How to Rewire Your Brain, Quit Porn, and Reclaim Your Life
- Jake Kastleman
- Jan 16
- 31 min read
Updated: Jun 3
To quit porn, you need to develop what I call the “no more porn” lifestyle. It is possible to rewire your brain and leave this addiction behind.
I had an excellent conversation with Tony Smith from The Walk Family Podcast, a Christian podcast for parents. We discussed the true struggle of pornography addiction in this country and around the world.
As many of you guys know, porn addiction is rampant. This is no longer the 90’s where the internet was new. Porn is now recognized as a legitimate addiction.
While it has not yet been officially included in the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) I believe that is coming soon. It has become impossible to ignore.
iPads, cell phones, computers...we really have set ourselves up to be an addicted society unfortunately. And not just to porn. Internet addiction, social media addiction, and other digital addictions that have become commonplace. Now, in small kids as well. We’re raising a society of digital addicts. And we need to change that.
In this conversation, Tony and I talk about my personal journey overcoming porn addiction, and I talk about how I’m helping men do the same thing in my 1-on-1 coaching business.
There are many different psychological and behavioral strategies and tactics you can use to decrease your need for porn. There are physical, emotional, and social roots of porn addiction that you can address and overcome, and eventually stop porn entirely.
Understanding the Roots of Porn Addiction
Porn addiction isn’t simply about seeking pleasure; it’s often an escape from unresolved pain, stress, or unmet emotional needs.
For many men, it starts with using pornography as a coping mechanism. Stress, insecurity, and past traumas create a fertile ground for addiction to take root. Each time someone seeks relief through porn, the brain’s reward system reinforces the behavior, turning it into a compulsive habit.
For women, the story is often more complex. Emotional and relational needs unmet in life can lead them to seek out pornographic material or fantasy-driven content like novels or romantic films. This isn’t about moral failure but a deep yearning to fill an emotional void. Recognizing these patterns is the first step in learning how to stop porn addiction.
Understanding why you’re drawn to porn is essential. Are you seeking comfort, validation, or escape? Answering this question begins the journey to quit porn.
The Psychological Trap of Shame and Guilt
Shame and guilt are frequent companions of pornography addiction. Many addicts know the harm caused by their actions but feel trapped in a cycle of failure and self-loathing. This creates a paradox: the more guilt they feel, the more they may turn to porn as a coping mechanism, perpetuating the cycle.
Breaking this cycle requires compassion—both for oneself and from supportive communities. Recognizing that porn relapse is not a reset and doesn’t define who you are is critical to maintaining hope. Instead of focusing on failure, shift the narrative to one of growth and resilience.
Behavioral and Psychological Principles to Quit Porn
Overcoming pornography addiction requires addressing both the psychological roots and the behaviors sustaining it. Here are foundational principles to help you break free of porn:
1. Acknowledge the Deeper Needs
Both men and women must explore their underlying emotional needs. Are you seeking connection, love, or validation? Recognizing these deeper desires helps address the real problem rather than just its the symptom of porn addiction.
2. Build a Recovery Mindset and Lifestyle
True recovery isn’t about abstinence alone; it’s about cultivating a lifestyle that supports mental, emotional, and spiritual health. This involves regular self-reflection, healthy porn recovery habits, and intentional living.
3. Daily Inventory and Journaling
Daily journaling is a cornerstone of recovery. By recording thoughts, emotions, and triggers, you gain insights into patterns and learn to navigate them effectively. Structured journaling helps you process challenging emotions, reducing the need for escapism.
4. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and IFS
CBT techniques help reframe negative thought patterns, while using Parts Work and IFS for porn addiction allows individuals to address the emotional parts of themselves that seek comfort through porn. Together, these methods empower you to face triggers with confidence.
5. Accountability and Support
Engaging with a community or program designed to overcome porn addiction is vital. Weekly sessions with professionals or mentors who understand both the struggle and the solutions offer encouragement and practical tools. Recovery isn’t a solo journey. Combining self-awareness with structured support accelerates progress.
How No More Desire Helps You Stop Porn Addiction
At No More Desire™, recovery is built around four foundational anchors designed to address the multifaceted nature of porn addiction:
Weekly One-on-One Meetings: Personalized, hour-long sessions provide a safe space to discuss progress, challenges, and breakthroughs with someone who’s walked the same path.
