Stop Thoughts that Cause Porn Addiction | The 5 Levels of Cognition Behind Porn Cravings
- Jake Kastleman
- Aug 6, 2024
- 29 min read
Updated: Aug 26, 2024
If you struggle with porn addiction, it can be a real challenge to figure out why you experience cravings for porn.
A lot of the world will tell you it’s because you crave sex - it’s your natural urges - and you just need to discipline yourself enough to stop watching porn.
That’s not the case. You’re not a man with an overactive sex drive. You’re not lazy. You’re not weird. You’re not a pervert. You’re not bad for dealing with a porn addiction.
You don’t build willpower to overcome porn addiction. Instead, you build a new way of thinking and living - a recovery mindset and a recovery lifestyle.
Today, we’re going to focus deeply on the recovery mindset, specifically, and exactly how this mindset is achieved.
You’re going to learn how to think and process through the thoughts and the emotions that are behind pornography addiction. You’re going to learn how to live the “no more porn” lifestyle by discovering how to talk to yourself about these thoughts and emotions, and how to become deeply aware of thought patterns that feed addiction, so that you can learn how to stop porn addiction by stopping and redirecting those addictive thought patterns.
The process I’m about to teach you is the very same one that I teach to clients across the world in my intensive porn addiction recovery program. And it’s the very same one that I’ve used to quit porn and remain sober for over 9 years now.
This is not about facing and fighting cravings. It’s not about special mental techniques to distract you from cravings or fancy methods to handle triggers. Instead, it is a system of 5 levels - from the surface of conscious thought to the deepest unconscious drivers of porn addiction. And I’m going to show you how to get to those unconscious drivers of addiction, and begin replacing destructive mental habits that lead to addiction with productive mental habits that lead to sobriety.
The following article is a tiny preview into a much more thorough overview of how to overcome porn addiction. If you want to go deeper, check out my Free Workshop: The 8 Keys to Lose Your Desire for Porn.
Level 1: Porn Addiction
Dr. Gabor Maté defines addiction as anything we want to stop, but feel we can't despite the negative consequences. By this definition, pretty much anything can be an addiction; even things that would seem positive, such as work, exercise, or nutrition can become an addiction, depending on our mental relationship with the activity.
Ultimately, porn addiction is a symptom of underlying mental and emotional suffering. To some extent, it is the mind’s reaction to stress combined with shame. When we relapse with porn, there are always underlying mental/emotional factors we are trying to cope with via the escape, numbing, and distraction of addiction.
Level 2: Cravings, Urges & Obsessions
At the most surface level, the addict mindset is characterized by cravings, urges, and obsessions. These are the immediate symptoms we often focus on when discussing addiction.
However, these symptoms are merely the tip of the iceberg. They are distractions created by our minds to avoid dealing with deeper issues. Many people think that if they can just manage these cravings, they can stop porn addiction. But in reality, this approach only addresses the symptoms and not the root causes.
This addict part of us isn't evil or inherently bad; it's simply misguided. It's trying to protect us from emotional pain and discomfort by offering a temporary escape. It's crucial to understand that cravings and urges are not the problem themselves but are signals pointing to deeper issues that need attention. This realization is the first step towards overcoming porn addiction and living a life free from the grip of these urges.
Level 3: Surface Negative Emotions
Beneath the cravings and obsessions lie our surface negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, depression, loneliness, perfectionism, and a sense of being unfulfilled. These emotions are the initial layers of discomfort that we experience, often leading us to seek solace in addictive behaviors. For many, the desire to stop porn is driven by a need to numb these uncomfortable emotions.
Healthy individuals, or those in recovery, can talk themselves through these difficult emotions without shame. They don't feel inadequate or wrong for experiencing anger or fear. However, when we struggle with pornography addiction, we often feel ashamed of these emotions, believing we shouldn't feel them. This shame compounds our suffering and keeps us trapped in a cycle of avoidance and addiction.
The key to quitting porn is not to eliminate these emotions but to acknowledge and process them in a healthy way. By recognizing these surface negative emotions, we can begin to understand the deeper, underlying issues that fuel our cravings and obsessions.
