Break Barriers to Quit Porn | 4 Psychological Blocks that Prevent Porn Recovery and How to Bust Through Them
- Jake Kastleman
- Oct 23, 2024
- 27 min read
You cannot quit porn simply by overcoming sexual cravings and urges. Porn addiction doesn’t ultimately stem from these urges (as surprising as that is).
In reality, porn cravings are a symptom of underlying psychological barriers you're experiencing that are preventing porn addiction recovery.
Instead of facing or fighting porn cravings, you need to get to the root causes of pornography addiction. You need to access the mental blocks in your mindset and remove them.
I’m going to teach you how to do this today.
If you properly and consistently follow these 4 steps for emotional processing from day to day, there's an excellent chance you will eventually not need to deal with porn cravings in the first place. They simply won’t be there.
It is impossible for me to give you the perfect formula to overcome porn addiction in one blog article. That said, I'll give you these 4 steps for emotional processing that rely on sound principles from multiple psychological modalities, including CBT and IFS, as well as spiritual teachings from Eastern and Western Faiths.
Healing Porn Addiction Using Daily, Emotional Processing
To some degree, the current psychological paradigm on addiction is that it stems from biological predispositions and emotional impulsivity, as well as mental cravings that stem from stress. The suggested solutions to overcome porn addiction often include facing and fighting cravings, sitting with cravings, getting honest with people about our addictions, and going to talk therapy.
All of these approaches have merit. But I’m going to teach you a different way that I think you’ll find very effective if you practice it each day.
Instead of thinking of cravings as bad and fighting them, or simply sitting with them, we can learn to process and talk ourselves through them. We can observe and get curious about them. We can uproot them by redefining them.
Cravings often carry with them feelings of fear and shame. But if we can see them not as bad or immoral, but as a signal to us of something deeper, we can give them space to be understood and relieved without acting out.
Here is one way to see it that people have found very effective…
Cravings are protective mechanisms attempting to keep us safe from suffering.
At first, this sounds counterintuitive. How could cravings be keeping you safe? After all, pornography addiction has ruined your life and the lives of your loved ones. But, if viewed another way, it actually makes good sense.
Much as a child can try to help in ways that are wildly ineffective, the unconscious parts of our mind (which can often act like children) may attempt to protect or keep us safe using methods that are mad.
If we can perceive these parts of ourselves not as “bad” but instead misguided, we can begin to work with them, collaborate with them, love them, and eventually help them transform into something that is actually helpful.
Instead of running from cravings, or other triggering feelings of loneliness, anger, fear, shame, etc., we can observe and get curious about these emotions. We can talk ourselves through them, like a compassionate father would speak with his son or daughter.
The Psychological Layers of Porn Addiction: Protective Mechanisms and Insecurities
Let’s explore the inner mechanisms of porn addiction together. I want you to go far deeper than the cravings, obsessions, and impulses. All of these are a reaction to psychological mechanisms that are below the surface. They are all a distraction from internal suffering and pain playing out consciously and unconsciously.
We often look at addiction as a horribly negative or shameful thing. But addiction is simply a protective mechanism, much the same as anger, aggression, or perfectionism are. Our brain uses addiction in an attempt to protect or keep us safe from underlying feelings of:
Fear
Weakness
Insecurity
Unworthiness
Lack of safety
Feeling unloved
Lack of motivation
Etc.
Porn addiction and cravings are the protective mechanisms. The feelings under the surface are our true target.
How to Stop Porn Addiction
To stop porn addiction, you have to realize that you are not powerless against cravings. You do not need to simply accept them as a reality of life, nor should you need to deal with them forever. There is a better way.
Cravings, lust, fantasizing, etc. are a reaction to or distraction from underlying negative emotions. If you can assess the negative emotions under the surface - either before you experience cravings or immediately after they are triggered - then you can build new mental habits to replace porn relapses. You can talk yourself through hard emotions and essentially keep them from evolving into cravings for porn.