Daily Assessments: Clients complete 15-minute assessments to take daily inventory, build holistic habits for recovery, and process triggers, emotions, and victories. These are reviewed before each session, allowing for focused discussions.
Structured Modules and Exercises: A comprehensive program integrates written and applied exercises, teaching practical skills for lasting change.
Personalized Recovery Plan: The program helps you build a plan that emphasizes ongoing growth, making recovery a lifelong practice rather than a short-term fix.
The Role of Women in the Porn Addiction Discussion
While the conversation around porn addiction often centers on men, women are increasingly affected. Studies reveal that women’s consumption of pornographic material is rising, with much of it driven by emotional needs. Recognizing this challenges the stigma and opens the door for healing.
Women struggling with pornography addiction must confront the deeper reasons behind their behavior. Often, this involves addressing unmet relational and emotional needs stemming from past experiences. By doing so, they can begin to heal the wounds that drive their addiction.
Why Porn Addiction Recovery Takes Time
Unlike quick-fix programs that promise freedom in 30 or 90 days, true recovery takes time and intentionality. Building a recovery mindset and lifestyle means committing to ongoing growth. This isn’t a burden but a gift. The practices that help you stop pornography addiction also cultivate a meaningful, joyful life.
Recovery isn’t about reaching an endpoint but embracing a new way of living. As you implement the principles of recovery, you’ll discover a deeper connection to yourself, others, and your purpose.
Take Your First Step to Quit Porn
If you’re ready to stop watching porn and transform your life, know that you’re not alone.
Programs like No More Desire are here to help you navigate the journey with professional guidance and proven strategies. Whether you’re seeking to quit porn or help a loved one, the path to healing begins with a single step.
Break free of porn. Reclaim your life. And discover the joy and freedom that come with living authentically.
Build the No More Porn Lifestyle
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Episode Transcription | Episode 82: No More Porn | How to Rewire Your Brain, Quit Porn, and Reclaim Your Life
[Begin Introductory Clip]
I think what some people understand, but what many other people don't know, is that a vast majority of the porn that's online is from human and sex trafficking. Or if they're not being trafficked, it's people who have been, they're either they're on drugs, right? And so they're being told in order to get the drugs that you want, you need to do this for me. Or there are people who have been coerced or manipulated or told that they need to do this in order to be accepted by their boyfriend or what have you, right? And then they're being used, right? And is that every bit of porn? No, right? Obviously there are those who are choosing to participate in that without this coercion or being trapped in trafficking and things like that.
But I would argue that the people who are doing that voluntarily, a vast majority of them carry a history of abuse and sexual trauma, which is driving them to do what they're doing. And that gets pretty complex from a psychological perspective...
[End Introductory Clip]
Jake, I'm very glad that you got to join me and just have this conversation.
And I really wanna start off with just understanding the origin of No More Desire and how it all started. Yeah, so for me, it starts from a personal standpoint. When I was in my teenage years, I was 13 years old, that's where porn addiction these days for so many men starts.
And for the men that I work with as clients in my program, at 13, and I think this is the case for a lot of people I've worked with, I was very undereducated when it came to sex or anything to do with it. I was very ignorant to all of that. And there's complex reasons for that.
And I've gained a real understanding from my parents and kind of what they came from. And they were doing their best, but we had the internet, right? I grew up, I'm a millennial. And at 13, I gained access to that and started to get curious and explore.
And by about 14, so a year later, I was pretty well addicted looking, you know, watching porn every day. And the interesting thing, one of the interesting things about my story is that my father has been in the porn addiction recovery industry, helping people with porn addiction since before that ever happened with me. So logically, I knew this is something that can cause problems in my life, but I really didn't understand the depth of what that meant.
I heard the word addiction and it's like, yeah, something that you really want and you feel like you can't go without it. But I didn't understand all of the things it would do to me from the standpoint of insecurities I would experience, loss of focus and motivation that I would experience from the dopamine drain experienced from all addictions. But porn addiction is a really, really hard one in that way.
And I had an addiction to video games, an addiction to food. It's not all just one thing. I think that's something we can talk more about if we want to.
But I had all these addictions going on. And when I was in my late teenage years, this is a Christian podcast. So I'd love to express this.
I had a spiritual experience where my father was talking to me about God. He was talking about God's plan for me. And I felt the spirit.
And at the time I was so removed from the gospel of Christ, from the church, from all of it, that I didn't know what that good feeling was. Like you'd think I'd knew it because I grew up in the church and in the gospel. But I just knew it felt really good and I knew I wanted to feel more of it.