Level 4: Core Negative Emotions
As we dig deeper, we encounter core negative emotions: fear, shame, and pride. These emotions are the bedrock of many of our struggles. They are more profound and ingrained than the surface negative emotions, often stemming from long-standing beliefs about ourselves and the world.
Fear, in this context, isn't about immediate dangers but rather a chronic resistance to what's happening or might happen. It's the fear of not being good enough, of being judged, or of facing painful truths.
Shame is the belief that we are inherently flawed or unworthy, often manifesting as thoughts like "I'm not good enough" or "I don't deserve happiness."
Pride, while sometimes seen as a positive trait, can also be a mask for insecurity and inadequacy. It's the belief that we must be perfect or better than others to be acceptable.
These core negative emotions are powerful drivers of addiction because they create a deep-seated need to escape or numb these painful feelings. To stop porn addiction, it's crucial to address these core negative emotions, practice self-compassion, and challenge the beliefs that sustain these ways of thinking.
Level 5: Unconscious Drivers
Even deeper than our core negative emotions are the unconscious drivers, namely resistance, judgment, escape, and control. These cognitive actions fuel our core negative emotions and, in turn, our surface negative emotions and addictive behaviors. They operate beneath our awareness, making them challenging to identify and change.
Resistance is our natural aversion to emotional suffering. We don't want to feel pain, so we resist it, which only intensifies our discomfort.
Judgment, particularly self-judgment, is one of the foundational sources of shame. It's the automatic thoughts we have about ourselves and others that reinforce feelings of unworthiness. The way we judge ourselves and others are reflections of one another.
Escape is our tendency to avoid uncomfortable situations and emotions, often through addiction.
Lastly, control is our attempt to manage outcomes and other people's feelings, driven by a perfectionistic desire to make everything just right.
These unconscious drivers are at the heart of addiction. They keep us stuck in a cycle of negative emotions and cravings. However, by becoming aware of them, we can begin to change these thought patterns and beliefs, paving the way for recovery and healing.
We can transform the unconscious drivers of addiction into the unconscious drivers of recovery. Instead of resisting our emotions, we can learn to accept and process them. Instead of judging ourselves, we can practice self-compassion and understanding. Instead of escaping, we can face our challenges head-on. And instead of trying to control everything, we can embrace uncertainty and focus on what we can influence.
This transformation isn't easy, but it's possible with awareness and effort. It requires a shift in mindset and a commitment to personal growth. It's about reclaiming the driver's seat of our lives and making conscious choices that align with our true selves.
The Path to Recovery: No More Porn
Overcoming porn addiction is a journey that involves understanding and addressing the complex interplay of thoughts and emotions that drive our cravings. It's about breaking free of porn and reclaiming our lives from the grip of addiction. The process may be challenging, but it's also deeply rewarding.
If you're struggling with pornography addiction and want to learn more about how to stop porn cravings and overcome porn addiction, check out my Free Workshop: The 8 Keys to Lose Your Desire for Porn. I will give you a practical and applied roadmap for recovery, including…
The REAL root causes of porn addiction.
How to stop porn cravings before they start.
The 5 Levels of Cognition that influence addiction.
The 4 Unconscious Drivers of porn cravings.
How sexual shame fuels pornography addiction.
1 simple daily practice to get out of the addiction funnel
And a whole lot more
You can also check out my Free eBook: The 10 Tools to Conquer Cravings, which gives you 10 quick mental techniques that you can use anytime, anywhere to redirect your mind and replace porn cravings with new thought patterns and mental habits.
So, head to nomoredesire.com to watch the Free Workshop or pick up the Free eBook and get going on the next steps of your recovery journey.
BUILD THE NO MORE PORN LIFESTYLE
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Episode 62: Stop Thoughts that Cause Porn Addiction | The 5 Levels of Cognition Behind Cravings
If you struggle with porn addiction, it can be a huge challenge to figure out why, right? Why are you experiencing cravings for porn? I remember I struggled with that for many, many years, 10 years as I suffered with porn addiction before I really started to understand some of the core issues, the thought patterns, the emotions that were behind my cravings, what was actually leading to my addiction. A lot of the world is going to tell you that it's because you crave sex. And your brain's going to tell you that too, because it's the most obvious kind of conclusion to go to, right? That if you're craving porn, it's because you crave sex, right? It's natural urges, it's natural desires, and you just need to discipline yourself enough to stop watching porn.