This requires you to dedicate yourself to consistent emotional processing throughout the day, every day. It requires you to be present with and aware of your emotions - to listen to them and give them space to be understood.
Now, I’m going to give you the step-by-step process to break through 4 psychological barriers preventing you from quitting porn. If you use this step-by-step process throughout the day, it will empower you to relieve porn cravings and keep them from escalating into porn relapse.
4 Psychological Barriers to Porn Recovery and How to Bust Through Them
I’m going to help you break porn addiction using a 4-step strategy for emotional processing. Use this strategy everyday. It’s not a one-time fix, it’s an on-going way of mentally processing challenging emotions including porn cravings. It can also be used just as easily for symptomatic (or secondary) emotions like anger or perfectionism.
This 4-step strategy to process through porn cravings is an acronym: “P.I.C.S.”
Protective Mechanisms
Insecurities
Core Intentions
Surrender (Forgiveness)
STEP 1: Protective Mechanisms
When a craving pops up, I want you to think of it less as a sexual inclination and more of an emotional trigger that is akin to feelings of anger or perfectionism.
Your mind is going to attempt to convince you that cravings have everything to do with your sexual desire, but you need to understand that they are an attempt to distract or protect you from other underlying emotions.
So, instead of running from the cravings, what I want you to do is mentally approach the craving. Move toward it. Ask it what it is trying to help you understand.
And I don’t mean giving into it, but instead going to the source of the craving and asking what it wants you to know.
This sounds strange, but you need to make friends with the part of your mind that is creating the craving. Dialogue with it. Listen to it. Understand it. Show it compassion.
Instead of hating, judging, or trying to control this part of yourself, ask it why it gives you these cravings. What is it trying to protect?
Again, it is important to understand that I am not talking about fixating on the lust or fantasies, but instead mindfully dialoguing with the part of your mind that is producing them. Try to show it love and compassion. It is attempting to soothe you using the thoughts of sex and fantasy. So let it know that you appreciate that it’s trying to help you.
Again, this may sound strange, but practice this each day for several weeks and see what happens.
STEP 2: Insecurities
Now that you’ve started listening to the part of your mind that is producing these cravings - without fixating on the lust, fantasies, or content of the cravings - the next step is to get deeper into your psyche and uncover what the cravings are protecting you from feeling.
We all have insecurities. Every person who has ever lived has insecurities. If you are a man, you may have been taught from a very young age that it was not okay to feel or admit to these insecurities.
But, my friend, you have been misguided. You’ve even been cheated, I would say. Because if you can deeply recognize and process through your insecurities each day, then you can eventually become free of them, or at least able to manage them effectively. And then, you can become more powerful, effective, successful, loving, and generous than ever before.
Whereas, if you continue to ignore your insecurities, not dialogue with your mind, and not talk yourself through the darkness…then that darkness will control you.
So, the next step is to get in touch with the underlying feelings of stress or weakness, and listen to them. What do they want you to know? What types of imbalances or hardships are there in your psyche that are burdening you? What feelings have necessitated the development of protective mechanisms like porn/addiction cravings, anger, or perfectionism? What’s actually going on under the surface?
You have to explore and talk yourself through this each day. Show yourself compassion; show yourself understanding; get to know the darkness so that you can shine a light on it. As you do this properly, the light you shine on the darkness will empower it to shrink over time so that it can transform into something better.
STEP 3: Core Intentions
Now that you’ve explored, listened to, and showed compassion for the protective mechanisms and insecurities within your psyche, you can go even deeper.
Underneath or branching out from every protective mechanism or insecurity I believe there is a good intention.
For instance, if you struggle with perfectionism, you may have a tendency towards procrastination, anger, and overwhelm, but you also have a powerful desire for quality work. You want to do things right and make sure that you are dependable.