And so I see kind of by the power of angels, Christ, the Holy Ghost, I was inspired to start praying every day and reading of holy words every day, right? Of scripture. And that started to improve my life. And as that began happening, my mind started to expand.
My perspective started to expand. And I started to notice when I would engage with porn or with a lot of other things I was caught up in at that time, it went into drugs, it went into alcohol in my teenage years because it just compounds and compounds, right? If you keep going down that road, you'll just gain more and more addictions. And that's where I was at.
And I saw how miserable all of it was making me. And I saw what I could, I started to gain a vision of who I could become, right? I started to gain a glimpse of it. And I was like, man, if only I could get rid of these addictions.
And so over a five year period, I worked very hard with a lot of immaturity and a lot of messiness and a lot of back and forth. And wishy-washy, but really working over five years to get out of my addictions. And bear in mind, for a lot of people, that looks like a lot longer journey.
I was blessed enough to grow up in a family with a father who was teaching about addiction recovery. And I had opened up to him around that same time in my late teenage years and said, this is an issue I have. And so I had that background to serve me and to help me.
And then I had that help from God. And so I learned, I learned, I grew, I built these skills over that five year period. And the journey really doesn't end there.
That's finally when I was about 22, I viewed porn for my last time, my whole life. And I've been sober 10 years now almost. And what automatically happens to, I think all people who go through recovery is you then wanna carry that to other people.
And so once I then said, I'm gonna do something about this. And so I started building a plan which started with the curriculum for me because I love to create content and I love to create methods and formulas and I love psychology. I'm a nerd for it.
And so I built out a lot of different concepts that have really evolved over the last few years and then built this business. And that's a massive story, but I did a podcast and got in 12 step groups and just started getting involved in some of the addiction community and helping people and getting help myself too in my recovery. Then started taking on clients and started coaching people.
And I can't say how much of a blessing it is to me that the joy of being able to help other people overcome this. And at the same time, it's such a blessing to me to do it, right? And to be in that position to do it. So it's doing this work every day, it's a privilege for me.
So you started the business side of it really was about two, three years ago, you'd say? Yeah. So we kind of started about the same time. Yeah, exactly.
That's kind of cool. So I wanna, so there's quite a lot there. So I wanna kind of take it into chunks.
So you struggled, you had this addiction that led to other addictions for about five years, right in the middle of your teenage years. And then 18. And I would, do you mind if I go back a little bit further on that and clarify it? Yeah.
And this is something a lot of people don't see. I believe I was an addict from the time I was four years old and a lot of people feel surprised by that, but it started with video games and food. That's how I escaped and how I dealt with my heart emotions.
It was a very intense child, loaded up with like fiery emotions and anger and intensity that I, and shame, feeling I'm not good enough. I didn't know what to do with all that. And so I went to video games and I went to food.
That was how I, that's where I found safety. It's where I found certainty and peace, quote unquote, at least the best a little four-year-old kid can, right? Using some of those things. And then eventually, almost 10 years later, I got into the porn addiction and then other addictions after that.
So I think a lot of people, especially in the church space or that are believers are thinking, you know, I, like, if I just, if I have a relationship with God, like he's going to take it away and it's just like snap of the fingers, that's that. But you and I both know, like, that's not true. He's a huge piece, but he's not just, he's not a magical genie that's just going to take it away.
Like this is, right. I think, I think all of us would. But the reality is, is you, with the clients that you work with and the fact that you have your own experience with it, it's like, it takes diligence and intentionality with like steps that kind of rewire your brain to overcome this.
And you said you're experiencing, you know, a decade of soberness now. So I'm just kind of attributing that it's, from the people that you've worked with, do you find that, yeah, it is just kind of like, yeah, snap of the fingers, you know, cold turkey, and then they experience victory? Or do you find that, you know, they need to follow certain steps to overcome this over time? Yeah, I love that you bring this up, Tony. Because it's so true, I think in the Christian faith, at least, and you know, I've studied other Eastern faiths and things, and I don't know exactly what that looks like in other faiths, but I know in Christianity, we can have this idea of, well, God, through the atonement of Christ and through God's power, he'll take your addiction from you and he'll take this desire from you.
