What it Takes To Overcome Pornography - 9 Items

Join Zach and Darcy as they discuss an email they received about pornography use. Listen to more episodes at zachspafford.com/blog

9 Maj 202247min

Overcoming pornography isn’t just pushing a new thought into your mind to supersede the thoughts that have naturally occurred. 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

2 Maj 202219min

I’d like to take you back to general conference a few weeks back. I loved listening to President Nelson as he spoke about how to keep spiritual momentum. If you don’t recall the talk, he offered 5 ways to Maintain positive spiritual momentum. The five were Get on the covenant path and stay there. Discover the joy of daily repentance. Learn about God and how He works. Seek and expect miracles. 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: Seek Understanding Maintain Agency 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. 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...

25 Apr 202217min

I was working with a client this week and he said something that really struck 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. 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...

18 Apr 202214min

What is pornography addiction? 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...

4 Apr 202215min

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

28 Mars 202214min

Real quick, before we get too far, I have a free masterclass for anyone who wants to overcome pornography forever. https://www.zachspafford.com/freecall (https://www.zachspafford.com/freec)https://www.zachspafford.com/freeclass (all) 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...

21 Mars 202215min