Re-Focus, Re-Habit, Re-think to Overcome Porn Forever

register for this month's webinar https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3515928863411/WN_OJSUbCHSQGi0Ap7WPDC8jg http://zachspafford.com.safechkout.net/pricing (http://zachspafford.com.safechkout.net/pricing) https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme (https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme) - What about, giving him sex so he doesn’t act out? o Control v partnership o - Seeing other women and being worried it will lead to pornography? o The beach o The fro yo place o - Controlling devices and checking up o Accountability partner – webinar question #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast #masterymonday #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast #latterdaysaintsdealingwithpornographyinmarraige #LDS #latterdaysaints #pornographyrecovery #sarecovery #ldssa #12steps

22 Juni 202040min

https://calendly.com/habitcoachz/30minconsult Join my Monthly webinar: zachspafford.com/freecall #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast

14 Juni 202025min

If you want to register for the webinar to help decondition urges and stop using pornography follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItcu2vqz4iEtwha5erXQmdgBu9xHjMWQwr If you want to set up a free consult so you can be in the July 1 Group Coaching Program follow this link: https://calendly.com/habitcoachz/30-min-consult-clone 1. Choose love So often those who are dealing with spouses that have chosen addictive behavior feel like we are supposed to punish their behavior. In doing that, we lose the perspective of love that we once had. Choosing love doesn’t mean that you need to allow your spouse to abuse and overrun you. It also doesn’t mean that you give in to the demands of a spouse who is manipulating you. Choosing love does mean that what you say, what you do and who you show up as come from a place of love. In place of saying things like, “I hate what you are doing in our home and what you have become” you can say, and mean, “I love you. This behavior is not ok.” Choosing love is for you. It is so you can be the person that you want to be in the moment of your interaction. It is so you can lead your relationship by example. Being the person you want to be in your relationship will help bring your entire marriage up, not just changing you but also, indirectly changing your partner. Love is what you experience toward another. Other people don’t feel your feelings. You feel them. Which means, how you feel is how you act and how you act creates your results. Choosing love does not mean we allow others to break the boundaries that we have set within the relationship. If you have set a boundary that for 48 hours after your spouse looks at pornography sexual intimacy is off the table, then hold firmly and lovingly to that boundary. Be clear, keep it simple and love without condition. 2. Give up the need to be right a. No real benefit to being right b. Need to be right is misguided c. When you do, tension will dissipate What has being right ever given you? Has being right ever taken something from you? In a loving, committed relationship being right at the expense of the other person doesn’t bring us together, it usually creates an unnecessary wedge. My parents have this running bet. Any time one feels they are right about some inane thing and the other is not relenting, they will say, “I’ll bet your $300”. No one keeps score, no one knows who is ahead, no money is ever passed to the “winner” because there is never a winner. It is their way of saying, “it doesn’t matter, let’s move on”. When it comes to pornography use, you may believe deep down that you are right about what is happening. You may “know” that if your partner would just stop doing x or start doing y that they would be able to move forward and stop regressing to unhealthy buffering with pornography. The question you have to ask is, “is being right making my partner change?” The answer is invariably, “no.” I’m also not saying that you have to be wrong. You don’t have to give up on your opinions or act as though your position is unimportant. If you love the person, being right doesn’t make them love you more and doesn’t make you love them more. Give up being right and you will find yourself free from so much conflict. 3. Stop trying to control the other person a. We want others to do things b. Adults get to behave however they want c. We can’t control others without creating problems...

8 Juni 202029min

Every time I meet with a client I hear something along these lines. I try to stop but I just can’t – I have been fighting through this my whole life – My whole world is burning down because of this addiction. I am keeping it at bay, but I want to be free from this. This is the place most of us go to when we try to stop a habit in our lives. Most of us try to use willpower to change our habits In fact, I get comments like this on my Facebook page all the time. They say things like, “just stop it” Maybe you’ve heard something similar from a friend, spouse, bishop This kind of language is the language of going into battle. It is that keeping it at bay and believing you could lose everything as another client put it that is hindering your progress That is not going to get you all the way there. So many of us have put our fullest attentions and greatest efforts into quitting pornography only to be drawn back into it after a period of sober living. That is because we used willpower to fight what has become our most difficult habit. Willpower is a recipe for short gains, long term struggle because willpower is a trap, great book “change anything” talks about this in depth . It talks about how we may have half a dozen things influencing us to continue a habit while employing just one strategy to negate it. The book also demonstrates that it is not about some innate ability or capacity that makes us stronger than our friends or peers. “…people (often) believe that their ability to make good choices stems from nothing more than their willpower – and that their willpower is a quality they’re born with or they’re not – they eventually stop trying altogether. The willpower trap keeps them in a depressing cycle that begins with heroic commitment to change which is followed by eroding motivation and terminated inevitably by relapse into old habits. Then, when the built-up pain of their habits becomes intolerable, they muster up another heroic but doomed attempt at change.” Willpower is what we think we lack when we tell ourselves that we just didn’t want to quit bad enough Willpower can only take you so far because your brain is not designed to use willpower for lasting change. Willpower is strictly a short term tool The problem with willpower is that it is a power of struggle. When we use willpower we are simply fighting, battling out against the one person we can’t beat, ourselves. There is this new will smith film called Gemini man where I think that is essentially the premise of the film. That resistance, that battle, that warrior mentality, it is costly in terms of energy. In change anything, the premise of the book is that you can change anything you want in your life, if you have the right skills. In my individual coaching sessions I teach people a lot of skills. The webinars I do, are about teaching people skills. Today I’m going to teach you the first of three essential skills that I will be teaching live on June 17. If you are interested in attending that, please go to my website, zachspafford.com and click on free coaching call. That will take you to a zoom registration page where you will get all the info you need to join the call. If you want to stop using pornography, you need to know how to do these three things. I only have time for the first today, but this skill alone will make a huge difference in your life. One of the most important skills you can learn is how to say, “no” to your urges to go down the rabbit hole. Think about how you say no, when you really mean it. Especially with something that might frustrate you. If someone is repeatedly trying to get you to do something that you don’t like, you say, “NO!” There is abruptness, there is a clenching, there is a tightening against the thing...