Okay, my friend, that is not the case. That's the beautiful thing. The miraculous thing is that is not the case.
You're not a man with an overactive sex drive. And I speak from experience having worked with clients all over the world and also going through my own addiction of 10 plus years and now being sober almost the same amount of time. You're not lazy.
Again, speaking from personal experience there, I used to think that. I used to think I lacked willpower. I used to think that I was lazy.
I used to think I was a pervert. You're not a pervert. You're not weird.
You're not bad for dealing with a porn addiction, all right? There are millions of men that deal with this, and you just need the skills. You just need the tools, and you need to understand what's actually behind the cravings. You don't build willpower to overcome porn addiction.
I think I used to, I used to think it was all about willpower, and it was all about facing and fighting cravings, and it seemed so insurmountable to me. Like, how do you face that? How do you overcome this beast that is porn addiction that these cravings hit, and they seem unbeatable? We're going to talk about how to do that today in a way that actually works and gets underneath, right, into the roots of what addiction actually comes from. So you do not need to face and fight these cravings.
That's not what it's about. Instead, you're going to build a new way of thinking, a new way of living, and a recovery mindset, and a recovery lifestyle. That's what it's about.
That's what I teach people to do in my program. Today, we're going to focus deeply on the recovery mindset, specifically, and exactly how that mindset is achieved. And I hope and I believe that this episode is going to be life-changing for you.
I say that all the time, but I see it change the lives of the people in my program. This is, again, a free episode, so there's a lot of things we won't cover, but there is a great degree we will cover here that's going to change your life. So you're going to learn how to think and process through the thoughts and the emotions that are behind pornography addiction.
You're going to learn how to live what I call the no more porn lifestyle, but by discovering how to talk yourself through these thoughts and these emotions, and how to become deeply aware of thought patterns that feed addiction, so that you can learn how to stop watching porn and to stop porn addiction by stopping and redirecting those addictive thought patterns. And the process that I'm about to teach you is the very same one that I teach to clients across the world in my intensive porn addiction recovery program, and it's the very same one that I've used to quit porn and remain sober for over nine years now. And again, this is not about facing and fighting cravings.
It's not about special mental techniques to distract you from cravings or fancy methods to handle triggers. Instead, it is a system of five levels that I'll make very clear and lay out step by step from the surface of conscious thought and cognitive processes, to the deepest unconscious drivers of porn addiction. And I'm going to show you how to get to those unconscious drivers, right? They don't have to remain unconscious.
They don't have to remain in your unconscious or your subconscious mind. You can actually bring them up to the surface and become aware of them. And so they don't, they don't have to run your life anymore.
They don't have to be these destructive mental habits that run your life. They can actually become productive. You can move into an area of productive mental habits and a life that is filled with meaning and peace and a mindset where this addict part of you, and I love to say part of you because it's not who you are.
It's just a part of your mind, a part of your cognition, of your inner processes that has betrayed you. Yes, but it is a part of you that is trying ultimately very, very hard to protect you. That's an amazing thing shared in multiple modalities, including IFS in particular, Internal Family Systems, which is a psychological modality that teaches that addiction comes from a part of you that's trying to protect you.
It's trying to essentially distract you from suffering, helping you turn away from suffering and helping you by numbing or escaping from things that are hard in life that you're facing. And we're going to talk about exactly what those hard things are and the ways that this part of you chooses to interact with the world in order to try to protect you from suffering and from hard experiences. And again, the addiction makes it worse, but much as a child tries to make things better through immature means, this addict part of us can act in immature ways, but it has the best of intent.
And through what you'll learn today, you will be able to deeply understand that part of you that has led to addiction and be able to redirect it toward productive mental habits rather than destructive ones. So I'm really, really excited for you. So let's get started.
To start, I want to tell you a story that I'm going to relate to this concept. So the story is about my amazing son, Russell. He's a year and a half old now.
I love this guy to death. He is, he is the center of my world. For any dads out there, you understand how that is.
And Russell, one of my favorite moments with him. So about probably three months ago when he just had gotten some of his baby teeth, but many, he's still missing a lot of molars that he, he doesn't have, but he's gained some teeth to be able to eat solid foods. And I will eat different vegetables like celery around him.
