How One Man Stayed Sober While Alone and in Pain: What His Story Teaches Us About Porn Addiction Recovery
- Jake Kastleman
- Apr 15
- 22 min read
Updated: Apr 28
The Perfect Storm for Porn Relapse—and Why It Didn’t Win
What happens when you're in pain, completely alone, and the people you love most are far away? For many men in porn addiction recovery, this is code red. But for one man I recently worked with—we'll call him Steve —this same scenario became a defining moment of strength.
Steve's wife and children were out of the country. He had just undergone surgery and couldn’t walk, exercise, or even move around comfortably. He was stuck at home, in pain, with far too much time alone and nothing to distract him. It was the kind of moment that would cause most men to spiral back into their addiction.
But Steve didn’t relapse.
In fact, he told me, “I haven’t felt this connected in such a long time.”
He didn’t just stay sober—he grew. What he did, and how he did it, holds a key to staying sober through your own vulnerable moments. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how he avoided relapse, and how you can do the same.
Why Solitude and Pain Usually Lead to Relapse
When we’re in physical or emotional pain, our brain is wired to seek relief. Add loneliness to the mix, and you have a perfect storm. There’s no accountability. No distractions. No feedback from the people who love you. Just you and your cravings.
For most men who struggle with porn addiction, this is one of the most dangerous setups:
You’re hurting physically or emotionally.
You’re isolated.
You’ve got a history of self-soothing through porn.
It doesn’t take much to fall. In fact, staying sober during recovery in these conditions might seem impossible—unless you approach it the way Steve did.
Steve's Story – From Isolation to Inner Strength
Steve found himself in the exact situation that had triggered relapses in the past. But this time, something changed.
His wife and children were gone. He was recovering from surgery and completely immobilized. But rather than escape into addictive behavior, Steve engaged in the practices that brought him connection, meaning, and peace.
He didn’t ignore the pain. He didn’t pretend the cravings weren’t there. He just didn’t feed them. Instead, he fed his spirit.
He told me:
“I prayed hard before the surgery. Then during recovery, I started praying multiple times per day. I read my scriptures. I set my daily mindset intentions. I worked on the program exercises. I felt closer to God and my family than I have in a long time.”
He said something else that struck me:
“The curiosity about porn just wasn’t there. The cravings had no space to live in my mind.”
Why? Because he had filled that space with something stronger.
3 Practices That Made the Difference
Let’s unpack what Steve actually did so you can apply it to your own life.
1. Prayer as Mental Anchoring
Steve didn’t just say a quick morning prayer and move on. He anchored his mind in spiritual connection multiple times per day.
He talked to God about his pain. He thanked Him for small victories. He asked questions. He listened. He received impressions and acted on them.
This is what it looks like to replace porn addiction with purpose and presence.
If you're asking how to overcome porn addiction alone, the answer is: don’t stay alone spiritually. God becomes your strength when you choose to invite Him in consistently—especially when it hurts.
2. Mindset Statements That Fill the Craving Void
In the program, Steve learned how to write a "Relationship Mindset Statement." Every day, Steve reviewed this intention—a mindset statement focused on his relationship with God, his wife, his kids, and his personal growth. He updated and modified the phrases daily to keep them fresh, relevant, and specific to his heart.
These statements aren’t just positive affirmations. They are mental scripts designed to fill the space that cravings try to hijack. When you wake up and immediately tell your brain who you are and what you stand for, you're far less likely to be influenced by cravings later in the day.
Daily mindset practice = mental strength training.
3. Curriculum and Ownership
Steve didn’t treat recovery like a passive process. He dug into the modules of the recovery program with intention.
He journaled. He reflected. He used his downtime as a sacred opportunity for internal transformation.
Too many men think they need the right conditions to get better. Steve shows us the opposite: recovery happens because you take action, not because your life feels easy.
Psychological and Spiritual Principles at Work
Internal Family Systems (IFS) Insight
What happened inside Steve's mind is what we hope for in every recovery journey:
His protective parts didn’t feel the need to act out, because his internal system was being cared for.
The curious, craving part of him didn’t get suppressed—it got ignored naturally because it wasn’t needed.
