are going to push for more.  Social media is not going to make its algorithms send things that aren’t interesting, they are going to send the things that we click on, that we watch more and that we seek out.  

So, if you believe that you are addicted to pornography, my question to you is, what value, what good, what hope is that bringing into your life?  

Because addiction is outside our control, there is little we can do to prevail against it. 

But, when I learn that I buffer or avoid the experience of feeling my feelings because I’ve never learned how to properly engage with them, then I have a direction, a place to go, a hope of learning a skill that other people know.  I can practice a skill.  I don’t have to be endlessly vigilant, I have to get a new habit of how to deal with my discomfort.  

That, may not be as simple as saying, my wife’s addicted to porn.  Or my husband’s a porn addict.  But it is more true.  It feels more hopeful. And it is pointing in a direction that you can travel, rather than sitting you in a place of stuck victimhood.  

So, if you are listening to this and you can, try taking the words porn addict out of your vocabulary.  

If you hear someone say, pornography addiction, as kindly as you can, help them understand that isn’t a helpful idea.  Have them listen to this podcast if you can. 

We can change the narrative.  You can start the change from where you are.  

During a coaching session this week my client and I were discussing agency and how language matters in the way that we perceive our struggles and engage with our trials.  

As we were talking about pornography we were going over the different ways that we deal with other things that we abstain from.  In particular, beer. 

I think i’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I’ll just touch on it briefly here.  If you want to go into the way you’re thinking about things in depth, the membership and individual coaching are great ways to really dig in and actually apply these concepts to your life.  

Most of us have been offered a beer in our lives.  When I worked for an insurance company, I even had a coworker tell me that he was going to get me to drink as if it was a badge of honor.  To be fair, we lived in Wisconsin at the time which has a deep tradition and culture of drinking.  It is the home of a number of major breweries and Milwaukee, the biggest city, has more bars per person than any other city in the country.  Basically, drinking beer is a way of life in Wisconsin.  Totally unrelated to this story, two fun facts, In Wisconsin, you can take your 12 year old to the bar with you and they will serve them beer if the parent consents and your first seven drunk driving offenses were misdomeners until just recently.  That’s how big beer is in WI.  

In that interaction with my coworker, I was polite and happy to banter with him, but I wasn’t going to drink a beer with him.  I would say things like, I don’t drink and that’s just not something for me.  

As he pressed me, saying “oh, you’re not allowed to drink because your church says so.”  I found myself double-checking my reasons for not drinking.  It was never really in doubt, it was simply a check at my core of why it was that I had never had a beer.  

I didn’t feel like I wasn’t allowed to drink.  I didn’t feel like my church would cast me off if I did.  I didn’t feel like my wife would be upset and leave me if I had a beer. (some of you may remember that Darcy joined the church as a teen and her family aren’t members)  

It came down to this. I felt like I could drink a beer with this coworker if I wanted.  But I didn’t want to and so I choose not to. It was my choice. It wasn’t something I wasn’t allowed. 

So, I simply said, I could drink, I just choose not to. 

As I was coaching my client we were talking about agency, which is essential to our ability to own and make decisions. I talk about agency in-depth in my first episode Agency and Addictive behaviors and episode 82 Easter, the Atonement, and Agency, I would highly recommend you go back and listen to those episodes and get a sense of how agency works.  

As we were discussing his sense of whether he was choosing this and how agency plays into the way we act, he said, “I found that if I say, I’m never going to do this again, it puts the decisions into such a big picture that it’s hard to make choices from that long term [perspective].” 

I don’t know if you are hearing this the way that I did in that moment.  But it was a profound lesson for me.  It was this lightbulb moment that made my conversations with my coworker make more sense about who I was and how retaining our agency is such an essential tool that any time we become rigid and inflexible in our sense of what we will and won’t do, begin to lose our agency and we begin to lose the battle of our choices.  

When someone has asked me why I can’t drink, I’ve always said, “I can, but I choose not to”.

I don’t intend to ever drink, I don’t think I ever will.  But, I’ve also retained my agency, even while saying no thanks to alcohol. 

I didn’t say, “I’ll never drink”

I regularly use an example in my coaching that helps people understand their agency and how it works.  

After we establish the idea that most of us can get behind that we can drink beer but we choose not to, I take my clients on a thought experiment.  I say, what if I could come up with a scenario where I can almost guarantee that you will drink beer.  

I say, what if you were stranded on a deserted island and on that island was a case of beer.  And that case of beer is the only thing between you and certain death.  You can either drink the beer and live as long as possible and maybe get rescued.  Or you can not drink the beer and die pretty quickly.  What would you do?  

I know, for me, I would drink the beer.  

I wouldn’t feel bad about it.  I would simply do it and make the best of a horrible situation.  

I think it is easy to see, in a life or death situation, how we can shift our priorities and values to best help us move forward and grow in this life.  This is the mental flexibility I talked about in episodes 108 and 109 on values.  

Porn is not life or death so we don’t acknowledge our agency the same way with it.   With porn, how many of us have said, “I’m never going to do that again.”  

We try very hard to be as rigid as possible about the way we think about pornography.  That it is unequivocally bad, that it is never ok to choose, and that we are addicted if we do choose it.  

Now, if you want to believe those things and I’m certain many of you do, then there is nothing wrong with that.  My question would be, has it helped you solve the problem you are facing?

Has saying, “Never” helped you resolve the issue, or has it made you feel helpless, small, and incapable in the face of such a monumental task?

I remember clearly the day that I left never behind.  

I was in the bathroom at the house next door to this one.  We owned that house before we bought the one we live in now.  

I was standing there, with my phone, going to the bathroom and my brain offered me the idea that i was alone and no one was home and I could check out some pornography. 

It was a quick thought, maybe not even a full sentence like the one that I just described, but it was full of meaning to me.  

This would have been a fight usually.  I would have exercised as much willpower as I could to keep from going down the path.  I would have phoned a friend or called Darcy to rescue me.  

But I was tired of the fight.  I was tired of the struggle and the neediness of having to rely on others to help me manage my brain, knowing that, in the end, they really couldn’t. 

So, I simply said, I can do that.  I can look at all the porn I want to.  I can stand here and search until I explode.  But, if I want to, I’ll do it later.  

It was kind of magic. Not because there were wands or fairy dust or any special effects.  

The magic was that the battle stopped.  It was quiet and I didn’t have to fight or run the way we often talk about our pornography struggle.  

In our efforts to reassert our agency, never isn’t a word that seems very useful.  The phrase, “I can” holds immense power.  

It is the power to choose, even if we can make choices that don’t live up to our moral standards.  

But that power to choose gives us the capacity to learn from our mistakes and choose differently the next time.  

Without it, we will not succeed at overcoming pornography for good.  

If you’re thinking it is a little scary to have that power and that you might mess it up.  You’re not alone.  You’re actually having the same discussion that I think our Heavenly Father had when his children were given the choice to accept His plan or the plan of the son of the morning.  

You once made the choice to take on agency.  Make that choice again.

Here you’ll learn how you can overcome pornography forever.

I want to talk about why it may be that you are not telling your partner about your pornography struggle.  

You may be one who always tells your partner. There are a lot of reasons that I believe this is the best course of action in the long run. The biggest reason that I believe this is the best is that it allows your partner to actually know you. What I mean by this is, when you tell your partner what goes on for you when you are alone with yourself, they get a real sense of who you are and can more fully make decisions about how they want to choose you or even reject parts of you that they don’t like.  

 You might not like the idea of being rejected. But I can tell you from personal experience, being rejected from an open and vulnerable position, rather than being validated from a dishonest position is more valuable to your development as a person and your process of leaving behind pornography. Being validated or told you are enough or good or loved from a dishonest, hiding position, leaves us with even greater guilt and possibly shame over not being who we say we are and our partner even more confused about who we really are.   

Speaking of who we are, telling your partner about your pornography activity allows you to live with greater integrity. There are two meanings for integrity that are important here.  

 The first is living with greater truthfulness. 

Think of it this way. Would you rather get hired after telling your employer that you have a certificate or diploma you do not, only to look over your shoulder for the rest of the time you work there and live in dishonesty? Or be rejected by that same employer, with the knowledge that you have been honest, earn the respect of the employer and come back stronger later when you’ve actually gotten what you need to be employable?  

The second is living in a more integrated way with the person you are when you are alone and when you are with others. Your private self is more fully integrated with your public self. 

 So, even though we may suffer rejection in the short term, as I spoken about on the podcast before, we earn greater trust with our partner and with ourselves that we are being who we say we are, even if we are not yet living up to our moral standards around pornography.  

 This is about the aggregation of marginal gains. Getting a little better here, even at a cost, is going to help us succeed at overcoming pornography for good.  

 Now you may not feel like it is worthwhile to tell your partner and they may have told you not to tell them. That is between you and them. I am simply offering my very real sense of what has made the most difference for me as I have overcome pornography personally. 

 Those are the reasons for telling your partner. What, then, might be keeping you from telling your significant other about your pornography struggles?

 One may be that you promised that you would never do it again and you will admit that you’ve failed.  

 Let’s talk about that for just a moment. First, if you have not promised that you would never look at pornography again to someone else, I would shy away from that idea. If you are going to be having this conversation with someone else, you want to set yourself up for success. The first thing you’ll want to recognize about the promise to never look at pornography again is, it is very unlikely that you will be able to avoid pornography for the rest of your life no matter what you do. I recall walking into our local pizza shop in Franklin Wisconsin, a long time ago and seeing a picture of a topless woman on the cover of a magazine laying on a table in the pick-up area of the restaurant.  

 I didn’t do anything with it or about it. I didn’t take it any further from that moment. But, if I had promised to never view pornography again, in that moment, through no fault of my own, I would have failed and my conversation with Darcy might have been one of mistrust rather than one of commenting on the occurrence.  

 Some of you might be saying, “well, that obviously wasn’t your fault so no one could hold that against you”. You might be right. But I’ve had conversations with spouses who were just as upset about accidental viewing of nudity as they were about purposeful viewing of pornography.  

The truth is, words matter. I was listening to Jordan Peterson and he said something that I feel is true and I try to do, though I don’t always succeed. He said, “be precise in your language.” We expect others to say what they mean and do what they say. If you have promised to never view anything pornographic again, then that is what you mean in the mind of the hearer, regardless of the possibility of accidents that are outside your control. This is like promising that you’ll never get in a car accident. The reality is, you have no idea if you are going to be rear-ended tomorrow by someone.  

Be precise.  

So, if you’ve made a promise that is going to be impossible to keep, the very first thing I would do, right now, pause the podcast, is call the person you’ve made the promise to and rescind it.  

Call and let them know that living up to that promise is likely impossible. You may not be planning to view porn in the future, but you can never promise to never view it ever.  

That accounts for the reality of life and it now recognizes with your partner that you are going to be honest about the possibility that you may not always succeed at this.  

That, by the way, doesn’t set you up for failure. It set you up for being able to have real conversations without the idea that you need to be perfect yet.  

If you have promised this and you have made the choice to view pornography, then we run into a bit of a dilemma. The reasons not to tell your partner can be compelling in the moment. They can be real and deep and help you manage whether you get to stay in your tribe and whether you will suffer some real shame and even a potential abusive reaction from your partner as they try to deal with what they may see, and will likely feel like, a real and deep betrayal of their trust.  

 At this moment, we need to recognize that not saying anything is about managing our partner. You might even call it manipulation.  

We aren’t telling them what is real and true because we are working to manage them to make us feel and them better in the moment.  

 If that is the case for you, ask yourself, do you want to have to manage them forever?  

 If not, it’s time to rip off the bandaid and say what is real without any expectation of how your partner will react.  

Another reason you may not be telling your partner is that you’ve done so well for so long and you don’t want to lose your streak in their eyes.  

 When we choose pornography as a way to manage our emotions, we are not on some imaginary timeline that starts over. 

Rather, we are at a moment of discovery, data, and divergence.  

When we look at our choices objectively and with our partner openly, we are more likely to discover what it is that opened the door to go down the path we chose.  

Utilizing that data is more valuable than anything you can do to understand what is going on for you emotionally. Emotions are data. They might feel like they rule our lives and drive our actions without input and they may be. but they are key to understanding what it is that our brains are going through to arrive at the decisions we make.  

Knowing how we got to the place we arrived at gives us a greater chance to diverge from that path in the future.  

That divergence is where the magic happens and you will be able to leave pornography behind forever.  

You don’t have to be perfect, but you do need to be a scientist. And, usually, the best person to help you with that discovery process is the person beside you who is most invested in your success. 

One last reason that you might not be telling your partner about your pornography struggle is that you believe you need to protect them.  

Let me just face this one head-on. You do not need to protect your partner. 

This has a couple of really powerful negative effects. One is that you are telling your partner that they are not capable or strong enough to handle the real you.  

The second is that you are pretending that you can handle everything on your own and without their input. 

These are both, massive miscalculations. If your partner is to really your partner, then they need to know the real you as we talked about earlier. Could you immagine going into a business partnership with someone and not knowing all the facts and then finding out that they were withholding information from you to “protect” you?  

That would not be a partnership that would last very long.  

Disney movies often portray a story where a charming prince comes along and becomes the caretaker of a hapless damsel.  

Darcy and I were talking about this the other day and how she really believed that I was there to caretake her financially in the beginning of our marriage. On the flip side, I thought that she was there to caretake me sexually. So we were even on that score. But the sooner you get out of the Disney fantasy, the better off you’ll be. 

So, how do you do this? How do you tell your partner if you haven’t yet. Or if you have but need to reengage them in the conversation that has been going on inside you?

 Three steps:

1. Start by figuring out what you are going to say. Write it down if you need to, but start formulating the sentences. 
2. Practice. Get in front of a mirror if you have to. Practice with someone you know who is willing to help you out with this. Just spend some time saying the things that you want to say. All while recognizing that any speeches you have may get tossed the moment the conversation begins. 
3. Speak. Start saying the words and keep talking until you’ve said what you need to say. 
4. Listen. Hear your partner. Be there for them as they grieve this moment of change. 

You might have gotten rid of your phone, blocked all the apps, given over your access code to someone else, tried avoiding certain shops at the mall, not gone to the beach.  Those are the physical things. 

Mentally and emotionally, you might have tried to eliminate urges, run from your emotions, suppressed your sex drive, and generally worked to stop feeling, sensing, or thinking about anything to do with pornography or sexuality. 

In all the avoiding you’ve done, I want you to just think for a moment and ask yourself, has it really helped?  

What I mean is, has it helped you become the person you want to be?  Has it helped you grow and love and triumph in your life?  

If you are anything like me, or any of my clients, the answer is very likely, no.  

I’ll admit, each of those techniques, may have helped you succeed at distancing yourself from your last pornography session. They may have been helpful in slowing down the number of times each week, month, or year that you turn to pornography.  

But, there is a good chance, that if you’ve been suppressing your life to avoid pornography, you’ve been suppressing your happiness and growth on the way. 

In Acceptance and Commitment Coaching, there is an idea called experiential avoidance, which is about utilizing certain methods, processes, or techniques, to avoid the real and sometimes unpleasant experiences of our lives.  

The problem with experiential avoidance is that when we avoid the bad, we are also avoiding the amazing, wonderful, and deeply joyful experiences of our lives. 

Here’s what I mean.  

If I suppress my emotions so that I don’t feel sexual in order to avoid pornography drawing me in, I also am suppressing my wholly appropriate and deep desire to be intimate with my wife. 

As a result, there is a good chance that something will give eventually.  

It may be that my suppression will work for a time, but will power always runs out and then what happens?  What has happened to you when you’ve pushed down the feelings and temptations for a long time?  

An analogy that I like to use is that of a beach ball at the pool. 

If you’ve ever tried to push a beach ball under the water, you’ve found that you can control it as long as you concentrate on it.  As long as you manage it actively.  But, eventually, your mind may wander, you may become distracted, you may have to deal with something and boom - out of the water blasts the beach ball. 

Our emotions, feelings, and urges are like that.  In trying to avoid them, we push them under until there is a moment when we no longer have the capacity to control them.  

That is what experiential avoidance looks like.  We avoid certain experiences for as long as we can and then they overtake us and overwhelm us and we lose control. 

In addition to losing control, we’ve also lost out on so many beautiful, amazing, experiences that can enrich our lives and help us feel the fulfillment we have been seeking. 

Imagine being at the pool and spending your entire time focused on pushing that beach ball under the water and keeping it there. 

When others offer to play a game, you’ll be busy.  When someone wants to engage in meaningful conversation, you’ll be distracted.  When your family wants to grab a quick picture with you, you’ll be somewhere else. 

As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that there were moments when I would take my eye off the ball, like Christmas or birthdays or vacations and I found that I gave in to my urge to engage with pornography.  I would become engaged in the everyday life events and make mistakes in my quest to eliminate pornography. 

So, I would double down, push the ball deeper.  Only to find that the next time I became engaged in real life, I would make a mistake.  

Darcy used to say that I would ruin every big event in our family for her.  Our beautiful memories would be tainted by knowing that Zach made pornography part of it at some point.  

If this describes your life, I’m glad to know you’ve been where I was.  And I hope you’re glad to know that there is a way forward. 

Avoiding the experiences of your life, the ones that happen internally, like emotions, urges, and sensations is not the way to finally get rid of them. 

It is the opposite.  

What we work to suppress our brain latches on to.  

Famously, there have been many experiments where participants have been told not to think about things, like pink elephants.  No matter how hard they try participants find themselves unable to keep the idea out of their head.  

Telling ourselves that we must never think of pornography, sexuality, or the urges that drive our very natural and normal sex drives results in the same thing.  Eventually, they come up and we find they consume us. 

So, how do we succeed at handling our urges, thoughts, and sensations?

Three things.  We work on these in-depth in the membership and in individual coaching sessions, where we can dive deep and apply them to real-life situations. Here on the podcast, we get to talk about them, but the real work happens in the coaching that I get to do with the men and women who struggle. 

The first thing we need to get good at and practice, even when pornography is not the issue is, recognizing our feelings, sensations, and urges.  

Becoming clear with what your brain is sending you will help you know what to do with it. 

I’ve often said that men, and women too, have not been given a lot of emotional training in life.  Most of us have been instructed to suppress anything that we can’t control.  

It is the way of western culture to be repressed in our feelings and so we don’t let them show, we try not to feel them, and we try to tamp them down whenever they arrive. 

Getting good at recognizing the depth and breadth of your emotions, urges, and sensations will be essential to actually resolving them in helpful and meaningful ways.  

Second, you need to become comfortable with these sensations being there. 

That, by the way, is not the same as giving into them.  

Most of us have two ways of dealing with urges, we either push against them and try to suppress them in some way, or we give in to them and follow them wherever they take us. 

But there is a  third thing we can do. 

We can simply observe them.  

Becoming an active observer is a skill that everyone who wants to eliminate pornography from their life must acquire.  

Much like those who film nature documentaries, we must become willing to objectively and thoughtfully see what is happening without getting entangled in the drama. 

Our brains are full of drama. That is the skill of every mind, to tell a compelling story to drive us to act. 

Rather than act on the narrative, we have to be willing to feel the anxiety of the moment without acting.  

That might seem counterintuitive at first, but if you’ve ever read a story of deep emotion without becoming a sea captain, fighter pilot, or wolf dog in the great wilderness of alaska, then you are already capable of this skill. 