And he really wants them, which is awesome. But he wanted celery one day. And multiple times in the past, I've told him that he can't have celery, right? Because he doesn't have enough teeth yet for the celery.
And so on, because I've told him probably three or four times at this point of, of what I'm about to share from the story. And I apologize if you can hear background noise of a lawnmower outside. Hopefully that'll go away soon.
But for Russell, three or four times I've explained to him when he wants to eat celery. And when he wants to share it with dad, I've told him, Hey buddy, you don't have enough teeth yet. Again, he's just a little guy.
You may not understand it, but I'm trying to explain to him why he can't have the celery. So I'd point at my own teeth and I'd say, dad, dad has more teeth than you do. I have more teeth.
That's why I can eat celery. You don't have enough teeth yet to eat celery. And I told him this three or four times over the course of several weeks.
And on this day, when he asks for celery again, I explained to him again, you don't have enough teeth. And again, he has some baby teeth in the front, but he's missing most of his molars. And so Russell looks at me and defiantly, he pulls out his binky and he points to his own teeth.
And he says teeth. In other words, dad, I have teeth. I can have celery.
You're telling me I need to have teeth. I have them hand over the celery. So he pointed at his teeth and said teeth, right? Trying to prove to me, I have the teeth for this.
And much in the same way, we can think that we have an understanding of the problems behind our porn addiction. We can think that we have a realistic knowledge of what is leading to porn cravings. We can say it was just my desires for sex.
And we can be ignoring altogether that we are missing some very key elements, very key parts of what is actually behind our porn addiction. And once we can discover those, we can then naturally move into the answers, which we will talk about today. So the very first thing to start out before we talk about these five levels, we need to, and I've explained this in other episodes.
I apologize if it's a rehash, but for those who haven't heard in other episodes, this is very key. And I have my clients ask about it a lot. When they start with me, we need to understand addiction from a very different point of view.
Often we really narrow in, we're tunnel vision with our addiction. And we think the reason that I'm addicted to porn is because I crave sex or I crave porn. And if I could just, if I can just handle those cravings, then I'll be good to go.
Addiction is a symptom. Fundamentally, it is a symptom. And this is, this is a huge shift in perspective.
If you've seen it as the problem, it is not the problem. There are various factors in your life that are contributing to your susceptibility to addiction. So addiction causes pain, but it's not the source of your pain.
There are other things leading to the cravings that you're experiencing. Those are going to be mental, physical, spiritual, and relational. In other words, relationship factors in your life that are leading to that.
And when I say spiritual, I don't want it to be understood. I'm not saying that you're bad for watching porn. I'm not saying anything morally.
I'm saying that we have a soul, we have a spirit. And when we can, well, when we can do practices, depending on what your beliefs are, in order to, in order to get in touch with that spirit or to strengthen it, that can really help us, right? But it's essentially the, I believe the mind and the soul are intimately connected. And so if we can work on the way our thought process processes work, and if you're atheist or agnostic, I have clients who are as well, that's just great.
We can approach this from a mental and psychological point of view, which is what we'll be doing today. But a symptom, addiction is a symptom of mental and emotional underlying suffering. Okay, it's a protective mechanism, like I said before, that a part of us is using to avoid suffering, to distract us from the true underlying mental and emotional challenges that we're facing.
It's using it to distract us. Okay, there's layers upon layers underneath the cravings and the addiction of things that you've not yet dealt with in your mental health, your physical well-being, and your relationships, right? Okay, and again, the spiritual can help out with all these things as well, depending on how you want to approach it, according to your beliefs. So then we need to understand on the other end, recovery is also a symptom.
Okay, recovery is not just about, I'm going to stop using porn. I can tell you right now, when I stopped using porn, that was not the end of my recovery. I moved from one addiction to the next, and that is, that is the core of what I teach people.
I don't want you, once you get relieved of porn addiction, to just jump to a new addiction, right? I was addicted to alcohol, to drugs, to porn, to masturbation, to work, to codependency, to drama, to manipulation, and lying, to, let's see, what else? To even to, again, some people think work is a good thing, but when it gets out of balance, or it gets to be an obsession or addiction, it can ruin our lives and hurt the people around us. I was addicted to nutrition and exercise, something some people would see as so good, but when it gets out of balance and there's fear and shame behind it, right, it can really drive a serious dissatisfaction with life and cause other people around us to suffer. But that is for a completely different episode.