When your Self is leading with intention, prayer, and peace, your protectors don’t have to scramble to solve problems. This is what it means to lead your internal system.
Spiritual Framing
Steve met God in the pain. He didn’t ask to be saved from the experience. He asked to be strengthened through it.
When you fill solitude with sacred intention, it becomes a place of power.
How to Build Your Own Solitude Survival Strategy
If you want to know how to resist porn urges when you’re alone, here’s a simple blueprint based on what Steve did:
Morning:
Begin with heartfelt prayer
Read a passage of scripture
Write a mindset statement that centers on purpose and service
Midday:
Engage with your recovery curriculum
If possible, do light movement or stretching
Reach out to someone—a friend, coach, or loved one—even just a simple check-in text
Evening:
Reflect on the day: Where did I feel God? Where did I lead myself well?
Voice memo journal to process emotions
Close the day in prayer
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about structure that invites spiritual power into your most vulnerable hours.
For the Spouse Reading This
If you're the wife of a man struggling with porn addiction, here’s what this story can show you:
Your husband is capable of more than you know, especially when he leans into spiritual and emotional grounding.
You don’t need to be his rehab center. But your encouragement and belief in his growth mean the world.
Healing is possible—not just for him, but for both of you. It begins when he takes ownership, and you give space for that ownership to grow.
Want to Go Deeper?
Want to learn how to create your own daily mindset practice? Need a guide to build spiritual resilience in your recovery? Join my free porn addiction workshop or apply for 1-on-1 porn recovery coaching today.
You don’t have to keep falling every time life gets hard. You can build spiritual strength and mental clarity that keeps you grounded when everything else feels shaky.
Final Word
Solitude doesn’t have to be your downfall. It can be your defining moment.
When pain comes, let it wake you up. When loneliness hits, let it drive you to connection with God. When triggers arise, let them be your training ground.
Like Steve, you can come out stronger than ever before—if you’re willing to act with intention and build the mindset and lifestyle of recovery.
Your strength is already inside you. It’s time to turn it on.
Build the No More Porn Lifestyle
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Episode 92 Transcription | How One Man Stayed Sober While Alone and in Pain: What His Story Teaches Us About Porn Addiction Recovery
Jake Kastleman (00:10.22)
What happens when you're all alone, you're in pain, and the people you love most are far away from you? For a lot of men in recovery, that's a recipe for disaster. But for one of my clients, something entirely different happened for him.
What he discovered in his solitude is one of the most important mindset shifts you can learn for recovery. So that's what we're going to dive into today so you can understand how to stay sober in these hard times. And if you haven't yet, hit the follow button, sign up for notifications,
and rate this podcast so others can find it too. With that, we'll dive in.
Jake Kastleman (01:12.546)
So my client will call him Steve. He's married, his wife and his kids are out of the country for an entire month. And on top of this, he's just had a surgery that's rendered him unable to exercise. So he's spending a lot of time sedentary in the house by himself. My client has come to rely on exercise and weightlifting over the years as part of his porn addiction recovery strategy.
It keeps him in a good mood so he can experience less cravings for porn. I know for me, this has been major working on weightlifting and daily exercise has been integral to my recovery. So what's incredible is that he's unable to do this. He's isolated in his house by himself. This is the kind of moment that usually triggers a relapse for men who are struggling with porn addiction. It's the perfect storm.
type of scenario. But what my client Steve did was radically different, and it's based in strategies that I teach all of my clients in my program. And I want to share it with you, as well as practical strategies and tips we can extract from his approach. So I want to talk about what Steve did right, and three powerful recovery principles that go along with how he reacted to this situation and how he
really responded and took initiative to turn this into something positive. What would other bias be an excuse by all rights for relapse for someone who's been struggling with porn addiction? So this first principle that I want to tell you about is spiritual anchoring. What I often see with those of us who are addicted to porn is the tendency to lose focus when times get tough.
We crumble under the pressure, and this sometimes has to do with a history for a lot of us of trauma, abuse, or neglect that has led to a learned helplessness, if you will. Perhaps it's stemmed from, on the other hand, a home environment where not much was required. So we've built habits of low resilience. Maybe we didn't have parents who were around or who taught us the proper way to do things or who helped empower us.