See the story, feel the feelings, but withhold action.  

Someone out there is probably saying, but that’s what I’ve been trying to do, not act and that isn’t working.  How is this any different?

Avoiding your emotions is not the same as feeling them and doing nothing. 

Avoiding your urges is not the same as acknowledging them as though they are normal and making no choice about them. 

Suppressing your desires is not the same as being willing to allow them the room to run out without them overtaking you.  

This requires a maturity of thought that wasn’t available to me at first.  

I used to think that if I even had a desire or thought or urge that I was bad and irredeemable.  

But, as you may know now, the urge, thought, or desire is not what makes us bad.  Those make us human.  

Being willing and able to see them, acknowledge them, and sit through them rather than avoid them is a skill that will pay dividends not just in eliminating pornography, but in every part of our lives.  

Hey, everybody, and welcome to another beautiful mastery Monday here on the Self

Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Zach Spafford.

Listen, I got something for you guys. I'm here to help you overcome

pornography. You guys know that right? I just want to let you know that there's

some stuff that's gonna change.

That's all. I'm not going to tell you what it is right now. But I'm going to

tell you something a little bit later in this podcast.

But these last few weeks have been a great deep dive into how you can really begin to

move past pornography by not just focusing on pornography, but focusing on how

you can become the person you want to be.

By the way, I just want to thank all of you who have written in and said how

much this has helped you. That's kind of awesome, actually, that you guys are

like, hey, you know what, this changed my life. So thank you for sending that

in to me. If you have a second, just take a moment and write a review that

helps people find us and all of this great content, more than anything else you

could do. You know, share it, obviously, with as many people as you can, but

writing reviews helps people find this. So please do that.

Many of you know that I am all about an evidence based approach to Overcoming Pornography.

You've probably listened to my episode about how pornography is not an addiction and the book by Dr. Lance Dodes, you may know Cam Staley, who is a PhD researcher out of the University of Idaho, a really great guy, quite like him.

You are probably thinking, okay, yes, we know that you like evidence. So not

only do I have the evidence from my own journey that I've shared with you, one

of the components of my coaching to Overcoming Pornography is based in

Acceptance and Commitment coaching, I call it ACC, which comes from Acceptance

and Commitment Therapy. Now, I'm not a therapist, but I have studied the

techniques and processes and systems that have helped 1000s of men and women

and their pornography struggle.

And I've done it myself, like, this is not pie in the sky. This is not, hey, you know what, let me tell you a theory, and I will help you figure it out. That's not it. This is real life. This is my journey. You are like, Yeah, I need somebody who's been there.

You know, I always talk about I have an MBA, and I've been in business for a long time,

before I became a coach, I, I was an insurance and I loved it. And I did some

other things that add some great, cool stuff. And I always think about, who's

the guy that I would come to, who's the person that I would go to, if I needed

help running my business. I would not even go to a Yale or a Harvard School

Business School professor, I would go to a guy who's actually lived the

process.

Some of you guys know Gary Vee, cool guy, I listen to his stuff, I don't listen

to a guy who works for Harvard. I don't, because I want to know what it looks

like to actually be in the trenches. And that's why I use ACC. And the coaching

that I do is based in both my real life experience and acceptance and

commitment, coaching. And then Acceptance and Commitment coaching, there's a

principle called the choice point. It is one of the key principles of ACC that

I use in the membership, which has been closed now to members to new members

for a little bit, a little while.

But I will tell you this, this month, I'm launching a new platform that will make it so

you can download a single app and get all the great content on your phone. So

I'm looking forward to it. And when it's ready, I will open up the membership

to anybody who wants to join. So keep an eye out for that.

When I talk about choice point, though, I want to go back to choice point because that's

really the point of what we're talking about. I want you to imagine a narrow,

long road that you're traveling, you're just out there in the woods. And I

always picture a Midwest road in the fall. So it's beautiful. It's cool, it's

damp, the leaves are falling. There's all these colors. That's the road that I

imagined your road might be totally different use yours might be in the desert.

And you probably know the the poem by Robert Frost, two roads diverged in a wood and I,

I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. So I want

you to imagine you're standing there at that same crossroad that that Robert

Frost talks about. And only instead of figuring out which one is the less

traveled road, you're going to apply a different calculus you're going to apply

a different set of rules.

If you recall back to October of last year, I did two episodes, one called

Overcoming pornography by choosing values instead of goals and the following one,

the one right after that so is episode like 108 and 109, Overcoming Pornography

by practicing the values we have. If you go back to those after you listen to

this, to help determine you what your values are, they will be excellent resources

for the choice point exercise that we're about to discuss.

Most of us are living a life in a way that we simply react to a lot of what's going on

around us. It's just reactions, we don't often think about why we do the things

we do. And we often simply make decisions, without giving them much thought,

this is a really, it's some is pretty normal. It's a habitual way of making

choices. It's super normal, it's super helpful, actually. Because if we don't

do this, we would actually have enormous mental and decision fatigue by about 9

am every single day. So every day would just be like, too tired to make any other

decisions.

But when it comes to pornography, one of the key elements of most people's habitual use is

found in this same idea. We've made the decision so many times before that

we've lowered what I like to call the consent threshold or the threshold that

we have to consent to making the decision. And our decision is really made in a

pretty automatic way.

So the choice point is a visualization of the crossroads that we come to every

time we encounter the discomfort that we want to avoid, that often leads to

pornography viewing. Using the choice point, and a little bit of a pause, each

of us can make decisions that more fully aligned with our values.

Now, you're like, What? Is this the only thing I need to know? No, this is not a silver

bullet, you're not likely to automatically stop viewing pornography because you

visualize this imaginary fork in the road. But when this is coupled together

with a number of the other skills, I teach in the membership, and with my

individual coaching clients, it can be a useful tool in your skill set.

So here we are at this crossroads. And the two roads are ahead of you. And to your left,

we have what we call away moves, or the away road. And to your right, we have

toward move or the toward road. Away moves are traveling down a path that takes

you away from your values. And the toward Road, as you may have guessed takes

you towards your values. You can see now I'm sure as you listen to this, you're

like, oh, yeah, of course, I need to know what my values are. Because if you

don't, then how do you know which direction to move.

So still just imagining, right, we're standing there, we take a pause, maybe 10 deep

breaths, maybe we just step back mentally, from our brain from what our brain

is telling us. And we just start observing where we are, and what choices we're

gonna make. And then I want you to imagine taking the away road, I want you to

see what's down there and how it ends. And how you feel when you've completed

that journey and what that actually looks like at the end. Now, I want you to

imagine taking the toward Road, what's down there? How does this end? How do

you feel when you've completed that journey?

And that's, it's as simple as that. It's a simple, simple process, if you are willing to

try it, take some time right now and see how it works. So you know, if you've

got a small decision in your life you want to make right now, it's a perfect

little, little experiment, we'll run together. And by the way, you might need

to do this, like 92 and a half times before you get any good at it. So just

don't, don't be discouraged.

But the key here is to try it, get used to it in your daily life and use it to be the gatekeeper for some of those automatic decisions that are not currently in line with your values. Again, it's not gonna be a silver bullet. But the more you try it, the more likely it is to work. And the more likely you are to align your actions with the values that you really love.

I love you guys, you know, keep going. If you're out there, and you're listening to this,

you know, whatever, choice point… that's fine. Just keep going, keep listening,

keep doing the things that I teach you just try them out. And one day they will

work and the better you get at all of them. So like get good at one at a time,

tiny little bits. And in the long run, you're going to aggregate do what I call

aggregation of marginal gains, right? You've probably heard that term. And

you're going to get so good that you're going to be way better than you are

now.

I've been where you are. And I know how to get you from where you are now to the place

where you want to be. So let my experience guide you. Alright, my friends, I'll

talk to you next week. Bye.

Meaning frames - Disorganization - Reorganizing with integrity

Self-confrontation – other confrontation

Self-validation – other validation

Self-disclosure - Self-presentation = Intimacy p 102-103

This month has been a real deep dive.  It has included a lot of really meaningful topics and subjects that I have tried to make as understandable as possible.   

We started with looking at our meaning frames and how disorganizing it can be to have them shattered by our partner not living up to the understandings that we have about pornography viewing in our relationships.

Next, we moved on to the process of confronting ourselves and our partner in loving and meaningful ways that can help us reorganize ourselves into more integrated people. 

The following week, we discussed how we are extracting validation from our partners, how we can stop doing that, and how we can become more self-validating through some of the work we discussed in the previous weeks.  

Last week we talked about disclosure and the ways in which we present ourselves to others in order to manage their beliefs and ideas around who we are.  

This is the last episode of the series.  Here we are going to explore enmeshment, differentiation, and the process of becoming a whole person who can also be a good partner without the need for someone to function for us. 

One of the biggest struggles that I think most marriages have is the issue of how much we fold into each other. 

What I’m talking about here is the amount of enmeshment and conformity that occurs when we become a couple. 

What this might look like is, a need to have the same opinion on important issues.  It might look like, one partner over functioning while the other partner under functions, which can be flipped in certain circumstances. 

This also looks like some of the requirements we have that our partner reflect our sense of who we are back to us.  Rather than holding up a mirror to who we are as we discussed in the self-confrontation/other-confrontation episode. 

In the process of creating intimacy that is built out of the validation of others, we often move along nicely together, until one day everything gets stuck or snaps and we find ourselves and our relationship in a moment of crisis. 

It might be a small crisis. It might be a big crisis. 

In the case of a pornography struggle, this is often a pretty big crisis.  

Where we have spouses saying things like darcy did to me, “if you don’t get this under control, this is the end of our relationship.”

In part, this is occurring Because the meaning-framework that we brought to the marriage is insufficient to hold onto the reality of the situation (that one partner is viewing pornography and pornography is destructive so our marriage is in jeopardy and so is my sense of self) in the face of the pain that is occurring through the rejection that the other partner is feeling.  

When we have crises points like this in our lives there are basically 3 ways that we can deal with it. Here we are again leaning heavily on dr David schnarch’s book, passionate marriage. 

I.

The first is to either violate yourself by folding into their demands on you or violating your partner by requiring them to fold into your demands of how things must be.  

In this scenario, I think a lot of women and partners of those viewing pornography feel totally justified.  Part of our culture and part of our moral code demands that pornography never be part of the equation ever or it will destroy.  So making this demand that your partner violate themselves to simply behave the way you need them to behave so you can be enough for them sexually regardless of what that looks like is pretty much ok with in LDS tradition. 

D – this is how I felt when I first found out.  etc. I would also do things that tried to fold into the way I thought Zach wanted me to be.  I tried being sexier, even though I didn’t feel like it just to try and please him. 

Z- the way I would do this was to give Darcy anything she wanted, even when it wasn’t in the best interests of our family or my own personal sense of self.  Like giving up meaningful activities that I enjoyed appeasing her.  

This is really about enmeshment.  It’s the kind of “I can’t live without you and you can’t live without me” kind of way that we deal with our partners that draws them in with a view of becoming one based on a single sense of self.  

II.

The second thing that often happens in relationships when there is an intense sticking point it to distance ourselves from the relationship emotionally or physically or both. 

If you have been in the depths of this kind of situation or know someone who has, you’ve likely experienced this or seen it.  

It shows up in a variety of ways that might be dramatic, 

Or that might not be that dramatic.

But either way our behaviors become about moving away from our partner and even closing off emotionally. 

I don’t think Darcy ever really did this, because she was really invested in me and our relationship. 

But I would do this by withdrawing back into pornography. 

Unlike the enfolding into each other sense that we get from accommodating or being accommodated, this looks more like, “I’m drowning in our us-ness and I need to escape it in order to be me”

Where this might be problematic is, that when I cannot be in relation to another person without taking on their anxieties and struggles, it is also not a refuge to be alone.  

Especially in the midst of a marriage.  

III.

The final way that we can engage with these stuck and difficult moments is to confront yourself and become more differentiated.  

This last process is one of ambiguous trying.  As I’ve read through Passionate Marriage and as I’ve listened to people like Jennifer Finlayson-fife, it has become clear to me that there isn’t a lot of concreteness to this process of becoming differentiated.  

Differentiation as a word means to make distinct from the things around them.  

But I’m not sure this word in itself captures for regular people like me how that is accomplished or what it means in terms of how relationships can be improved by it.  

In part, it is the amalgamation, putting together all of the concepts that we’ve been discussing this month. 

Doing each of these things helps us to determine how we are different from our partner.  But there is a step that we haven’t talked about that is key to this concept. 

While we are different physically and mentally, we often try to conform to each other in order to create a sense of unity. 

But differentiation does not include conformity.  It includes choosing closeness in the face of our differences without letting go of our sense of self.  

One way that this is put in the book is that differentiation is the ability to soothe your own anxiety and resist being infected with other people’s anxiety.  

I take that to mean, that I can manage my own emotions, not require that my partner take care of me, willingly accept the loving critique of my partner, while also being willing to confront the things in myself that I don’t like, as I also overcome my need to be validated by others and become capable of validating myself, in the process of eliminating unnecessary ways of presenting myself to others, especially my spouse, as I disclose to my partner who I really am.  

If that seems like a lot, we took 5 podcast episodes to explain all of it for this one moment.  

No wonder it is hard to become the people we want to be.  We have to get good at so many important and sometimes difficult processes at once.  

Another way that Dr Schnarch describes differentiation in the book is having the ability to maintain a sense of self while in relation to others.  

He also describes it this way, Differentiation is your ability to maintain your sense of self when you are emotionally and or physically close to others – especially as they become increasingly important to you. 

For many of us, the closer we get to our partner the less we see ourselves as one person who chooses another.  We are more likely to see ourselves as an indistinct part of a whole.  

In talking about the ways that we use other-validated intimacy last week, we began to understand what it is and how we might be working to get it from others.  

We didn’t really talk about why that might be a problem.  

Relationships built on other-validation create cycle of self-presentation for validation, which eventually breaks down when one or more of the people involved don’t want to play the game any more.  

There have been a number of scandals over the years of influencers doing work that wasn’t quite real or genuine in an effort to gain more social media currency.  They are putting forward a picture of themselves that is not real in an effort to be seen as more than what they really are.  

They fake houses, cars, vacations, and other status symbols so that those who follow them believe in the person’s success regardless of its truth in the real world.  They present a picture of themselves as something they are not when they are alone with themselves.  

As a pornography user, this is exactly what I did to my wife and what she did to me. 

I would present to her a reality that wasn’t a reflection of who I was when I was alone with my inner thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  

I was presenting myself to my partner by not telling her how I felt.  I was not real with what was going on for me.  I was actively trying to manage her impressions of me, how she felt about me, and her anxiety around the difficult subjects in our life. 

I would do this by not sharing difficult situations at work.  I would do this by not showing her that I was stressed, I would say I was tired or something else instead.  I would find ways to avoid her when I had looked at pornography.  I would lie about my pornography use.  I would tell myself that she couldn’t handle it.  I would tell myself that I was only hurting myself and that she didn’t need to know.  

I was presenting a picture of who I was to Darcy in order to keep her “happy” or “Safe” or to get her to like me.  When the reality was, I wasn’t the person I was saying I was.  

D - Sometimes I would have sex when I really didn’t want to. I would be more sexual to try and compete with the porn that you were using.  I would act like everything was fine when they weren’t.  

This, in turn, created a great deal of anxiety for me.  It made me constantly nervous and anxious about our future and my ability to care for Darcy. It left me lonely and alone in very real ways.  

Which, incidentally, were my biggest emotions that I was trying to escape.  And were some of the main reasons I would turn to pornography. 

So, in self-presenting to Darcy, curating the image she had of me, especially the false parts of it, I created a lack of intimacy.  I removed intimacy from our lives.  I made it so she was not able to track honesty and openness in me.  Which was the very thing she would tell you that she wanted.  

She wanted to know me, but she was also scared of who I actually was in meaningful ways.  

What was that like for you?

D – I wanted to know you as far as it made me feel ok.  but when it came to you, when it made me not feel ok, I didn’t like it.  So, in a very real sense I was helping create an environment that encouraged Zach to self-present.  Which is not the same as making him do it.  He was still very much responsible for his own actions.  It’s important to understand that this is not an excuse for us to lie.  It is simply an acknowledgement of my part in the environment.  

Z- We all do this in some small ways and most of us do this in some significant ways. 

The reality is, that being able to present a picture of who we are to others is a valuable tool that helps us advance our interests. As far as I can tell, It also seems to allow us to keep things that aren’t really good to share with everyone to ourselves.  

D – we all know that couple who we might even look up to and we think they are doing so good.  Then the next thing you know they are getting divorced.  And we wonder what happened.  Really, they were just super good at presenting a certain image, while underneath something else was happening.  

Z - This is the time and place issue that we run into with a lot of things that are important to us, but that wouldn’t be really appropriate to share with everyone, at all times.  

Here is where we move into the ambiguity of being the person we want to be. 

If we only told the truth, what was absolutely real for us at all times to everyone, in every situation, there is a good chance we would alienate ourselves from those around us. 

Imagine going in and telling your personal business to everyone at work, regardless of the details, in an effort to be entirely transparent and honest and open. 

Doesn’t seem like a good idea. 

But, there is someone that it may be in our long term best interest to share who we are with.

Let’s just take a moment and talk about what I mean by the idea of who we are.  

We present a picture of who we are to those around us. Our work has a picture, that we choose to show them, of who we are.  Church has a picture of who we are, based on what we choose to show them. Our Children have a presented view of who we are, based on things we share with them.  Thiers is a more intimate and real view, but it isn’t the most real view.  

Then there is our spouse.  He or she will know who we are the most of anyone, usually. 

Once we peel the layers away and stop showing people what we want them to know about us, we are left with just who we are when we are alone with ourselves.  

This is your personality at its core.  This is who you are at your core.  This is the place where there are things that you know about yourself, that maybe no other person knows.  It is the place where we put the things that are the most true about us.  (this isn’t to say those things can’t change, it’s just where that reality is). 

This is who we are.  

D – In an ideal world, The person that we can share this stuff with is our partner, our spouse.  It really boils down to how intimate we want to be.  Some of us really don’t want intimacy in our lives.  What we really want is a relationship where you tell me I’m awesome and I tell you that you’re awesome. We don’t really want our partner to tell us what is really going on because it is scary.   

We talked about this last week on other-validation.  

Z - To create the greatest intimacy in our lives, we need to be willing to stop self-presenting to them and start self-disclosing. 

To create the intimacy that is the most fulfilling, we must be willing to take a risk.  The risk of being rejected by others. 

A good way to explain this is to take us all back to high school.

If you are like me, you might have been interested in certain things in high school that would have labeled you.  

You might have been labeled a nerd if you liked star wars or star trek.  You might have been a popular kid that worried that if others knew how much you liked band you’d lose credibility.  All the things that you liked that you worried that your friends might make fun of you for any reason and you wouldn’t share because it was too much of a risk.  That is what I’m talking about. 

Often we think there are only two outcomes.

People could reject you, judge you, and never talk to you again.  Or they would be just like you. They would love it too.  And it would deepen your friendship.  

This all sounds so shallow. But it was real I think for most people.  

Now think of the things that you keep from your wife or husband that you think would make them reject you.  

The things that you feel like you are keeping from them to “protect” them from you. From the real person that you are when you are alone with yourself.  