What I'm trying to help you do is to see recovery as a symptom of all these other factors that you are, that you are essentially, these things that you are doing within balance and very well in your life in order to support a life of recovery. So I think I went off on too much of a tangent there, but hopefully that's helpful. So moving into these five levels, the first thing that I want you to know is on my site, I've just launched a new free workshop.
It is completely free. It is an extremely extensive in-depth workshop with exercises and with many concepts. Eight keys, eight keys is the eight keys to lose your desire for porn.
And in this free workshop, these keys are going to give you a practical and applied roadmap for recovery. You're going to discover the real root causes of porn addiction and how to stop porn cravings before they start. So what I'm teaching today is just a tiny portion of everything in that free workshop.
And again, what you'll learn today, I believe will be extremely powerful for you. So if you want to discover far, far more and learn more, go to nomoredesire.com slash free dash workshop, or just go to nomoredesire.com and up in the menu, you'll see workshop. You just hit that and get started a hundred percent free again, very easy to dive into.
And you'll see that in the description below as well under free workshop. So let's uncover what we call the five levels of the mental and emotional roots of porn addiction. Level one.
Okay. We're getting started here friends. Level one is addiction.
Okay. Pretty simple. And as we move through the five levels, we'll get deeper and deeper from the conscious into the unconscious mind.
Level one is addiction. Addiction is anything we want to stop, but feel we can't despite the negative consequences. Okay.
It's often what we'll see on the surface and we can see, okay, this is something that's hurting my life. It's hurting me. It's hurting the people around me.
It's disabling me from being as great a man as I want to be as powerful, a husband and a father as I want to be. Level one is addiction. What's underneath addiction level two are cravings, urges, and obsession.
Okay. So these are the uncomfortable desires that push us towards something we know hurts us, but we still crave. And ultimately it doesn't matter how bad we feel about these cravings, these urges, these obsessions, the level of disapproval that we may have of our cravings will not make them go away.
In fact, something really incredible about the brain science of addiction is that the worst that we feel about something, as far as if we're feeling ashamed or dirty or horrible about ourselves, it's very often that we're going to be even more drawn to that behavior because it's so intense. And the things that we feel really neutral towards that we know aren't good for us, that we're kind of like, yeah, that doesn't serve me. It doesn't do anything good for me.
And I'm just going to stop doing it. Those things don't become addictions for us. Addictions are those things that we feel fear and shame about.
And so if we felt neutral towards our sexual urges, and this is something I've experienced in my life and been able to achieve, and you can achieve it as well. If we feel neutral towards our sexual urges and desires, then we're not addicted to porn or sex or those things. And when we achieve that on extremely stressful days, we may see that reemerge, but then we have tools.
We have ways of handling that. But all the fear and the shame and believing that there's something wrong with us, that really heaps on the intensity of the emotion. And this intensity of emotion draws the addict part of the brain back to the behavior again and again and again, because the unconscious portion of our mind really doesn't so much value reward as it values intensity.
Pure and simple. Negative, positive, whatever it is. We understand this as well from a standpoint of why do we get in fights and argue over and over and over again.
There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that it is an intense experience. It makes life more intense. And so this addict part of our brain, when it is in an addict mode rather than in an assistant kind of something that actually encourages or empowers us, when it's in a mode of addiction where it's driving us to numb out and escape, it is motivated by intensity.
It just wants something to numb the pain. Whether that's negative or positive, it wants to distract us from the other issues and challenges we're facing mentally and emotionally so that we can be distracted from the real problems underneath the surface. So if we felt neutral towards our sexual urges, we likely would not be addicted.
That leads to the obsession and the craving and the urges, right? If I am able to feel neutral about them, I can be a human being with sexual urges and desires and see them as very normal. And one of the basic reasons for this is that, well, let me say this. We think we're drawn to porn because it's pleasurable because we've been told that over and over.