Another example would be anger. If you struggle with anger you likely have a deep compassion for others under the surface. You don’t want people to suffer, which causes you to behave in ways that are controlling or judgmental because you want people to avoid pitfalls or hardships. These judgmental and controlling mentalities result in anger, and they’re extremely difficult for others to deal with, but there is still a core intention of care.
Now, you may be wondering, when it comes to porn cravings, how could those house core intentions that are pure and good?
The answer to this is fairly complex, but I’ll do my best to explain it.
I venture to say if you are someone who struggles with porn addiction, then you are someone who - at their core - cares deeply. For others, for the world, for the quality of your relationships, your work, and your life. You care so much that it hurts.
I know this because I was this way, and every single one of my clients have been this way as well. Addiction may have grown a callous over this care, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
As a child you may have been highly sensitive, perfectionistic, meticulous, or an overachiever. You may have had extremely high expectations of yourself that you felt you could never live up to. Or you may have created havoc to hide the fact that things bothered you deeply and you didn’t know how to handle them.
So, in order to cope, your mind chose porn because it needed something to help you escape from the pain.
Now that you’re older, it is time for you to get in touch with that inner child that carries all of these amazing gifts and a deep desire to make a difference, do exceptional work, and love others without reservation. It’s time to begin recognizing these core intentions.
If you can love and admire these core, pure intentions within you, and focus on them each day, then these core intentions can start to bloom and take the place of symptomatic insecurities and protective mechanisms. I believe these core intentions are who you actually are, despite all of the other challenges on the surface.
STEP 4: Surrender (Forgiveness)
If you can gain compassion, understanding, and admiration for your protective mechanisms and insecurities, and dig into your core intentions, you may be able to reach a place of surrender or forgiveness - to give up your burdens and start to feel some true peace.
Everyday, as you dialogue with yourself and explore these layers of your psyche, practice forgiving yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made. Surrender them up. Give them away. See yourself in a new light.
If you can do this for yourself, then you’ll be able to do it for others. It will enable you to be a more loving and effective husband and father, and to show up with more generosity and selflessness in the world.
Quit Porn by Building a Recovery Mindset & Lifestyle
If you want to not only overcome porn addiction, but actually lose your desire for porn, you must do the intensive work to get down to the root causes of your porn cravings. By building a recovery mindset and lifestyle, you can eventually no longer crave porn.
My Intensive Porn Addiction Recovery Program gives you a step-by-step system to build this recovery lifestyle and mindset. It is developed through:
Daily Assessments that instill the mental habits of recovery, and give you insights into what cravings actually are, where they come from, and how to overcome them.
Structured Recovery Program with exercises to transform your mindset and lifestyle one step at a time.
Tailored Recovery Plan that you and I build out together, and which contains your personal answers to get rid of porn cravings. This will be the plan you’ll use every single day to stay sober for the rest of your life.
Weekly 1-on-1 Sessions with a coach who has proven professional experience helping men recover, as well as personal experience with recovery.
There is no other system designed like the No More Desire ™ program. It is a program that is intensive, personalized, structured, and it helps you build a recovery mindset and lifestyle so that you can lose your desire for porn.
If you’re ready to get rid of porn addiction, set up a Free 30-min Consultation with me. During the call, you and I will break down the causes of your porn addiction together. You will gain personalized direction and insights for your recovery, and I’ll answer any questions that you have about the program. Set up your Free Consultation now.
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Transcription of Episode 72: Break Barriers to Quit Porn | 4 Psychological Blocks that Prevent Porn Recovery and How to Bust Through Them
Hey my friend, this is Jake Kastleman with No More Desire. Welcome to the show. Today we're going to talk about how to break barriers to quit porn.
We're going to talk about the four psychological blocks that prevent porn recovery and how to bust through them. Very first, you need to understand, and if you've heard my other episodes you've heard me say this before, I'll say it over and over again, you cannot quit porn simply by dealing with sexual cravings and urges. In my first-hand experience with porn addiction and overcoming porn addiction and my professional experience working with clients, porn cravings don't have a lot to do with sexual cravings and urges.