I've never had God take anything from me without a very substantial amount of work on my part to get there. And I believe, and a lot of people will see that as, isn't God merciful or doesn't he love me? He loves you so much that he's going to allow you to work through the steps, as you said, right? To get to a place of progression where you've learned, you've grown, you've gone through a journey. How else would you appreciate sobriety if you didn't go through a journey? If someone just came up and said, here, I'll take that, now you're good.
The level of growth and what I went through over the course of many years and what I still go through, right? I'm still working my recovery every day. Now, it's really rare for me to have a desire for porn or for anything like that to pop up, but you still have addictions that all us human beings have. Like we have, so many of us have addictions in one form or another, to one degree or another, to work or productivity or to anger or to controlling people or judging people or gossip or media, TV, video, whatever these things are.
And so developing that recovery mindset and lifestyle. For my clients, what I find most often, so many men especially, and I don't think that it's a coincidence that men are the ones who struggle with porn addiction the most and that are the most susceptible to this. We are not taught how to process through our thoughts and emotions.
So many of us are not taught that, right? We're taught to stuff down difficult, hard emotions like sadness or anger or loneliness, insecurity. Insecurity is a big one. That can be like a swear word to a lot of men.
It's like, I don't feel insecure. I don't have insecurities. Everybody has insecurities.
Everybody's got them. And we all carry these burdens. And so I teach my clients, well, two different frameworks for processing through and working through daily thoughts and emotions, hard ones that you experience and triggers because they go right along together.
I use the same two psychological frameworks to do that, which are based in CBT and parts work. And so if you can work through your thoughts and emotions in a way that's effective, that will lead to success and you practice that each day, then things like anger or loneliness or grief or sadness, things we all experience as human beings won't overload you and overwhelm you behind the scenes without you being aware of it. We need to become deeply aware of what we're experiencing in our thoughts and our emotions psychologically and process through it.
Be aware of it. Show acceptance and compassion to ourselves. And that is so fundamental for people.
And the interesting thing is much of it goes right along with Christ and his teachings. It goes right along with the gospel in a lot of ways, but so many people don't know how to integrate that into their own mindset and an inner dialogue that they're having inside to treat themselves with that acceptance, that love, that compassion and how to truly forgive yourself. On a fundamental standpoint, one of the way I teach my clients to handle triggers and negative emotions is a process of forgiveness.
It's my brand, it's my way to do it based on psychological modalities, but to forgive yourself. If you can forgive yourself ongoing on a daily basis, and I recommend bringing God or your higher power or Christ into that to be your facilitator and your guide in doing that, now you're doing the work of recovery from a mindset standpoint. So there's a huge faith element to, I mean, essentially like we call it a practice, right? To your practice, like there's a piece to that.
Would you say it is necessary to your journey to recovery or is it just kind of like an extra? I think that nowadays, and a lot of people aren't aware of this if they're not in the psychology space, but psychology and spirituality are really knitting together pretty powerfully. And a lot of that's happening in internal family systems. There's an essence, a core, a wisdom, or a presence inside of you that essentially can be this inner witness, this deep wisdom that you can get in touch with in order to be a leader to the different parts of you, like the addict parts, right? That can take over and take the lead and lead you down paths that are insane and crazy and delusional.
If that light of God inside of you or whatever you believe it to be, right? But if that light of God inside of you can really take the lead over these parts of you and you can be a space of acceptance and compassion for yourself, then you can recover. Now, what you asked is, do you have to have a reliance on a higher power or do you have to have this reliance on God? I would say I've never seen someone, this is me personally, I'm saying this, I've never seen someone recover long-term without that. Now, that can come in many forms.
And if it's more kind of like a spiritual thing for you, you understand there's this essence, this peace, this light inside of you, or you understand it to be God or Christ or Buddha nature, right? Or I believe you need to have a reliance on something greater than you that will inspire you and fill you with power to work through your personal problems. We all have, there's similar themes for all of us in what drives us to addiction with our internal psychological troubles that we experience. That essence, that light, right? That light of Christ or that light of God can guide you in understanding those things about what you go through personally.
And I see it as fundamental. Without that, you're kind of on your own and you just have to have a greater power backing you. And that's exactly what I was looking for.
Not just one way or the other, but just like with somebody who has experienced victory over this that is leading other people to victory over this. And like, it's a real, I mean, essentially like this is a pandemic that's plaguing men everywhere. And if we're just gonna say, yeah, God is this magical genie that's just gonna take it away.
Like that's just not true. And, but he's an essential piece to your practice. It was kind of what I was getting at.