It is in part, of course, because it's pleasurable, but more so it's because it's an intense experience and it's low effort, right? And it's highly accessible, which makes it so much more complex to overcome. That's why there's millions now that have a porn addiction, particularly men, for various psychological and cognitive reasons of how men's brains differ from women's. And I've talked about that on other episodes, but the intensity ultimately is what this part of us can use to cover over pain and suffering.
Okay. So I hope that makes sense. We all have pain and suffering.
It just depends on what that pain and suffering entails and how we handle it. How do we process it? How do we perceive it? Are we aware of it? And are we able to talk ourselves through it, right? And that's recovery. People who've never had any kind of a serious addiction or who are very balanced and mentally healthy, they know how to talk themselves through difficult emotions.
It's not that they don't have any difficult emotions, but they don't feel shame about things like anger or about things like fear, right? They don't feel ashamed of themselves. In other words, I'm not good enough. I shouldn't feel this.
I wish I didn't feel it. It's bad for me to feel this. I shouldn't feel it.
It needs to stop. I don't have time for this. Instead, they know how to, in a healthy way, psychologically talk themselves through their emotions and thoughts.
So level three case, we've talked about addiction. We've talked about cravings, and obsessions. Let's get down to level three.
And level three is surface negative emotions. These are going to be negative emotions like anger, impatience, anxiety, depression, disconnection. In other words, loneliness, feeling unfulfilled, perfectionism, any kind of negative emotion, right? We're talking surface negative emotions here, the ones that we experienced.
And if we can call them out and be aware enough of them, then we can start to perceive those are actually underneath the cravings, urges, and obsessions that then lead to the addictions. Because ultimately, cravings, urges, and obsessions come up as a method of distracting us from our negative emotions that we don't want to deal with, that this part of us is trying to protect us from, this addict part. And again, not an evil part, not a bad part, just misdirected.
These negative feelings drive stress. They drive disconnection from others and from God, right? If you're trying to have a relationship with God, these negative feelings can really drive disconnection. And so, because we feel disconnected from God, from others, from our, what I would call our true self, or what Buddhism would call the big self, I believe it's Buddhism, or what Daoism might call the whole, that's, the whole is actually Stoicism, but Daoism calls it the, oh my goodness, the Dao, duh.
Okay, it's in the name. They call it the Dao, right? It is this bigger self, this bigger consciousness that we are linked into. And you could also argue from a psychological perspective, it's essentially, it's the real most advanced, wisest part of who we are, right? If you don't believe in a big self, or the, you know, the universe juice, or that you're a child of God, that's just fine.
If your view is just psychological and behavioral, this has been studied in psychology, right? It's the wisest, most mature, most authentic part of us, of who we are. Certain parts of our brain can turn towards addiction, as a way to try to numb feelings of anger, anxiety, feeling unfulfilled, perfectionism, etc. Okay, so we see those surface negative emotions.
Then level four, we're going to get, we're going to get deeper here. And a lot of people will stop at those surface negative emotions, and say, these drive, right? If we can get these handled, and process through these, then we're going to be able to overcome addiction. Level four, but it goes deeper.
We can go deeper than this, and be more effective. So level four are the core negative emotions, which are very simple. They are fear, shame, and pride.
And that last one, pride, is hard for most of us to swallow. But I'll explain why it's included in just a minute. So fear is essentially the concept of, I feel resistance to what's happening, or what might happen.
And I'm not talking about fear of a lion chasing you in the woods. That's just like chasing you in a lion in the woods, chasing you in the jungle. There you go.
I'm not talking about a lion, or some kind of a beast, or some a primal fear. Okay, I'm talking about chronic fear, that so many of us experience, especially in westernized culture today. It's this resistance to what's happening, or what might happen.
Shame, I feel unworthy. I feel that my mistakes reflect on who I am, rather than just on something I did that I can learn from. I'm not good enough.
I don't do enough. I can't change because it's just the way I am. Or I'm unworthy of change.
I'm not worth it. Okay, that's shame. And then pride.
Pride disconnects us from other people. It's our way of coping with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. I don't see pride as some people may see it.
I do believe it is certainly a comparison to believing that we're better than others. That is for sure true, in my view, which is a very normal and natural inclination of ego and of our mind. But I believe that this inherently comes from a place of feeling insecure and inadequate, in addition to some of these kind of delusional, or unproductive, or immature ways of seeing ourselves as better than other people.
