Avoiding Pornography

zachspafford.com/thestuff for the mini course for wives mentioned in today's show.

30 Nov 202018min

Your brain is probably lying to you 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

23 Nov 202011min

An interview with Eric and Jackie, a couple who has been coached by Zach and Darcy through pornography issues in their marriage. https://www.zachspafford.com/freecall https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme https://calendly.com/masterycoach/30-min-consult-darcy?month=2020-11

16 Nov 202043min

Motivation and willpower aren’t enough. 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. This problem didn’t go away as I got older because, as BJ puts it, my behavior “was a design issue, not a character flaw.” What I needed to do, and what I eventually did, long before I read BJ’s book was create a series of habits that crowded out my pornography and masturbation habits. I undermined what they were giving me by creating habits that gave me more. And, just like the examples that BJ uses in his book, when I lapsed back into old habits, I didn’t look at it as a failure that impugned my character and made me irredeemable and broken. I saw it as a moment to learn how my designed behaviors had worked and how they could be improved. I’ve always felt like a tinkerer. My wife is often amazed at the things I do when it comes to building and creating and fixing the things in our home. I love to use tools and build and create, design and refine. When I stepped back from 12 steps and councilors about 8 years ago, that was the same attitude that I brought to my pornography habit. So, I want to give you two, tiny habits that I have identified from those years that helped me create new habits that helped me so I could see pornography as a problem I had outgrown and no longer needed to help me feel better. If you are someone who needs help with a pornography habit and wants to work with me on it, go to my website, zachspafford.com/workwithme and set up a consult with me. I can tell you how you can get the one on one help that you want to get to being worthy and free and clear from this trial in your life. The first habit was a really simple phrase. Whenever I would begin to feel the urge to use my phone to look at...

9 Nov 202013min

Welcome to another beautiful mastery Monday, this is the Monday before election day. Please go vote. Regardless of what your political views are, be a part of the conversation, vote. Our 4 year old, Felicity came to me and said “My belly is saying food, I listened and I can hear it talking inside my body. It says it wants pasta or a sandwich” · When felicity said this my mind immediately turned to how applicable this story is to all the different behaviors we use to feel something different. And how when we are buffering we are not allowing ourselves to connect with what we really want and need. Felicity in that moment was so in tune with her body and what it was she truly needed and that was food to fill her hungry belly. · If I take this idea one step further and ask myself what is it that my husband truly wants when he looks at pornography. I can without a doubt say that he is not looking at pornography to hurt me, make me feel betrayed or cheated on, make me feel not good enough, to ruin my girl time…You name it I can keep going of all the things I would make my husband looking at pornography mean to me and about me. The truth is the reason he was looking at pornography was because he didn’t love himself, he hated who he was, and that he wanted to feel good in the moment. When felicity came to darcy asking for dinner, she was listening to her tummy tell her what she really wanted. For many of us when we have urges to view pornography we are actually not listening to our true needs. Partly because we are adults and we have learned to set our needs aside. Most of the people I work with are avoiding feeling lonely, sad, frustrated, angry or stressed. The question we want to talk about today is, are you listening to what you really want, rather than trying to avoid what’s going on for us really, in an effort to feel good now at the expense of feeling good long term. I recall a particularly difficult summer when darcy and the kids went to Wisconsin for three weeks and left me in California to work at my ladder climbing job at a large insurance company. In my mind it was two months and darcy had to remind me that it was only three weeks long. So, that might tell you how big this was to me. It holds a big place in my mind. Because she was leaving and I wanted to stay away from pornography, we had put in place some really good, quality measures to keep the internet from creeping into my loneliest times, late nights at home. We locked down my phone so it wouldn’t be a temptation. My company computer was going to be left in the car at the end of the day. And the only way I could get on the internet would be to go to the MacDonald’s half a block away. With all the precautions in place, Darcy set off on the 33 hour drive to Wisconsin from Thousand Oaks CA. We were ready. We thought. Darcy, what were your thoughts as you left? · In that moment I was hopeful that he would be about to stay away from pornography while I was away. In my mind I was thinking about how this would be a great opportunity to prove to me how I could trust him and that he could “behave” while I was gone. I remember being anxious about what might happen while I was not home but, I wasn’t willing at that point to not go visit all my family for a few weeks. For me this was my moment to show that I could do it. I could spend the 3 weeks alone, and show Darcy that I wasn’t going to be viewing pornography forever and that I had grown. So, I was setting myself up to go it alone, make my mark and show how good I could be. What I really wanted was connection with my wife, self...

