Feel good - own your pain

zachspafford.com/freecall How can I tell that I’m ready to change? Costs outweigh the benefits. - Buffering provides something - Acknowledge those benefits. - How do you want to feel when you think about pornography - “Client said, I want to feel disgusted.” - That doesn’t acknowledge what pornography has done for you - - That also doesn’t acknowledge what it is costing you - It is just a judgement that makes you feel disgusted because you like pornography - So, honestly acknowledging the costs and the benefits of use will allow you to make the cost benefit analysis - Wanting vs commitment - For the better part of 25 years I wanted pornography out of my life. - I pleaded with Heavenly Father to take this problem away from me - For lots of years it was just a want, the way a little girl wants a pony. - I would ask and think that I just deserved it because I asked for it. - . - It wasn’t until after we got married and Darcy found out about my pornography use that I really got committed. - It wasn’t until it was costing me my self confidence and I was desperate to stop feeling like a terrible person who was never going to get rid of this problem that I started to take action. - I started with bishops, who were great and loved me. - They didn’t have the answers, they were there for me to confess but not to give me tools. - They sent me to counselors who were there to hear where I was and witness my struggle and validate my feelings, but didn’t have any answers, didn’t have any real world idea of how I was doing and why I was where I was. - They just told me I was an addict. - So that lead me to the twelve steps… which was full of earnest men, trying to move forward with their lives. - but that time only served to reinforce that I was “powerless against my addiction” - - - Then when we had the twins, I took a step back. I saw that none of this had gotten me where I wanted to go. - So I committed to figure it out by looking into my own mind, true principles that I could see from a gospel perspective and all the things I learned that made sense from what I had done before. - - This is what being committed looks like. - Trying. - Trying again, - Trying something new - Trying something different - Trying anything I hadn’t tried before - Trying things that were harder than anything I had done before - I spent $40,000 and...

5 Okt 202014min

Webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1016012548152/WN_9v9d7yYxTtyZ9RVzLRmJ3g How much power does pornography have? So many of us want pornography to have no power over husbands, over our children, over our own lives. Yet, so many of us allow pornography to have so much power over us. Why? Let’s just talk, for a minute about the attractive capacity of pornography. Let’s be honest – the human body is beautiful, arousal feels great, climax is enjoyable. When we see others doing something that is beautiful, arousing and enjoyable even outside of pornography, that fires all kinds of empathic receptors in us. As humans, part of this group of creatures that our Father in Heaven has put on the earth to learn and grown, empathy and mimicry are key components of our survival and success. We are also creatures of comparison. We look at someone and we think about how we compare to them. Are we taller or shorter, better looking or not as handsome, stronger or weaker, all of that is part of the game our brains play to determine if we are sexually compatible with or mating rivals with others. Add to that the human sex response, which is one of the strongest drives within our system, and you can see how pornography might draw you in and keep you entertained for a long time. When I think of all the things I just mentioned and how so much of our biology drives us toward this highly pleasurable, highly rewarding, low cost option, it’s no wonder that the statics show that in one study of 18-35 year olds over a six month period, 98% of men and 73% of women reported internet pornography use. That is astounding. I would hope that the figures are lower among LDS Men and Women, but without data on that, I’ll just say that these figures give us a picture of it’s overall usage within society. So what does someone get from viewing pornography. And again, my goal is to be clear and honest about what I perceive to be the realities of the issue. Just as we discussed on my podcast “get on the map” you need to know where you are so you can get to where you want to be. From my perspective the number one and most significant reason, and possibly the only reason many people who have a moral objection to pornography viewing continue to view pornography is, pornography relieves uncomfortable or negative feelings. I want to note that I saw a post on social where a wife was saying that the husband was viewing pornography occasionally but that they were unclear why he kept going back to it. It was something they had tried to figure out, but had no success doing. This is why coaches often say, it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle. This is one of those things that demonstrates to me why everyone should have a coach. Tiger Woods has a coach, Tom Brady has a coach, CEO’s, business leaders, world leaders and presidents all have coaches because they want to be the best they can be. And even the most brilliant among us sometimes has trouble seeing how our swing might be adjusted, how our actions might be improved, and how our thoughts are creating a result that is no longer serving us. For those men and women who are dealing with pornography use that they would rather not have in their lives, most often they are doing so as a way to address the feelings they are untrained in dealing with. What I mean by that is, all of us have coping mechanisms that we use to feel more at ease in various situations, some of them create long term positive outcomes and others create long term negative outcomes. For most pornography users that I work with, they feel the momentary and immediate relief created by arousal and as a result their...