They do have to do with these things to a degree, but as surprising as it is, that is really not the root, nor does it have much to do with the addiction itself. In reality, cravings are a symptom of underlying psychological barriers that are preventing you from recovering from porn addiction. We're going to talk all about that today.
Instead of facing and fighting porn cravings, something that frustrated me for so long, you need to get to the root causes of pornography addiction. You need to access the mental blocks in your mindset and remove them. And I'm not talking about just thinking positively here.
I'm going to teach you a method to do this, to get through four layers of your cognition and four layers psychologically in order to get down into the roots. Because in my own experience overcoming porn addiction, it was so hard for me to face cravings and to feel panicked. Excuse me, my voice today, I have a little bit of a cold, but we should be able to get through this okay.
So I found that I did not want to battle cravings. I did not want to have to deal with them. They were challenging for me.
They could be very overwhelming for me. And I thought there has to be a better way. A lot of people would tell me, you know, you just need to just accept the craving and roll with it.
You just need to be mindful of it and sit with it. And that just never sat with me right. I thought, where do these cravings come from? Where are they stemming from? Because in my recovery, I was coming to kind of understand it was not to do with sexual cravings and desires and urges.
There were other things going on and I wanted to understand what those were. If you can follow this four-step process to break through these psychological blocks, if you can do this each day consistently and properly, you will not need to deal with porn cravings in the first place because they simply won't be there. And again, I speak from personal experience.
It is impossible for me to give you the perfect formula to overcome porn addiction in one podcast episode. But today I can give you some tools for emotional processing that rely on sound principles from multiple psychological modalities including CBT and IFS or internal family systems for those who are unfamiliar, as well as spiritual teachings from Eastern and Western faiths, which really correlate very nicely with a lot of psychological teachings. If you're not familiar with those teachings of Eastern and Western faiths, you may not perceive that, but they often correlate together.
So today as we talk about how to overcome porn addiction using daily emotional processing, to some degree the current psychological paradigm on addiction is that it stems from biological predispositions, emotional impulsivity, and mental cravings that stem from stress. And I remember when I was told that biological predispositions and emotional impulsivity were behind my addiction, I remember thinking about how meticulous and perfectionistic an individual I was and how that just again didn't sit right with me. I did not connect with that.
It didn't make sense to me. So again, we're going to take a different approach today. Often the suggested solutions that people will bring up for overcoming porn addiction is to face and fight cravings, like I said, or to sit with cravings.
And then it's also to get honest with people about our addictions or to go to talk therapy. And these approaches have merit, of course they do, but I'm going to teach you a different way that I think you're going to find effective. If you can practice it each day consistently, act on it, experiment with it, work through it, use it, I think you'll find it effective.
Instead of thinking, so before I teach you that four-step process, and I do this in every episode, but I need to set things up properly so you have a deeper understanding of these concepts and how this works. Because if I give you this deeper understanding, the four steps are going to make a lot more sense to you. So first off, instead of thinking of cravings as bad or fighting them, because that is very naturally what we do, and in fact what we're taught to do.
We're taught to fight them. We're taught to ignore them. We are taught to just stop.
We are taught to turn away from cravings or distract ourselves from them. We're also taught to just sit with them again. Instead of that, instead of thinking of them as bad and something to be avoided, we can learn to process and talk ourselves through them.
We can observe them, get curious about them. We can uproot them by redefining them. Cravings often carry with them feelings of fear, feelings of shame for so many of us that struggle with addiction.
But if we cannot see them as bad or immoral, but as a signal to us of something deeper that's going on psychologically, we can give them space to be understood and relieved without acting out. So here is one way to see it that people have found very effective. One sentence.
Cravings are protective mechanisms attempting to keep us safe from suffering. Again, cravings for porn are protective psychological mechanisms that our brain is using to attempt to keep us safe from suffering. At first this sounds counterintuitive.