Which doesn't mean we are immature. It just means this part of us that expresses the pride is approaching things immaturely. Because if it felt at peace about who it is and who you are, the pride would not be necessary in order to cope with life.
So underneath any surface negative emotion, we can find these core negative emotions of fear, shame, and pride. And again, I go much deeper, much, much deeper in the free workshop on this. But anger is a secondary result of fear, right? So let's take that for instance.
Anger is a secondary result of fear and shame. Okay, I'm not good enough, right? Also, it can be of pride as well. I don't deserve this.
I don't deserve what's happening to me. I'm better than you. I'm better than this.
I shouldn't be going through this. It's your fault that this is happening, right? And that we see the fear, we see the shame, right? Fear, I'm afraid of that something bad is going to happen, or I'm afraid of, you know, I'm going to lose something, or I'll be rejected, right? And shame, I'm not good enough. I shouldn't feel this way.
I'm bad for feeling this way. And then we experience the anger, and then we heap on more shame about feeling it because we say anger is bad. I shouldn't feel anger, right? And it really stacks up that negative intensity of the emotion.
And then anxiety, right, is fear and shame, depression, fear and shame, disconnection or loneliness, fear, shame, pride, right? Depending on how it works, we can see all of these. And if you, again, if you want to know more about them, head to the free workshop on my site. So in order to cope with these core negative emotions and surface negative emotions, our brain can create cravings, urges, and obsessions in order to numb, escape, or distract us from suffering.
And now we get to level five. You'd think, well, fear, shame, pride, those seem like pretty core kinds of emotions. How would we get any deeper than that? I used to just talk about fear, shame, and pride.
But fear, shame, and pride are ultimately symptoms in and of themselves, I believe. And the reason that I say that is because there needs to be an action, a cognitive action behind the fear, shame, and pride. And again, not just talking about fear in a primal sense, talking about fear in a chronic sense, or in a way that is obsessive, or that continuously is interrupting our life, or keeping us from doing things that are good.
It's not a great way to explain that, but hopefully that makes sense. So there has to be cognition behind that. What are the cognitive acts behind the fear, shame, and pride? And the answer to that, as best I understand it, and what works very well for my clients and works very well for myself, is to understand it as resistance, judgment, escape, and control.
level five are the unconscious drivers of resistance, judgment, escape, and control. Okay, and within my program I have an opposite end of recovery, the unconscious drivers of recovery.
Okay, these are the unconscious drivers of addiction, the unconscious drivers of recovery are the opposites of resistance, judgment, escape, and control. So resistance, this is the unconscious resistance we have to suffering. Okay, emotional suffering, it presents a challenge, right, but what really intensifies it is our tendency to push against it.
Okay, and we could argue all day about, you know, is it the resistance that comes first that causes the anger and the feelings like impatience or loneliness, right, or is it, do we feel the emotions and then they're added to through resistance. We, again, we could talk philosophically on that and I think it's, I don't know if there's ever a certain way to know. I'm sure many people have written on that, but this, again, this resistance of saying I can't feel this, I shouldn't feel this, what's wrong with me, I can't feel weakness, this is so bad to feel this, it has to go away.
That's really, it's really driving, driving, driving the cravings, urges, and obsession because there's a cognitive dissonance where I experience hard things and I say I can't feel this and so this addict part of us says, okay, here's a solution, here's a way of not feeling this. Again, that way is addiction and it makes things worse, but this part of us is trying to help. And then there's judgment.
Okay, and why would judgment be behind cravings, urges, and obsession? Again, because judgment is behind shame. Okay, in judgment, when we think judgmental thoughts about ourselves or about others and it can happen very automatically or constantly without us realizing it, this is going to drive the shame. And again, there's such a powerful answer to this, to judgment, what the opposite of it is that we won't take time to get into right now.
But needless to say, when we're in a state of judgment, we're driving that shame, which is driving things like anger or anxiety or depression, which is driving the cravings, urges, and obsessions in order to numb those feelings of anger, impatience, anxiety, depression, loneliness, etc. And that is culminating in addiction. Again, when we add this up and we see these five levels, it helps us to start understanding, holy crud, I can change this.