2 Nov 202020min

Have you ever been upset by someone who wasn't behaving how you thought they should. Take a listen to this week's Mastery Monday. Sign up for the webinar zachspafford.com/freecall

26 Okt 202016min

Abdication v delegation I’m releasing this while I’m walking down a slot canyon somewhere in southern Ut so if you want to get together with me while I’m here, feel free to message me on Instagram zachspafford.theselfmasterycoach I love angelicas, the peruvian chicken place or even the Indian place. On Friday two weeks ago I was in my weekly meeting with my friend Jody Moore, talking about interrupting mirroring and anthropomorphizing and all the fun stuff that we coaches talk about behind closed doors and as the discussion progressed a really interesting topic came up. We were talking about abdication vs delegation. This is something that I work on with my clients all the time. Although I wouldn’t have called it this until we discussed it the other day. All of us do some form of either of these at various times. So, what is the difference between abdication and delegation. When it comes to how we interact with our agency this distinction can really make or break your path back from an unwanted habit. Our oldest has been learning to drive and as a result I have been learning to relax. As I have been learning to relax I have been thinking about this relationship between abdication and delegation as it relates to my son and as it relates to our habits. A couple of Sundays ago the oldest half of my kids and I went to church and left the younger ones at home with mom. My oldest got in the driver’s seat and we headed off on the 8 minute drive. Along the way he made a wrong turn and I gave him direction on how to get back on track. As he drives, I pay attention to what he is doing with his hands, his eyes, his feet. I help him with proper technique and sometimes I even yell stop when I think he’s going to hit something because he is driving too close to it. All along the way I am still taking responsibility for the path we take and even how he drives. Let me tell you about a different driving experience. On the way to Utah Darcy and I took turns driving. While she drove I would try and get some sleep because I knew that it would be my turn soon enough because we were going from Milwaukee to st George a 24 hr trip that we wanted to do in one shot. As she drove I rarely paid attention. Obviously, I would sleep at certain points so it was entirely her responsibility to get us from point a to point b. I took no responsibility for how she changed lanes, where her hands were posisitioned or whether she was watching the road. Abdication is giving up the responsibility for the decision making. Delegation is retaining responsibility for the decision making. Each has it’s place in our lives. But what I find when it comes to certain habits is that we are often abdicating when delegating would yield better results and more closely yield the outcomes we are striving toward. When I talk to clients, often they have abdicated their agency on certain topics. Pornography is one of them. We think, I can’t ever look at pornography because it is unacceptable. Or with weight loss, we think, I can’t eat certain foods because they will make me gain weight. What we are doing when we do that is relinquishing our capacity to choose and allowing our lower brain to drive decisions based on the motivational triangle rather than what will be fulfilling for our long-term happiness. Listen to the following phrases, “I’m powerless against my addiction” or “I can’t stop using pornography” or “I shouldn’t look at pornography”. Each one of these phrases places the responsibility for pornography viewing outside of our immediate control. And therefore outside our responsibility to choose. I’m...

19 Okt 20208min

Learn Something, Move Forward Taking stock of lapses by learning something and moving forward is the only way to put it behind you. Each time we do the thing we promised we would never do again we tend to beat ourselves up. We often treat it like we are never going to get past it, we think we are lost, unworthy and powerless. That wallowing and self pitying approach keeps us from learning. It keeps us from figuring out the next thing we need to learn to move forward with life in a way that creates the person that we want to be. The moment you let yourself be the object of your own pity and scorn you've lost the opportunity to learn from what happened and you're likely to make the same mistake in the future. Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. ― Thomas Edison This is where the purposeful practice of Learn Something, Move Forward comes into play. When mistakes occur, because they will, take the time to learn from them. This practice is one of self reflected love. Viewing our mistakes the way our parents would have viewed our stumbling baby steps as we learned to walked. With eagerness for us to learn and grow. Not with scorn, derision and shame. In my program I often have people work through one of the many micro courses I teach to learn something and move forward. Often their response is, “I know that I’m not supposed to use pornography already” or “I already know that I want to stop this habit.” What they are looking at is the end result, expecting that they already know everything they need to know about the way they are thinking, how they are processing their emotions and how they are required to behave so they can feel worthy, strong and lovable. Let’s take the example of a baby learning to walk. 8 kids Baby sees running, starts to run and falls on face and cries No inspection of movement, No testing of skills No trial and error Just “I’m supposed to be able to run” Falling on face and crying How long would it take for that baby to learn What will that baby miss How will that baby learn Questions you can ask yourself. What did I view and how long that wasn’t planned? 2 What was the Situation that started this lapse? What was the feeling or desire I had? What was the thought that caused the desire or urge? Did I try to resist or did I just react? Did I try to allow the urge? What worked and what didn’t? 6 What did I learn? What will I do next time? How can I let this go now? How do I want to feel about this moving forward?

12 Okt 202014min