Self-disclosure is a really scary thing when it comes to pornography use.  Overcoming pornography, is a struggle in and of itself, but telling others about it can be debilitating.  It is fraught with a deep and real fear of being rejected.  

Here’s the thing.  If you want to be successful at overcoming pornography, you need to have the skill of being real with your partner.  Being the person that you really are with them. 

One of the reasons that I believe that men and women turn to pornography is that they are afraid of rejection and pornography never tells them no.  It never says that your ideas are unacceptable.  It never rejects what you want. 

One of the reasons that we are often afraid of intimacy and self-disclosure is because our partner and others around us are not only capable of telling us no, they do it regularly.

One of the reasons that we are not able to eliminate pornography is that this thing we do, even if we talk about it after we have done it, is just ours.  It belongs to no one else when we are doing it. And it never rejects us. 

To be capable of overcoming pornography and entering into a deeper intimacy with our partner, we have to be willing to brave that rejection, sometimes endure it’s intense feelings, evaluate whether it is worth it, and still choose our partner.  

The Self Mastery Podcast is dedicated to helping Latter-day Saints overcome pornography. Men and women struggle with overcoming pornography.

This podcast draws on the real-life experiences of the hosts, Zach and Darcy in their struggle to overcome pornography, strengthen their marriage, and grow personally.

If you want to know what real success looks like in overcoming pornography from real people who have been where you are, then this podcast is for you. The interviews with real clients who have succeeded, the amazing skills, techniques, and systems that are shared, and the real-world experiences of the hosts make this the number one podcast for Latter-day Saints looking to overcome pornography.

If you are ready to take your knowledge and understanding to the next level, join the Self Mastery Membership at zachspafford.com/workwithme

The way we seek validation will also help us understand how pornography has been playing a part in our self soothing process. 

I am going to lean on Dr. David Schnarch’s book “Passionate Marriage” for the definitions of these two concepts and then we are going to talk about what they mean in the context of pornography and marriage. 

Other-validated intimacy involves the expectation of acceptance, empathy, validation, or reciprocal disclosure from our partner.  

Self validated intimacy relies on a person maintaining their own sense of identity and self-worth when disclosing, with no expectation of acceptance or reciprocity from their partner.  our capacity for self-validated intimacy is directly related to our level of our ability to maintain a clear sense of ourselves when our loved ones are pressuring us to conform to their views, wants, or expressed desires.  It is the tangible product of our relationship with ourself.  

So, let’s talk about other-validated intimacy and how that might be keeping you from being successful in eliminating a pornography habit. 

When we expect our partner to give back to us as much or more than we are giving them, we are engaging in what Dr. David Glover calls in his book, “No more Mr. Nice Guy” a covert contract. 

This is our way of trying to get our partner to tell us that we are enough for them. 

I used to do this all the time with foot rubs and back rubs for Darcy.  When I wanted her to reciprocate with sex or love I would do things for her to make it so she was supposed to give back to me. 

I also did this with things like house work.  I would do everything so I could take off her plate any excuses she might have for saying no to me later.  

I did this so she would validate me with sex.  

This covert contract was about expecting something from her that she was not offering freely because she wanted to give it. 

D – and when he would do this I would …. Tell your feelings about this here. 

D – Give an example of how you would seek validation from me.  –  we never talk – this was a regular refrain, even when we had spent all day together the previous day.  I was seeking for Zach to tell me I was enough, accepted. 

What we are doing when we seek other-validated intimacy is asking our partner to manage our sense of whether or not we are OK.  

One of the reasons, that I believe men and women turn to pornography is that there is nothing we can’t ask for that won’t be given in that space.  It is almost a total free for all.  It is self-gratifying and other-validating, even when those others are not present physically, mentally, or even willingly.  

This is just an idea that occurs to me, but it makes sense, at least from one position.  Pornography validates us regardless of how we feel and regardless of whether we are acting with integrity.  When we deal with real people, in real time, over real issues, we are constantly at risk of being rejected.  

This is one of the central things that I believe makes pornography so appealing on a different level than just aroused by it.  Pornography never rejects us.  It never says that what we want is not available.  It never says, “I’m not comfortable doing that” or “I’m tired, can we just snuggle” or “I’m upset with the way you treated me”

This is a counterfeit other-validation that is available at the tips of our fingers at all hours of the day and night.  

Whereas, to be self-validated and to have self-validated intimacy, we must be able to maintain our own sense of identity without requiring others to affirm it.  We must be willing to disclose who we are when we are alone with ourselves without requiring that others reciprocate.  

This is a fine line.  Be clear.  If we go off into the land of “I don’t care what anyone thinks and I’m gonna do what I want because I’m never wrong” that’s not a healthy place and not what I’m talking about here.  Please don’t mistake what I’m saying here. 

Self-validated intimacy is about being able to choose closeness with our partner or others, while simultaneously maintaining our sense of self.  

This is a dance of being in relation to others because we want to while being solid in ourselves.  

The most clear example of this that I can give to pornography viewers who are in relationships is from my own life.  

When Darcy would come to me and ask me, have you been clean and I would answer yes, and she would follow up with, well how do I know.  I could see that she wanted me to validate her.  

In past times, I might have tried to convince her or just fold into her insecurities by working extra hard to prove that I was a good husband.  

But as I became clear that I was doing what was right and that I didn’t need to prove it to her, in fact, that I couldn’t prove it to her, it became clear that my answers needed to be about me.  

Instead of saying things to manage her emotions and try to prove my innocence, I would instead say, “I can’t prove it to you. I just know that I am doing the right things.”

It was an unsatisfying answer for her and for me.  

It lived in ambiguity.  Which is one of the reasons why I think true intimacy, the kind that lives in self-validation and the choice to be near our partner can sometimes elude us.  

Those of us who want true intimacy in our lives are going to need to get comfortable in this place of uncomfortable ambiguity.  Where we chose to understand that our sense of self is essential to our relationships with others.  

Next week we are going to talk more about this when we talk about differentiation and enmeshment.  

But for this week, if I can give you one thing to take away from this conversation it would be to look at how often you are looking outside yourself to determine if who you are, what you are doing, and how you are relating to the world around you is ok.  

For example, I had one client say, “I try to think about everything I’m saying in a way that it will make it so my wife takes it in the best possible light, so as not to upset her or create a bigger argument”. 

Everything that client is doing is to gain validation from his partner while simultaneously he is losing himself in her view of the world.  

A self-validated person would speak honestly and clearly about what he believes to be true, while holding space open for meaningful dialogue around what might be better than what he believes to be true. He would be choosing closeness, not sameness or conformity.  He would be choosing honest discussion, not shying away from meaningful disagreement. 

As Dr. Schnarch says in Passionate Marriage, Intimacy is the two-prong process of confronting yourself, (which we talked about last week) and self-disclosing to your partner from a position of working to be self-   validated

-       

David schnarch talks about self confrontation and other confrontation

• Engage with our behavoirs in a meaningful way from an objective place. 

One of the keys to love is the capacity to confront who we are.  Now, this isn’t to say that you aren’t inherently loved or lovable.  But, there is an element of growth that seems to be required for each of us to love ourselves.  I think one of the keys to loving yourself is having a sense that you are growing and leaning in into the discomfort of becoming more than what you are now.  

It also requires that we hear the truthful parts of what others are able to observe and point out to us.  

This is a skill that requires a capacity to not just endure the discomfort of the process of confronting who you are, but even to lean into that discomfort.  

So, let’s just take a moment to define what it means to self confront and be confronted by others in ways that are growth and love promoting. 

The process of confronting your behavior is simple but can be difficult to face if you are unwilling to be objective about what is going on and your worth in relation to what is going on. 

In order to self confront, you’ll need to see your behavior clearly and objectively.  Meaning that you fully understand or are seeking to fully understand what you are doing.  This is as simple as acknowledging what the behavior is by describing it dispassionately, and without layering in judgments that you might be using to beat yourself up with.

Darcy and I were talking to a couple who we’ve been coaching and one of their experiences recently was a conversation in which the husband let his spouse know that he had viewed pornography.  As they discussed the situation, the husband became more and more distraught, in a sense, to convey how much he was not pleased with his own behavior.  He worked to manage his wife’s experience of his actions by being more upset about the situation than she was.  

This is an example of not being clear and objective about your behavior.  That’s not to say there is no room for passionate discourse or even deeply felt emotions.  It is to say, managing our partner is not part of clearly acknowledging where you are.  It is hard to be objective about what is going on when you are working to manage others’ feelings.  

So how do we engage with an internal process of evaluating our behaviors?  We go into this in the membership, which you can join anytime by going to zachspafford.com and there are workbooks that you can use in there to really get in deep on this   .  

But first you’ll want to start by recognizing that the high emotions are sometimes ways of . 

Often, we want to hold our ground and defend where we are because it feels safer than confronting our actions openly.  

Second, you’ll need to be objective about what that behavior’s outcomes are, how they are impacting you, and how they might be impacting those around you. You can do this by being willing to look downstream from where you are and acknowledging the results in the eyes of others and even acknowledging the effects you’ve been working to ignore or hide from.  

Many of us do this well in other parts of our lives.  For instance, at work you might be really good at looking downstream and seeing what the effects are.  But when it comes to your relationship with your partner or yourself, it is not uncommon to be unwilling to see what we’re doing based on the way it will end up later.  

I know, for me, darcy and I were having a discussion in the shower just a couple of nights ago and she was pointing something out to me, something that I didn’t want to see.  At that moment, I had a choice.  I could get defensive, push back and say that she was wrong or that I didn’t see it that way, which until she said something, was somewhat true.  Or I could listen for the truth that she was trying to convey to me. Even if I didn’t agree with every part of what she was saying. 

I was able to see the important parts of what she was saying. 

Sometimes we want to argue a point that may have been indicated by our partner but isn’t the actual issue at hand.  

One of the men I work with said this to me about the discussions he has with his wife.  “I rarely say the right thing.”  This was an indicator to me, based on that phrase and some other data that I have, that his partner is keen to pick up on anything that isn’t quite right in his phrasing and hold that up for examination, rather than get into the parts where she is being confronted.  

If this is how you are reacting to what your partner has to say, picking apart the little things to avoid the more important issue, then its time to step back and see what is being said from a kind and open place.  

In the example of Darcy and I chatting in the shower, I could have let my anxieties about how she might see me or how I don’t like being wrong put me into attack mode.  Picking apart her argument and digging in my heals. 

Rather than do that, I took a moment to look at her thoughts and seek  to find any truth in them.  And even work to make her argument for her.  

Why don’t we want to confront ourselves or have others confront us?  

Because we don’t like the invalidating feelings that brings into our lives.   Next week we are going to talk about self-validation and validation from others.  But for the purpose of this weeks engagement on love, just being aware that this confrontation of our realities, statements, and behaviors is not about designing ways to hurt or jar ourselves or others into changing.  This is about loving ourselves and others enough to see how what we might be doing is not living up to our highest potential.  

As you do the hard work of self confrontation and listing when another person, usually the person you trust the most, offers you ideas or their thoughts about what might be going on for you, be aware that you’ll probably want to deflect from what you see and hear. 

If you can, lean into it.  If you can, be clear that only by going through it, will you succeed at being the person you want to be.  

I think it is also really important to be kind to yourself and your partner when this is happening. 

It really isn’t as effective to come in from a hard place and go through the process of telling your partner off.  That is more likely to create conflict than the self confrontation that is results and growth oriented.  

I think it’s also really important to be willing to be patient with the things we offer.  I can think of a couple of examples in our lives where Darcy has offered me some feedback that I wasn’t willing to hear at the time.  And she would step back from it, let me be, and re-offer it at a later time that seemed appropriate.  I think I’ve done the same for her.  

Confrontation is not about conflict or being right, but being willing to find truth. 

Kindness is essential. 

Patience will be rewarded. 

Leaning in will help you succeed.

For the month of february we are going to talk about Love - but not in the way that you think…

This month, love is going to be about our capacity for great freedom if we are willing to love and be loved through the process of understanding some concepts that you may not be familiar with.  We are going to talk about How to use these concepts to improve your ability to love and feel loved by others will be a central focus of our conversations around these concepts. Our goal is to help you choose yourself and be able to choose your partner.  

A lot of you listen to this podcast in order to move past a pornography struggle.  Each of these concepts is fundamental to the integrative process of becoming the person you want to be who doesn’t turn to pornography.  

Darcy - For those of you who have a partner who struggles with pornography each of these concepts is just as fundamental for you to work through in order to create the dynamic that you want to create.  They will help you engage with your partner around their pornography struggle and show up as the person you want to be in all of your life, not just your family’s pornography struggle.  

Zach - These are the topics we are going to cover over the next 5 weeks.

Meaning frames - Disorganization - Reorganizing with integrity 

Meaning frames are the way we look at the world in order to make it make sense to us. 

In each relationship we have, we create meaning frames that help us determine the way we are to act when we are alone, engage with others in our lives, and assure our place within a group.  

Many of our meaning frames are built into our theology and are perpetuated by our family of origin.  For instance, in my household, when I was growing up and as I have become and grown in adulthood, my meaning frames have referenced the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This meaning frame has given me a way to interpret the realities of life in ways that serve me and my family and help me make sense of the life I lead.

We all have meaning frames that we bring into our relationships that help us manage our life through lenses that provide meaning and value.  

In most LDS homes, pornography viewing is seen through a meaning frame of it being always destructive, personally, professionally, and theologically.  This makes pornography an always off limits type of behavior.   Those who engage with it, then find themselves deeply ashamed of their actions.  

Darcy - The family, especially the wives of those who engage with pornography, find themselves just as deeply ashamed of the pornography use for different reasons.  Including the idea that “I am not enough” if he uses that behavior to entertain himself, self soothe, or escape his emotions.  

Zach  - Either way, the meaning frames we bring to our relationships are the lens we use to help us see the behaviors and realities of our lives.  

Each meaning frame that we have does at least one thing for us.  It gives us a way to see the world on a given topic.  

What this looks like can often be a black and white way of viewing a behavior that can isolate us or others because we are not conforming properly to that meaning frame. 

When we encounter someone who is not properly conformed to the meaning frame we have and that we assumed they shared is a disorganization of thought and meaning. 

Darcy, what went on for you when you found out that I was viewing pornography?

Darcy -  Talk about how you thought I was one thing only to find out that I was someone else. And how that threw your whole sense of self and sense of me into disarray.  

What does that mean about my family?  What about our salvation?  What else might he be lying about?  Am I not good enough? Is he not happy with me, satisfied with me? What does this mean for our future?  Am I going to end up as a single mother like all the other women who ended up divorced because of pornography?  

Zach - When our sense of a particular meaning frame is disorganized it creates a lot more questions than what we have answers for in that moment.  

It is anxiety inducing and as a result can raise the conflict in the home and internally.  As you struggle to recreate a new sense of how to organize around this issue, it is helpful to know that you don’t have to have all the answers all up front.  It is also helpful to know that Darcy and I specialize in guiding you through that process.  

Within the membership 4 wednesday’s each month we help people navigate these questions and reorganize with integrity around what they want for themselves and their marriage. 

Reorganizing with integrity is the process of creating a new way of looking at the problem in order to account for greater nuance, understanding, and grace within the relationship. 

The reality of meaning frames is that we decide what they look like. 

We get to make them into what we want them to look like.  

Darcy - More importantly, we get to create the meaning frames that serve us and align with our values. 

Darcy - When it comes to reorganizing meaning frames around pornography we often see spouses using a betrayal model of meaning.  

Darcy - This looks like putting yourself in a near perpetual state of victimhood to your spouse's actions.  

Zach - This is not to say that the reality of finding out that your partner has not lived up to your implicit or explicit meaning frame is not a traumatic experience.  On the contrary, being aware that this is disorganizing, traumatic, and emotional is an important part of rebuilding a new meaning frame that serves and allows us to grow. 

Zach - For you, when you found out that I was looking at pornography, what kind of trauma did that create for you?

Darcy -

Zach - Once you were able to acknowledge that trauma, what did you do to leave victimhood and move into an empowered place that allowed you to reorganize our relationship in more meaningful ways?

Zach - when you think of the new meaning frame that you have around pornography, what does that look like?

Darcy - Answer and then - what is your new meaning frame around pornography?

Zach - I think everyone really needs to look at this for themselves and see how they want to show up.  For me, the idea that this is a struggle that I know you’ll help me with is one of those things that I see as our new meaning frame.  To be real about this, I don’t know that I’ve ever said this to you before, but I struggled being honest around this issue with you in the past because I was really afraid of disappointing you, how you would react, and of how those things would hurt me.  I didn’t want to talk about porn because I was trying to protect myself, which might be an obvious statement, but it wasn’t the same as if I came to you and told you I was having any other struggle.  

Ep

Self-confrontation - other confrontation

Self-validation - other validation

Being known - self-presentation

Differentiation - enmeshment

Zach and Darcy Spafford helped Eric and Jackie overcome pornography in their marriage.

Visit zachspafford.com to set up your 30 minuter consult with Zach or Darcy.

This is just the way things work in large families and small families.  The truth is that every child, as they grow up, experiences things that create narratives that they internalize as their reality of who they are.  

For me, one of the things that I felt and struggled with was this sense that I was not enough to merit someone paying attention to me and spending the time with me that I wanted them to spend.  

It really didn’t matter what I was doing or how successful I was in sports, drama, or school my parents were busy and, in my mind at least, didn’t show up as often as I thought they should. 

This perception, whether it was true or not, helped my forming mind create a sense that I was not enough.  

This affected the relationship that I have with Darcy and how pornography helped soothe me through parts of our life. 

On the 94 freeway headed north as we left the Chicago temple when Darcy and I were first married Darcy made a comment about my driving.  I reacted in a way that was not kind, was not safe, and not how I would want to show up in the rest of my life.

I got upset, angry with her characterization of my driving.  I felt like I was being attacked for doing my best and that no matter what I did, it would never be enough. 

Fast forward maybe 15 years, heading south from a trip up to Salt Lake, Darcy made another comment about my driving. Again, upset, frustrated, and defensive I proceeded to let Darcy know that I didn’t think her characterization of my driving was fair.  After all, I was doing my best and clearly, she didn’t appreciate everything I do to make her life happy, safe, and stable.  

I was, once again, not enough. 

You might have similar stories, your stories might differ in details, but feel the same. 

One of the reasons that I turned to to pornography was it’s extraordinary ability to bring me to a place where I was always enough. 

In the world of pornography, you can be with any woman, regardless of your talent, abilities, or money. 

In the world of pornography, the women you are with are willing to do anything with, for, and because of you.  They want you, the same way you want them. 

You don’t have to prove you’re a good match, capable of caring for them and your children.  You don’t even have to know anything about them, and they want you. 

Being wanted, unconditionally the way pornography makes you feel is possible is a powerful sensation. 

In the world of pornography, you are always enough, for as long as you can make the fantasy last.  

After that second driving incident, Darcy and I met with our friend Dr. Larry Bradley.  In that session, he mentioned two things that have made a significant difference in our lives. 

He helped me see that I was carrying around this idea that I wasn’t enough and that I can never do enough to please the people in my life. 

He also helped Darcy that the narrative that she learned for herself was that “I’m not lovable.”

