Quitting porn for good means not being an emotional debtor

Untitled project from Captivate

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So I wanna talk about emotional debt. One of these things that I have been, I've been working on this with my clients. I've been teaching it to them. I think it's one of the most powerful ways to look at the process that we are going through when we view pornography and avoid our feelings.

And we've talked about this on the podcast before we bought a house. We came, we moved back to St. George. We're so grateful to be here. And it was really super exciting for us to buy a house here in St. George because for 18 months we lived in Milwaukee and we really missed all our friends and the life that we had here.

I. And we just love it. Here it is getting hot though, so I might be like, uh, let's go back to Milwaukee for a couple days. So when we bought the house, we were really excited and then we sat down and I, so in a previous life I was securities licensed, which means that I understand some financial stuff.

Not as much as you might think. I'm, I would understand, but I used to be six and 63 licensed so I could like, Trade stocks and that sort of thing and as I sat down and looked at the amortization table, which is the thing that tells you how much you end up actually paying for the thing that you just purchased, I actually cringe a little.

And you get one of these when you buy a house or a car or anything with kind of a number of years in a loan. And in the end we'll end up paying probably about two times the amount that we purchased the house for. When we talk about buffering, we often just call it a behavior that creates a net negative in your life.

And while buying a house is probably not exactly a net negative in your life, in fact, hopefully it's a net positive. There's, the loans and money that we use to buy houses, they offer a really great analog for what we do when we buffer, or really how we manage our emotions. Let's talk about how we are both borrower and lender for our own emotions and how we can better manage that process by using some very simple math.

I like to talk about emotions as the math of our lives for a couple of reasons. One is I'm usually speaking with men, and when Darcy talks to the women, she uses different analogies. But when I'm talking to men, we men, we like to think our life's journey is a series of solvable puzzles and problems.

Unfortunately, the men and women that I work with, Often think that the emotional struggle that is often part of leaving pornography behind is a foreign land of mush and gush, right? We think, oh, it's Stuart Smalley and we gotta be super feely and touchy. That's not really what it is, and I just want you to be aware that when we get into the emotions of our lives, we really can look at them in terms of an equation of pluses and minus.

If that's helpful to you. You don't have to look at it that way if it's not helpful to you, but to me it's been very helpful to my clients. It's been very helpful. Second, it really gives us some powerful perspective on what's happening and what it costs to choose certain ways of dealing with our lives.

So here's. What the emotional loan process looks like. Here's how we become an emotional borrower. Let's start with that, right? So let's start with a really simple example. When we feel really stressed and we choose to turn to pornography, we feel arousal. So now we have this one-to-one view of emotions.

We have stress on the negative side, and we have arousal on the positive side. Now, if this were where the emotional exchange ended, Then we'd be totally fine. That would be the end of it. That would be us living life in 50 50 or opposition in all things, as I like to say, when we talk about it from a gospel perspective.

The problem is that this is usually not where it ends, especially when it comes to. Doing things that don't fit within our moral compass. Now, first feeling arousal doesn't actually deal with the reason why we might be stressed. So if I'm stressed because of work, then turning to pornography is not gonna get my work done any faster.

Or if I'm, if I'm a student, same thing, right? Second, that stressed feeling is now going to be compounded by additional negative feelings that I'm gonna have to deal with as well. Just like interest, when we borrow a positive feeling from ourselves, from our kind of like our future self, like arousal, something that doesn't really fit into our moral compass and we're borrowing against, the reality that we actually want, that doesn't really create an emotional benefit in our lives.

We actually create an emotional loan that will have to be paid back with what I like to call interest. So now we have stress, and then the interest is guilt and shame and frustration, and maybe even a little more stress that wasn't there before because we spent time doing something that didn't help us get work done.

And we are actually even more behind now. So we've now just created a four or a five to one exchange. So we've got one positive feeling or one. Feeling that can be construed as positive, right? The arousal that comes from looking at pornography. But we also then have those five negative feelings, the guilt, the shame, the frustration, the stress upon stress, and the original stressor, right?

Think about it, right? Imagine if somebody walked up to you on the street and they were like, Hey, I got a really nice new crisp dollar bill and I'll give it to you if you'll give me a crinkled up. Old Fiverr, right? You'd be like, "no, uh, I'm gonna keep my $5 bill. Thanks. I don't care what it looks like." but that is really exactly what we are agreeing to when we take the emotional loan of arousal or overeating or excessively checking our phone or playing video games to excess, that sort of thing.