Jake Kastleman (03:37.762)
during challenging times rather than enabling us to escape. It can come from a lot of different factors and a lot of times this leads to low self-esteem. And this is something we don't need to shame ourselves for. We often feel that our flaws make us unworthy as a person. These things, really make us human. I want to drive that home. I'm someone who dealt with a deep level of low self-esteem for most of my life.
And those are still things now, right, that I work on insecurities and challenges that I deal with mentally and emotionally, just as all human beings do. We've all got stuff, right?
So these things make us human, and we can unload and overcome this stuff. It's okay. Self-esteem essentially comes from meeting challenging situations and succeeding, facing problems and solving them. And then the impact that we make on others in the world and others in our community, when we see the impact we make on others, we got to face challenges, face problems, impact others.
So the way we need to become resilient in these really hard times and stay sober is by practicing. And again, this coming from personal experience for me, it took years for me to practice a new way of living and thinking, perceiving, to actually stay sober in these types of situations. Starting wherever we can, we want to meet ourselves wherever we're at. And that may be a pretty low place at first, and that's okay.
You can get to a far higher place in your life through concepts of neuroplasticity. Your brain can change and hope and faith and you know, really these habit change concepts, things that we can do to overcome. And fundamental to this practice is again this spiritual anchoring. So here's essentially what my client did. Steve, instead of crumbling under this pressure or
Jake Kastleman (05:45.294)
crawling inside himself, isolating, he really leaned in, he anchored his spiritual life. And for whoever you are, Steve is religious, he's Christian, just as I myself am, but you can apply these same concepts if you're spiritual in a different sense, or if you simply enjoy Buddhist or Taoist concepts or things like that, right? You can apply a lot of these same concepts.
But I will say from my personal perspective that that leaning on higher power, that developing a relationship with higher power, even if it's just a belief, which is really all it is for any of us, pretty much all of us, you don't have to know. You're just reaching out to something that's beyond you. And so when you're doing that, you're going to receive this power in your life, psychologically, spiritually. So instead of...
Crumbling he built that relationship. He started praying multiple times a day and he really leaned in He didn't just pray for a couple of minutes in the morning in the evening He leaned into some really, you know long quality prayers I didn't ask him how long those were for me personally I spend a good 15 minutes in in the morning praying and that sounds like a lot especially when you don't pray at all or you only pray for 30 seconds or a minute
It's like 15 minutes. Who has time for that? Right? I get that. But let me drive home the reason that I do that. I spend those 15 minutes and my client spends this really dedicated time because it's so powerful and central for my recovery. It helps me come from a place each day of setting my intention. It brings spiritual power into my life, I believe. It brings God's power into my life. It connects me.
with that higher power, this essence, this light, this truth, this love that is beyond me, and it links me up. Each day I'm setting that intention, I'm getting my mind right, I'm praying, I'm focusing on gratitude and the good of others. It's that simple. The two G's, gratitude, the good of others. I focus on those two things for 15 minutes, and I'm not perfect at it, doesn't always look the same every day. Sometimes I have hard days, I still give myself that 15 minutes.
Jake Kastleman (08:08.268)
And I can't go without it. In fact, I just had this experience yesterday where it was Sunday. I was headed to church. I had a lot of different meetings I was going to. early in the morning, I didn't wake up early enough. I've had this kind of experience lately in the mornings. I've been sick and going through some different things mentally. Waking up in the morning, it's been hard. Like it's hard for a lot of us, right? I've had this debate in my head when I wake up like,
Should I hit my snooze button? Should I go back to sleep for an hour? And that's been a struggle for me lately I'm trying to trying to navigate that and work on some some different strategies for myself to improve that But I didn't wake up early enough so I didn't get my spiritual time in before I had to go to a meeting and I went to this meeting and it was it was really profound to me as it has been on multiple occasions How much of a difference it made for my mental my emotional state?