So, just to re-clarify.  This isn’t a story about how bad our parents were or how they didn’t do enough for us and how we are damaged beyond repair and it’s all their fault. 

What Darcy and I experienced is a normal process that young minds go through to understand and manage their expectations in the world they are presented with. 

What we had to do, and continue to do in our marriage and lives, is become aware of how our brains were offering us a narrative that we weren’t good enough and that was hindering our long-term happiness. 

One of the ideas that most of us take into marriage is that our partner is there to validate us and help us feel complete. 

For me, I wanted Darcy to tell me that I was doing enough in all my efforts. 

For Darcy, She wanted me to act in ways that made her feel loved above all else. 

We go into our marriages with a sense that our partner is supposed to be there to complete us and when that doesn’t happen, we often find ways to manage that sense of not being enough. 

For many of the men and women who are listening to this podcast, that means escaping into a world where you are made to feel enough without exception.  

Now, you might be listening to this and think, oh, so the solution is for zach to be more loving and do the things that make Darcy feel lovable.  And for Darcy to be more expressive of her belief that Zach is doing enough and that he is always doing his best in everything he does and to never criticise him for what he does that she doesn’t like. 

But at the same time, if you live in the real world, you know that always being on guard to protect your partner’s fragile sense of self in ways that are always validating and uplifting is not only an impossible task, it would be mind-numbingly exhausting.

Here we arrive and we have this story in our heads about how we are not enough.  Most of us use behaviors that feel good and temporarily meet our desires to feel enough.  And most of those behaviors that we use create long-term negative effects in our lives which perpetuate the sense that we are not enough.  Many of us have gotten married, working to integrate ourselves with another person so that they can help fill that gap in our lives, which doesn’t work, which only deepens our sense that we aren’t enough.  

If you are recognizing this in your life, you’re not alone.  And you’re probably wondering what do I do to move past this downward spiral of never being enough in your own mind and in your actions.  

Let me give you two concrete things that you can do in your life to create a process of escaping this downward spiral. 

First, face up to your behaviors.  

When Darcy was asking me to slow down or drive more safely, she was putting something in front of me that she found to be undesirable behavior.  

Once that is done, I have to have a mechanism within me that allows me to evaluate that behavior on its merits and based on who I want to be in my life. 

Facing my behavior means that I’m not looking at that behavior through a lens of whether it is acceptable among others or if it has been tolerated in the past.  

It means evaluating my actions in light of my values and my desire to be a more complete person.  

Driving is a fairly small example, but pornography or overeating is often more impactful.  

As Darcy and I progressed, there were occasions where she would find something that wasn’t pornography but that was me following links that included bikini pictures or other material that I would not have been proud to explain to others that I was looking at.  

In her best moments, Darcy was able to engage with me in a conversation about that particular behavior or incident without making it mean anything about her.  She would ask me, is this who you want to be?  

This is a really great question when confronting your own behavior. 

When we ask this question without judging ourselves we can look at the behavior objectively and compassionately.  We can see it for what it is, a way to manage our sense of discomfort.  And we can evaluate it in terms of how it integrates into the whole person we want to be when we are alone and with others. 

In other words, when you find or your partner points out behaviors that don’t seem to be part of the whole picture you have of yourself take a step back from defending it. Allow yourself to be objective about it.  Imagine how it might feel to live without it.  

Facing your behavior and dropping judgment isn’t easy.  It is a really uncomfortable and meaningful process.  

Second, let go of caretaking your partner and other equals.

This is something that a lot of men do, and I did, to try and keep Darcy happy.  Darcy also did this to try and keep me happy, but more, to keep me from turning to pornography. 

Caretaking our partner is about hiding from them what is real and true for us.  

For me, I would do this by lying about my pornography viewing behaviors.  I would also do this by giving up what I wanted to show her that her needs and wants were more important than mine.  

She would do this by engaging with me sexually even when she didn’t want to, in order to try to manage my pornography viewing. 

Working to manage our partner emotionally and physically is frustrating for both parties in the long run. 

The Self Mastery Podcast is dedicated to helping Latter-day Saints overcome pornography. Men and women struggle with overcoming pornography.

This podcast draws on the real-life experiences of the hosts, Zach and Darcy in their struggle to overcome pornography, strengthen their marriage, and grow personally.

If you want to know what real success looks like in overcoming pornography from real people who have been where you are, then this podcast is for you. The interviews with real clients who have succeeded, the amazing skills, techniques, and systems that are shared, and the real-world experiences of the hosts make this the number one podcast for Latter-day Saints looking to overcome pornography.

If you are ready to take your knowledge and understanding to the next level, join the Self Mastery Membership at zachspafford.com/workwithme

In this episode you'll learn 3 keys that you can use to leave pornography behind.

zachspafford.com

Episode 123 – 

100k downloads

Scholarships as a thank you to JFF as we mentioned last episode – follow us on Instagram so you see the link for the application

This month in the membership we are talking about Porn is not The problem.  

This Christmas had a note from eric and Jackie – we did a client interview with them episode 62 in nov 2020, they are doing so well.  If you want to go back to that one and listen, you’ll get an idea of the amzing changes that can come to your life working with darcy and I

They are such an amazing couple.  They just messaged us in dec and that were doing super well.  

One of the things that we got over Christmas was one of those Chinese finger traps. 

You know, the ones that you can put your fingers into and then once your fingers are in there, if you pull they get trapped.  

And for a really good one of those, the harder you pull the tighter it grips you.

This year as all of us are setting goals and laying out resolutions we really need to take time to recognize that a lot of these goals can be like that Chinese finger trap. 

The more we resist and fight with what we don’t want in our lives, the more that thing grips and holds on to us.  

The only way to get out of them is to lean into back into the trap and release its hold.  It is a lot like a snare used for catching rabbits. 

So, what does that look like when it comes to pornography and other unwanted habits. 

Much like the finger trap, the more you resist your unwanted habit, the more it seems to be a struggle to get away from it. 

Simply put, if you are going to get away from this trap you are going to need to see what it is that you need to lean into, to start allowing that habitual trap to loosen up and let you walk free. 

1 To do this you’ll need first to recognize that you have a response ability.  You have the ability to respond to the underlying reason that you have been turning to this habit.  

Learn what those reasons are.  Ask yourself, why am I using this habit to avoid my life?

Most of the people I work with find that the reason they are using an unwanted habit to avoid their life or buffer is that they feel uncomfortable.

This comes in a variety of ways, including the regular, if unpleasant emotions of loneliness, being tired, stressed, frustrated, entitled, and any other negative emotion you can name. 

Once you learn what the underlying reason is for your habit, you can now begin to exercise your response ability.  

Respond to that emotion differently.  In my membership we work on a variety of techniques to do this, including simple meditations, but no matter what you do, experimenting to respond to that emotion differently really needs to include leaning into it and allowing it to exist without resistance. 

2 Then next thing you need to do is not freak out if it doesn’t work perfectly the first time.  

Like an animal caught in a snare, the freak out is the think that keeps you trapped.  

When mistakes are made, create an honest, open dialogue with your partner that can help you see the situation for what it is.  And learn from what happened.  

When we catastrophize and act as though we will never be free from this behavior, we really do get snared and trapped.  

3 finally, this last thing that you can do, rather than set goals that might be Chinese finger traps, let’s re-view our values, reassess how they fit into our lives, and reprioritize them as we see fit.  

In episodes, 108 and 109 I go into depth on how goals and values interact and how you can more fully live your values in ways that help you succeed in the long run.  

One of the things that I talk about there is that goals are about a finite timeline.  Meaning that when we have a goal, we can be really good at focusing in on it until that moment is achieved in our minds.  Weight loss is a great example of this.  If you have ever tried to lose a certain amount of weight, reached your target only to find that in the next days, weeks, and months, you fall back to old ways of eating and gain the weight back and maybe a couple extra pounds. 

This is an example of how goals exercised in the name of willpower can be detrimental, whereas values are more about who we are. 

Living your values means that they are done in the here and now, and the here and now never goes away.  So, if I eat healthy because one of my values is to eat healthy then I’m more likely to live my life based on who I am, not what I’m supposed to achieve.  

Whereas, with goals, once the achievement has been made, our focus shifts and we move on to another goal. 

This podcast draws on the real-life experiences of the hosts, Zach and Darcy in their struggle to overcome pornography, strengthen their marriage, and grow personally.

If you want to know what real success looks like in overcoming pornography from real people who have been where you are, then this podcast is for you. The interviews with real clients who have succeeded, the amazing skills, techniques, and systems that are shared, and the real-world experiences of the hosts make this the number one podcast for Latter-day Saints looking to overcome pornography.

If you are ready to take your knowledge and understanding to the next level, join the Self Mastery Membership at zachspafford.com/workwithme

If you have struggled with pornography and are ready to quit, this is the podcast for you. Porn affects so many men and women and now you have a way to quit for good and forever.

Come listen to Zach and, when you are ready, sign up for his once a year Group Coaching by clicking HERE.

Overcome porn for good in your life and become the man or woman you want to be in 2022!

Check us out at zachspafford.com

If you would like to start your year off amazingly, come be part of our only group coaching of 2022.

If you are looking to eliminate an unwanted porn habit, this is the podcast for you.

Learn more at zachspafford.com

Check out the amazing work course Joey and I put together at TeensQuitPorn.com

You can also check out Joey's work at firmlyfounded.com

This question is one that I think a lot of people struggle with, so I wanted to take some time and talk about the differences between the ways that we approach problems and how we might be approaching our struggles with pornography in ways that aren’t helping us ultimately succeed. 

I’m going to touch on 4 different concepts, how they might help and how they might keep you from succeeding if you utilize them too heavily without other key elements. 

Let’s talk about Motivation, Our Why, Habits, and Who we are. 

I’ll start with Motivation.  Which I like to think of as synonymous with willpower. 

This is a pretty common way of thinking about a problem.  First, we encounter a problem and then we find some motivation that helps us overcome that problem until it is finally gone. 

When it comes to short-term and long-term,  external problems, this is often a really good course of action.  Take school or work for example.  External problems can be broken into a variety of short-term, solvable, puzzles that once they are overcome fade into the distance.  This is why motivation works.  We don’t have to sustain a long-term, near-permanent grasp on the problem.  We simply need to go through the maze of struggle until we get to the exit and then we can move on to the next problem. 

This is like setting a goal and when that goal is accomplished we no longer focus on the goal.   I once did a weight loss challenge at work with my co-workers.  I kept telling myself that these were permanent changes that I was making and that I would never look back.  Immediately after winning that challenge I stopped eating healthy and went back to being the same person i was before.  I was no longer focused on a goal, my willpower had run out, and my motivation (the money) had long been spent.   

So, it is much easier to have motivation on a short-term project, issue, or goal because we can use willpower and motivation to see it through to the end. 

Where we get lost is in thinking that willpower and motivation are enough to overcome an internally motivated feedback loop. 

In their book, change anything, the authors describe willpower as a trap.  In their studies of children who were offered tempting items to purhcase after they had just been given cash for going through a series of steps that were presented as the experiment. In reality the experiment was what would the kids do with their money.   they demonstrate that willpower is not the main determining factor in whether the kids buy.  

Motivation and willpower are easily manipulated it turns out. Where the kids who succeeded in keeping their earnings was more based on A set of skills learned along the way that the kids could draw on when the temptations arose.  Skill, not willpower or motivation determined whether they bought overpriced trinkets for the thrill of the purchase, or simply said, “i’ll save my money for later.”

Many of you have said, after a particularly difficult patch, “this is the last time. I’ll never go back to that.”

You found yourself motivated and full of willpower.  A year later or less, without having changed your skill level your willpower has run out and the brightness of your motivation has faded until you give in again.  

Let’s take a look at the Why? Simon Senik talks about this a lot with corporations and I do think there are applications in personal life as well.  In his most famous example, Simon talks about the reason we all buy apple products when there are more affordable and often, more functional products out there.  

It’s that they focus on why they do what they do.  

Let’s talk about how the Why is often used and how we can use it more effectively to succeed.  

Usually, when I hear my clients talk about the reasons they want to eliminate pornography I hear them tell me that there is some sort of external why.  

“I don’t want to upset my wife” “It’s not ok as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to do this” “I can’t go on a mission until I get this under control” 

Each of these reasons are trying to make our internal problem an external one by putting the locus of our why outside of us and on a person or entity that isn’t us.  

I often talk about this as an abdication of agency and a nice guy approach to living which ends only in resentment, failure, and frustration.  

One thing that Simon talks about in his famous ted x talk that you only see if you’re paying attention is that all of the why’s of great and famous entrepreneurs are focused in on themself making something that they like.  Meaning, when we focus on who we want to be, creating what we want, and making that thing work for us, our why can be helpful in structuring a meaning frame that provides a long term creation of who we want to be.  Why must lead to who we want to be, not who we want to please.

So, let’s talk about who, because who we are and how we see who we are is integral to executing behavior that allows us to succeed at higher and higher levels. 

Let me give you an example from my own life.  

When I left a very lucrative job working for a large company my in-laws thought I was insane.  The work I was doing wasn’t going to end any time soon. I had a six figure salary, a five figure bonus, and a company car.  But I also had a tight schedule, bosses that I was beholden to, and very little freedom in my day to day.  

In the beginning of being in that job I saw myself as a lifer.  I thought I would be there forever.  Then one day a switch flipped for me.  I no longer saw my self as a corporate man.  I saw myself as an entrepreneur.  I wanted to own what I was doing.  I wanted to be my own boss and was willing to risk greater insecurity for greater rewards.  

My who had changed.  As a result, I found a way to buy a business and become my own boss.  

My behavior reflected my sense of who I was.  Not the other way around.  

When it came to pornography, who I was became just as important.  When I stopped seeing myself as an addict, I started to figure out that I don’t have to act like someone who can’t control my own behavior.  

As I left that space I had to find a new vision and belief about Who i was.  

For a time I was someone who occasionally looks at pornography.  

Eventually, who I was entered a phase where  I am someone who doesn’t view pornography at all. 

From my belief in who I am, my behavior followed because if I were to act in a way that was contrary to my understanding of who I am, that would become very disorganizing to my sense of self.  

This same principle is why vegitarians don’t eat meat, Cubs fans don’t buy White Sox hats, and Latter-day Saints sacrifice so much to go on missions.  

Who I am trumps short term happiness when we fully integrate it into our lives and use it to show us the way forward.  

“Who” also dictates our habits and can help us create worthy, valuable ones where unhelpful and damaging ones previously existed. 

So, when we talk about habits, I start with a simple equation.  Cue, response, reward. 

In this equation we have one lever of control. How we Respond.  

Cue’s will always be part of our lives.  As a result, we need to retrain our response process to give us rewards that align with our long-term sense of who we are. 

First, what I mean when I say cue is the external circumstances and internal feelings that occur to everyone. You might have referred to these as triggers.  I find that to be a loaded word that relinquishes too much control over who we are.  When I have a cue, i choose how to respond to it.  When there is a trigger, I go off like a gun regardless of what I want to do. 

This process of creating habits based on skills that we learn creates automatic, values-based responses to cues that align with our internal why and sense of who we are. 

Setting up a habit is not just about trying one thing one time.  It is about training.  

I grew up a military brat,  we traveled from place to place and were deeply ingrained with a sense of pride in our armed forces.  

If you think about what it means to be a soldier in the US armed forces you probably think about training.  

Lots of training.  

Which is just a word for practicing the skills that we need to automatically react to the environment we’re in. 

Just like the military, we can practice our overcoming pornography skills in what I call “off game” scenarios.  

Food is a great place to do this, but so are other commonly occurring circumstances.  

If you are looking to overcome porn for good. This is the podcast for you.

If we want to succeed we have to be able to automatically react, rather than fight, search for motivation, and drain our willpower.  

If you drop soldiers into battle without training them, they will likely not succeed.  Dropping yourself into life without training for urges, cues, and circumstances hoping you’ll have willpower enough to walk away from your computer or motivation enough to talk to your partner is a recipe for disaster.  

Instead, learn your “why,” create your who, and train like your life depends on it.   

“Is this going to help me eliminate my pornography struggle?“

What they are usually looking for is a confirmation that the work I do with people is going to be the very last thing they need to solve their pornography struggle. 

My standard answer is, “I don’t know if this is the last thing you need to know or just the next thing that you need to know. But everyone who struggles needs to know what I teach.”

So, let me tell you guys what I do that helps people solve their pornography struggle in a way that sets them up for success. 

I want to start by saying that if you keep working at it, you aren’t failing, you are succeeding. 

The process I teach is a simple one that uses the techniques I’ve learned from the life coach school and the CTFAR model that was developed by Booke Castillo and Acceptance and Commitment Coaching developed by Steven C. Hayes

Within those two systems, I help people learn how to solve for pornography with a variety of skills that I teach in three different settings.  The three coaching settings that I have right now starts with individual coaching, where you and I work together for about 6 months and we focus on your individual needs.  I teach and coach you alone during 12, 30-minute sessions.  This gives us a thread of work to follow and a lot of people see their best work happen during these sessions.  

The second way that I get people moving in the right direction, is with my coaching membership.  The coaching membership includes 4 open coaching calls each month, 2 for men and 2 for women. This usually breaks down along the lines of people struggling with Pornography and their wives, but that is not always the case.  There are a number of women who participate in the women’s calls that also struggle with pornography.  In this setting, I coach along with Darcy on the women’s calls and we help those who volunteer to be coached to get a different perspective on where they are and how they can move forward.  

The third way I help people is, once a year, I set up a group coaching program.  If you’re a part of my mailing list, you will have gotten a coupon code to join that for 55% off this year.  In the group coaching program, we get together weekly and coach just those in the group.  Many of whom go on to be highly successful in their path away from their pornography struggle. 

If you want to learn more about how each of those work, feel free to set up a consult with me by going to zachspafford.com/workwithme. 

Or you can just email me at info@zachspafford.com

So the next thing that you’ll want to know is, what do I teach.  

A lot of the things I teach are things I teach on this podcast.  

There are also some that I don’t teach on the podcast.  

That said, one of the main things that I teach is to become aware of the thoughts and feelings that are going on for you.  I teach you how to become more aware and how to use that awareness to improve your ability to make the decisions that you want. 

I also teach you some really important things that your brain is doing, like, the motivational triad, confirmation bias, and feeling good in ambiguity among other things.  

These simple things that your brain does automatically, are part of the reason that pornography has such a powerful draw.  Understanding how they work and what they do in your life that is helpful and not helpful is an ally in the process of retraining your responses to improve your outcomes when it comes to pornography.

Being aware and understanding how your brain works give you a base to start from. 

Add that to skills designed specifically to deal with urges, thoughts, and feelings will give you a compelling way to eliminate pornography. 

When urges, thoughts and feelings arise, there are three really important skills I teach. 

First, allowing without needing to intervene.  Many of us believe that we have to do something when our brian offers us an idea that is contrary to our moral compass.  We’ve even been taught to forcibly, “change what’s on the stage”.  This technique helps us recognize that if we went around jumping at every shadow that crossed our path, we’d be miserable.  Many of you listening have been miserable because of that very thing.  

Another that i teach is being present with where you are in life.  Many of us fail to go through the difficult parts of life because we would rather pretend it isn’t there and avoid it. Learning to deal with those difficulties helps individuals become more successful at not turning to the behaviors that they have used in the past to avoid those unpleasant feelings and moments. 

