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Mastering pornography means dealing with discomfort
A lot of my clients come to me with this one question, why do I behave one way, when I believe I should behave another.
A lot of you are listening to this podcast because of pornography use, but this work and all the principles apply to any unwanted behavior that you might be engaging in.
But I’m going to use the example of pornography. We ask, “why do I turn to pornography, when I know that it is against my values, I want to stop using it, and I am causing myself so much shame because I use it?”
They never ask it like that, but essentially that is what they are all asking, in one way or another.
They ask that because they feel stuck in one way or another. They often feel like there is no way to quit this habit because they go back to it time and again.
At its core pornography use is an escape from discomfort. that goes against our values, damages our sense of self confidence and leaves us with a sense that we lack control over our own behavior
Why do we use pornography when it goes against our values? Because it helps us escape discomfort in a moment.
Why do we use pornography when we want to eliminate its use from our behaviors? Because it feels good when we are feeling bad.
Why does our pornography use go contrary to our sense of control of how we want to behave? Because we tell ourselves that we should behave differently than we are.
So, if we are using pornography to escape discomfort and feel good, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we should behave differently, it’s no wonder that we might feel stuck and trapped by this behavior.
We believe one thing, we do another.
So, in order to reconcile that disconnection we have to rationalize what is happening. Sometimes that means that we call ourselves addicts. Sometimes that means that we say we are powerless. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we deserve this indulgence because someone or something outside us made it our only recourse to feel good.
No matter the exact way we do it, in some way or another, in order to maintain our sense that we are a good person we tell ourselves a story that makes what we are doing somehow ok, at least for a moment.
Then we beat ourselves up. We tell ourselves that we are stuck in this decision because we aren’t making a different decision
I had a client this morning, talking about his career said, “I know I’m not gonna quit, so that puts me in this box of not having a choice.”
His statement there is really telling. He says, “I know I’m not gonna quit.” Which is a statement that shows that he is making this decision. If he had stopped there and been ok with that statement, then he would be in a position of power over his choices and fully realizing his ownership of where he is. But the second part of his statement, “that puts me in this box of not having a choice” which he believes, makes him a victim of his own choice. He is his own captor.
Partly because he is telling himself a story that the decision he made is now not his. He externalizes the cause of why he feels trapped. It’s subtle, but if you listen closely, he says, that now he’s in a “box of not having a choice.”
We do this with pornography, we do this with food, we do this with anything in our lives that makes us feel trapped or stuck because we see it as detrimental to our long-term happiness.
For example, “I can’t believe I ate that entire thing, but it’s just so good I couldn’t stop.”
This story tells us that the thing we ate made us a victim because it was so good.
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