So yeah, thank you. I'm gonna go back to your own experience just for a minute. So you had mentioned that you confided into, or confided with your dad around late teenage years.
How was that conversation? Because when you're talking about shame and addiction and men in general, like men are not typically like warm and fuzzy and wanna have open conversations about something like this. Yet you took that step, talked to your dad about it. How did that go? I wanna answer that in a kind of a broad way.
So specific to my dad, it went well because he was in that space where he was already working with people who were struggling with addiction to porn specifically, which I came to him and I said, I have this addiction to porn. And I'll add in as well, this is something that many men like, they don't wanna talk about, but I was struggling with an addiction to masturbation as well, simultaneously. And that word for so many guys, there's don't say that word, it's a weird word.
And look, like 99% of men are doing that. And there is a way to actually overcome the craving for it, which we could go deep into, but that takes like an entire book to do that or joining my program to do that. But essentially when I came to him and I told him that, he was very open about it.
He was very accepting. He was very supportive and understanding. And that was good.
I mean, that was a positive experience for me. He, I think one of the biggest things we need to understand is that what drives us to the need for addiction in the first place is what we might term these little managers that we have inside of us, which are these judging and controlling parts of our minds that are really brutal and self-critical. And because they're so brutal and so self-critical, we then choose to go to escapes, right? Like porn.
And we may be completely unaware of that. I know I was when I was a kid and then in my early teens, but you don't need to approach someone who has just confessed to you that they have an addiction and say, well, you need to stop that. Like you shouldn't be doing that anymore.
They are already fully aware. They don't want to be doing it. They have, they already have a manager, quote unquote, inside of them.
That's really brutal and really self-critical. Whether they're aware of it or not, they don't need you to be that. What they need you to be is a witness and an open space of acceptance and support and compassion for them.
Now don't mistake that with enablement. Like, oh, that's fine that you have that. It's okay.
Like it's normal. And like, if it happens sometimes, that's fine. It's important that we don't come from a standpoint of saying this is perfectly fine and you can keep doing it or enable someone, but also not condemning them.
There's this, what we might call that straight and narrow path, right? Of just really bearing witness to what they're experiencing and being that space of acceptance and compassion. And we so often think like we got to jump in as the ones who tell them, you know, do this and do that. And this is how you fix it.
And tell them all the ways to fix it. They already have that voice inside their head. That's like telling them all the ways to fix it.
Don't do that. Just open up the space and be a witness for them and then allow them to take the action to be, to step into, again, that opens up a space for that self-leadership with the big S, right? For God to start to work inside of them, to start to bring them to answers and be open. If they have an open space, then they can be open to, you know, maybe I could actually do something about this.
You know, maybe I could get better. Do you find a lot of your clients or people that you've interacted with are married or single and moving into that realm, how does this, how does pornography addiction affect married men or even men that are fathers and dads? I think one of the most fundamental things that we, so to answer your first question, married, that's a vast majority of my clients. Now you might question why that is.
That's because those are the ones who are the most motivated to actually get help. Whereas single men, a lot of times, there can be a vast array of excuses or I'm okay, I don't need help or I don't want to pay for it or this or that. But when you have another human being in the mix now who you deeply care for and you really want to make them happy, all, I think pretty much all men want to make their wives happy at a fundamental level inside them, right? And if you're not doing that, we can genuinely feel like we are failing as a man at our deepest responsibility.
I'm making my wife unhappy. That's what I see the devastation it causes for the men, for husbands and fathers is I am letting my wife down, I am destroying her, I am betraying her, and I'm a bad person because of it. And that's shame, right? And that just, it cripples a man in his confidence, in his ability to be there for his wife, in his ability to show up selflessly and with love because he's so overwhelmed with this feeling that I'm a bad person because I deal with this or I'm not good enough.
If only I could get rid of this addiction, then I could finally be the man that I want to be. And what's a bit paradoxical is you need to make the changes as a man in your lifestyle, in your mindset, in the ways that you approach yourself psychologically and in making steps so that you eventually lose the need you have to escape using porn, that's your answer. It's not, I'm going to just stop watching porn and then everything's going to be fixed.
You got to start at the core, at the roots of why you're going to it. And so that, yeah, that shame is very overwhelmed for men. And then you tie that to how it impacts them as fathers and how much the addiction is draining your brain of dopamine because it's really large spikes of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that occurs neurologically.
