3 Mental Habits to Quit Porn: The Recovery Mindset

So you've got this monkey on your back, an addiction to porn, or maybe a loved one does.It keeps interrupting your life. It keeps interrupting your loved one's lives. It increases your anxiety when you give into porn addiction, right? Maybe for days afterwards or weeks.It decreases your ability to connect with others. You feel more depressed. You don't feel as motivated or driven.It's sucking your potential away from you. And you keep thinking all you need to do is just try harder. Be determined to stop.This is what people tell you, right? Be more dedicated. Think more positively. Believe in yourself.Think about your family, right? Don't you want to be sober for them? What's wrong with you? You just need more willpower. Or maybe the message you're being given is that you have high libido, a high sex drive. And so all these sexual thoughts and these urges are really normal, and you just need to learn how to say no to watching porn.If you're getting any of these messages or anything akin to them, I got news for you, man. The world's lying to you. Okay, none of these things are the answer.None of them. And instead of beating your head against a brick wall like I did for 10 years addicted to porn, continuing to hurt yourself and your loved ones through your addictive behavior, it's time to learn how to actually stop watching porn. And I'm going to tell you how to do that today.In order to quit watching porn and to quit porn for good, there's one thing you need to develop for that to happen. And that's a recovery mindset. That's it.You have the right mindset and you'll break free of porn. And you're like, well, okay, what does that even mean? What's a recovery mindset, right? Because that could be a lot of different things. Am I saying just think positively? No, no, not at all.In fact, don't listen to people who tell you that. I'm talking about a mindset that is specific to living a life of joy, peace, meaning, love, connectedness to God, to those around you, to your inner self, the true you. That's a mindset of acceptance at its core, I believe.And that doesn't mean a mindset of acceptance for your addiction. Not that your addiction is a part of you and it always will be. That's not what I'm talking about.I mean, approaching your life, yourself and others with acceptance. In other words, with understanding, compassion and empowerment. And if you've heard something like this before, I guarantee you what you're going to hear in this episode is like nothing you've ever heard before.I have a lot more to say to really dive into the details of this to share with you exactly what this mindset of acceptance means. It's time to stop all the resisting and the fighting. If you're under the impression that fighting and resisting your addiction, fighting and resisting cravings, fighting and resisting negative feelings is the way to recovery, it's not.It's time to stop escaping and numbing out when you experience difficult emotions. Stop judging yourself and hating yourself for having this problem. Being so dang hard on yourself is not going to help you out of your addiction.And also, being so dang hard on yourself for all of your mistakes. Okay, so many of my clients struggle with perfectionism. In fact, every single one that I've ever worked with has some form of perfectionism about some different categories in their life or in all of life.This perfectionism, really this unwillingness to accept mistakes and that mistakes define us, right? And who we are. They reflect on our worth rather than just being something we can learn from. The resistance, the fighting, the willpower, being hard on yourself, feeling bad about yourself and your addiction, all of those things, feeling bad about the cravings, the mistakes, the sexual feelings and thoughts, all that's just fanning the flames of porn addiction.It's filling you with negative emotion and that negative emotion is driving you back to your addiction as a way to cope with all of the shame, the fear, the self-judgment. Do you kind of see how that works? The more fear, the more self-judgment, the more shame we feel about our addiction, the more we'll be drawn back to it as a way to cope with all the negative emotion. So you might be wondering right now, well if I don't do that, you know, am I supposed to just feel okay about my addiction? I'm just supposed to say, okay, it's cool.I'm addicted so I'm gonna feel good about it. Again, it's not what I'm saying. So listen up.What can you do instead? Again, to overcome our addiction, we need to develop a recovery mindset, a mindset of acceptance. That's going to be acceptance of ourself, of others and of life, life circumstances, life happenings. What's going on in life? What are the hard and challenging emotions you're experiencing? We're going to need to embrace those emotions and those thoughts with acceptance.We're going to need to see the maybe screwed up or messed up things that we think and not judge ourselves for them and instead just see them as parts of, you might hear some thunder right now, there's a little weather outside, but you might see these thoughts as who you are, right? And we've been taught that in our culture, especially in, well, I guess Western and Eastern culture. We're taught that our feelings and our emotions define us. It's who we are.And I'm here to tell you that's not who you are. Okay. You're a human being.You're a child of God. You're a spirit, at least, right? If you don't believe you're a child of God, you are a spirit. I think that's pretty hard to contradict with how many people have have talked about that for thousands of years and how many people have had personal experiences with knowing their consciousness, their spirit.Okay. You are a spirit that is of infinite worth. That's who you are.You're not your thoughts and emotions. Those are ailments of the mind and maybe not ailments. Emotions