1 Juni 202018min

Pain now or later. Almost every time I get a new client the first thing that they learn is that they have been putting off their pain. Each of us has discomfort that we deal with on a regular basis. Pain comes in lots of forms, some more painful in a moment than others. Some are physical pains like going to the dentist and others are emotional pain like loneliness. The thing is, that when we avoid painful things in search of short term happiness and pleasure, we are usually setting ourselves up for long term pain that is worse and more damaging than the pain we were avoiding. A perfect example of this happened to me at the start of this covid quarantine. Darcy had noticed that one of my front teeth was looking funny, which it turns out was a cavity behind a filling that had come loose. Immediately I thought, “oh, how much is this going to cost.” Being an entrepreneur I pay all my own dental bills. You can see my dilemma, put it off, don’t deal with the cost of fixing the tooth now and keep my, what turned out to be $300, or pay for it now, get into the dentist even though there is this new order to stay home and they aren’t seeing anyone for hardly any reason. There were a lot of good reasons to stay home, there were a few good reasons to go to the dentist. Having worked in a dental office, I have seen first-hand what happens when someone neglects dental work. Anything from needing heavy duty cleaning with a machine that basically jackhammers your teeth with sonic waves all the way up to pulling everything out because not a single tooth has enough integrity to stay in the mouth without the possibility of getting infected. Had I left it for a couple of months until things opened up again there very well could have been the need to put a crown on it or worse, do a post replacement of the entire tooth. Which would have cost a lot more money. A lot of what we do in life is a trade off. We work out knowing that a little pain now will help us be stronger in the long run. We get shots knowing that the vaccines, steroids and even pain killers that hurt some going in, will help us avoid worse, even excruciating pain in the long run. When it comes to pornography use and the struggle that you have been dealing with for years, ask yourself, am I willing to take a shot now in order to avoid an even more painful future. What’s the value of that to you? What’s the cost of continued therapy sessions for both you and your spouse before finally resolving this issue? What’s the cost of all the time you’ve spend doing something that is tearing at the fabric of your self-confidence? What’s the cost of sleeping in your car because your spouse has asked you to leave? What’s the cost of the hurt you are putting into your relationship and the trust you are breaking because of pornography use? What’s the cost of a divorce? What’s the cost of living separate lives? Just like dental work, working on our self is something that if you don’t get in as early as you can, the cavities in your capacities can fester, grow and get infected. The emotional pain that you feel when you are frustrated, stressed, lonely or even just bored are all types of immediate pain that if we choose to ignore it, we are creating a long-term pain that will eventually become unignorable. When I was deep in my pornography use, there was this huge gap between how I felt and how I wanted to feel. I struggled so much to feel wanted and loved and worthy that I would have done anything to get those emotions in my life. But, like so many of us, I didn’t know how. I thought that when I was lonely that no one wanted me. What I...