I’ll give you two more. 

This next one might surprise you.  Especially as members of the church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints.  I love to help people engage with and become more familiar with their top priorities and values.  

I often ask my clients, “what are your top five priorities in life?”

It is very rare that any of them see themselves as a top priority.  They will often list off their family, their work, their church responsibilities.  These are all amazing, and appropriate priorities for us to have.  

But the one they fail to mention, themselves, is often the one that is being neglected.  In neglecting to take care of themselves and make their happiness a priority, they shortchange the other four.  

Last one, being kind.  I’ll talk about this one in my next podcast more in-depth.  But for now, I’ll just tell you that being kind to yourself is essential to making this struggle a thing of the past.  

I realize this isn’t a deep dive into what I do, but it is a significant part of the process.  

I’ve done a number of interviews with clients since I began this podcast, you can go back and get a more in-depth understanding of what their experience was and how you might see yourself through the conversation that I have with them. 

Each of the things I teach and coach on is going to help you. 

One of them might be the magic that unlocks the change you’ve been wanting. 

But more than anything, I hope you understand that the success you get from the work is in not giving up and choosing to have hope.  You guys are amazing. 

If you have struggled with pornography and are working to quit, then this is the podcast for you.

Check us out at zachspafford.com.

Here is a simple process that you can use every time to intervene when your brain offers you the chance to view pornography.

If you are looking to eliminate an unwanted porn habit, this is the podcast for you.

Learn more at zachspafford.com

If you are someone who needs help with pornography, please set up a free consultation at zachspafford.com/workwithme.

If you are looking to eliminate an unwanted porn habit, this is the podcast for you.

Learn more at zachspafford.com

For more information on how to overcome porn please visit, zachspafford.com.

To schedule a consult, go to zachspaffor.com/workwithme

• Don’t judge who you are in that conversation - allow for neutrality in thoughts
• Someone can be beautiful or sexy without making it mean anything about you. 
• 
  
• Focus on what actions you want to take next
• Allowing the thought to be there
• Drop the judgment of what your brain offers you.  
• Stop believing a thought is morally corrupt if you aren’t choosing it.

My wife is a wonderful woman, whom I love and adore. 

She also used to try and control me with sex. 

It wasn’t always overt, and it wasn’t usually something that was designed to make me do something that I didn’t want to do. 

In fact, it was the opposite. 

She was trying to get me to not do something. 

She was trying to keep me from looking at porn and I didn’t really want to look at porn. I wanted to stop.

It was always, in her mind, something she would do to “meet my needs”.

And I thought she was, by her actions, “meeting my needs.” 

In her mind, my pornography problem was about controlling how often I needed to give in to my urges. If she could interrupt my urge by engaging with me sexually, then she was helping me. She thought she was helping control my choice to use pornography. 

She would ask questions like, “How are you doing today?” in an effort to gauge where I was and if she “needed” to intervene by providing me with an outlet for the day. 

What she was doing, in reality, was frustrating herself and rewarding my pleasure center for disconnected, isolating behavior. 

Two main things were frustrating her. 

First, was the fact that she could not, despite her best efforts, control my urges or when or how I acted on them.

Whenever we try to control others, we will always find ourselves frustrated. They will rebel, they will deceive, they will find a way around you. People are like water; they will go wherever their personal gravity takes them. 

It is inevitable. 

Second, and I think more importantly, when what each of us really wanted was intimacy in the deepest and most connected sense of the word she was creating resentment and I was creating disappointment.

Control is antithetical to intimacy because inherent in intimacy is trust and control requires none. 

She resented needing to look over my shoulder to make sure I was making good decisions. 

I was disappointed that the intimacy that I wanted wasn’t available in a resentful spouse 

Don’t get me wrong, when you and your spouse decide that pornography use is not ok in your household then both of you should take steps to create an environment where viewing pornography is difficult. I am also not condoning pornography use. 

I am also saying, whether you are a man or a woman, making a decision to intercede in the urges of your spouse in an effort to control their actions is not going to work out in the long run. 

Let’s flip this on its head for a moment. 

Imagine a wife who is struggling with eating sugary treats. Each morning her husband asks her how she is feeling about that cheesecake with fresh strawberries in the fridge. 

During that discussion the husband hears the wife is having a hard time not sneaking a piece. She knows that it is for dessert after dinner this evening, but that she really wants to have just a little. 

So, he says, I know what, I’ll help you out. I’ll meet your needs. I have a carrot for you. It should tide you over because carrots have a lot of sugar. 

His attempt to “help her out” places him in a position that makes no sense to anyone. 

He’s giving her a “sweet treat”, but it isn’t what she wants. Not really. 

She may even take and eat it. But she may feel resentful that he is trying to control what she eats. 

Do you see the parallels?

What we all have to understand is that controlling others behavior isn’t really going to bring us or them to the place we want to be. 

It may only to create a short-term fix and will probably create a long-term negative effect. 

How do you avoid this?

1. Ask yourself, is it working? Is trying to control his behavior or her behavior working?

2. Make your decision about you being your best you. 

a. If you need time before reengaging with your spouse sexually, let them know and wait until you are ready to begin trusting again.

b. If your spouse is offering you carrots when you really want cake, discuss it and be prepared to wait until you can come to a mutually agreed on timeline. 

For a long time, I wanted my wife to control internet access on my phone, my computer, anything that I could get into trouble with. 

I found out that doesn’t work because in the end I needed to make good decisions based on my long-term desires, not my short-term urges. 

Being the person taking the carrots then being mad that I wasn’t happy with them and mad that my partner was putting “health food” in my face when what I really wanted was dessert that evening with my spouse. 

Here is what I know:

- proactively confronting yourself and why you are choosing pornography over intimacy is essential to chang 

- Being held accountable doesn’t mean someone is constantly checking your phone. We all know that things can be hidden and that is not your spouse’s job. 

- User’s must be solely responsible for their actions, no one else. There is never a reality where, “she didn’t meet my needs” or “you didn’t make the internet safe” or anything like that. The “devil made me do it” isn’t true. You chose to look or not look. Feel free to curiously explore why. 

- You are going to have negative feelings like loneliness, disappointment, anger. Don’t let them compound by making decisions that temporarily block the emotion. Seek instead to feel it, understand it and honestly and lovingly express it. 

- Intimacy comes through honesty and trust, not sex, not control, not buffering. Seek to find ways to experience intimacy.

- creating the life you want involve  

I love my wife and she loves me. 

I can’t control her and she can’t control me. 

I want you to know that it is possible to figure this out. I coach men and women who can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel who finally reach the sunshine and see how much better it is on the other side. 

If you are a pornography user or the spouse of a user, sign up for a 

free mini session and let me help you begin the process of letting go of control so you can have greater intimacy in your life, home and marriage. 

As promised, this week we will be talking about how to decide what your values are. In addition to that we’ll talk about how to more fully live them. 

When you think of your values, this is often where your deepest emotions lie. And as a result this may be an emotional process for you to go through.  

As you think about what your values might be, I find it helpful to use I statements that convey a sense of who you are.  For example, from the last podcast, “I choose sexual experiences that create intimacy.”

Here we have a current position on who we are, who we want to be and how we want to act in the moment. 

When you think about your pornography struggle or any struggle you have.  If your goal is to eliminate a pornography habit, ask yourself, what would achieving this goal show that you stand for or support ( or stand against or oppose)?

As you look at the core values that emerge from that question, you can form them into I statements that can fully express and inhabit your core value.  

So, for instance, if I were answering the question, what would eliminating pornography from my life achieve and show that I stand for or support?  I might say, I stand for living chastely, being open and creating intimacy in my life. 

My I statements would then look something like, “ I live chastely”, “I am open with my spouse about my sexuality, including when or if I view pornography” and our phrase from earlier, “I choose sexual experiences that create intimacy”. 

As you go through the process of doing this you may want to come up with two or three core values statements that are easy to remember and that help you convey to yourself a new sense of who ¥ou are.  

Then, in the process of living those values, it is important to keep in mind what we learned about values last week.  If you havent’ listened to that, go back and get familiar with what values are. 

You;ll want to hold these new values loosely. Meaning, rather than holding so tightly to them that when you fail to live up to them, you beat yourself up and feel like these values are impossible to live by, you hold them like you would a handful of sand. 

If you’ve ever grabbed a handful of sand and squeezed it tightly you’d have noted that most of the sand escapes your grip and you are left with very little of it when you open your hand . 

Rather, when it comes to values, using the sand as an analogy, if we pile the sand on an open palm, we end up being able to hold more than we ever could by squeezing it.  

This analogy also allows us to prioritize which sand, and how much of each type of sand we will hold at given times in our lives. 

When we prioritize our values properly, we find that we are no longer trying to hold on to ever decreasing amounts of capacity in our hands, but allowing, at times, some values to take a back seat to our current needs while still maintaining a small focus on values that are still important but not urgent.  

So as you hold your values lightly, prioritizing them as you do, you’ll find that you’ll need to practice your values for yourself and in your interactions with others.  

You’ll also recognize that as you focus in on a priority value, that your other values are still relevant to your life and who you want to be. 

One key to living your values more fully is being aware of what they actually are, which is what we’ve just done. 

The next key to living your values more fully is practicing them whenever you can. 

Think of scenarios where you have not lived up to your values in the past and role play what you would do if you had lived up to your values.  

You could even go into safe situations where you previously had not practiced your values and practice them.  For instance, if you have not been truthful with your spouse and one of your values is that “I am open and honest” then you might take a few minutes each day and openly convey to your spouse what your real feelings are.  You can do this is in a non-threatening and simple way.  for instance, you can come to them and ask them to just listen to you for one minute.  Ask them to not try to fix or even respond to what you say, but that you are going to open up and tell them what is going on for you.  

Do this regularly for a month and it will become second nature to speak about your life in real terms, rather than hiding from them what you are feeling and struggling with. 

As a person who struggled with pornography I had one goal.  Stop looking at pornography. 

There is a problem with this.  It isn’t that this isn’t a worthy goal.  It is. 

The problem with this goal is that goals are about finite moments in time.  

Goals are about achieving a target at a point, usually, in the future that once passed, will no longer be as relevant to your daily life as it was before you achieved it. 

That means, that once this goal is achieved, it stops being relevant, and then becomes something that you are no longer shooting for. 

Let me give you an example. 

Some of you may have done iron man competitions.  WE JUST had the world championship Iron man, here in st g over the weekend. 

If you have a goal of racing in the iron man, you’ll do certain things on a set schedule to achieve that goal. 

The day of the race comes and goes and the next day you are back to your routine you had before you were training to become an iron man or iron woman. That is what a goals based result looks like.  

But what about those people, who for years, keep doing it.  They seem to love it.  They seem to be doing it as part of who they are, not to simply say they’ve done it.  

Often, when I see men or women who come to me after a year or more of not looking at pornography, they have been training hard and achieving a goal. 

They have turned things off on their phones. They’ve been careful to not be left alone.  They’ve changed certain aspects of their lives as a process of exercising the willpower to achieve a goal. 

But the moment it is achieved, it is no longer a goal. And all that work that we’ve done to get to a certain point, may stop happening.  

This is what a diet looks like as well. 

You stop eating certain foods.  Foods that you will go back to once you’ve gotten to x weight. 

Then when you achieve x weight, the goal is no longer a goal and you go back to the way you ate before and maybe even worse than before.  That is why most people who go on a diet, end up gaining it all back and then some.  

The problem is, this goal based system of seeking achievement is not attuned to the long term results you are looking to create. 

What you need, what we all need values . 

Learning to create a values based decision making process will clean up all the struggle that we have with ourselves and what we aren’t achieving. 

First, this week we’re going to teach you about how values work.

Next week we are going to teach you about how to decide what your values are and how to live them more fully. 

1.     values are here and now. Goals are in the future.

a.     So, just like in the case of losing a certain number of pounds or running the iron man, once you’ve achieved your goal to stop looking at pornography, it is no longer a goal. 

b.     Some of you might be clever and thinking, well, then what if I say, My goal is to never look at pornography ever again. 

c.     Well, ask yourself, have you ever set a goal that you’ve failed to progress at to the point where you’ve convinced yourself it’s unachievable?

d.     So, how do we do this different?  

e.     we create a value around this

f.      I like to use “I” statements for this because they easily capture who we are

g.     And by virtue of the nature of “I” statements, they are in the now. 

h.     “I live chastely” “I keep my commitments to myself sexually” “I choose sexual experiences that create intimacy”

i.      These kinds of values are about me, they are about now, and they are not the values of someone who views pornography

j.      We can still have goals of eliminating pornography or losing a certain amount of weight, or competing in an Iron man

k.     Those goals serve as markers of how we live our values, rather than the substance of our purpose. 

l.      

2.     Values never need to be justified

a.     Are a lot like our favorite drink.  

b.     It’s not really possible to justify why you like a certain type of drink.

c.     Mine is root beer.  

d.     Which I know lots of people disagree with.

e.      You’ll rarely have to answer for why you have a value. 

f.      You’re more likely to need to answer for the actions you take trying to live up to that value. 

g.     One of our values is that we educate our children

h.     Because of this value we’ve chosen to homeschool

i.      For which darcy and sometimes I have had some explaining to do.  

j.      

3.     Values often need to be prioritized

a.     Living our values sometimes means that we let one value or another take a back seat to values that need to be front and center

b.     As a missionary I set aside my values of earning a living and pursuing secular learning 

c.     When I came home, my values of sharing the gospel and sharing my testimony come up occasionally, 

d.     But they were no longer my total focus. 

4.     Values are best held lightly

a.     Some values will take priority in our lives at various times, 

b.     But we also need to be aware that values can change and morph

c.     This means that the process of growth in our lives allows us to realize that values are not absolute rules. 

d.     We also don’t want to focus to closely in on one.  But be able to bring values up as needed to keep us moving in the right direction. 

e.     Much like getting fixated on the speedometer or gas gauge would make it difficult to drive 

f.      Getting fixated on being too strict with any given value may make it difficult to progress in that value or in others 

5.     Values are freely chosen

a.     This is very much a component of agency, 

b.     If we want to own our values we must choose them, 

c.     They must be ours because we want to not because we must 

d.     Any sense of compulsion is likely to eventually create rebellion.  

e.     

6.     Values include self and others

a.     When we live the value of Choosing sexual experiences that create intimacy, that value needs to reflect in our actions for our selves and others. 

b.     That means that when we think about how our values function and guide our actions, there needs to be consistency 

c.     

That is how many men and women act when confronted with their pornography viewing habit. 

We see ourselves in last place and never able to get to that top ten so we can finally win at something. 

I had a consultation with someone this last week that was somewhat out of the norm for me. 

Most of the people I speak with are in a place where they have struggled with pornography for a significant period of time and want to end their involvement with it. 

That was not the case with the client I’m going to tell you about. 

He was earnest and open with his wife and church leaders. 

He seemed honestly desirous that he could be in full fellowship with the saints and still view pornography because of what it had done for him. 

Before anyone listening gets out the pitch forks, I would like to take a step back and just touch on this perspective.  

For this client, who had some recent issues that made zoning out important to him, pornography had become an escape to which he could go for relief from a painful struggle.  

According to him, his wife seemed to be accepting of it.  

So let’s talk about, what if I don’t know if I want to stop 

I have only had a couple of people that have come to me with this type of scenario.  

In fact, two people.  

The first, really wanted me to say that pornography viewing was ok. 

The one I chatted with this week, I’m not sure what he wanted me to tell him.

But to both of them I would say the same thing.  

What is the best way to find out if they are being exposed to it?

How can we help family members who watch porn or struggle with addiction?

After many years of a pornography addiction, can an individual overcome this problem on their own without the 3 prong program the church suggests?

How do we protect our children and grandchildren from pornography?

How do you think it is best to block some of that content on the internet we don’t want to have show up on our screens?

Do you have a recommendation for what to tell kids to do when they come across something that’s inappropriate? (eg turn it off, tell a grown up, sing a hymn, say a prayer)

How do I encourage someone whose life is impacted by pornography?

What are the steps to help someone who has stopped using pornography but they still struggle with masturbation?

What can my kids say to others who might show up with inappropriate images or materials?  How can I help my kids confidently shun it and encourage better behavior and activities?  Wanting to remember to hate the sinner and love the sinner “we can do much better”

-       For the first time in a long time, I’m alone at home.  

-       Some kids are with darcy at a playgroup, others are out running errands, one, I’ve just dropped off at work

-       There was a time when this would be a moment of struggle. 

-       When I would fight, with all my might to stay clean through this time. 

-       Being alone, with no one to catch me, was always a moment where my mind would offer me thoughts like,  “nows your chance” “no one will know”

-       As a business traveler, I found myself in hotel rooms alone often. 

-       It was a consistent pattern that I would end up, at some point, spending a few minutes at least and sometimes an hour or so, viewing pornography. 

-       Having 8 kids, there have been very few rare moments where I was strictly alone at home

-       So, on the road is where I would do it most often. 

-       Part of it was loneliness 

-       Part of it was boredom. 

-       Part of it was the idea that I could get away with something and the only person who would know was me. 

-       That last one is the one that really, in the end, made it so I stopped looking at pornography 

-       Last night I had a conversation with a client who was telling me about his ‘accountability’ partners. 

-       As he described them, various people, including his wife, he asked me, what my thoughts are on the software for accountability and accountability parnters in general

-       He also asked if there were a permanent filter that I know of that is free 

-       I told him, the only filter or accountability person that really ends up working, is your own brain. 

-       That is the only way I know how to truly end a bad habit. 

-       Is retraining our brains to no longer desire pornography, no longer follow the urges, and no longer ignoring our moral compass. 

-       That process is what I coach people on, how I help them to get to where they want to be.

-       That is how I got to the place I am now. 

-       Alone, in my house. With no one to catch me.  

-       Yet not even fighting with my urges in the slightest. 

-       Because, I could look at pornography if I wanted to. 

-       I’m allowed, by virtue of my agency to do so. 

-       But I choose not to, because the person I want to be, doesn’t

-       Not because there is a filter I couldn’t surpass

-       There is no free, permanent filter available. 

-       You get what you pay for

-       That’s why I do the work I do.  

-       I wish I had a coach that would have helped me through this process.   

-       Because so many of us, feel like we can’t be alone.  

-       We don’t trust ourselves. 

-       We aren’t yet capable of saying no when there is no other barrier. 

-       

-       Porn and food are similar in the way we interact with them. 

-       Food is required for sustained life 

-       Our sexual desires are inborn and not likely to just disappear when we stop looking at pornography. 

-       Recently I have been working to eliminate an extra 20 poounds that I’ve earned over the last 20 years. 

-       I’m finding a lot of parallels to my struggle with pornography

1.     Urges and cravings come from nowhere 

2.     The same techniques that I used to stop looking at pornography are helping me stop eating every time my brain says to

a.     Fast food

b.     Eating out

c.     Sugary treats

d.     Stopping, dropping into my body, and breathing

e.     Noticing what my brain is offering and asking if it is going to help me achieve my goals. 

f.      