28 Sep 202027min

If you’ve ever been to a 12 step meeting you’ve heard the phrase, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m an addict”. ·⁠ Almost everyone I’ve worked with thinks they’re “addicted to porn”. ·⁠ What if, instead of believing, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m an addict” we believed something else. ·⁠ I used to think that I was addicted to pornography, there was something in my brain that made it so I would return to pornography because I was “powerless against my addiction”. ·⁠ I hated it. ·⁠ I felt like I was trapped, incapable of real change because I would always be an addict. I felt like I would be forever at the mercy of this problem and I would always have to be on the look out to keep it at bay. ·⁠ It was exhausting. ·⁠ Eight years ago, after we had our twins, giving us six kids seven and under, my wife said to me, “I need you at home and if all these meetings you are going to for 12 steps and counselors aren’t making this better, I would rather have you here to help me with the kids.” ·⁠ It wasn’t a demand, but it was pretty close. ·⁠ As I looked at the previous years and took stock of what I had learned and the progress I had made, I knew I had plateaued. ·⁠ Now was the time to try something new, something different, something that I didn’t know how to do and that I had never done before. ·⁠ I took a step back and started to look at my brain differently. I started to ask myself questions about what I was thinking and believing and doing that was keeping me tied to pornography viewing. ·⁠ In that work, something occurred to me. ·⁠ At every meeting I had ever been to with the 12 steps the prescribed phrase to introduce yourself to the group is “I’m an addict”. ·⁠ But not everyone uses that phrase. Some say, “I’m a recovering addict” and some say, “I used to be addicted.” ·⁠ I realized that what they were really saying was that being an “addict” means I’m stuck, a victim, unchangeable. ·⁠ What if you could believe, “I used to look at pornography, but now I don’t”? ·⁠ Your brain will find evidence that it true. Your emotions will drive actions that make it true. ·⁠ Most importantly, you’ll begin to become free. #theselfmasterypodcast #realrecovery

21 Sep 202015min

This episode we talk about the most important turning point in our relationship. How things changed for my wife in a way that allowed her to be there in a moment that previously would have been a blow out fight.

13 Sep 202023min

Download the roadmap free here: zachspafford.com/roadmap Sign up for my free webinar here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1515981173927/WN_9S9QoOmaQwW8fiFYXFYE8g Get on the map Free webinar on Sunday Sept 13 at 830 Mt time. When I lived in Alaska my friends and I loved to go out into the woods and camp I loved the ferns. I loved the birch trees that had such great bark for starting fires. I loved four wheeling and snow mobile-ing with my friends. But, on occasion I would go out alone. I would test my capabilities. I would camp on the side of a mountain alone. In those moments I needed to rely on my ability to read a map and orient myself on the map. One of the most important skills in reading and following a map is knowing where you are. Knowing where you are is the very first thing you must do if you want to end up getting to where you want to go. If you don’t correctly identify your position on the map you are trying to follow, you will invariably end up in a place you were not intending to go. The same is true of pornography use In fact, just this week I had a conversation with someone who enrolled in my individual coaching program who was very frustrated because he had done so much work, put in so much effort in so many important and critical ways. Yet, he didn’t feel like he was succeeding. As we spoke it became clear to me that he had not yet admitted to himself that he had been using pornography because it had helped him deal with his stress and with his loneliness. That’s right, I said it helped him. In those moments when he had been stressed, it had provided relief. In those moments when he had been lonely it had given him a break from his feelings. So many of us would just like to demonize pornography and users of pornography. It is a convenient and easy story that makes it so we stand on moral high ground, seemingly above the problem. We say things like, pornography is just the next step toward infidelity. We believe that people who use pornography are addicted and powerless. We hide it and hide from it whenever people discuss it because that kind of person is disgusting and they look at things that are disgusting and everything about pornography is disgusting. When this is what we believe about pornography and by extension, inference and explicitly users of pornography we are creating shame that withholds from the users and from ourselves the love that we all truly crave and wish for all of our HF’s children. - Just ask yourself, where did Jesus spend his time? - - - Moral high ground doesn’t help anyone What I really find interesting about this is that it is not just the wives who think and believe and behave this way. It is the user’s themselves. Just like my client who had up to that point, not really accepted where he was on the map, we all try to pretend that things are different than they really are. We do this so we can feel good about ourselves. We do this so we can feel good about our judgement of ourselves and others. Strange right: Pornography users judge themselves for using pornography the same way non-users do. Here’s the problem. None of that helps you become the person you want to be. None of that helps you find the path away from pornography. None of that is even true. All of those thoughts actually hold you back from becoming the person that you want to be, if you are the user, and can hold your spouse back from being the person they want to be, if you are...