The fact that I had not taken the dedicated time to pray, to read of scripture, to journal, all these things that I spend, you know, 45 minutes in the morning doing these things. And that's, it's a lot of time. It's 15 minutes for each item. that, but it brings this incredible power into my day. And so that is fundamental for me. It's not like I did it out of necessity.
because I'm someone who has a highly sensitive mind as well according to statistics 25 % of people have this highly sensitive mind. So a lot of us and a lot of the clients I work with have this as well if not all of them. It's these highly sensitive minds that are so susceptible to we kind of perceive things in our external and internal world in very sensitive ways. So
It's an amazing gift to be able to reach levels of deep introspection, deep understanding, but also it's a, it, so it gives us that edge, it's that gift, but it's also, it also gives an edge to our life where we're like standing on the edge of a knife. We can feel like a lot of times where we're just barely balancing between like totally losing it and feeling amazing. It's like, like we could go one way or the other at any given moment. And so I've done a lot of things in my life.
Jake Kastleman (10:29.496)
to really support my mental and emotional well-being, my spiritual well-being, my physical well-being. I am very conscious and deliberate about things that I do every day for my mindset and lifestyle to balance my mind and bring structure and peace to my mind. And so that's not an easy thing, right? That's not an easy thing to do. It's not an easy way to live, but it's something that I know I need to do. So just...
as is the case for me, my client is coming to discover this and he's been learning this in the program, these daily routines that we lean on. So he's praying multiple times a day. He's spending good structured quality time doing that. He has sincere scripture study that he's engaging in each day. And then throughout the day he is practicing that presence, that emotional mindfulness and that mindfulness and awareness of this light that we carry within us, right? Whatever you believe that is.
We see it in psychology now. There's plenty of clinical types of experiences that therapists are having with their clients of discovering self with a capital S, right? This light of God, this power that's inside of us. And then obviously spiritually and in religion, we have been, we've known about this light and this essence for, since ancient times, Maybe since the dawn of time, if you will.
depends on how you look at it. But for him, he is leaning on this more and more. And so he's acting on these inclinations. gets really being in flow, being in a state of mindfulness with what is the right call for me to do in this scenario? Where is my time most needed? What is the best thing to do for my well-being right now? Or...
How do I fulfill more responsibilities, do more good in the world? And so he's learning that more and more. He said something to me that I loved. He said, I haven't felt this connected in such a long time, even though my wife and kids are far away. He felt more connected than ever because he had these strong, structured spiritual practices in his life every day. They can't be replaced. And then when physical and emotional pain,
Jake Kastleman (12:53.07)
is present, right, for him in this scenario. He is going deeper, right? He's going deeper into his spiritual and his mental practice, deeper into journaling, into some other things we'll talk about. Instead of going darker, he's going deeper. The next thing, the second principle is mental grounding. So for my client, he's been working on what are called relationship mindset statements.
So he's actually written, and I give some instructions to my clients to do this, to write a mindset statement. And so he's given a lot of thought to this. He's modified and expanded this statement that he originally wrote based on instruction and templates that I gave. He's modified and expanded it. continues to progress on a daily basis as he just reviews it in the morning for a couple minutes.
just to set his mind straight on what's important to him. And it's really this, you know, this statement of who do I want to be as a husband? Who do I want to be as a father? How do I want to show up in the world? What's most important to my loved ones around me? And how can I bring that into their lives? What kind of man do I want to be? And just those characteristics, those outcomes, that light, that power that you want in your life. so he's written about that and he's reviewing it.
each day, just often reviewing a, well, I actually didn't ask him this, but the approach is to read a portion of it and just be mindful and present with what you're reading and visualize it, think about it, pray about it even as well, including God in there, help me be this man. And so he's, again, continued to expand it. And these statements, when people write these statements, they set their intentions. I did a
an episode a while back with a walk through fire statement. Now in my program, I have what I term your sobriety story, which is really this vision of your entire life as a sober man and what it looks like and from a wide range of perspectives, your community, your spirituality, your physical health, your your mental health, etc, etc. So these statements that we write, it's an act of faith, right? We are actually
Jake Kastleman (15:14.638)
writing about our lives, what they're gonna look like when we're sober, or what's the kind of man we wanna be. And we are writing about it as if it's already happening.