3.     There are also some differences. 

a.     I don’t feel the same kind of guilt when I grab a snack though I do feel guilt

b.     I don’t feel like I have to talk to my bishop

4.     There are some similarities

a.     I tell my wife when I stop and get some food

b.     I don’t feel like I’m living up to who I say I am when I eat in ways that are contrary to how I’ve committed to eating. 

c.     Understanding that this isn’t a diet but a way of life. 

d.     Sometimes my wife gets upset that I am eating something we’ve agreed I wouldn’t 

I am so excited to be here and talk to guy guys today.

Today I wanted to talk about how to create more compassion empathy and love for both you and your spouse.

When a love one struggles with pornography it often creates very big emotions for both partners.

.

IF you follow us on Instagram you might have seen the post I wrote that said 

The more time we can spend creating compassion, empathy, and love for both ourselves and our partner the further along we get.

 I wanted to go into a bit more detail here on the podcast. Sometimes I find it hard to write things because it is hard to convey tone and intent through writing. 

The way to create more compassion for each other is realizing we are all just trying to feel better and that we each have behaviors we use to achieve that goal.

What are some of the behaviors you find yourself doing when you are avoiding doing housework, meal planning, being present with your kids, stressed, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, or defeated?

I can tell you some of the things I do in case you need some ideas…

Scroll Instagram, check our podcast numbers and reviews, go out for ice cream, over eat or just eat food that doesn’t make me feel good. Sometimes I yell at my kids or try to place blame outside of me why and am not feeling happy. 

The way we create more empathy is seeking to understand our spouse and trying to imagine what it would be like if we were in their shoes.

.

The way we create more love is by dropping the judgement we have of our partner and ourself.

.

When I began to truly empathize with Zach and his struggle with pornography and drop the idea that the way he “sinned” was worse than mine, the easier it was to create a relationship where there was room for us both to grow.

.

If you are trying to get to this place and feel stuck message me and let’s chat!

.

I love helping women move forward in their relationship themself and their partner.

-       To love, letting this become a challenge that we face together, growing with, and strengthening each other

-       We are going to discuss ways to understand and recognize the fear based messages that we offer

-       As we discuss these we’ll talk about how we might discuss address these when others say them and how we can open conversations differently

-       And change those conversations to love, hope, and success

-       Let’s start with somethings that we often hear and see

-       “This will destroy your life?”/marriage

-       You can never forget those images

You will always be addicted/this will be a problem 

Seasons of marriage

Imagine on the day you got married you knew that there would be a trial so difficult that it had the potential to tear apart your entire life.  

Your every belief structure would be questioned. everything you had worked for would be reduced to the decision of whether to stay or go.  all of your hard work, love, and hope would be tested so thoroughly that either this would be the end of your marriage or your marriage will be strengthened immeasurably.  

Imagine, as you stand there, vowing to make your life and your eternity with the person you now adore, that this will happen not just once, but multiple times during your life together.  

Would you get married?  Would you choose a different partner?  how would you approach marriage differently?

As I have worked with hundreds of men and women over the past few years, I have noticed a pattern of behavior emerge that is the critical turning point from being fully the master of your behavior to viewing pornography and following the habitual following of feel good now based rituals.

This doesn’t happen with every one every time, but it happens with such frequency that it makes sense to get a feel for it, if you are someone that is working to eliminate a bad habit in your life. 

It all starts with a near truth. 

A near truth is something that, on the surface is easily seen as true and something that most people would agree with you on. 

These kinds of thoughts sound like this: These are all actual beliefs that individual clients have said to me in the scope of our coaching.

“I don’t want to be miserable all day”

“being in control of myself is so hard”

And 

“When I find something I enjoy, I stick to it”

These are the kinds of thoughts that we think should be true.  

I’ve never met someone who wanted to be miserable at all, much less all day.  We have all been in a position to where we think self control is hard.  And who doesn’t want to stick with enjoyable things.  

They are near truths because they are the kinds of phrases that are hard to argue against.  They seem right, others are likely to agree with you when you say them, and they are easy to believe because of these things. 

The problem here is that though they are near truths, they aren’t true in the long term.  They are actually lies in the long term.  Not because you actually do want to be miserable all day or because being in control of yourself is really easy or because when you find things you enjoy you don’t stick to it.  

Let’s start with the first one, “I don’t want to be miserable all day”

There are at least two untruths in this statement.  

The first issue is that most of us, when we deal with our feelings directly, are not going to feel miserable “all day”. 

Modern research shows that most emotions, when felt out to their full extent, last about 90 seconds.  That isn’t to say that your feelings might not last longer or shorter.  Just that is the average.  Usually, the reason our feelings last longer is that we keep retelling stories that refresh and restart the cycle of the feeling. 

When we fall in love, we tell stories of how our new love loves us.  When we are miserable, we tell and retell stories about how someone has wronged us, how we are in the right, and they are not.

This particular client was dealing with work struggles.  He was telling himself how others around him were talking about him.  

The only way he was going to be miserable all day was if he kept telling himself repeatedly about what he thought others thought about him.  All day is a long time to dwell on anything, especially, when we are aware that our thoughts, beliefs, and stories are the things making us miserable and we get to choose whether they are true or not and how long to dwell on them. 

The second issue with this statement is that we assume that we don’t want to feel miserable and that the proffered solution is going to make us feel better.  

Funny thing about emotions is that they exist to be felt and we often do everything in our power to avoid feeling them.  

In this scenario this client believed that he didn’t want to feel miserable all day, and the solution his brain offered him was 30 minutes of arousal to remove the miserable feeling. 

a thing that our brains often do is discount future pain based on current desire to feel pleasure, 

What his brain didn’t take into account was the fact that when the arousal finished, and it always finishes, he would not only still be left with his miserable feelings from before he turned to pornography to feel arousal, he would also have some additional negative feelings to deal with. 

Guilt, frustration, loneliness, shame, and isolation often set in after we come back to focus on our reality outside of feeling arousal created by pornography. 

The analogy I often use is, if I came up to you on the street and offered you a brand new, mint condition one dollar coin if you will give me your dirtiest, oldest, ugliest five dollar bill, you would think I was an idiot and never take the exchange.  

Our lower brain often thinks that positive emotions are more valuable than negative emotions and will seek this five to one exchange rate even though our rational mind finds it to be unreasonable.  

So, if you’re going to feel miserable, wouldn’t you want to avoid compounding it with other emotions by dealing with it directly?  By turning to pornography to create an immediate sense of arousal to push away our misery we suppress misery for only a short time and end up with many more negative emotions once that arousal ends.  

So in the case of the idea, “I don’t want to feel miserable all day” what is more true, that we are going to feel more miserable, with the compounding of negative emotions if we avoid feeling miserable now, or If I feel miserable now, I’ll feel better later. 

So in the sense that avoiding our misery creates more misery long run, it is a lie that we don’t want to feel miserable, we do want to deal with our emotions up front more than we want to compound them by avoiding them for short term pleasure.  

Recognizing this near truth for what it is, a belief that is only true in the short term and never true in the long term is key to stepping back from allowing it to guide your actions. 

A great question to ask is, will this be true tomorrow?  Will believing this help me be more like the person I want to be?  Is this true all the time or only when I don’t want to feel bad?

The second step our brain takes when we start down the path of choosing pornography, food, or any other buffer is, to justify it.  

In this step we tell ourselves some kind of limit that we will follow. 

We say things like:  “I’ll only look at bikini pictures” or “I’ll only eat one bite” or “I’ll only scroll Instagram”

We offer ourselves a belief that is only true until it isn’t.  

These are the kinds of thoughts that really don’t hold up to the scrutiny of standing alone, but in light of our believing our first thought, they seem more plausible and, importantly justified because of our previous thought. 

Take the thought, I’ll only scroll Instagram for instance.  

If we have, in the past, used Instagram as a way to fully engage with pornography, then this justification is a thinly veiled lie that we basically know is not true in the long run. 

We know that the Instagram algorithm is eventually going to offer us some click bait that will lead us to the next thing and the next thing until we reach phase three, which we will go into in a minute. 

We can see this is a justification, we wouldn’t believe it if someone else came to us and said it, so why do we believe it when we are in the moment?  Because it feels exciting.  

Thinking, I’ll only go so far, is this exciting moment that puts us on the razor’s edge and allows us to simultaneously believe that we will be good, while also believing that we can fall into doing something that is contrary to our moral compass.  

This justification is also part of why we tell ourselves it won’t be our fault if we come to something that is outside our moral compass or self-defined boundaries. 

In the case of food, I’ll only take a couple of bites, leads us into the mountains with the idea that if a boulder crushes us, we had nothing to do with it.  

But the truth is, if we don’t want to get crushed by a boulder that we know is there, teetering on the edge, waiting for the slightest vibration in the earth to dislodge it, we must take responsibility for being on the path at all, rather than plead gravity as the sole force contributing to the devastating descent of our crushing burden.  

Justifications are a way to offload responsibility while concurrently choosing a path that leads to consequences we are all too familiar with.

To create greater awareness of whether you are falling into a justification ask yourself, Have I said this before and was it true then?  I know what will happen if I go down this path, do I want to deal with the consequences? 

The third thing our brain will do is outright lie to us.  

It will tell us that we are “already here, so we might as well keep going”. It will say, “this is the last time” when it has said that before.  It will tell you, “It’s too late to stop now”.  Or “you’ve already done it today, you might as well do it again.”

These are starker, they stand out more, they are more clearly untrue when they stand alone.  They require the previous two steps to be followed to even be considered in the moment of choosing pornography to arouse or food to create dopamine.  

This is usually the last step before we fully give in to our habit of buffering, regardless of what the buffer is. 

These are the final tip over the edge that creates the motion we call falling off the wagon.  

When in truth we pushed ourselves into this state. 

These beliefs are the kind of laughable thing a toddler might say to an adult to explain why they turned the kitchen into a flour based winter wonderland, complete with pasta sprinkles.  

When we hold them up to the light and see right through them no one is surprised and we wonder, ‘how could I have believed that?’

This is likely the hardest place to intervene and ask questions, because it is closer to the end of the path of lucid thought and right on the cusp of being in the state of lower brain control.  

This is the point right before we let our habit running portion of our brain run the show and just get out of its way. immersing ourselves in the feelings rather than consciousness. 

There are, however, even in this moment questions that you can ask, that will give you a moment’s pause and an opportunity to get off the train.  

Whatever the thought your brain offered you, just question it.  Directly.  

Is it really the last time?  Have I told myself that before?  

There is often, in marriages and in the addiction model of pornography struggles, a question of, “what about my accountability partner?”  

Often, we ask this because we are seeking to have someone who will struggle through this with us and help us in those intense moments where we are believing the lies our brain tells us about how we don’t want to feel bad and pornography will help solve that immediate, acute struggle. 

As I was talking about this with a client this week, I urged him to use the plan ahead protocol that we teach to our individual coaching clients and in our membership, as well as, being radically honest with the people around him.  In particular his mother.  

His response to me prompted this podcast.  

He said, “my mom struggled through my dad’s drug addictions as his accountability partner and isn’t really willing to do that for me.  She said, I need to do this one on my own.”

Her story was one of being crushed by the overwhelming burden of being the person who is supposed to help someone do something, and having absolutely no control or influence over that person’s behavior. 

She didn’t want to be “responsible” for her son the way she had been “responsible” for her husband all those years.  

What is the difference between being or having an “accountability partner” and being accountable to yourself while being open about our struggles?

The traditional role of an accountability partner the way it was explained to me and the way I interpreted it, was that they were a person you checked in with regularly, they measured your progress, you called them when there was a crisis and they were the person who was going to talk you down off the ledge, convince you to stop, try to interrupt your model and get you back on the straight and narrow path. 

Sounds good right?  

Darcy, what do you think about this idea?

Then there is the idea of partnering with yourself and if you desire one other person to help you just be honest out loud with what is going on for you.  

This is the person you are going to tell what is happening for you, while simultaneously expecting nothing from them.   They aren’t there to talk you off the ledge, help you stop, or distract you from your problems.  

Really, what we are talking about is a vulnerability partner.

Being willing to say what is really going on with you.  

Talk openly about your wants, struggles, feelings, and joys

Not lying to self about what pornography does for you

-       I don’t want to feel frustrated the rest of the day – this is where it starts

-       Now’s a good time, 

-       After I turn to pornography I won’t feel frustrated

-       Turning to pornography will help me forget

-         

Being aware that your brain is trying to help you feel good now, not feel good about yourself. Or in the future – your brain is always in the moment

Being upfront about your pornography use. 

-       Plan ahead, 

-       Confess ahead

-       Stop acting like we don’t know the pattern

-       Owning the decision

o   Don’t want to believe the things that you would believe about yourself if you were actively, consciously choosing it, rather than being caught off guard or a victim, or addicted, 

Is it going to destroy your life if you drink a cup of coffee?  What if you have sex outside of marriage?  How about if you don’t eat meat sparingly and fruits and vegetables in the season thereof?

We think the more that we oppose something, talk about how bad something is, create and perpetuate fear around it, the more we will be able to keep people, including ourselves, from doing it. 

So, we often tell stories of designed to highlight the absolute worst thing that could happen to a person should they engage in a particular behavior that is contrary to the gospel.  

When it comes to things like pornography, modesty, alcohol, or really anything we are striving to keep our kids and family members away from.  

We tell the stories of the one person we know who did, you name the sin, and lost everything.  

So to help us stop doing that we are going to tap into 2 timothy ch1 v 7 to talk about how we can stop stigmatizing what we find morally wrong and start living more fully within the gospel that heavenly Father has given us. 

7 For God hath not given us the spirit of ^afear; but of ^bpower, and of ^clove, and of a sound mind.

Let’s start with power. 

I personally interpret this as agency.  We have the power to chose what it is that we feel is right.  Oftentimes, the fear side of things tells us that we are addicted, trapped, stuck.  When we talk about our struggles this way we disempower ourselves and others.  

To take back power, we must accept our agency.  Take responsibility for our choices.  Stop saying “can’t” should, shouldn’t.  

Let’s move to love

Charity and love go hand in hand, but they also are complimented by empathy and understanding. 

I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t prefer love to a story of doom and gloom about their behavior. 

Just because we don’t agree with a behavior, doesn’t mean that telling horror stories is going to keep people from doing it. 

Last – sound mind. 

This is probably one of my favorite things within the gospel and often it gets short changed because we like hearing dramatic stories of revelations and hero stories of great triumph. 

But a sound mind, to me means that we just need to use our brains and the logic and gospel principles that God has given us.  

We can figure things out.  we are pretty smart.  

The brother of jared comes to mind. He was sent back to come up with a solution.  Only the parts we aren’t able to do, like lighting the stones, are where the lord wants to intervene because he wants us to grow. 

Shame cannot survive being spoken, it cannot survive empathy,  brene brown.  

We need to teach our children swimming skills

-       Agency

-       Repentance

-       Atonement

We need to model the skills of healthy sexuality with our kids. 

Want to work with Zach or Darcy. Set up a consult at zachspafford.com/workwithme

The kind of coaching that I do is called causal coaching.  This work seeks to find the underlying issue that is creating the results in your life.  

This means that when someone comes to me and says, “I’m looking to eliminate a pornography habit from my life.”  I seek to understand what is creating that habit. 

Many times that habit is a result of a lack of emotional skills.  In my own life, I had a lack of understanding about what was driving my behavior and a lack of understanding on how to deal with what was driving my behavior. 

So the two skills I needed and everyone needs to begin cultivating to be successful in this work are 

1.     Awareness of the emotions that are created in their life by the thoughts they believe

2.     Practice dealing with those emotions without trying to avoid them, suppress them, or discount or negate them. 

For instance, when darcy would go on trips with the kids to see her family and I was left alone to work, I had to learn to recognize that I was feeling lonely and learn to understand the thoughts surrounding that feeling.   Then I had to learn how to process that loneliness.  How to accept it, feel it, and not avoid it.  

Sometimes, clients want to get a new emotion by just switching their thoughts or trying to skip past feeling the emotion.  That’s a mistake.  In this situation, I want to feel lonely because it serves me to recognize that when my family is gone, I miss them. 

In gaining an awareness of the emotion of loneliness through practiced Noticing, I was able to see it coming, see when I was most likely to turn to pornography.  This helped me be able to make conscious choices, rather than following the easy path toward just seeking to feel good that my brain had often offered me. 

In addition to that, feeling loneliness fully allowed me to get good at feeling all of my emotions.  So, when Darcy or the kids were on the phone, I could feel happy to talk to them more fully.  

When my clients work with me, they are responsible for taking practicing these new skills as often as possible.  I call it off game work.  Just like in sports, where we practice outside of the game to help us prepare to play our best in game time situations, this off game work is done by repeatedly engaging with the skill in non game time situations.  

For anyone trying to kick a habit, like pornography, overeating, or excessive phone use, practicing noticing your emotions on something that occurs regularly but isn’t the habit you are trying to eliminate gives perspective on what is happening in your brain.  It empowers you to use those skills when powerful urges that you would normally give into come knocking. 

So, how do you take advantage of this newfound off game practice?

Start by writing down what you are going to do and attach that practice session to a current habit. 

For instance, every time you brush your teeth, you can take 1 minute immediately afterward to practice being aware of how you are feeling and what your thoughts are that are creating that feeling. 

I like doing this in the mornings because, for many of us, this is a good time to reflect on what is happening that day, which can be a source of stress for the work we have to accomplish that day.  

Once you’ve done that, take 1 more minute to write down what thoughts are creating the feelings and what feelings you have.  

This is a small practice, but it will help you to become more aware of what is happening for you. 

Once you have written down your thoughts and feelings, take just one more minute, so we have a total of three minutes here, and practice feeling one of the emotions that you’ve written down.  

So, if the emotion is stress, practice feeling stressed.  See where it happens in your body and how it feels in your body.  As you do this you’ll find that you are much more capable of going through your emotions, feeling them to their fullest, and not running from them.  

This simple, three minute practice will pay huge dividends as you work through your pornography habit.   

The other day Zac h and I went hiking up Shadow Mountain with our 4 little kids. Just to get up to the base of the “Mountain” you have to climb up two very steep hills. The two toddlers were complaining about their legs being tired before we even got to the base.

.

As we started to climb the “mountain” my brain started thinking in metaphors and how this hike up this “mountain” was a great metaphor for all the challenges we experience in life.

.

As we began to climb it was pretty flat. Then it got steeper and steeper.

.

There were points along the trail were the toddlers needed some help along the way or they wanted to hold hands to steady themselves.

.

Then there were a few instances were the toddlers were not physically able to do the next step on their own and needed us to boost them up the boulders so they could continue on their way. There were points along the way where Zach had to carry our youngest.

.

As we were climbing, if I looked up ahead at where our 9 year old boy was, (he likes to RUN up this “mountain”) it was easy to get discouraged and feel like we were so far behind and that we would never going to catch up to him.

.

It was easy to think how lucky he is too have a healthy body that can scale this “mountain” in no time compared to the rest of us that went a lot slower.

.

But, as we put one foot in front of the other we eventually got to the top of the “Mountain” just like Briggs. It took us WAY longer to get to the top but, we DID IT!!!

.

It was so awesome to look back down the “mountain” and see how far we had come.

.

Sometimes moving away from pornography and moving closer to what we truly value in life can feel like a huge “mountain” to climb.

.

The truth is all you have to do is keep moving forward and when you slip on the loose gravel on the path (like we all do) you get up, learn from it, and keep climbing.

.

If you don’t give up eventually you will make it to the top of the “mountain!”