How would cravings for porn be keeping me safe? After all, pornography addiction has ruined my life. It's ruined the lives of my loved ones by effect. How could this be possible? That doesn't make sense to me, Jake.
You might be thinking, I'm going to teach you how this works. If we can view cravings another way, it actually makes sense. So think of it this way.
Much as a child can try to help in ways that are wildly ineffective, the unconscious parts of our mind may attempt to protect or keep us safe using methods that are seemingly mad. Because the unconscious parts of our mind are often like little children, right? If we study inner child psychology or we study IFS, we come to understand that these parts of our mind are very much like little kids. If we can perceive these parts of ourselves not as bad but instead misguided, much as a little child can be, we can begin to work with them.
We can begin to collaborate with them, to love them, to have compassion for them like we would a child, and eventually help them transform into something that is actually helpful over time is the ultimate goal. Instead of running from cravings or from running from other triggering feelings like loneliness, anger, fear, shame, etc., which are also triggers that play right into addiction, we can observe and get curious about these emotions. We can talk ourselves through them like a compassionate father would speak with his son or his daughter.
So let's explore a little a little bit more these inner mechanisms of porn addiction together. I want you to go far deeper than the cravings, the obsessions, the impulses. All of these are reaction to psychological mechanisms that are below the surface.
They're all a distraction, a very convincing distraction from internal suffering and pain that's playing out unconsciously and consciously. We often look at addiction as a horribly negative or shameful thing, but addiction is simply, again, this protective mechanism, much as anger, aggression, or perfectionism are. Our brain uses addiction in an attempt to protect or keep us safe from underlying feelings of fear, shame, weakness, insecurity, a lack of safety, feeling unloved.
Porn addiction and cravings are the protective mechanisms. Okay, so I know I've said that a fair number of times, but again, I hope this is making sense. The feelings under the surface, those are our true target.
That's what we're going to be working with today and learning how to get down to. So to overcome porn addiction, you have to realize you're not powerless against cravings. You do not need to simply accept them as a reality of life, nor should you need to deal with them forever.
There is a better way. You can stop experiencing porn cravings, and I'm not saying that in a black and white manner. If you go through extremely stressful times in life, like a loved one dies or you lose your job, you may experience porn cravings again, but in your general everyday life, even with stressors and hard things you go through, you can get to a point where you are not experiencing cravings for porn.
I have watched it happen for myself and other people have experienced it too. Cravings, lust, fantasizing, etc. They are a reaction or a distraction from, a reaction to, a distraction from these underlying negative emotions.
So if you can assess the negative emotions under the surface, either before you experience a craving or immediately after a craving begins, the second it begins, you can build new mental habits to replace porn relapses. And you can talk yourself through hard emotions and essentially keep them from evolving into cravings for porn. This requires you to dedicate yourself to consistent emotional processing throughout the day, every day.
It's not an easy thing, but you just take it one day at a time. Don't worry about tomorrow, just staying sober for today, practicing emotional processing today in the manner that I will teach you. It requires you to be present with and aware of your emotions, to listen to them, give them space to be understood.
Now I'm going to give you this step-by-step process to break through the four psychological barriers preventing you from quitting porn. If you use this step-by-step process throughout the day, it will empower you to relieve porn cravings. I believe it will if you use it properly and keep those cravings from escalating into porn relapse.
So before I take you through this process briefly, I just want to let you know, if you want to go deeper into how the recovery mindset works, which I'm teaching you a portion of today, go to nomoredesire.com and hit the workshop tab. If you're on the mobile version, just hit the menu up in the top right-hand corner and go to workshop. You can get the free workshop there.
It doesn't cost you anything and it's going to take you through vastly more than I can teach you in a podcast episode. You can also check out my free ebook, The 10 Tools to Conquer Cravings, which has quick mental techniques that you can use in addition to what I teach you today. Again, an arsenal of tools that you can use all for free in addition to this episode.