You're spiking it really high when you watch porn because frankly, what other way in history have men been able to look up hundreds of these perfect women in an instant that do whatever they want with no effort on their part? That's a lot of dopamine in a way that our brains aren't meant to handle. And when you spike it that high, then there's a drop. And this isn't just exclusive to porn, right? This is the same way with television or video games or drugs or alcohol.
These are all behaviors and substances that really spike our dopamine. I call them low effort, high intensity types of activities. In other words, a highly intense reward mentally where it's going to drain you later.
So your focus drops, your motivation drops, your ability to connect with people drops. And that's inhibiting men in the way they show up as fathers. They feel like they can't fully be there.
And it's hard enough to be a dad and a husband in and of itself. And you add in the addict, the addiction component. And now it feels impossible to show up in the way that you want to.
Just with your experience too, like truly how evil is the porn industry? Like how bad is it? Well, so my father has had some connections with Operation Underground Railroad. For those who've heard of that, it's an industry that, well, a lot more people have probably heard of it now because of the film, Sound of Freedom. Yes.
Yes, incredible, incredible film. Very hard to watch. I was crying, I swear I was bawling my eyes out from beginning to end in that film.
I mean, phenomenal, phenomenal movie, but also like it brought a ton of things to the attention of everybody. Like anybody that's seen it or even heard about it. And like, it's just absolutely crazy.
Yeah. And so what people, I think what some people understand, but what many other people don't know is that a vast majority of the porn that's online is from human and sex trafficking. Or if they're not being trafficked, it's people who have been there, they're either they're on drugs, right? And so they're being told in order to get the drugs that you want, you need to do this for me.
Or there are people who have been coerced or manipulated or told that they need to do this in order to be accepted by their boyfriend or what have you, right? And then they're being used, right? And is that every bit of porn? No, right? Obviously there are those who are choosing to participate in that without this coercion or being trapped in trafficking and things like that. But I would argue that the people who are doing that voluntarily, a vast majority of them carry a history of abuse and sexual trauma, which is driving them to do what they're doing. And that gets pretty complex from a psychological perspective, but that's why they're doing it.
And then even those who don't have that history of abuse, they're doing it so they can, they can find acceptance and value as a human being, and they're seeking in a place that's, that's, I believe, tearing them apart. And so how that uses and really defiles human beings, it is ultimately evil.
I think evil is that harm to human beings that isn't resulting in anything good, obviously. It's only resulting in a great deal of pain and suffering and people making exorbitant amounts of cash off of that. And I know that the men who struggle with the addiction, it's not like understanding that is going to break you out of it.
That can be part of your motivation for stopping. But unfortunately for some men, they know that and they continue to engage in it. And it, and it just, it adds even more shame on top of it for that, man, what's wrong? Why am I such a horrible person that I'd continue engaging in this? And it's, it's, again, it's a, it's an escape mechanism that your brain is using in order to cope and handle stress and suffering you're experiencing.
And you need to go to the stress and suffering you're experiencing and work through it. Going into like the industry itself. I went to a conference a couple of years ago and Josh McDowell was there and he was speaking on it.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but prominent speaker from 20 some years ago. But anyway, he did an extensive study on the porn industry and he had said that about 70% of new porn that is being created is actually geared towards women. I don't know if you've heard that stat or if that is, is even a factor, but there's a stigma that porn only affects men.
And obviously like no more desire that's geared towards men. And I think the vast majority of people are men that struggle with it. But what sorts of encouragement or value do you have to offer women who also might be in the same boat? That's really important you bring that up.
Because I think a lot of women, I mean, stories that I've read and they can feel like, man, what is like, what is wrong with me? Yes, I get that men deal with this, that's bad enough, but why am I so screwed up inside that I would pursue this? And for women, it often gets a bit more complex. Sex is more, tends to be more emotional for them. Whereas for men, it can be more physically based.
Now I'll say without a caveat, I think for men, it should become much more emotionally and spiritually based. And hopefully it becomes very whole and beautiful for you with your wife. And in a context in which it brings you guys together in a very special, powerful way, I think a sacred way.
Right. But for women, naturally it tends to be much more emotional. So they'll seek it out for reasons that are often more complex than the men.
For the men, it's a lot of us men can't perceive this at first, but we start to, but we have stresses, we have suffering, we experience insecurities or other burdens we're carrying psychologically. We seek out porn as an escape. And then it's something we become addicted to neurochemically.