I have power to change this and these thought processes. And if I can shift these ways of thinking, then the cravings will decrease and decrease and decrease. We don't have to battle the cravings.
It's not about the cravings. Those are just a symptom. So if you want to learn more about that, again, please head to the free workshop.
You're going to learn way, way more than what I'm teaching in this episode. And then escape, escape. Okay.
So we've talked about resistance, judgment, and then escape is obviously we're trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. We're trying to escape responsibility. We're trying to escape our pain and then control.
This is probably the hardest one for most of my clients and was hardest for me to understand. All of the people I've worked with in my program struggle with perfectionism. Everyone I've ever worked with, everyone I've also ever been a volunteer for in the past, friends that I have that struggle with addiction, that I'm a support to or that I help, people that I've met within the field in the industry, it is that perfectionism is always there.
It's always there. I constantly see it. It's just without fail.
I see it every time. I'm not saying that's the case for everyone, but it's been that the case in my experience. And there are, there's literature out there to second that and professional opinions of experts I've talked to to second that.
But underneath perfectionism is control or this desire to control. When we try to control outcomes, situations, we try to force ourselves to do things. We try to make certain things happen in a certain way.
We try to ensure that things happen in a certain way. We try to make certain that that our loved ones won't struggle or suffer. We try to ensure that others are okay.
And we see it as our responsibility and the burden being on us to make sure that others feel happy. And all that pressure can really lead us to cause other people a lot of pain. That's the strange and paradoxical thing is the more that I make myself responsible for other people's happiness, the more I will, I will likely cause those people to suffer because it is not up to me.
I cannot control it. I can help the people around me substantially really make a huge difference and be a tool in the hands of God or a part in the vastness of the universe to bring about change in people's lives. I can do that, but I could do everything I can if I can't let go of other people's well-being.
I will stand to do far less good for them. And so control, when we try to control other people, we can often think we're coming from a good place. We can think that our intention is good when we say, I just, I just want you to be happy, or I just don't want you to suffer, or I just want you to be okay.
And really underneath the surface, we're using judgment and control, or we're using escape. In other words, enabling other people to escape, the things they have to go through in order to grow as a person, and not that we're going to force them to go through that, or that we're going to, you know, punish them. That's not, I'm not talking about that.
But we can utilize these methods of resistance, judgment, escape, and control, and think we're coming from a good place when really we need to look at our, the unconscious drivers, and we need to switch over to a different way of doing things. So every single one of these things is normal. Resistance, judgment, escape, control.
Pretty much everybody does this to varying degrees. When life is going well, we, the real us, again, that's either true self, big self, child of God, the child of God within us, or just the wisest and most authentic part of who you are, it's in the driver's seat. And we can stay aware of resistance, judgment, escape, and control.
And we're able to, at least a majority of the time, choose a better path than resistance, judgment, escape, and or control. But when we are caught up in addiction, these unconscious drivers have essentially hijacked our car with us sitting in the back seat. Like what's happening? Where are we going? Why do I feel so out of control and confused? I don't understand my emotions.
I don't understand these cravings. I don't know where they're coming from because we're not in the driver's seat resistance, judgment, escape, and control are in the driver's seat and they're dictating our every move. And the stress that they cause is manifesting on the surface as these negative emotions and as cravings and obsessions and addiction.
And it can be very, very hard to see this. Just as my son couldn't see that he didn't have enough teeth, he's never had them before, right? He said, I have teeth, I can see, I know that I have teeth. It's not a perfect analogy at all, but he didn't know what he didn't know.
And so once we start to see this, again, I hope this is extremely helpful to you to start to understand that. So look underneath towards those unconscious drivers and they will empower you seeing them, giving voice to them, understanding them. It will empower you to transform and to overcome porn addiction for good.
So rate and follow this podcast, my friend. I hope you found it helpful. Again, check out my free workshop, The Eight Keys to Lose Your Desire for Porn.
I'm going to give you eight practices of a recovery mindset and a recovery lifestyle. You will gain a practical and applied roadmap for recovery and discover the real root causes of porn addiction and how to stop porn cravings before they start. Truly, it is the culmination in so many ways of many of the things that I've learned over the last 10 years of recovery, and I'm giving it to you for free.
So there's no reason not to do it. Go to nomoredesire.com slash free-workshop.
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