So you can go to nomoredesire.com to pick up the ebook or the workshop. You can find both those on my homepage very easily.
Okay, so as we dive into the four psychological barriers to porn recovery and how to bust through these barriers, again, use this strategy every day. It's not a one-time fix. It's an ongoing way of mentally processing challenging emotions, including porn cravings, but it can also be used very effectively with things like anger or perfectionism, fear, shame, loneliness, anything that you experience like that.
And this four-step strategy to process through porn cravings is an acronym, PICS, P-I-C-S. And this stands for Protective Mechanisms, Insecurities, Core Intentions, and then Surrender, or in other words, Forgiveness. Okay, so step one, let's talk about protective mechanisms.
We've already talked about these to a good extent, but this has been all building up for me to essentially set the stage for you to understand some concepts. So we're going to go deeper here of exactly how to do this step. When a craving pops up, I want you to think of it less as a sexual inclination and more of an emotional trigger that is akin to a feeling of anger or of perfectionism.
Your mind is going to attempt to convince you that the craving has everything to do with your sexual desire. But you need to understand, and I know that it can be so hard to comprehend this, especially when you're in the beginning stages of recovery, you need to understand that these cravings are an attempt to distract you or to protect you from, in other words, a protective mechanism to protect you from other underlying emotions. So instead of running from the cravings, what I want you to do is mentally approach the craving, move toward it, and ask it what it is trying to help you understand.
And I don't mean giving into it. Okay, so please don't misunderstand me. Instead, going to the source of the craving and asking what your mind wants you to know.
Why are you experiencing this craving? And don't get caught up in the why, but go to the source and feel, right? And essentially try to be intuitive about, okay, this is a signal to my mind. Where is this coming from? Why has it emerged? Because there's a reason. So this sounds strange, perhaps, but you need to make friends with the part of your mind that is creating the craving.
Dialogue with it, listen to it, understand it, show it compassion. Instead of hating it or judging it or trying to control it, trying to control this part, ask it why it gives you these cravings. What is it trying to protect? And again, it is important to understand that I'm not talking about fixating on the lusts or the fantasies, but instead mindfully dialoguing with the part of your mind that's producing them.
Try to show it love, show it compassion. And I know that for some people that might sound little feminine or hippy dippy, but love and compassion, they're the ultimate answer, my friend. You can overcome addiction through love and compassion.
Okay, but you need to know how to use them in order to empower your recovery. So this is one of the ways to do it. This part of your mind, it's attempting to soothe you using the thoughts of sex and fantasy.
So let it know that you appreciate that it's trying to help you and then ask it why it's feeding you these things. What's behind it? Again, this might sound strange, but practice this each day for several weeks and see what happens. Step two is insecurities.
Now you've started listening to this part of your mind that's producing the cravings, this protective mechanism without fixating on the lusts or the fantasies or the content of the cravings. And the next step is to get deeper into your psyche. Again, we're busting through layers here.
Get deeper into your psyche and uncover what the cravings are protecting you from feeling. We all have insecurities. All right, guys.
Okay, whoever's listening to this, if you're a man, I say the word insecurity and you may like puff up and get, you know, I don't have any insecurities. Or you may feel fear or both, probably both. We all have insecurities, guys.
I have them. You have them. Everybody has them.
Every person who has ever lived has insecurities. There's nothing shameful about it. It is part of being human.
If you are a man, you may have been taught from a very young age, it was not okay to feel or admit to these insecurities. But my friend, listen to me. You've been misguided.
You've even been cheated, I would say. Because if you can deeply recognize and process through your insecurities each day, then you can eventually become free of them. Or at least able to manage them effectively.
That is the beautiful secret. You need to approach them, move toward them, understand them. Then you can become more powerful, effective, successful, loving, and generous than you've ever been.
