Never Fail Again Overcoming Pornography

Hey, if you are ready to get started on your journey to quit porn and start thriving, go to zachspafford.com/freecall and register for a live webinar this Thursday.  You’ll be glad you did. 

When I struggled with pornography and was attending the 12 step meetings regularly, one of the things that was the most difficult to deal with was the idea that any missteps meant that I was starting back at zero each time.  

The whole idea, especially with 12-step meetings where you would get a token or a chip for each period of sobriety, as they called it, and if you messed up, even one time, that meant that you would go back to zero.

It was discouraging and depressing.  

Each time I went back to zero, I felt that I was a complete failure. That was how we treated it at the meetings, it was how I treated it in my mind, and it was how Darcy treated it in our conversations. 

In today’s podcast, I want to teach you how you can set yourself up to never fail again as you overcome pornography. 

Imagine you are working on eating healthy and working to make your weight more reflective of a healthy body as well as eating according to that ideal. 

Each week for ten weeks you eat the things on your plan. You feel good.  You’ve lost 20 pounds. You’re doing well.  

Then, on a regular old Tuesday, with no special meaning and no reason to celebrate, you decide to eat everything in sight.  Nothing is on your list and none of the things you eat are what you might call “good for you”. You feel like you can’t help yourself.  

The next morning, you wake up and you’ve gained a pound.  You are 19 pounds lost instead of 20.  Are you back to zero? Are you starting over, are you a complete failure?  

I know that if a friend of mine called me that Wednesday morning and said, “Look, I failed.  I gained back one of the 20 pounds I lost and I’m just so ashamed of myself, I think I’m going to quit on my goal of eating healthy.”  I know what I would say to them.  

Hey, you have something to be proud of.  You’ve done 10 weeks of healthy eating.  Paying attention to your mind and what it is offering you around your food habits.  You’re doing so well.  You’ve lost 19 pounds.  You’re healthier than you’ve been in a while.  

I think we all would. 

But, for many of us, that is not how we approach pornography. 

So, today, I’d like to offer you two ideas that you can use to help you never fail again. 

First, Progress trumps Perfection. 

When we think about our struggles, we tend to think of them in terms of “have I arrived yet?” Have I overcome porn entirely yet?  Have I lost all the weight I want to yet? Do I make enough money yet? Do I have a degree yet?

In life, progress is more important than the place we’ve arrived at. When we value progress, we value ourselves as we are.  

You might be listening to this and say, “I don’t want to be who I am right now. I want that person to be gone. I want to be someone who never views porn again. I can’t value who I am.  I must be someone else.” Or some version of that. 

Here’s the problem with that.  When we believe that we aren’t enough, it shows up in our actions.  It shows up in our attitude.  It shows up in our results.  

If you think about your experiences with little children who are learning to walk, you might have noticed that they simply accept the things that happen as a matter of course.  And If they get sad or frustrated, when they fall or fail to make the progress they feel they would like to, and start crying, what do we do?  We pick them up and tell them it’s ok and that they are doing a good job and to keep trying. 

We value their progress, regardless of how little it is.  We believe in their capacity to succeed, as long as they keep trying.  

No one would stand over them and shame them for not being perfect, or yell at them for not getting another step in.  

Now, the truth is that we are not babies.  We are grown-ups and when we choose porn, in spite of our best efforts, there are consequences, including how our choices affect those around us.  

I would argue, however, that when we approach pornography in a progress-over-perfection attitude, we free up the space in our brain to keep trying. 

The second thing that I think anyone who is choosing pornography can do to never fail again is to Learn Something and Move Forward.  

In my program, Thrive Beyond Pornography I have a module dedicated to practicing this very thing and in coaching, we dive deep into how to effectively do this.  

Think about an auto mechanic.  What is the first thing he asks when you bring your car into him. “Can you describe the problem?”.  Imagine if you just said, “I don’t know”  and told him to figure it out.  It would take a lot longer than if you can accurately describe, in detail what lead up to the problem, what the problem is, and how you think the problem started. 

One of the first things that most people do after they choose pornography is they work hard to forget what happened.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked a client to describe to me the events that lead up to choosing porn and what their mind offered them as they chose porn and heard the response, “I don’t know”. 

In order to learn from our mistakes, we need to face them, head-on, and in full daylight. 

That means, in order to never fail again, we have to be willing to see the problem so we can learn from our choices and try new ways of resolving the issues that we face. 

Learning how to mindfully and accurately describe the problem is one of the many steps that will allow us to figure out what is going on so that each time we make a choice that goes against our moral compass, we can use it to grow instead of beating ourselves up and feeling like a failure. 

Progress over perfection and learning something so you can move forward are game-changing tools.  Just these two steps alone can dramatically improve your capacity to overcome pornography and never fail again.  

Send me an email with your progress, I’d love to hear from you.