#127 Overcome Pornography Through Self Confrontation - For the Love Series - Chapter 2 of 5
Part two of our 5 part series on Love and what it looks like to really be lovable, loving, and to love one’s self. David schnarch talks about self confrontation and other confrontation Engage with our behavoirs in a meaningful way from an objective place. One of the keys to love is the capacity to confront who we are. Now, this isn’t to say that you aren’t inherently loved or lovable. But, there is an element of growth that seems to be required for each of us to love ourselves. I think one of the keys to loving yourself is having a sense that you are growing and leaning in into the discomfort of becoming more than what you are now. It also requires that we hear the truthful parts of what others are able to observe and point out to us. This is a skill that requires a capacity to not just endure the discomfort of the process of confronting who you are, but even to lean into that discomfort. So, let’s just take a moment to define what it means to self confront and be confronted by others in ways that are growth and love promoting. The process of confronting your behavior is simple but can be difficult to face if you are unwilling to be objective about what is going on and your worth in relation to what is going on. In order to self confront, you’ll need to see your behavior clearly and objectively. Meaning that you fully understand or are seeking to fully understand what you are doing. This is as simple as acknowledging what the behavior is by describing it dispassionately, and without layering in judgments that you might be using to beat yourself up with. Darcy and I were talking to a couple who we’ve been coaching and one of their experiences recently was a conversation in which the husband let his spouse know that he had viewed pornography. As they discussed the situation, the husband became more and more distraught, in a sense, to convey how much he was not pleased with his own behavior. He worked to manage his wife’s experience of his actions by being more upset about the situation than she was. This is an example of not being clear and objective about your behavior. That’s not to say there is no room for passionate discourse or even deeply felt emotions. It is to say, managing our partner is not part of clearly acknowledging where you are. It is hard to be objective about what is going on when you are working to manage others’ feelings. So how do we engage with an internal process of evaluating our behaviors? We go into this in the membership, which you can join anytime by going to zachspafford.com and there are workbooks that you can use in there to really get in deep on this . But first you’ll want to start by recognizing that the high emotions are sometimes ways of . Often, we want to hold our ground and defend where we are because it feels safer than confronting our actions openly. Second, you’ll need to be objective about what that behavior’s outcomes are, how they are impacting you, and how they might be impacting those around you. You can do this by being willing to look downstream from where you are and acknowledging the results in the eyes of others and even acknowledging the effects you’ve been working to ignore or hide from. Many of us do this well in other parts of our lives. For instance, at work you might be really good at looking downstream and seeing what the effects are. But when it comes to your relationship with your partner or yourself, it is not uncommon to be unwilling to see what we’re doing based on the way it will end up later. I know, for me, darcy and I were having a discussion in the shower just a couple of nights ago and she was pointing something out to me, something that I didn’t want to see.
