Mastering Your Emotions to Break Free from Pornography

Episode 281

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Zach Spafford: Hey everybody, welcome to Thrive Beyond Pornography. I'm your host, Zach Spafford. As I was working with a client this week, he asked me how to implement all the tools he's been learning.

And I think that's a good question. And as we discussed his needs specifically a little bit more, I thought, you know what, let's just start at the beginning. And I think for most people, the very beginning is a process that starts with simply getting good at recognizing feelings.

One of the things that most men in western society struggle with is being in tune with their feelings.

Being able to pinpoint an emotion, name it, and then moving through that feeling without escalating it or avoiding it. What I mean by escalating or avoiding is that we translate that particular feeling into something that creates a sense of greater control while paradoxically being less in control.

For example, when feeling frustrated, we can escalate to anger and we then use that anger to modify the way others behave around us, or when we feel lonely, we can avoid feeling that particular feeling by masking it with arousal and using that new feeling to avoid why we were lonely in the first place.

I often say that men are only allowed to have three feelings, hungry, angry, and horny. So when we have more feelings than that, we tend to try and eliminate or circumvent them.

Rather than do that, the first thing that I recommend in really getting to the point where you can permanently eliminate your struggle with porn is simply getting familiar with your feelings. This is just kind of the beginning of everything.

It's a lot like the check engine light feelings are a system that can help us monitor how well we're doing. They are not actually the problem, right? They are simply an indicator that tells us we might want to look deeper and more thoroughly into what's happening under the hood.

In order to do this, I recommend a number of simple techniques.

First, learn the language of how you feel. That, that might seem pretty simple, but according to Brene Brown, the average number of feelings that most of us can name is about three.

You know, we use happy when what we might be more precisely feeling is hopeful. We say angry when we feel misunderstood. Learning what feelings you have and how those feelings impact you might be something that you've been taught is mushy gushy stuff and that only girls need it. And you're supposed to just get back up rub some dirt on it. Keep going.

For certain aspects of being a grown man, that can actually make sense. And sometimes, we do need to just focus in on a task, get that task done, and then you can feel your feelings later.

When it comes to dealing with porn, and why porn is in your life, it might be time To get more in tune with your feelings so you can figure out how to stop using porn in order to avoid them.

So to do that, there are a number of tools out there. You can get a feelings wheel, you know, just Google it, or you can email me and I'll send you a PDF copy of one that I have.

Another tool that's out there that I really like, uh, that I just discovered is this brilliant app called How to Feel. I don't get paid if you download it, so this is just me telling you that it's out there, but this app can help you walk through the process of diving down into the feeling that you're feeling naming it in a way that creates awareness for you and build your ability to address what's underlying the sensation that you're having.

And let me just walk you through what this app looks like.

First, it breaks your mood down into four quadrants. High energy unpleasant. High energy pleasant. Low energy unpleasant and low energy pleasant.

When you pick one of the quadrants, let's say high energy unpleasant, that gives you a 6x6 grid of feelings. Everything from enraged in the top left to uneasy in the bottom right. From the 36 choices, I'm gonna pick tense.

As I identify feeling tense, there are some options. I can add other emotions to the choice so I can kind of compound the conversation. I can add a journal entry to say what's going on, what I'm what's happening in my mind, how I'm thinking about this. And then I can also say what I'm doing. I can. There's a just a checkbox for, you know, I'm trying to work or I'm hanging out . And then you can add additional items as you feel the need.

Then you just, you know, complete the check in.

One thing that I really like about this app is that it will remind you to check in.

I'm a big proponent of habits and using habitual responses to solve everyday problems.

And these reminders can help you start checking in anywhere from one to five times a day.

Another thing that I love about this app is that it will help identify patterns.

I can't tell you how many times someone has come to me and said, I don't know what's going on in my brain in the 15 minutes or so before I view porn.

We are often unaware of our minds because we are in it, instead of observing it. And pattern recognition is key to learning how to deal with your emotions and how they are driving you toward unwanted porn use.

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But before we run off to analyze the data and build strategies, there's one more thing that we have to do. And we have to get good at feeling bad.

No, no one likes this step. And it feels like a strange idea. I mean, who starts their day thinking, "you know what I'm really want? I want to, I want to be the best at feeling terrible," but this is the capacity to face difficulty without needing to run from it.

Once we know the feeling, let's go back to that example that we had of feeling tense from just a minute ago, we'll want to learn how to sit with it without being compelled by it.

For most of us, feelings compel us to action. When I was younger and working in sales at a cell phone company, we learned that the most effective way to get someone to buy is to create a feeling.

To create a feeling to sell means to strategically evoke a positive emotion in a potential customer connecting it to the benefits of that product or service that you're trying to sell, thereby making it more likely that they're going to purchase and people want to feel good and creating positive feelings in association with what you sell makes them feel more likely to trade their money for that product because of how it makes them feel.

When we get clear about our feelings and what they do, and what actions they are trying to make us take, we begin to have the ability to sit through them without needing to take action. Unlike when I was selling cell phones, I don't want you to take action when you get the feelings. I actually want you to sit through that feeling without taking action.

And this is a crucial shift in perspective, because learning to sit with your feelings, rather than being compelled To act on them is how you reclaim control over your decisions. It's not about ignoring or suppressing those emotions. They're valid, and they're often rooted in something very real and very important to you.

But this is actually about giving yourself the space to observe them without being driven by them. When you can sit through discomfort, when you can sit with those emotions, you create a moment of choice. The chance to align your actions with your values rather than being pulled along by a fleeting emotional response.

Getting good at feeling bad is harder than it sounds, but it's one of the most important skills you can build if you want to quit porn and take back control of your choices. The more you practice sitting with discomfort, the less power it's going to actually have over you. And the more empowered you'll then feel to align your actions with your values.

Start, however, by figuring out which emotions you're feeling and use one of the tools that I mentioned before the feelings wheel or the how we feel app and just begin recognizing and naming your feelings.

You may even just want to simply set aside a few moments each day to reflect on your emotional state.

Remember, this is a process. It's not something that you're going to master overnight. It's not like, you know, decades of training and not feeling your feelings and dealing with them and I'm naming them is going to just like switch immediately.

This is something you're going to want to work at for a little while. Take some time, take two or three weeks, a month, two months, and say, "I just want to get good at being able to recognize the feeling that I'm feeling. At a deeper level, not just hungry, angry and horny, I want to get good at being able to say, I feel anxious, I feel stressed, I feel tense, whatever it is, and recognizing what that looks like and then not doing anything about it other than being present with it."

In the next episode, we're going to dive deeper into the practice of sitting with your feelings in a productive way, how to feel them without judgment, and how to use those moments to strengthen your ability to choose what aligns with the person you want to be.

And if you're ready to take the next step already, and you just want to get personalized support, I'd love to help you. You can sign up for a free consultation at GetToThrive.com/workwithZach. Let's figure out what tools and strategies are going to work best for you on this journey.

Thanks for tuning in. And I'll talk to you guys next week.