Emotional debt

We’ve talked about this on the podcast before – we bought a house.

It was super exciting for us to buy our house here in st g because, for about 18 months we lived in Milwaukee and missed all our friends and the life that we had here in st g. 

We are super excited to have the chance to buy our house.  But when I look at the amortization table, which is the thing that tells you how much you end up actually paying for the thing you just purchased I cringe a little.  In the end we’ll pay 2x the amount that we purchased the house for.  

When we talk about buffering we often just call it a behavior that creates a net negative in your life.  

While buying a house is probably not exactly a net negative in your life, in fact, hopefully it is a net positive, loans and money offer a great analogue for what we do when we buffer or really how we manage our emotions.

Let’s talk about how we are both borrower and lender for our own emotions and how we can better manage that process by using some very simple math. 

I like to talk about emotions as the math of our lives for a couple of reasons.  

One is, I’m usually speaking with men and we men like to think of our life’s journey as a series of solvable puzzles and problems.  Unfortunately, the men and women I work with often think that the emotional struggle that is often part of leaving pornography behind is a foreign land of mush and gush.

Second, it really gives us some powerful perspective on what is happening and what it costs to choose certain ways of dealing with our lives.

Here’s what the emotional loan process looks like. 

Let’s start with a really simple example.  

When we feel stressed and choose to turn to pornography, we feel arousal.  

Now if this is where the emotional exchange ended then we would be fine.  That would be the end of it. 

The problem is that this is usually not where it ends.  

First, feeling arousal doesn’t actually deal with the reason why you might be stressed.  So, if I’m stressed because of work, then turning to pornography won’t get my work done any faster.  

Second, that stressed feeling is now going to be compounded by additional negative feelings that I’m going to have to deal with as well.  

Just like interest, when we borrow a positive feeling from ourselves, like arousal, that doesn’t fit into our moral compass, we are creating an emotional loan that will be paid back with interest. 

So now, we have stress, guilt, shame, frustration, and maybe even more stress that wasn’t there before because we’ve spent time doing something that didn’t help us get work done and we are now even more behind. 

We’ve just created a 4 or 5 to one exchange. 

Imagine if someone walked up to you on the street and said, hey, I’ve got a nice crisp new dollar bill.  I’ll give it to you for that crinkled up old 5er.  

You’d say, no thanks.  

But that is exactly what you are agreeing to when you take the emotional loan of arousal or overeating or checking our phone.   

We are taking an emotional loan from ourselves, short changing ourselves and paying back at a 5 to one ratio, sometimes more, in order to feel good right now.  In the moment. 

When we feel a negative emotion, often times we look to mitigate it by using a good feeling emotion, like arousal, which is what we feel when we look at pornography. 

So, in that moment we have done what I like to call, taking an emotional loan.  Meaning we have now borrowed a positive emotion from ourselves which we will need to pay interest on over time.  

The interest that we usually end up paying is a compounding of the negative emotions that we feel.  

So, just like buying a house, we take out a loan, we feel good, excited, and even comfortable when we use a buffer to enhance our emotional state in the short term. 

Then, once that emotional high point fades we have compounded our negative emotional state by layering in additional negative emotions like frustration, guilt, shame, and discomfort. 

Let’s talk about what being an emotional lender looks like.  

Why do banks and lenders give people loans?

It isn’t because you are a nice person or even because you are a good credit risk.  

They do it because they want the interest.  They want to get more out of the transaction than just their money back.  They want to get the interest. 

This is a risk, by the way.  this can be scary.  Our lender gave us a big, huge amount of money up front so we could buy our house. They took a risk on us.  

We are going to have to be willing to take a risk on ourselves and believe in our ability to earn dividends and interest over time. Rather than needing to take the positive emotions up front. 

When that feeling of stress comes along, we don’t run from it, we don’t fight it, we don’t act like we have to avoid it.  We process it.  When we just go through the process of feeling our emotions, and then doing what we need to do anyway, we begin the process of giving our future self a loan.  

That means that we feel stressed, even when we don’t want to.  

But there is a huge payoff after we feel all the way through our negative feelings.  That huge payoff comes, just like interest on a loan.

After the negative feeling is processed and we choose not to view pornography or overeat or some other buffering behavior, we get to feel satisfied, maybe proud, maybe more capable, even self-confident. 

We get this whole menu of feelings that are more subtle and that we can keep getting time and time again. We get to feel good about who we are, who we are being, and how we are living in integrity with who we want to be. 

And I don’t think it is a one time thing.  When we get good at feeling the negative feelings up front, I really do think that we get more dividends over time.   When we are emotional lenders, rather than emotional borrowers we are receiving interest instead of paying it. 

And we are the only person we can borrow or lend to.  

There isn’t some where we can borrow from emotionally, because those feelings are inside us.  

So, we have to decide how we want to spend our lives.

Do we want to spend our lives in perpetual emotional deficit or do we want to have an emotional surplus that will keep paying us dividends?

Let’s talk about how to do this.  

I teach this to my members and my individual coaching clients in depth, and they love being able to go back to the training videos and workbooks available to them inside the membership. 

The process is really simple, but it is extremely important.

First, you have to notice. 

Most of us really aren’t there at all. 

We go from moment to moment and think that whatever comes into our heads and the actions that we take are just happening to us.  When we start to notice, we begin to step out of our unconscious, reactionary mind and bring to our concious mind all the actions and beliefs that are happening.

This takes practice. 

Next we, say yes and no. 

Say yes, we can do whatever it is that our mind offers us to do so that we can feel good now and then we say no, thanks, I’m going to observe what’s going on here.   

This is different from using willpower because we are not fighting with our brain. We are observing while withholding action and questioning what is happening. 

This combo of yes/no is a lot like when someone says to us something like, “oh, you’re a Mormon, you can’t drink” and we say, I can but I choose not to. 

It is an acknowledgement that we are masters of our agency and able to choose either way. 

After that, we observe. 

We just watch, ask questions, and take notes. 

You can take mental notes or written notes, but just like an anthropologist we are looking at the behavior, thoughts and emotions that our brain is offering us and we are learning what is happening.  

Last, but essential to the process. 

We breathe.  

Deep breaths that help us fuel the body and mind while we become the watcher of our brains.  

This process, that we all need to learn is essential to being an emotional lender rather than an emotional borrower. 

As a mom how often do you talk to other moms about pornography and how often do you find that their kids are struggling?

Mom’s often bear the burden of talking about pornography with their kids, what tips would you offer any mom who wants to begin creating an open dialogue with their kids around pornography?

There is often a lot of guilt and shame for moms when they find out their child is looking at pornography.  Why do you think that is?

What ideas would you offer to moms to help them eliminate the shame for themselves so they can come to that conversation with their kids in a frame of mind that they can be pleased with?

When you go to mothers retreats like the one you just attended, you seem to find that everyone wants to talk to you about your work once they find out about it.  What would you say to women who don’t know who to talk to about the struggles they are having with pornography and their children? 

You’re addicted to pornography, Right?

Monthly webinar

T: The addiction Causes Problems. 

F: Stress

·      Addiction means I’m not responsible for my actions – 

·      Addiction can be a rationalization that our brain offers when we want to believe we are a good person even though I don’t always live up to my values. 

·      What is the value in believing “I’m an addict?”

This idea has been on my mind a lot lately. 

We are all designed to notice beauty

Just because we notice beauty it doesn’t have to mean anything

Is it possible to notice and appreciate beauty and still live in line with out values

I’ve often gone back to the bible dictionary to understand this principle and I am struck by what it teaches about the nature of prayer.  

First, it is work.  So many of us go through prayer as though it were just an incantation that we learned to conjure the spell of this blessing or that.  

The way we pray over our food may be an example you can look to for what I mean.  

But work is uncomfortable, sometimes strenuous, and, often, marked by giving up something we want.   

Interestingly, one of the only things that we have that we can give up is our will.  And in this context, our will is often, as much as it is anything in our lives, the desire to feel good here and now.  

When we layer that idea into our pornography use, it’s important to acknowledge that the thing we are often seeking when we seek out pornography is to feel good, here and now.  

In the ancient world, people hit themselves in the chest or tore their clothing as demonstrations of sorrow.  They were, in their attitude of prayer, literally giving up comfort in the here and now and paying the cost of discomfort in giving up their will to God in that moment.  

Second, It is not a commandment, it is a conversation.  It is an opportunity to acknowledge what we’ve been given by our Heavenly Father.  It is an opportunity to discuss with him what we believe we need, want, and desire.  

Prayer is an intimate expression of our weakness and dependence on our Father.  It is an opportunity to express and experience the love He has given us.  

Prayer, as far as I can tell, has two main purposes. 

 Firstly, it is meant to help us bring our will into concert with that of God’s.  

Secondly, it is a place to seek out the blessings that are already ours, but that we are required to ask for.  

All of this, in my view, brings the discussion we are having with Heavenly Father about our pornography struggle into a bright highlight of what we might do better to fully realize the blessings our Father has in store.  

So lets start with the phrase that I used and I’m sure many of you have as well. “Lord, please take this pornography problem away from me.”

That may not be your exact wording but, it is likely similar to things you’ve said in your moments of want and struggles to end pornography in your life.  

Let’s dissect where this type of prayer might miss the most powerful parts of prayer.

First off, this sounds like we are giving up our will to HF.  We’re thinking, I don’t want this problem any more, I can just ask HF to take it away and make it so that I don’t have to struggle with it, because I’ve asked for a clearly good thing.  I’ve asked that I no longer look at pornography. 

But what this misses, is that in asking HF to “take this away” we are asking Him to be in charge of our choices.  Problem there is, he gave you agency, he isn’t taking it back.  

It also doesn’t account for work.  This is a want, a wish list item that doesn’t have any cost to it except that you asked for it.  This is like a little girl who asks her dad for a pony.   All she does is say, I want it and doesn’t create any path to making it a reality.  

But, you say, this is a blessing that God might be willing to grant.  Sure, I think that might be possible.  But I also think it is unlikely.  

To be honest, I don’t think HF cares if you look at pornography.  I don’t think that sits high on his priority list of things to eliminate from your life. 

What I believe HF wants for each of us is an abiding testimony in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the Joy that atonement allows us to feel as we return to live with them.  

When we pray to have our problems removed from us, we are asking HF to help us circumvent the natural process of struggle, growth, and learning that makes each of us stronger spiritually.  We are asking him to take away the hard parts of life so we can feel the good parts.  This is essentially creating a reality where we are only being righteous because we don’t have temptation, trial, and struggle in our life.  

Feeling uncomfortable is, well, uncomfortable. This type of prayer is asking God to break the rules for us.  Because there is opposition in all things, we have to go through discomfort in order to be able to truly feel joy and comfort spiritually and physically. 

The work of prayer is partly figuring out what it is that we should be asking for and partly hearing answers that may challenge our sense of self, comfort, and life direction. 

When we pray, we don’t often ask for greater capacity to feel bored.  We don’t look at prayer as a moment when we should ask HF to help us see more clearly how we can experience our upfront, in the moment, discomforts, so that we can better learn from them.  

We often ask for boredom to be eliminated and our pain points to be minimized so we hardly see them. 

As best I can tell, this doesn’t mean that we are out seeking to be miserable all the time.  It is, however, us meeting our challenges head on and being willing to see the good in them, learn from them, and grow, while still seeing beauty in and being grateful for them.   

Let me give you an example.  When I walk out my front door there is a hill that I can see that I climb multiple times a week.  It is very steep, rocky, and strenuous to climb.  The top is only about a quarter mile from my house but it is about a five hundred foot elevation change.  It is equivalent to climbing the stairs of a 50 story building on foot.  

Why do I do it.  Because I love the view from the top.  It is beautiful. I can see both the santa clara side of st George and the temple side.  

It is my favorite view in the city.  

As a benefit, I also get stronger legs, stronger lungs, and greater fitness.  

It isn’t comfortable to climb that hill.  It is worth it. 

When we go to HF in prayer, especially around pornography, we need to be able to talk about and do the work that will make the strength we want worth it.  

The view from a place of worthiness and self confidence is not available without the work that allows us to get to the top of that hill.  

It is, however, worth it.  

So, maybe we can ask for help practicing feeling our uncomfortable feelings instead of having them taken from us.  Maybe we can ask for opportunities to see what we are missing, rather than asking for everything to be laid out for us.  

The struggle of getting up the hill is what makes us capable of staying there long term.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I believe in miracles.  I believe that some can have stark moments of change that completely shift their underlying habits and move them to a place where pornography is no longer part of their life.  

That was not my experience.  I offer these thoughts as ideas based on my life, my experience, and understanding.  

This is the gospel according to zach. And if it is wrong, thank you for bearing with my own learning process.  

I hope this is helpful.  

https://www.zachspafford.com/podcast-freebie

https://zachspafford.securechkout.com/Membership

One of the skills that I teach my clients is to bring their urge responses from a place of unconscious habit to a place of choice and planning.  

As my client was working through this with his spouse one of the things she asked was that he not look at pornography while she is in the house. 

He committed to that with her and immediately broke his word.

His desire to be “good” for his wife was pretty strong and I think a lot of us do things like this.  

We commit to things because we want to, we think doing so will help our spouse feel better, and it doesn’t seem like a huge ask and we should be willing to do what we’ve been asked. 

This particular commitment is one that I think comes up pretty often as men and women work through their discussions about pornography in their lives.

Seems simple, she says, Please don’t look at pornography while I’m in the house.  Or please don’t look at pornography while the kids are in the house. 

Most men want to acquiesce to this request.  We don’t even really want to be viewing pornography to manage our lives anyway, so why wouldn’t we say yes to this?

For a lot of us, this boundary is hard and fast and should never move.  

So, let’s discuss it. 

There are a couple of things that you and your partner need to be clear about and understand when you make commitments.  

Is it realistic?

Is it going to produce the results we want?

Let’s start with that first question. 

Is it realistic to ask your spouse to never look at pornography in your home?

From a statistical perspective, americans spend 70% of our time at home.  

This means that at home is the most likely place that pornography is being accessed.  

Darcy – a subtle way to Control his behavior - If the result you are looking for is to restrict pornography 

It is also a little scary to think he’ll be out, somewhere, looking at pornography.  Which creates a possibility that he could have an interaction with police because he’s looking at porn in public and create some additional issues. 

Darcy – telling him to take his biggest struggle out of the home

Is it going to produce the results we want?

Darcy – whats the result

Many times this is a subtle way to reduce 

if the result you are looking for is to restrict pornography use, then I would say no – if it were that simple then this wouldn’t be a problem. 

I think a lot of people are looking to rebuild trust in their relationships and this seems like one of the things that seems like it should be easy enough to do and totally a good idea, but I think it creates a situation where failure is inevitable.  

The client I was working with was really struggling with this because he wanted to do what his wife was asking but also, basically knew that he was going to fail. 

One thing that his wife has said is more important than if he looks at pornography is if he is honest with her.  

This is a tough moment because it is clear that he can’t really be honest with her and commit to this requirement. 

So, it’s important for each of us to be clear on what we are committing to.  For this client he needed have a candid conversation with his wife and tell her that this is not something that he can commit to at this point.  

This candid honest is really difficult for both parties.  But it is essential because the intimacy that we want requires us to know our partner.  

When we know our partner and are able to hear their reality and can accept them as they are we create intimacy.  

So, is telling our partner that they aren’t allowed to experience their struggle in the home really creating the result we want?

This is a lot like when we are dealing with our kids, this example comes up for me, when we tell our kids that we’re never going to buy them toys again because we’re frustrated that they aren’t cleaning up after themselves.  

It’s really important that we take the moment to discuss the boundary and be honest about whether it is possible.  

And also, whether one of us is putting ourselves in a one up position to be in charge of the situation. 

It is really important in a boundary conversation that we be clear that we are on equal footing in a marriage relationship.  

I think with kids its different, “if you look at pornography in my home, I won’t provide you internet access.” Which is different from saying that to a spouse. 

*

Nothing I’ve ever done in my life that has been worth it was an accident. 

*

Yet so many of us believe that we can just fall into a life where pornography no longer has a hold on us. 

*

One of the most important things that a man or woman who is using pornography to escape can do is just begin to think about what their life will be like without pornography. 

*

This new conception of the life they want is a simple, impactful stepping stone to becoming that person. 

*

Once that life begins to formulate in your mind, only then will you have the capacity to believe in it. 

*

Belief in this new idea of who you are won’t be easy at first.  

*

You’ll need to practice it, play with it in your mind, and work to integrate that belief in who you are into the subtle soul of your identity. 

*

As you believe in you, believe in your new vision, the concept of a person who doesn’t spend their time viewing pornography, you’ll begin to start achieving it. 

*

Many people make the mistake of thinking that achieving will lead to belief, but that is the wrong way around. 

*

You know this if you’ve ever watched someone accomplish a dream that only they could understand and see. 

*

Achievement comes after the idea is formed and the belief is solidified. 

*

Start thinking today about what your life looks like when pornography is no longer part of it.    

Lots of you guys travel. 

This is a huge issue for pornography users.  

It is a great opportunity to start learning what is going on for you. 

Loneliness is probably the biggest issue I dealt with when I traveled for work.  Boredom is another feeling travelers often try to avoid. 

Whatever negative feelings you are seeking to avoid through buffering, I want to give you 3 things that you can do to make your trip successful and pornography free. 

1.     Plan ahead

a.     Know your down time 

b.     Create a schedule

c.     Create a back up plan for down time 

d.     Plan for exercise

e.     Plan for positive eating

f.      Plan wholesome entertainment

g.     

h.     

2.     Increase self awareness

a.     Create intimacy – reach out to friends, family and your spouse

b.     Don’t expect them to fill the void of bad feelings

c.     Be willing to feel bad

d.     Notice your feelings

e.     Notice the thoughts that create them

f.      Be willing to ask questions of those thoughts 

g.     

3.     Learn from your actions

a.     In our membership we Use something called learn something and move forward in 

b.     Look back at the last time you went out of town.  

c.     When did it hit you last time? and 

d.     what could you do differently?

e.     What is the story that you tell yourself about when you go out of town?

                                               i.     Is it that this is a time to escape and let loose?

                                             ii.     Is it that you always fail?

                                            iii.     Is it that you never win these battles?

                                            iv.     Is it that you are going to have to fight and be strong and struggle?

                                              v.     

f.      Decide on a different story

g.     Allow missteps to be opportunities to learn

h.     As we get older we think we should know better

i.      If we haven’t learned it yet, then we need to learn it, not beat ourselves up for not knowing it yet. 

j.      

k.     

The man I was coaching said, “when That guy asked that question, it was as if he had been reading my mind.”

This is the amazingness that comes from being part of the membership. You get to hear the questions you didn’t even know how to ask, asked for you!

This moment was when I decided that I needed to answer that question for you all, here on the podcast.

As part of the coaching I do, often we talk about shame and how to manage and deal with it.  

The question we’re talking about was part of this discussion about minimizing shame in our lives. 

The question was, “what is a good way to not let myself feel so much shame when I act on my urges?”

First off, let’s talk about why we feel shame. 

Knowing what shame is gives us the ammunition we need to actually end it.  

Shame is often contrasted with guilt.  

The thing about guilt is that it can be a powerful catalyst for change.  

Guilt is about learning that what you have done is not what you would like to have done, had you been able to.  