are beautiful too.Thoughts can be beautiful, right? But the difficult negative thoughts and emotions, they don't define you. Okay. I think I genuinely believe that people's natural state is a state of happiness and love and generosity.Down here on earth, we're kind of taught a different way in our, in the world, the culture that we live in right now, which is look out for yourself. And that doesn't help us be happy. So today we're going to talk about three mental habits to quit porn.And those three mental habits are aligned with this recovery mindset, this mindset of acceptance. So I'm going to teach you about what that means right now and how can you, how you can apply this in your daily life in order to break free of porn for good. So mental habit number one, okay.Process through thoughts and emotions. Process through thoughts and emotions. That's mental habit number one.When my clients first start with me, processing through challenging thoughts and emotions is, is foreign to them. So many of them, I have clients that will literally say, I didn't know it was okay for me to feel my feelings. I didn't know that was something I could do.Or clients that cravings just seem to pop up out of nowhere. Maybe you can relate to that. Cravings for porn just come out of nowhere.It's like, well, this came this, what reason do I have for feeling this? Okay. And there's a source, there's a reason what thoughts and emotions, what difficult negative thoughts or emotions or shame or self judgment or judgment of others, right? If you're in a state of judging other people around you, that's a very negative state. And I'm not condemning anybody for that.Again, it is just a product of the mind and we can change those habits. We can change them to better ones. That's the beautiful thing about the mind.We can change it to something that actually helps us instead of hurts us. Right? It doesn't mean we'll ever be perfect at that, but we can certainly improve and our lives can be a lot better. A lot of times these, this inability to process through thoughts and emotions is either because we grew up in a household where we were emotionally neglected or where we were emotionally hurt or abused.This is very common. Again, all of my clients have some form of this. Maybe we're emotionally neglected.We were never taught to process through our thoughts and emotions. We were taught that our thoughts and emotions weren't important when compared to the other things happening in the home, right? Perhaps our parents or our siblings, because our relationships with our siblings can be just as impactful as those of our parents or more impactful depending on the context. But perhaps our parents or our siblings were so caught up in their own negative emotions, their own pain, their own trauma, that they couldn't be there for us, or at least they felt they couldn't be there for us.And the amazing thing is, is when we actually start to work through that pain and we're generous and selfless and do good for others, we find we have more and more capacity, the more we give, but that's not an easy thing to do, and I know that. Okay, I struggle with those things too, right? Practicing this selflessness is a daily act and something we can ask God to help us develop. But perhaps they went through that, right? They're so caught up in their own negative emotions, they can't be here for us.Or perhaps our parents or our siblings were so busy with work that either they were burned out at the end of every day or they were so busy pursuing building a business or pursuing their career or their financial goals that they just didn't have the mental bandwidth for us. And that hurts, man. It hurts to go through that.Or something a little less cliche perhaps, but also something that happens is perhaps our parents or our siblings spent a lot of time out in the community helping other people, but not a whole lot of time helping the people closest to them and their family. And one of the biggest reasons for that is because it's a lot easier to go out and help people out in the community that you don't have to deal with their daily issues and their bad habits and the things that are hard to deal with like you do in your family. You're very close to the people in your family.You see all their mistakes. You see all their flaws clearly under a microscope. And you have to be determined to empower rather than try to control, to love and understand rather than judge.The judgment and control is part of what leads us to addiction, big part of what leads us to addiction. Both being judged and controlled by other people, especially those closest to us, or judging and controlling ourselves, which often comes as a result of being judged and controlled by others. We can also be emotionally hurt or abused.Maybe we were taught that feelings were dangerous or unwanted and that we should keep them to ourselves or conform with what others were telling us we should think or we should feel. Okay. Again, very common for my clients.Now this doesn't, this doesn't doom us. Okay. I want this to be clear that if we were emotionally neglected or hurt growing up, this does not doom us to a life of insecurity and unhappiness.If you feel that today, it does not doom you in any way, shape or form. In fact, it gives you an opportunity to be a deeper, more powerful person than you could be without that pain in your past. And you may not believe that, or you may say, man, I wish I didn't feel any of this.I wish it could just go away. And I hear that. I've wished those same things in my life, but ultimately God can turn lemons into lemonade.When you were a child, it was your parents responsibility to be good to you, right? It was your siblings responsibility to do good for you and to be good to you. But now that you're older, it's your responsibility to be good to yourself. It is now your responsibility to be good to yourself and to be good to other