We are taking an emotional loan from ourselves, short-changing ourselves and paying it back at a five to one ratio, sometimes more in order to feel good right now in this very moment. And that's what it's like when we bought our house, right? We bought a house, we feel great about it, and then we go look at the amortization table and we're gonna have to pay that back over time.

And when we feel a negative emotion, oftentimes we look to mitigate it by using a good feeling emotion like arousal. Which is what we feel when we look at pornography. So in that moment, we've done what I like to call an taking that emotional loan, meaning we have borrowed a positive emotion from ourselves, which we will need to pay interest on in the future.

The interest that we usually end up paying is a compounding of the negativity and the negative emotions that we feel. So just like buying a house, we take out a loan, we feel good, we feel excited, we, we even feel nice and comfortable. 'cause now we have a house, when we take an emotional loan out, when we use a buffer to enhance our emotional state in the short term.

We have to pay back the interest. So then once that emotional high fades, we have compounded our negative emotional state by layering in that additional negativity and the negative emotions like frustration, guilt, shame, and discomfort. So let's talk about so that's one side of it, right? Let's. It's, this is when I take out a loan, I have to pay it back.

So when I choose to buffer or feel arousal or overeat or play video games, rather than do the things that I've, said that I would do the things that I've committed to doing, for my own personal wellbeing, I'm taking out a loan and then I have to pay back that loan with interest. When it comes to, the other side of it, how do we actually become an emotional lender?

So let's take a look at that. Why do banks and lenders give people loans? I have people sometimes say because I'm a good credit risk. Nope, they do not give you a loan because you're a good credit risk. You, that may be a factor in how much of a loan they give you, and it may be a factor in how much the interest is on what they give you.

However, that's not why they give you a loan. It isn't either because you're a nice person or any of that, right? They do it because they want the interest. They want to get more out of the transaction than just their money back. That interest is what creates the wealth of a bank. And here we're trying to create wealth of emotions.

And by the way, this is a risk, right? This can be scary. Our lender gave us a big, huge amount of money upfront so we could buy our house and they took a risk on us. We are going to have to be willing to take a risk on ourselves and believe in our ability to earn dividends and interest over time, rather than needing to take the positive emotions upfront when that feeling of stress comes along.

We gotta be willing to take the risk of feeling it and not running from it. We gotta be willing to not fight, and we also have to be willing to not act like we have to avoid it. We actually process it when we just go through the process of feeling our feelings, feeling those emotions, and then doing what we need to do anyway.

We begin the process of giving our future self a loan. This is why I like to use the phrase, The currency of success is discomfort because when we are willing and able to actually go through the discomfort of the moment, we begin to create success in the long run. This means that, by the way, we're gonna feel stressed even when we don't want to, but there's a huge payoff.

After we feel all the way through our negative feelings, that huge payoff comes just like interest on a loan. And if you've never lent somebody money, it's pretty amazing. I actually I had a Lending Tree account and it was cool because I was micro lending to real people and I was also getting interest on that, and I really enjoyed that, that process of giving out loans and getting back money.

Just because my money was sitting there and I did nothing to make that money really right. This is what happens when we take the negativity upfront. We feel it, and then that emotion just has been taken care of. And when we choose not to, view pornography or overeat or whatever the buffering behavior is, we get to feel satisfied and maybe even proud or maybe even capable or even self-confident.

We get this entire, whole menu of feelings that are more subtle and that we can keep getting time and time again. We get to feel good about who we are. We get to feel good about who we're being and how we're living in integrity with who we want to be. And I don't think this is a one time thing. If I just don't look at pornography one day and I, just feel all of my stress, I get to feel.

That same confidence and that same, love for myself. Every time I think about that incident, we get a, we get good at feeling negative feelings upfront, right? And that's part of the practice that we do. And I really do think that we get more dividends over time when we're emotional lenders rather than emotional borrowers we're receiving interest instead of paying it.

And here's a cool thing, right? We are the only person that we can. Borrow from or lend to Now think about that there isn't somewhere that we can go and borrow from someone else emotionally because all of our feelings are inside of us as grown adults anyways. As kids, I think there's a little bit of borrowing that goes on there, that was, if you look at the parable of the 10 virgins, those ladies, I assume they were all ladies.

I'm pretty sure they were all ladies. Those ladies who didn't have the oil, they were looking to borrow from those who did have the oil. And they weren't really grown up in their own testimonies. Right? And this is the same thing that we're doing emotionally. We have to stop asking for other people to help us feel good and recognize that we're the only ones that can have an emotional strength be emotional borrowers and lenders in our own minds and in our own bodies, right?