24 Maj 202012min

Why we use pornography even when we don’t want to. When we try to control our feelings the results begin to overwhelm us. The paradox of control On a personal level, it refers to the phenomenon by which the harder a person tries to control something, the more difficult it becomes to exercise that control. Examples that are often given of this phenomenon are: (1) the harder you try to fall a sleep, the more difficulty you have actually falling asleep; (2) the harder you try to stop thinking about something, the more you think about it; (3) the more you try to control negative emotions such as fear, the more powerful those emotions become. There is another paradox involved in this phenomenon: we get a sense of well-being when we feel we are in control, yet we do not actually have the power to control very much. The question then arises, why one or why the other. If we cannot have control over very much, why do we get a sense of well-being when we have the illusion of control? Conversely, if we have a sense of well-being when we have the illusion of control, why is it so difficult to actually exercise control? The two things seem to work against each other, and therein lies the paradox. On the interpersonal level, when we try to control the behavior of those around us (or the things that happen to us), we find that our attempts rarely succeed. Only when we stop trying to exercise control that we are able to get the results we desire. The paradox here lies in the fact that in order to exercise control, we have to stop trying to exercise control. I like to illustrate this with sand. If you have ever picked up a handful of sand and tried to hold it you know that the tighter you squeeze the more the sand just falls through your fingers. Eventually you will hold a tiny amount in your hand but the rest will just fall away because you can’t get a good grip on it. On the other hand, if you scoop up a handful of sand and just hold it there, letting it rest on your hand, you will find that you can have a lot more sand in your hand with very little control. In connection with the paradox of control, it is sometimes said that we cannot control what happens around us, but we can control how we respond to what is happening. If we shift the focus from external control to internal control we will get better results. That is, if we come to terms with the fact that we do not have control over the external world, we can have better control over a given situation by controlling the way we react to what is happening to us in that situation. This is especially true of the wives of pornography users. If we are looking for inner peace and to feel in control, exercising control over the way we choose to think about the situation, which gives us control over our emotions and our actions is the most effective way to get to the peace, love and self confidence we are all looking for.

17 Maj 202023min

What is, not what should be All good stories start at 330 am right. September 15 2001, just a few days after the September 11th terrorist attack, my missionary companion, the other two elders in our apartment and I were sound asleep in our seventh floor flat two blocks from the piazza garibaldi train station in naples Italy. On the minds of each of us was this great tragedy that had just changed the face of the world and as we slept we subconsciously thought of all the loss and fear and hatred and pain that were at that moment permeating the lives of americans 8 time zones away. A rainstorm had been pounding the city for hours. Deep in sleep four missionaries heard a desperate thunder banging through our apartment and in our slumbering ears our 60 year old landlady crying “fate presto!” “Come quickly!” As our feet hit the floor, something was clearly wrong. Where there should have been only tile, there was water. At the door, our landlady begged us to shut off the water, which she was certain was coming from our apartment. It was, after all full of boys barely old enough to vote, so obviously they must have broken something. Stepping out and standing on the landing of our top floor apartment I could see a cascade of water, careening toward the earth and crashing at the bottom of our large stairwell. The door to a second apartment opened to reveal our neighbors across the hall bleary eyed and confused. Offering no answers, we all looked at the third door on this level. An empty apartment that had been unoccupied for as long as anyone could recall. I tried the door. Nothing. But I could clearly feel the flow of water gushing between the door and the floor. The landlady had no key as it was a private apartment. From the landing there was no way in. The balcony of that empty apartment and the adjacent missionary apartment was separated by a stone wall with only one way around it. Over the edge of the wet balcony with only a slippery rail seven floors up to hold on to. In a moment ‘I put on my raincoat, went onto our balcony and climbed to the flooding one where I found the only drainage hole blocked by a wayward mop and a random piece of plastic.’ Crisis averted, time to clean up. Sometimes I have conversations with spouses of pornography users who come to me at the moment of crisis. They have just found out about the pornography use of their spouse. Many are distraught, unbending and unable to look at this as anything other than betrayal. They believe that their marriage is over, their spouse is broken beyond repair and that they are a failure. They are focusing on what should be and not what is. Let’s talk about the differences between how we act when we focus on what is vs what should be. “What is” creates possibility. “What should” be delays possibility. A high school graduate might say, “my gpa will get me into these colleges, I’m ready to make a choice” Or when the think about what should be, they might say, ‘my gpa isn’t good enough to get into the school I want. I wish I had studied harder.’ A business person might say, ‘our sales were 93% of target, let’s evaluate our process to see if there are any adjustments we can make for the next quarter’ Or ‘if only I had made one more sale. I missed my bonus, this is the worst, I should have worked harder’ A pornography user might say, ‘I see how I have behaved, I understand the choices I made that brought me here. I am going to learn as much as I can from this.’ Or, ‘it just happened, I don’t have control over myself and I’m an addict.’

10 Maj 202018min

Making decisions from a place of fear. What is fear and why do we often make decisions from a place of fear rather than from a place of abundance? Fear of missing out Not having enough Failure Not being conservative enough How is fear different than caution and how can we tell the difference? What is it about making a decision from a place of fear vs abundance that makes our lives better or worse? What is good about fear? What can be bad about fear? If you knew this was going to work, what would you give up to get there? Matthew 13:44 – the man who sold everything and bought a field. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” He didn’t think, what if someone discovers it before I get back? what if I can’t raise enough funds? The reasons we use for a lot of our behavior are often contrived out of nothing. Book – the art of possibility talks about “experiments with people who have suffered a lesion between the two halves of the brain have shown that when the right side is prompted, say, to close a door, the left side, unaware of the experimenters instruction, will produce a reason as to why he has just performed the action, such as, “oh I felt a draft.” …It’s all invented, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us” I don’t know how the experiment conducted, possibly through visual input to one side of the brain or a physical stimulus that only would show up in one side of the brain and then the other side creating a reason for it.

3 Maj 202023min