people.And that's really one in the same, how we treat other people, how we treat ourselves is one in the same. And so, so many ways, maybe we go out of our way to serve and do good for others, but maybe there's caveats of expecting things in return, right? Maybe we if, if we truly love ourselves, maybe, maybe we feel a sense of pride in ourselves, but that's not the same thing as love and understanding and compassion for ourselves. If we feel pride, right? And we feel kind of a self centeredness or a, a cockiness, that's not actually going to enable us to treat other people better.And it's not actually a true security and a true peace. We are seeking for true security and true peace by giving ourselves and others compassion, understanding empowerment, right? Empowering other people, empowering ourselves, being encouraging, being positive, being optimistic. These can help other people.These can help ourselves, right? But it needs to come with the understanding piece. We need to look at the dark and the hard things in life and express understanding for others and for ourselves when it comes to those things. Okay.You can change your mental habits, but it requires you to strengthen these parts of you that you may not have much, have much practice with yet, or it requires you to work through the hurt and the betrayal that you've experienced, whether through therapy or through whatever means that might be. It may be your parents fault in part that you carry all this trauma, but now it is your responsibility to overcome it. So what does this mean? How does that work exactly? When you experience negative emotion, okay, what I mean by processing through thoughts and emotions is when you experience negative emotion, anger, sadness, impatience, fear, you need to process through what's going on.What are the root causes behind those negative emotions? Express understanding for yourself. Look at what's happened in the weeks or the months or in your childhood or that day. What's going on that has caused this anger and try to really find those root causes.And I have my clients on a daily basis go through daily check-ins or daily assessments that they fill out and they fill out many different questions about their feelings and their thoughts and assess exactly what's going on so that they can practice this ability to really process through thoughts and emotions in a way that is guided, in a way that is powerful, and in a way that forms new behavioral and psychological habits. And I have them do that every single day. And then all of that data, all the stuff that they fill out in that assessment and check-in is sent over to me.And when we meet on a weekly basis, I go through some of those things with them to be able to focus on solutions. It's very important, very important to process through these negative emotions and then cravings as well, right? I work on these with my clients too. When you experience a craving, you got to ask yourself, what is the addict part of my brain attempting to escape? What am I trying to run from right now? Very, very important question.Mental habit number two is to see failures as learning experiences. This requires a lot of practice undoing shame habits and shame habits are this. Anytime I make a mistake, I feel bad about myself.I feel self-pity. I feel resentment towards myself. I feel like the mistake defines who I am.It drags me down. It causes me to want to numb out and go to my addictions. Okay.So I'm not just talking about failure as far as relapses or slips with addiction here. I'm talking about all failures in all parts of life. Remember, we're not just talking about stopping the behavior of addiction.We're talking about developing a recovery mindset and a recovery mindset means every single aspect of my life. I am seeking to live in a way of recovery, have a mindset of recovery. And we can do this again.It's what I teach people to do step by step by step through daily practices and exercises within the program. What is the addict part of the brain though want to do with failure? It wants you to bludgeon and beat yourself down with it. It wants you to destroy yourself with it.Why? Why does it want you to do that? Well, one of the reasons is because it's an excuse to numb out and escape to go to its addiction. Again, you might notice I'm saying the addict part of the brain that is because I'm not defining you by that addiction or by those impulses or cravings. That's how you need to see your brain.Just see it as a part of your brain, the addict part. There's a whole other part of who you are and a part of your brain, your thoughts, your emotions. You're a powerful, incredible individual with amazing talents and skills and strengths and abilities and a bunch of good to do in this world for yourself and for other people.You can make an impact and make a difference. That's who you are. There's just this addict part of your brain that is getting in the way of your potential.And it wants you not to process through thoughts and emotions because it'd like to keep you distracted from them, which is a coping mechanism, right? Ultimately, in some ways, that part of your brain may be trying to protect you, but it's not helpful. It's not helpful to numb out and try to escape hard emotions. We need to process through them, feel them, actually feel them.Again, I've had clients that say, I didn't know it was okay to feel my feelings. Didn't know it was okay to feel my feelings. It is okay to feel our feelings, especially as men.We can sometimes not understand that or feel that, that it's okay to feel sadness, feel anger. One of the most challenging parts about anger is when we try to stuff down that anger or deny that it's there. I'm not angry.I'm not angry. You're what? I'm not angry. You're angry, right? That is not going to empower us.That is going to send us into a state of control where then we're trying to control other people. We're