but we see no evidence of it yet, and we're believing in it. We're having faith in it, and we're including God in that process. And when we do that, it's an act of faith because essentially faith is a belief in things that we do not see. And so if I have a belief in things that I do not see, and I act on that then, right, I write these statements and I review or listen to them, I record them in my own voice and I listen to them, now,
I'm integrating that belief into my life and then I start to see it happen. All right, it's a training of your mind psychologically and it's also a spiritual practice of faith. So if you don't give your mind a script, it's going to default to craving. You have to give your mind a script. The third principle is emotional ownership. So he leaned into the curriculum in the program. That's another thing that he did. So he's...
doing spiritual grounding, he's got these relational mindset statements going, and then he's actually engaging with his recovery more active than ever. Instead of leaning out right when times get hard, we can be very prone to do that. He wasn't coasting, he was doubling down. My wife and kid are gone, I've just had a surgery, I am doubling down, I am going to go deep into my recovery practices, my daily routines, I'm gonna have this structure in my life so I can feel good.
Be connected to God, feel connected to those around me. Right? He's calling friends. He's engaging with people. He used the recovery tools instead of just knowing they existed. Right? It's one thing to be educated or informed. It's another to actually practice. that, again, that takes a long time. Ownership means doing what you know is right, especially when it's hardest. And that is, that is not an easy thing. That is a difficult, difficult thing to do. And so you keep
Jake Kastleman (17:21.518)
Practicing it just little by little by little getting better and better Continuously over time. I did a previous episode on the meaning and purpose of your life a Recovery belief system. I believe it was the last episode that I did and that episode just relates essentially, know, you can have a car with all the you can have gas in your car and all the bells and whistles and everything you'd have your skills for recovery in other words and your knowledge of recovery
You've got to get the meaning and purpose behind what you're doing. And so I'll add that your spiritual practice, a really dedicated quality, you know, quality amount of time and focus dedicated to connecting with God each day, engaging in, you know, spiritual words, right? If that, if you're Christian, that's the Bible, right? Or other, or other holy words. Engaging with these things is going to help bring that meaning and that purpose in your life. can't stress that enough. So it becomes a way of life.
Now all that said, again, I'm not sitting here saying, you know, pray the addiction away. I'm saying something very different here and that it's a part of your daily structure, your daily life, and with a host of other tools and skills that you are engaging in for your sobriety.
Jake Kastleman (18:38.072)
So the next thing is spiritual and psychological insights that I want to share with you. I've shared the three principles. That is what my client was doing while his wife and child are out and he's just undergone surgery. And then I want to share some things from an IFS angle. Internal Family Systems, IFS, is an approach to psychology.
It's an approach to recovery now that's sweeping across the world. It's extremely helpful for people. If you haven't heard me talk about it before, it's this really fascinating and beautiful way to comprehend the mind. Essentially, it takes your mind and splits it up into parts, your psyche into parts. And these parts are going to look a little different for everyone. They have similar themes and functions. But essentially,
You have all these parts of your personality, these little sub-personalities inside you that make up your personality, your psyche. And what's incredible is when I start to see myself in parts like that, each sub-personality is like an individual, right, within me. know, for me, for instance, I've got seven different parts, right? I've got an organizing part, an achiever, a creative part, an adventurer, a nurturer, and a performer.
part, right? And then the seventh part would be self. That would be that light of God inside of me, that's my soul, you know, that's in connection with God. I believe that, you know, that spiritual light that I carry was given from Him originally, and I carry it with me that we all do. And so those are my seven parts. And I essentially, when you have inner dialogue with your mind, you connect with these parts and you see them as separate individuals.
that can actually talk with, which sounds a little schizophrenic, like a little DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. It's not like that. It's a framework for understanding the mind. It's extremely powerful. And so just to kind of relate this back, my client, his, what we would term perhaps an addictive part or a firefighting part, as they say in IFS or in parts work, this firefighter that like sprays out emotions.
Jake Kastleman (20:52.334)
It sprays out, so it firefights emotions by escape, by pleasure, by numbing out, novelty, excitement. It's going to go to porn. This part of him that's become addictive, it's taken on this role of being addictive, is going to go to porn. Instead of that part being active and taking the lead in his life, he's caring for the other parts of himself through prayer, through connection, through intention, and he's actually satisfying that need.