Right. For women, they'll often go to novels or other, I mean, yeah, a lot of novels or romances and films, stuff with a story, right. Where it plays out like a fantasy that they really, really want.
Because they don't feel loved. They don't feel accepted. They don't feel worthy.
And I think if you're a woman struggling with porn addiction, if you can understand that you're pursuing it for much deeper reasons than just you want to feel sexual pleasure, I think you can hopefully, if you could understand that at the deepest level and why that is and why you go to it, I believe that you would lose your desire for porn because you would be able to heal. It's not going to happen in an instant, but if you could understand yourself fully and see, oh, wow, you know, these are the things I experienced in childhood where I didn't feel loved and accepted, or I didn't feel the connections I needed. And that's true for men too.
But women really will pursue deeper emotional needs through the porn as a fantasy to either try to, it's kind of a, how would I say, a fabrication of what they want at a deeper level. But it's just, it's stuffing something in that hole temporarily and then it empties again. And it's just this endless black hole they're trying to stuff with the porn.
So it's not about you being a bad person or being, you're not like some sex monster because these are the things that our minds can tell us. You have deeper emotional needs and desires that aren't being met and you need to go on a journey to explore those with God, with other people, with support, and through resources to help you and programs, you know, and you can find those answers. And once you understand them and you actually feel a compassion for yourself and an understanding for yourself, you can start to heal.
How is it that people get down to a low point? So they experience shame, they experience guilt, maybe even other emotions like frustration and anger because they're, they have a desire to overcome it, but they keep going back to it, going back to it, going back to it. So when they hit a, truly like a low point and they seek out help and they say, you know, they happen to stumble upon No More Desire. They happen to stumble upon your company.
What does No More Desire do in a practical way? Yeah, I have four anchors to my program. So we meet, I meet with my clients once a week for an hour. I think a fair number of programs or therapy or things like that out there will just offer that one-on-one once per week.
And a lot of good can happen there. That's great. But I want to take things much deeper and I do with my clients.
And so in addition, right, so that first anchor would be those weekly meetings, right? With someone who has professional experience helping people and personal experience overcoming the addiction. The second anchor and the one that really feeds straight into those weekly sessions are the daily assessments. And I alluded to, I have two different specific step-by-step processes that my clients use to process through thoughts and emotions and triggers.
They're based in CBT and parts work, these psychological modalities. And so essentially by doing these daily assessments, about 15 minutes long, people start to practice how to work through hard thoughts and emotions and triggers for pornography or for whatever other addictions they experience as well. And in addition, they're recording their thoughts, their feelings, the stuff that they're experiencing, their weaknesses, their strengths, the things that they're experiencing on a daily basis.
And so by journaling all that out and following these specific processes, they submit all that over to me. So they've actually practiced, right? They're practicing recovery through those daily assessments. And then I get all the information from those assessments and I review them before we meet each week.
So I don't just come together and say, how's your recovery going? Tell me about it. I already know exactly how things are going. I know whether you've relapsed or how many times during the week.
I know the types of challenges you're experiencing. And I center in on and hone in on what people may either perceive to be loaded topics for them psychologically or what they often may not perceive to be something that they really struggle with. And we center in on those, discuss them.
I bring solutions to the table from a mindset and lifestyle standpoint for their recovery. Now, in addition, we have a recovery plan that we build out and that has all these skills and really fundamental factors of recovery. And then I have a structured recovery program.
So they're doing both written and applied exercises for recovery. So those four different anchors all build together to be what I call an intensive porn addiction recovery program. It's pretty involved.
This is not just something that you show up once a week for an hour to chat. It's on a deeper level. And I think that that's necessary, especially for something like porn addiction, where you have access to it 24 seven devices are all around you.
You've got to build a completely new mindset and lifestyle. And that's That's awesome. The fact that you have a level of intentionality in depth intentionality with these people.
I think that's I think that for me personally, like that's a huge piece because you're not just saying, hey, you know, do this and best of luck. We'll check in later. It's intense and it's intentional.
And I think that really can show people that not only do you care, but like these steps work. When people sign up for your program, how long does it typically take to get through your program? But also, how long does it take for them to experience victory over porn addiction? It's an amazing question, Tony, and I'm going to give you a very loaded answer to that question. So I think that there's a number of programs out there that will quote, you know, 30 days to freedom or 90 days to freedom or six months.