trying to willpower our way through stuff, right? I'm going to control myself into doing the right thing. Not going to work.Acceptance is the way it has to go. We need to seek to understand ourselves, process through things, use failures as learning experiences, and instead of letting them turn us to anger and sadness and bludgeoning ourselves. And again, it's just fine to feel sadness.It's if that sadness then is turning to shame and crushing us and causing us to escape and numb out and hurt the people around us, whether directly or indirectly, right? Because if we're engaging in addiction, that is hurting our loved ones, regardless of what the addiction is, because it takes our focus away from them. It takes away our potential. It takes away our ability to serve and love and do good for others.And so we need to overcome that addiction for the good of our loved ones. And just in talking a little bit more about seeing failures as learning experiences, my whole entire life up into my, oh man, mid-20s probably, maybe late 20s, failure was this, is what it is for a lot of people that I speak to and work with, which is it's this swear word. We even say, I don't think failure is a thing.You know, failure always leads to something good. And yeah, that's true, I guess to an extent it's semantics, but it's okay to accept failure. Okay, failure.I read a book called Failing Forward. Great book. It says the same concept throughout the whole thing of just the concept is to turn failures into learning experiences, but it's so, so true.And it takes a lot of practice to do that. It doesn't just happen automatically, right? We have to practice again and again and again, and again, every single time we fail and we want to feel shame and horrible about ourselves and not try and give up, right? Or we want to say, this just isn't for me, or, you know, why am I so bad at this? Or I can't do this, or I can't do that. Instead, we're going to practice saying, okay, what did I learn from this failure? What did I learn from it? And that's all it needs to be.And eventually that's all it can be in a lot of ways, right? We might feel disappointment. We might feel hurt. We might feel saddened by something that we did and not the way that we would have preferred, right? Or we failed.We didn't meet our goal. And then we ask, okay, what am I going to do in the future? How am I going to change? And that's all it needs to be. And that's a big mental habit because failures and feeling shame from failures can lead straight to cravings, which can lead straight to relapses with our addiction.Mental habit number three is to focus on others. And I know it can sound cliche in ways, but this is big. This is really, really big.So I want you to listen to this. Addiction is a self-centered act. Addiction is a self-centered act, right? It's hard to admit that, right? But it is self-centered.It's selfish. It's all about us getting our fix, feeling better, escaping the pain, and it hurts the people around us. And that's, that's sad.It's hard, right? And again, it's that attic part of the brain. It's not who you are. It's just that you've built habits of giving into that, escaping, numbing out, turning to this addiction funnel where we go into a funnel and everything else in our lives disappears for that period of time while we're numbing out with our addiction.And then once we give in and it's done, we come out on the other end of the funnel and we feel horrible about ourselves. It's a very temporary, intense reward with a long lasting pain. And so instead we want to do things that serve other people.We want to do things that are actually going to uplift us, bring us peace, bring us joy. And by focusing on others, by actually connecting in relationships, loving others, showing them care, showing them kindness, making plans on a daily basis to serve the people around us, making it a point to spend time listening to our wives or our children, right? Or the people close to us. Taking time out for quality time and to love others the way that they need to be loved.And the more that we build that habit of focusing on other people, the more that we are training our mind psychologically out of addiction and the behaviorally on the outside, we're doing things that are opposite of addiction to serve others, do good for others, be connected with others, spend time with them, have good conversations, right? Go about serving them in whatever manner that might be. That is undoing addiction because it's the opposite of addiction. Addiction is self-centered and selfish.And if we choose things that are other centered or selfless, we're undoing addiction. It doesn't mean we're never going to experience cravings or never have it, you know, thoughts of addiction pop up again. That's not what that means.It just means the more we do it, the more we focus on others and serving others, the more we'll come out of that habit of addiction. So I hope this has been helpful to you, my friend, please rate this podcast right now. If you've enjoyed this episode, if it's been powerful and positive for you, follow this podcast and turn on notifications so that you can get more episodes after this.I have a lot of material and information I pump out here to help you overcome addiction. So rate this podcast. If you want to become a part of the program, go to nomoredesire.com slash program.There's a link in the description. I would love to help you overcome your porn addiction for good. You can do that in the program.It's seven units, months of help, months of material, hands-on exercises, and it is psychological and behavioral solutions allied with spiritual principles to give you every single step, step-by-step you need to break free of porn addiction for good. If you're not ready to go to that level, simply go to nomoredesire.com and download my ebook. It's completely free and it'll get you started.God bless and much love my friend.