6 Sep 202030min

Sign up for a free webinar zachspafford.com/freecall

30 Aug 202018min

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1515981173927/WN_9S9QoOmaQwW8fiFYXFYE8g Mastering pornography means dealing with discomfort A lot of my clients come to me with this one question, why do I behave one way, when I believe I should behave another. A lot of you are listening to this podcast because of pornography use, but this work and all the principles apply to any unwanted behavior that you might be engaging in. But I’m going to use the example of pornography. We ask, “why do I turn to pornography, when I know that it is against my values, I want to stop using it, and I am causing myself so much shame because I use it?” They never ask it like that, but essentially that is what they are all asking, in one way or another. They ask that because they feel stuck in one way or another. They often feel like there is no way to quit this habit because they go back to it time and again. At its core pornography use is an escape from discomfort. that goes against our values, damages our sense of self confidence and leaves us with a sense that we lack control over our own behavior Why do we use pornography when it goes against our values? Because it helps us escape discomfort in a moment. Why do we use pornography when we want to eliminate its use from our behaviors? Because it feels good when we are feeling bad. Why does our pornography use go contrary to our sense of control of how we want to behave? Because we tell ourselves that we should behave differently than we are. So, if we are using pornography to escape discomfort and feel good, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we should behave differently, it’s no wonder that we might feel stuck and trapped by this behavior. We believe one thing, we do another. So, in order to reconcile that disconnection we have to rationalize what is happening. Sometimes that means that we call ourselves addicts. Sometimes that means that we say we are powerless. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we deserve this indulgence because someone or something outside us made it our only recourse to feel good. No matter the exact way we do it, in some way or another, in order to maintain our sense that we are a good person we tell ourselves a story that makes what we are doing somehow ok, at least for a moment. Then we beat ourselves up. We tell ourselves that we are stuck in this decision because we aren’t making a different decision I had a client this morning, talking about his career said, “I know I’m not gonna quit, so that puts me in this box of not having a choice.” His statement there is really telling. He says, “I know I’m not gonna quit.” Which is a statement that shows that he is making this decision. If he had stopped there and been ok with that statement, then he would be in a position of power over his choices and fully realizing his ownership of where he is. But the second part of his statement, “that puts me in this box of not having a choice” which he believes, makes him a victim of his own choice. He is his own captor. Partly because he is telling himself a story that the decision he made is now not his. He externalizes the cause of why he feels trapped. It’s subtle, but if you listen closely, he says, that now he’s in a “box of not having a choice.” We do this with pornography, we do this with food, we do this with anything in our lives that makes us feel trapped or stuck because we see it as detrimental to our long-term happiness. For example, “I can’t believe I ate that entire thing, but it’s just so good I couldn’t stop.” This story tells us that the thing we ate made us a victim because it was so good. Take out the can’t and the couldn’t and the story...

24 Aug 202026min

Join this month's webinar, Register Here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA Let me tell you about the day I lost my job. It was Mother’s Day and the person that let me go was also my best friend. He let me go because he had hired me to do a job that I wasn't qualified for and I didn't provide him any real value other than he liked having me around. Now his company was going through a rough patch and I needed to go, since I was the least useful person on his staff making the most money. It was a relief. The truth was, I had been moving away from working with him for a few months. I was not just there to provide value, I was there to babysit my friend who wasn’t very self motivated. Don’t get me wrong, he had a good income and a great life and that is why he could and did hire me. But he also needed someone to sit next to him while he was on the computer and watch his screen so he wouldn’t look at pornography while he tried to work. Once I made the mistake of working on my computer, facing the same direction as he was, arm’s length apart from him but looking at my own computer and not his. He was at a standing desk, I was sitting. I was working merrily along, trying to build us a new company. He walked out of the room, I assumed to go to the bathroom or talk to his kids (we worked at his home office). Suddenly his wife came storming in and said, “you need to put your computer up on his desk so you can see his monitor at all times, because he can’t be trusted.” My friend, sheepishly, came back to his desk, right next to mine, an armlength away from me and started typing while his wife stood there with her head practically in flames. He had been looking at pornography right next to me. He had been flicking back and forth from what he was doing for work and what he was doing to feel arousal. That moment was one of the last times I actually worked side by side with my friend. It was probably the beginning of a rough patch in our friendship and certainly the beginning of the end of our business dealings. You see he had been using me, as he had been using so many other people and things in his life, to keep him “safe”. Once he no longer felt that I was able to keep him safe while he worked, we only worked together maybe two more times in the next 3 months. I had watched and studied my friend for years at this point and I knew a few things about him. Part of the reason I believe he had hired me was that I had been open with my struggle to overcome pornography use in my life and he desperately wanted to stop using pornography himself. There are a lot of reasons he probably never will. He has, by his own estimate and his wife’s, had an episode a week on average for fifteen years with little change. But that moment, the moment he viewed pornography while I was sitting next to him made me think of a moment in my own past that I feel so ashamed to admit. Until now, I’ve never told anyone, not even my wife. I had done the same thing years earlier, on a sleepy road, in a little duplex, sitting on my couch with my friends in the room, facing me, while I was on my laptop. I looked at pornography while I was chatting with my friends in my living room. Until this moment, no one else but me knew it. My friends, whom I love dearly and still keep in contact with have no idea. In writing this, I feel empathy for my friend more than anything. I am disappointed for my friend, not in him. I am sorry that he is dealing with this, not angry that...

16 Aug 202010min