I’ve heard it said this way and this definition works for me.  

Guilt comes when I understand that what I’ve done is not right for me. 

Guilt comes when I’ve acted incorrectly, based on my own sense of right and wrong and according to my agency within the framework of truths I hold. 

As brene brown put it, guilt is I did something bad. 

Shame on the other hand, is not about a behavior, but about our sense of who we are.  

Shame comes when when I believe that what I’ve done makes me bad, irredeemable and unacceptable. 

Shame comes when I’ve acted contrary to my framework of truth knowing that I’m discarding my own sense of what is right and wrong and feel incapable of exercising my own agency. 

Again, going back to brene brown, Shame is, I am bad. 

So “What is a good way to not let myself feel so much shame when I act on my urges?” 

Here are 3 things that you need to do to eliminate shame when you have acted on urges that don’t fit your idea of who you want to be. 

First, you need to decide that this is an opportunity to learn

Learn something move forward.

Second thing you’ll need to eliminate shame when you’ve acted on your urges is talk to someone you trust.  

-       Create intimacy

-       Practice openness.  

-       

Third thing, understand that you are enough.

-       Atonement

-       

Each of these things will help you eliminate shame and understand that you are not bad. 

Hopefully they will serve to strengthen your capacity to exercise your agency, accept responsibility for your actions and shape the person you want to be. 

I used to think that darcy could make me happy.  

I thought that if I could just make her happy enough then she would, in turn, make me happy. 

Seemed simple enough. 

I used to do pretty much whatever she wanted.  

I would let her get things that I thought we didn’t need.  

I would do whatever it took to make her life as comfortable as possible. 

In the first few years of our marriage we moved so many times, just because Darcy found a new apartment that she liked better than the one we lived in at the moment.  

The first time we lived in Milwaukee we only lived here for about 6 years and we lived in 3 different places before we bought a house.  6 years, 4 houses.  Did we really need to move. No.  did we do it because darcy wanted to. Yes. 

I learned to build things, fix things, make more money and climb the corporate ladder all so I could give Darcy more.  

When it came to my personal time.  Time to go play basketball, watch sports or do outdoors activities, Darcy had a firm veto on all of it.  

If she didn’t like what it was I wanted to do, she would put a stop to it. 

Then there was sex.  

I would do anything for sex.  

I would give up whatever I wanted for sex.  Some strange bargains were made in the name of sex. 

I did this in an effort to make her happy and to make me happy. 

I have a confession.  I was doing it wrong. 

I was looking for happiness in the wrong place. 

I was looking for someone else to make me happy. 

I was looking for something outside me to make happiness available. 

All while this was going on for me, something else was going on for Darcy.  

Something similar, but slightly different. Tell your experience of trying to get happiness from me. 

Darcy –   I truly believed it was Zach’s job to make me happy, I 100% believed he had the power to do that and that he should. When I wasn’t happy it was his fault, or the kids fault or the houses fault.

Pretty much everything outside of me what to blame for my unhappiness. Don’t get me wrong I was not miserable all the time but when I was not happy it was not my fault.

I would use sex as a bargaining tool for me to get what I wanted on occasions. I also used sex as a way to feel validated by Zach. I also thought I could make Zach happy by having sex. 

Sounds terrible. 

So, what happened and how can you take control of your happiness?

Around the time I was really making headway in quitting pornography I became more aware at how much of my choices were dependent on Darcy’s desires. 

I worked really hard to do what she wanted because I thought that it would build our relationship.  

In part, it did and in part it created a lot of resentment.  

Sure, in the moment, it usually made her feel good and I could say that I would feel good too.  But in the long run, I would look back at some of the choices and I would feel like I had been manipulated.  

Now, I want to be clear, I know now that I was choosing what I was choosing.  I don’t blame Darcy for any of the way I acted.  

What I was missing was the idea that I have to take both responsibility and action where my happiness is concerned. 

1.     Marriage isn’t a fairy tale

2.     We weren’t bringing everything we could because we were acting like the other person would make up half the work. 

3.     You can’t be happy by waiting on someone else to make you happy. 

So, how can we be happy?

-this is something we talk about in the self mastery membership when our clients come to us. Come check it out. 

1.     Know what it is you want from your life – has to be your own, must be important to you, you must be willing to make it happen, even when your partner isn’t 100% on board yet

a.     Cats and dogs

b.     

c.     – top five priorities. 

                                               i.     This makes it easier to say yes and to say no

2.     Believe in you 

a.     

b.     Begin by knowing what makes you happy

                                             ii.     Take back your power

c.     Other people don’t have to behave in certain ways for you to be happy

d.     Choose to trust yourself and your spouse

e.     Figure out a new story – one that is true but that also serves you better than the one you have been telling that keeps you from being happy. 

f.      

3.     Take risks 

a.     TELL YOUR SPOUSE WHAT IS GOING ON for you

b.     Be willing to hold space for them if they don’t like what is going on

c.     Forgive yourself, forgive your spouse

d.     

-       New years 

-       New beginning

-       Time to create turning points in life

-       Give you 2 keys to make any new habit stick

-       I can’t 

-       One of my least fav phrases

-       It means we aren’t capable. 

-       It means we don’t have agency, 

-       Agency is

o   Knowing what is right and wrong

o   consequences

o   Ability to choose

o   

-       Any missing – don’t have agency

-       A lot of us have, in our heads a laundry list of things that we can’t do. 

-       I want to give you three keys to help you deal with that list and start doing the things that you want to do

-       More importantly these three things will help you become who you want to be.  

-       Because this is so important, 

-       Want it to stick

-       Not going to talk about 5 things or 10 just two

-       If you want to make a permanent change to anything in your life. 

-       New habit

-       You have to do two things

-       First, make it doable every time. 

o   Let’s say you want to be able to do 50 pushups

o   Your goal will be to just do one

o   When you are going to do it, all you have to do is one. 

o   If you want to be a runner, your goal is to put on your shoes

o   If you want to eat healthier your goal is to write what you’re eating once a day

-       Second, attach your goal to something you are already doing. 

o   50 push ups, do one every time you finish peeing.

o   Running? If you want to do it first thing in the morning, put your shoes on immediately after you turn off the alarm

o   Food journaling – right as you sit to eat, before you pick up your fork. 

-       third – create and believe in I am statements

o   Change is most effective when it is who we are not what we are doing

o   I’m a push up fanatic

o   I’m a runner

o   I’m a healthy eater

o   Don’t have to be doing it all the time, or even consistently

o   We all know a hunter – they say, “I’m a hunter” 

o   No one is like, “are you hunting right now?”

o   Have you hunted in the last week?  Prove to me you’re a hunter

o   We just take people at their word

o   The more we believe we “are” the more we are likely to act in a way that reflects that belief

o   

Darcy and I have built a world class membership for you and your loved ones to come and make 2021 your year to finally put pornography behind you and as a special offer, you can be a founding member for less than the cost of one date night each month. 

Get a year pass as a founding member, lock in this price forever, and make 2021 the year you stop feeling so frustrated and overwhelmed and start feeling more confident, fulfilled and successful!  

We can help you do that.

We are going to get you there and have fun in the process.  

We are going to have seven different ways you can get help in the membership. 

We are going to have a monthly workshop, where we take a deep dive on one of the skills you need to get pornography out of your life. 

Then we are going to have six monthly calls for coaching and Q&A. 2 for those dealing with pornography, run by me. 2 for spouses and 2 for parents. 

IF you are dealing with pornography in your life, in your marriage, or in your household , this is the perfect moment to set yourself up so 2021 is your year. 

We can help you do that. 

As part of our last webinar we had two very interesting questions come up in our discussion and I wanted to highlight them here with the help of my sweet heart

What is the catalyst that gets the wife to jump over the anger and betrayal issues, my wife has been upset and angry for 11 years now.

I’m a wife. I’d like to know how you rebuild trust, when lying is such a big part of the pornography compulsion addiction or problem?

If you would like to come to our next free webinar, you can by signing up at zachspafford.com/freecall or click the “Free Webinar” link at zachspafford.com

We love having people come to our calls and work through some of the very deeply held difficulties that have been part of their struggle to overcome pornography use in their marriages. These calls are free and are so helpful at getting people started on the road to a life where pornography doesn’t intrude on their happiness. 

These two questions boil down to essentially one thing.  “How do I trust and even love my spouse again?”

Darcy: I think it’s really important to recognize here that no one is requiring that you stay.  You can choose to leave this situation.  You may not like what that looks like for any number of reasons but staying or going is 100% your responsibility and your choice. 

-       That perspective is essential to building the life that you want, not just in terms of a marriage where pornography has been present.  

-       

Zach: I think it is also really important to see that the men who are struggling with this issue are almost invariably, earnestly trying and have desire to eliminate it from their lives. 

-       I’ve spoken to so many men and women who struggle with pornography use in their lives and not one that I’ve come across has said, “I don’t want to give this up, but my spouse says I have to.”

-       Their struggle is real and they are trying to be the best they can. 

-       

-       

1.     The behavior of an individual is about that person trying to feel good. 

a.     We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but maybe we’ll just put a fine point on this. 

b.     Our lower brain is geared toward helping keep us from feeling bad and is not very good at distinguishing between actual physical danger and the pain of feeling lonely, sad, stressed, tired, hungry or angry. 

c.     As a result it looks for ways to keep us from having to endure pain. 

d.     In doing so it creates habits that it engages at various times to avoid that pain. 

e.     A good example of this is food. 

f.      Lots of us eat when we feel uncomfortable. 

g.     It is pretty common to find that after a long stressful day, you’ll have eaten more than your fair share of the delicious things around you.  

h.     I think it would be a pretty thin argument for me to say to darcy, “I can never trust you again because you keep eating all the Nutella in our house”

i.      We would seek to understand what is going on, why this keeps occurring and help that person find ways to eliminate that action without making it about us

j.      

2.     If you never knew would you be, betrayed?

a.     This question is a good exercise to help understand that what you are choosing to believe about the behavior is what is creating your pain, not the behavior itself. 

b.     

3.     Is demanding your spouse change their behavior something you would tolerate?

a.     Let’s talk about food. 

b.     What would you do if your spouse all of a sudden started demanding that you stop eating meat?

c.     Or only eat fruit in its natural season?

d.     Not only do they demand it, they get really upset and threaten divorce if you don’t stop

e.     They tell you that every bacon cheese burger hurts them, makes them feel like less of a person and that when you eat something that isn’t part of what they make you, it is a direct assault on your marriage

f.      That might sound absurd.  

g.     It isn’t a perfect comparison

h.     We think it is an apt one

i.      

4.     Losing what you thought your marriage would be or was doesn’t mean you’ve lost your marriage.

a.     This is a really interesting and important point

b.     Our marriage is different than it was when we first got married

c.     Our expectations are different than they were when we fell in love

d.     Our beliefs, values and personal traits are different too

e.     The truth about marriage is that your marriage is nothing like you thought it would be.

f.      It is a very different, more real, more difficult, more fun thing than we could have ever imagined. 

g.     No one could have told me I would be working for myself 

h.     Much less have 8 kids and 3 cat. 

i.      I could have predicted a dog

j.      but have always said no to. Animals 

k.     

l.      

5.     Choose to trust

Darcy: A word that comes up often is “betrayal”

-       Just want to give a quick run down of what that word means and how understanding it might help us see this issue more clearly.

-       Betrayal is “the action of betraying one's country, a group, or a person; treachery.”

-       It is synonymous with duplicity and deception. 

-       As the woman from the webinar noted in her question, she felt that lying was such a big part of the issue and wanted to build trust back into the marriage. 

-       One of the things that we all deal with in marriage is when our spouses are not 100% forthcoming with their problems, actions and even wants.

-       In the broadest definition of betrayal, all of us have, at one time or another betrayed our spouse. 

-       Choosing to trust each other is a continual act of intimacy that over the lifetime of a marriage is wiped away and rebuilt like a sandcastle on the beach. 

Zach:

-       I don’t think darcy has ever held back a secret from me

-       But there are definitely things that we have agreed to in our marriage that she has not upheld 

-       What I tend to think we do is say, “this is worse than that.”

-       Which I don’t have a problem with per se

-       When it becomes a situation where you are being the victim continuously once you know what the new situation is, then that is a recipe for misery. 

Darcy:

-       To avoid that, decide, two things:

o   1. Will I stay or will I go?

o   2. Will I choose happiness, compassion and love by not making this about me?

-       Once you decide those two things, the path is clear. 

-       If you stay and you are choosing happiness, compassion and love, not making this about you, then you are choosing trust. 

-       If you choose to go, then it is simple, you don’t have to trust. 

-       If you choose to continue to make your spouse’s behavior about you, then it will be hard to stay. 

-       

One of the things that happens when we start down the path of buffering is that our brains will tell us things that are not true. 

It will try subtle phrases that it knows have worked in the past and that have taken you down the path of your buffer before.  

It does this because a little lie is ok most of the time and especially if it is said to make someone feel ok. 

You know what I mean if you’ve ever told your spouse that you loved her in that dress when you really hated it.  

Little white lies are actually pretty normal, simple stories that we all use to grease the wheels of social interaction. 

You wouldn’t tell your boss that you absolutely can’t stand being in meetins with him because he never shuts up.  So when he asks, “do you think we got the message across?” rather than saying, ‘yeah, you repeated yourself about 8 times” you say, “I’m certain the team knows what you were trying to convey.”

We also do this with our kids, we indulge them with stories that, while not strictly true, help us and help them navigate the world around us.  

The easter bunny and santa claus are examples of this, but also when we are encouraging our children to accomplish something they’ve never done before we tell them, “I know you can do it” when you know no such thing, but you simply think it will help them try. 

what we say to others, while not about being deceitful, can often be construed as not quite truthful when put under strict scrutiny. 

Our brains use this same capacity to keep our external interactions running smoothly on our internal dialogue as well. 

The phrase my brain used to tell me “This is the last time”

I remember distinctly being upstairs in our Chugiak Alaska home as a kid, tucked away in the cubby under my parents water bed.  

It was always warm in there and since we lived in Alaska, it was a great place to hang out, read a book and be alone. 

By that point in my life I had been taught that masturbation was to be avoided so there I was, warm and cozy and wrestling with the hormones of a pubescent boy. 

I told myself, “this will be the last time and then I’ll never do it again.”

It made my decision to masturbate easier.  It was a final farewell.

It made it so that immediately afterward I felt good about myself.  I felt like I was going to follow through with that promise I made to myself. 

We do this with food too. “I’ll start my diet on Monday.”

You’ve already not followed your diet today, it’s ok if you don’t follow it the rest of the day. 

These are some of the things it says to help us feel better when we are not doing the things that we said we would.

These are the little white lies that grease the wheels of feeling uncomfortable.  

The simple thoughts that, when you examine them closely, often turn out to be only partially or completely untrue. 

Our brain lies because it wants us to feel good. 

It wants us to know that we are going to be ok, that we are safe, that we will survive. 

When we choose to believe these stories our brain tells us we get immediate relief from the discomfort that we are feeling by saying yes to a buffer that we may not really want in our lives. 

For instance, it’s the holidays, I have a bag of white chocolate mint pretzels in the house.

I also have been working on not eating mindlessly and eating healthily. 

When I see those pretzels my brain will tell me, “it’s not that bad, you’ll just have one.” 

I grab one and chomp it down. 

Then, to keep me from feeling the discomfort of having to stop eating them and the discomfort that will come because I now have eaten something that wasn’t really going to help me reach my goals my brain will offer me a new thought.  “It’s not that bad.”

“You’re already here you might as well keep going” 

My brain isn’t outright trying to lie to me, it is just trying to make me feel better when it knows there is discomfort on my horizon. 

So how do we deal with our brain lying to us when we really want to stick to our goals and become the masters of self?

And if you have questions about this topic or anything we discuss on the podcast, register for our free webinar Sunday night December 6 at 8 Mountain time. There will be a link in the show notes or you can go to zachspafford.com/freecall

The first thing you are going to want to master so you can work with your brain and not fight against it is going to be, recognizing the urge. 

Urges are thoughts and feelings that intensely drive us to actions that feel better than our current state. 

To get to a place where you can manage these urges you first have to start to recognize them.  

You’ll have to pay attention to when you are uncomfortable and be willing to question those thoughts and feelings and delay action.

Delaying action here or withholding action is one of the hardest things we do.  People are set up to act, there is a well known principle called action bias that says we would rather act than wait.

Once you notice the thoughts and urges The next thing you’ll need to do is question them. 

Why am I feeling this way?  can I just feel this instead of doing anything about it? What is bringing this up for me? 

This process of having a discussion with your brain is key to getting to the root of the issue. 

For me when I was eating those delicious chocolate covered pretzels, I was bored, and tired.  

It would be more in line with the purposeful and intentional person I want to be to put the bag down and go to bed. 

Having the conversation, without judgement helps us determine what we really want and gives us a better understanding of how this request for action from our brain will play out in our long term lives. 

The last thing you need to do with those thoughts and urges is feel them to their fullest.  

This is a little difficult at times because sometimes we feel like our feelings go on and on.  But if we just stick to one feeling at a time, it takes only about 90 seconds to go from beginning to end. 

That’s because our feelings are chemicals in our bodies that run a course.  Just like when you feel happy, it doesn’t last forever, when we feel hungry or lonely it won’t last forever, as long as we don’t keep repeating the story in new ways, question the thoughts that brought up the feelings and feel what we are feeling to the fullest. 

So, the next time your brain tries to pull one over on you and talk you into buffering with food or pornography or anything that you have chosen to quit but don’t quite seem to have it kicked, take a moment and ask, is my brain telling me the truth about what it’s asking me to do?

Black Friday sale

https://www.zachspafford.com/freecall

https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme

https://calendly.com/masterycoach/30-min-consult-darcy?month=2020-11

When I was about 14 years old I told myself that I wasn’t going to do this any more.  I knew what I was doing was not really something that I wanted to be doing but felt like I had to just get the right motivation and put some willpower to it and it would be done.  

I could quit this.  I wanted to be the kind of kid who didn’t have to feel ashamed of who I was when people weren’t looking.  

This was around the time I went to my first youth conference, I’m pretty sure it was in Seward Alaska, at some high school and it was a blast.  

The theme song was Fly like an eagle by the steve miller band. Pretty sure that is a not so veiled reference to getting high from the same band that brought you the line, ‘some people call me a space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love’  - but as kids we just went along with it and enjoyed our time learning about the gospel with our friends, meeting new friends from around Alaska and singing along whenever the leaders played the song, “time keeps on slippin into the future.”

I came back more motivated than ever to be done with masturbation.

The thing about motivation and willpower are that they are unreliable partners. 

I’ve talked about willpower being a trap and how it is the wrong tool in episode 38.  

Let’s talk about motivation. 

Motivation is fleeting, it comes, it goes. It usually only sticks around for a little while until some other emotion takes over our current moment. 

Anyone who has dieted knows this.  We are forever fighting the battle of the bulge in this country and part of the reason is, we use motivation to start strong and then, when that motivation is all used up, because emotions all fade eventually, we haven’t built the habits that we need to behave the way we think we wanted to when we were motivated toward the end result. 

As I have been reading the book, tiny habits by bj fogg I have noticed that is what I was doing as a young man working to eliminate a behavior that had been keeping me from being my best self.