Whereas if you continue to ignore your insecurities, not dialogue with your mind, not talk yourself through the darkness, then the darkness controls you. It has you. If you can't turn toward it, look at it, dialogue with it, it controls you.
Parts of us can only have as much power as we give them in as much as we ignore them. So the next step is to get in touch with the underlying feelings of stress or weakness. Listen to them.
What do they want you to know? What types of imbalances or hardships are there in your psyche that are burdening you? What feelings have necessitated the development of protective mechanisms like porn or addiction cravings? Porn cravings or just general cravings? Like anger, like perfectionism. What's actually going on under the surface? You have to explore and talk yourself through this each day. Show yourself compassion.
Show yourself understanding. Get to know the darkness so that you can shine a light on it. And as you do this properly, the light that you shine on the darkness is going to empower you.
It's going to shrink the darkness over time so that it can transform it into something better. Step three is core intentions. Okay, so we've talked about protective mechanisms and insecurities.
So we're diving down more deeply and deeply into your psyche. Okay, into the conscious and unconscious layers of your psyche. We're diving down into the roots of your mind.
Things that, again, when I say unconscious, I mean things that you are not aware of. So we're trying to bring those into awareness. Step three is core intentions.
Now that you've explored, listened to, and shown compassion for the protective mechanisms and insecurities within your psyche, go deeper. Underneath or branching out from, this is my belief, underneath or branching out from every protective mechanism or insecurity, I believe that there is a good intention. For instance, if you struggle with perfectionism, you may have a tendency towards procrastination, anger, overwhelm, being judgmental, being controlling, but you also have a powerful desire for quality work.
You want to do things right. You want to make sure that you're dependable. You want to make a huge difference in the world.
All that core intention, that purely good intention, drives perfectionism, but only the positive end of it. The positive end of perfectionism is high achievement, dependability, organization. The dark end is the controlling, the judging, the anger, the overwhelm, the procrastination.
Another example would be anger. If you struggle with anger, you likely have a deep compassion for others under the surface. You don't want people to suffer, which causes you to behave in ways that are controlling or judgmental, much like perfectionism, because these things are tied.
By the way, perfectionism, anger, and addiction, they're all tied together. They come from extremely similar, if not the same roots. If this causes you to anger, you don't want people to suffer.
This causes you to behave in ways that are controlling or judgmental, because you want people to avoid pitfalls or hardships. These judgmental and controlling mentalities can result in anger. They're extremely difficult for others around you to deal with, but there is still a core intention of care.
You care. You deeply care. That, in part, is where, again, the deep core intention of care is not where the anger comes from.
That core intention of care gets twisted and manipulated by insecurities and by all sorts of burdens and pain that we carry, and it manifests itself as anger, control, being judgmental. Now, you may be wondering, when it comes to porn cravings, how could those house core intentions that are pure and good? How could my porn cravings possibly house core intentions that are pure and good? You may think it's, you know, I'm perverted. I'm messed up.
I'm twisted. I'm screwed up. Look at me.
I'm incredibly selfish. Look at these things that I do to myself and my family. The answer to that one is fairly complex, because there are multiple layers.
I'm going to do my best to explain it from this perspective of seeing core intention. I venture to say, from both my personal and professional experience, if you are someone who struggles with porn addiction, then you are someone who, at their core, cares deeply. Again, much like the perfectionism and the anger, very similar roots.
You care for others. You care for the world. You care for the quality of your relationships, your work, your life.
You care so much that it hurts. And I know this because I was this way. I still am this way.
Every single one of my clients have been this way as well. Every person I've worked with, when it comes down to it, may not seem that way on the surface. But when I get to know them well enough, this has always been the case.
Addiction may have grown a callous over this care, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there. As a child, you may have been highly sensitive, perfectionistic, meticulous. You may have been an overachiever.
Maybe you had extreme high expectations of yourself that you felt you could never live up to. Or you may have created havoc to hide the fact that things bothered you deeply and you didn't know how to change them, how to handle them, how to make them better. Now, in order to cope, your mind chose porn because it needed something to help you escape from the pain.