And I just don't think that's fair. First off, I'll say, from my perspective, 30 or 90 days is far too short to overcome an addiction. I can say after 90 days of sobriety, for me, I was still deeply in the zone of danger, I'll say, of not understanding like, yeah, I've got three months, that feels good, but I'm still so susceptible.
And there are so many things I need to be doing each and every day ongoing. The recovery mindset and lifestyle doesn't stop. I think that's one of the things that we can often get wrong or that we're taught is like, yeah, you'll get over the addiction, you'll leave it behind you, and then you're good.
And you can just move on with your life. I wish I could say it works that way. It doesn't.
You keep living that with that recovery mindset and lifestyle forever, forever. And that's not a bad thing. It's what I teach people to do.
So much of it, it's when you look at it, you know, I can ask people like, what out of this system is something that someone who is living a, you know, a highly meaningful, a joyful life would not do? None of it. All of this is something that someone who is living a healthy, meaningful life would do, right? Well, that's, okay, so people who don't struggle with addiction, they're doing a lot of these things. That's how they're sober.
They grew up doing a lot of these things, right? And their relationships, their mental state, their spiritual life, all that. So essentially for my clients, it depends on the individual. For some of my clients, I've, you know, worked with them six months.
They make some really substantial progress. And they're like, you know, I think that, I think I'm doing pretty good. And I think that I'd, I'd like to finish out here.
My program itself, where it stands, it's about a year. And that can sound so long to people. They're like, a year, that's forever.
And what I encourage people to, and kind of how I challenge them is I say, how many years have you been addicted to porn? You know, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Well, if it took 10 years to overcome a 30-year porn addiction, wouldn't that be pretty reasonable? Well, yeah. Okay.
Well, it's not going to, I don't think it's going to take that long, you know, but about a year is the length of the program. And I tell people, just expect one to three years. Like come in expecting that.
And that way you'll have hopefully a mindset of patience with yourself and understanding for yourself that this takes time. It's okay. You're not, I think often when people relapse, they'll, we're taught to say, you failed.
You're on day zero. You don't lose your progress when you relapse. Eventually, yes, you need to get to that point of long-term sobriety, long-lasting.
You're not going back to the addiction. You'll get there, but you're practicing the skills of recovery. And so during the course of a year or longer, or, you know, whether it's six months or a year, whatever it is, you're practicing all those skills of recovery.
And once you can get to a point where you're implementing all the skills that I teach you in there. So a lot of them in the program, once you can implement those in your mindset and your lifestyle each day, it's ongoing, they become habits for you. And you keep that going long-term.
Now you're in a space to be able to stay sober. And ultimately my goal with my clients is to get them to a place where they no longer desire porn. And for a lot of people, they can be a bit confused by that.
They're like, it's just like, yeah, I get sexually aroused. I'm a human being. Desiring porn is something very different than just normal.
Well, I say normal, than sexual arousal that we all experience. And for someone who is very sexually healthy, first off, there's things with their mental state and with their life that are going really well and their relationships that are going really well. That's why they're not, that's a big part of the reason why they're not drawn to escape using porn or to use it as a fantasy or something that helps them escape life.
But you can get to a place where you understand and feel a really great level of peace with sexual arousal and desire and things like that. And it's very manageable for you as a human being, right? Perfectly fine. You'll still have all those things.
You just won't have the obsession and the fixation. That's where I want to get my clients to. And there's a lot, there's a lot psychologically underneath that fixation and that obsession.
Where can people go to connect with you, to get access to No More Desire, to learn more about this program, about the potential of recovery and experiencing victory over porn addiction? Yes. So the main two things that I would recommend for people where people should start is to go to nomoredesire.com. And on my homepage, I have a free workshop. It is an hour and a half of extremely, extremely helpful, very meaty content to help with recovery.
It gives you eight keys to lose your desire for porn. That's where I would recommend starting is get that free workshop, totally free. There's no strings attached.
Grab that or my free ebook, The 10 Tools to Conquer Cravings. Both excellent free resources that are right there on my homepage. You can grab right now.
That's where I'd start. And then of course, my podcast, which is free as well. So all excellent places to go.
And if you want to take it to the next level, you want to join my program, you just apply for a free consultation and we can go from there. So it's all nomoredesire.com. Jake, thank you so much for being on our show and best of luck to you. This is really, this was really special.
This was a really, really good conversation. So thank you. Well, good.
Well, thanks, Tony. It was fantastic for me too. And I really appreciate the time to be here.
It's a huge privilege for me. So thank you.
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