The Power To Never View Pornography Again

You can join a free call to overcome your pornography addiction at zachspafford.com/freecall 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