And now that you're older, it's time for you to get in touch with that inner child that carries all of these amazing gifts and a deep desire to make a difference, to do exceptional work, to love others without reservation, to make a difference in the world, to do powerful things and live in a powerful way. It is time to recognize these core intentions that you hold inside of yourself. If you can love and admire these core, pure intentions that are within you, my friend, and you have them, even if you think you don't, they are there.
Every person I've ever interacted with has them. If you can love and admire those pure core intentions, if you can focus on them each day, then these core intentions can start to bloom and take the place of symptomatic insecurities and protective mechanisms that we've talked about. I believe that these core intentions are who you actually are, despite all the other challenges on the surface.
That's my belief. And then step four is to surrender, or in other words, to find forgiveness. Okay, and I'm not speaking in a religious context here.
I'm speaking either in a spiritual or a psychological way or both. I believe it's both, but it depends on how you think about it, what your beliefs are. Totally great.
I'm going to speak from a perspective of mostly of psychology. If you can gain compassion, understanding, and admiration for your protective mechanisms and insecurities and dig into your core intentions, you may be able to reach a place of surrender or forgiveness and give up your burdens and start to feel some true peace. Again, if you believe in God, I think that's beautiful and wonderful.
Give up your burdens to him or to that power, that force. Okay, if you don't believe in God, you can still surrender and give up your burdens. Every day as you dialogue with yourself and explore these layers of your psyche, practice forgiving yourself for the mistakes that you've made.
Surrender them up, give them away, see yourself in a new light. If you can do this for yourself, you'll be able to do it for other people. It will enable you to be a more loving and effective husband, father, and to show up with more generosity and selflessness in the world.
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Again, check out the free workshop, The Eight Keys to Lose Your Desire for Porn. You're going to learn so much more about the recovery mindset there. Check out my free ebook, The Ten Tools to Conquer Cravings.
You're going to learn much more about quick mental tools. You can use any moment to manage and handle cravings well, to redirect your mind and form new mental habits. And if you want to not only overcome porn addiction, but actually lose your desire for porn, you have to do the intensive work to get down to the root causes of your porn cravings.
We've talked about some of those today. You have to build a recovery mindset and lifestyle. That is what I believe.
So that eventually you no longer crave porn. My intensive porn recovery program gives you a step-by-step system to build this recovery mindset and this lifestyle. It's structured.
It's systematic. I guide you step-by-step through the process as we work one-on-one together. You're going to have daily assessments that you take that instill mental habits of recovery and give you insights into what cravings actually are, where they come from and how to overcome them.
Again, through very specific mental exercises and written exercises. And I will get the results of those daily assessments so I can gain from a professional perspective insight into what you go through. And I can also relate that to my own personal experience, being someone who is addicted for a decade and someone who's been sober almost just as long now.
I have a structured recovery program with exercises to transform your mindset and your lifestyle. You have a tailored recovery plan that you and I build together, which contains your personal answers to get rid of porn cravings. And this will be a plan that you carry with you every single day to stay sober for the rest of your life.
And then of course, again, you and I are meeting one-on-one together. There's no other system designed like the No More Desire program. It is a program that's intensive, it's personalized, it's structured, and it helps you build this recovery mindset and lifestyle so that you can lose your desire for porn.
I'm not just going to teach you techniques for how to deal with cravings, though we do work on those and they are techniques that are highly effective for people and I have many of them. But we are going to get down into the roots of your addiction and work through them mentally, physically, spiritually, relationally. If you're ready to get rid of porn addiction, set up a free 30-minute consultation with me during the call.
You and I can break down the causes of your porn addiction together and you will gain personalized direction and insights for your recovery. And I'll answer any questions that you have about the program, my friend. So set up your free consultation now.
You can see that link in the description below or on my website. It's easy to find there. God bless and much love, my friend.
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