That's underneath the surface. He doesn't he doesn't have that that part doesn't need to take try to take the lead and Take him over because he has the meaning and the purpose the Joy the piece that he needs that that addictive part has kept trying to satisfy Through it through the addiction. It is trying to protect us Save us from our hard feelings using the addiction and so he's actually satisfying that need
There is connection with God, his connection with others, his feeling of meaning, his intention he's setting every day, his well-being he's feeling spiritually and emotionally. And so this is really taking the place. This is bringing that light, that light of God into the lead so that the other parts of his personality can actually fit in where they need to be. It's a beautiful thing. And so when we're in that state of self-leadership, as it's called in IFS, self with a capital S, we're present.
And these protector parts don't need to act out. So the more that Steve reached upward, the more that he became grounded, the better that he was doing in his recovery. Solitude doesn't have to equal isolation. It can be a sacred space when filled with intention. And so I just want to give you some actionable takeaways.
for you based on what we've talked about that I think will be helpful for you. So let me share a few of those. We can do a, we can have a solitude survival strategy. So if you wanna know how to really overcome porn urges or to move through these things when you're alone, here's a simple blueprint based on what Steve did.
Jake Kastleman (23:13.262)
and sharing a few more things, kind of branching out from that. So in the morning, I'm going to share a morning, midday, and evening kind of routine with you. can take notes on this. So begin with a heartfelt prayer. I recommend 10 to 15 minutes. I know it's a long time for a lot of people, but I promise you're going to experience amazing help from that, an amazing change if you really dedicate yourself to that. It might suck at first, but you do it for weeks.
And you're going to get to the point where you're seeing, my gosh, this just changes everything for me. So begin with a heartfelt prayer, read some scripture, again, some good dedicated time there, 10 to 15 minutes. That sounds like too much. I get that. work with lots of clients where they start smaller. So start smaller. That's fine. And then write a mindset statement that centers on purpose and service and review portions of that statement each day and modify and change it as you go along.
To keep it fresh, right? We want to modify and change over time or only review portions so that our mind doesn't get conditioned to it and get bored. We want to change it. Then midday, you want to engage with, if you have a recovery curriculum, if you're going through 12-step, obviously if you're in my program or if there's things that you can review in my blog or podcast or if there's some other kind of program, engage with recovery in a substantial kind of way.
Do that in the afternoon for a reasonable amount of time. Then if possible, do some light movements, some stretching. Often, most of us work desk jobs. We're not getting enough movement in our lives. So get a bit of that. Go out on a walk. Do something physical. And reach out to someone, a friend, a coach, a loved one, even just a simple check-in text with someone. And then in the evening, you're going to reflect on the day. You know, you're going to essentially ask yourself the question,
Where did things go well? Okay, you want to say, how did I show up today? And how do I want to do better tomorrow? Those two questions. How did I show up today? And how do I want to do better tomorrow? And so if you can answer both those questions, that's a pretty good way to end the day. You want to journal as well if you do that in the evening, or you can do it in the morning, that's when I do it. But again, start where you're at. If you're not doing any of these, just implement one of them.
Jake Kastleman (25:38.754)
You want to process emotions. That's an incredibly, it's another central, central piece of recovery and close the day with a prayer. Okay. It doesn't have to be that 10 to 15 minute thing, but close it, close it with a good prayer. Right. and so just remember that this isn't about perfection. It's about structure that invites power into your most vulnerable hours. kind of, just closing up here, you know, I want to,
say that you need to fill mental space with intention, with vision, not with fear and fantasy. Otherwise, your addiction is going to slip in there. You have to fill your life with this intention and this vision. And I want to just pose the question, what if your hardest moments is really the ground where your strongest growth begins? Every challenge can be an opportunity for spiritual practice, an opportunity to grow and become better. When life isolates you,
You don't have to be alone. Like Steve, you can become more connected in solitude than you ever were in comfort. The opportunity isn't just to survive the storm, it's to transform through it. So what would it look like for you to choose that? So I challenge you to do that, my friend, and I hope this has been very helpful for you. God bless and much love.
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