So we have to decide how we wanna spend our lives. We have to decide whether or not we wanna spend our lives in perpetual emotional deficit, or do we want to have an emotional surplus that's gonna keep paying us dividends. I did a hard thing, like if you ever think about the hard things that you've done in your life, for me, one of the things that I look back on as a hard thing that I did, I enjoyed it immensely, but I also recognized that it wasn't exactly easy to do is be a missionary.

And I look back at that time and I have been given emotional dividends for choosing to do that hard thing time and time again year after year. The people that I met the relationships that I gained the. Just the love and the joy that I have in the Italian people. I look at my mission president who came and visited us the other day and who is off hopefully soon to go back to the Rome temple and be the Rome temple president.

They've been here in America quarantining and not being able to be there. But, I look at that relationship that I have with him, and that is one of the main. Dividends or one of the most beautiful dividends that I can point to. But I also, the companions that I had the, the relationships that I had with other elders in, that time of my life.

I look at those times and it wasn't easy, but I got so many dividends out of it. And this is simply the same thing that we're doing. Right now with our emotions, am I willing to go through the hard thing now? Am I willing to deal with whatever stress or frustration or whatever it is upfront and recognize that it's gonna take practice?

It's probably gonna take a little bit of relearning how to. Do what it is that we need to do. It's, l relearning how to deal with our emotions in a way that does fit into the mold of who we want to be. It's like going to the gym for the first time and being like, okay, I don't really know how to lift weights, but I'm gonna start by just trying.

I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna make sure that I just show up every day, even if it's just for five minutes. I'm gonna show up every day and I'm try to get better. And that's what we've gotta do when it comes to. Dealing with our emotions and becoming an emotional lender rather than an emotional borrower.

So let's talk about a little bit how to do this. And I teach this to my members and in my individual coaching clients in depth, and they, I think they love being able to go back to the training videos and the workbooks available to them inside the membership. But the process is really simple, and I think it's really extremely important that we all know how to do this.

First, you have to notice most of us really aren't there. We go from moment to moment and think that whatever comes into our heads and the actions that we take are just happening to us. When we start to notice, we begin to step out of our unconscious reactionary mind, and we start to bring that to our conscious mind and all the actions and the beliefs that are happening, right?

And this takes practice. So noticing in and of itself, that's the first step, and you're gonna need to practice that probably pretty regularly, like every day for a couple of weeks, just to begin to start to be good at it, right? The next thing we need to do is we have to say yes and no. Say yes. Of course I can go look at pornography.

I can stop feeling stressed and I can go look at pornography. And we can do whatever is on our mind, right? Whatever our mind offers us, we can say yes to that and we can feel good right now. We can choose that. That's totally available to us. I'm gonna choose to say no right now because I'm gonna observe what's gonna go on here.

I'm gonna see what's happening. And this is different from using willpower, right? This is because willpower is, we're not fighting with our brain. We're observing it, we're, we're withholding action, and then we're using questions to see what's actually happening. So we understand the process, and I like to call this the switch, right?

We're switching from just being inside our heads to being the observer, the watcher of our own mind and the problem solver. We're no longer just feeling our feelings. And going with the flow. We're like, oh, let's see what the problem actually is. And we start to ask questions. And this combo of yes no is like when we say some, someone says to us something like, oh, you're a Mormon, you can't drink.

And we say, I can, but I choose not to. It's really an acknowledgement that we are the masters of our agency and we're able to choose either way. And then after we say yes and no. We observe, we just pay attention. We start to ask questions. We start to watch. We really, you take notes, right? And you can take mental notes or you can write 'em down.

But just like an anthropologist, we are looking at the behavior. We're looking at the thoughts and the emotions that our brain is offering us, and we're just trying to learn what's happening. We're just paying attention. We don't have to make any decisions. Right now, all we're doing is we're paying attention to our brain and trying to.

Figure out what's happening. And last, but I think extremely essential to this process is we breathe deep breaths, just like the ones that you've always been taught. Just take deep, 10 deep. If your parents were like, if you were a kid with a little bit of a temper, or you were trying to figure things out and your parents were like, just take a deep breath, right?

Just take those deep breaths. Those deep breaths that help. Us fuel the body and the mind while we become the watcher of our brains. This process that we all need to learn is, I think, essential to being an emotional lender rather than an emotional borrower. And this process is one that I think if you can put it into practice, is going to pay.

Extraordinary dividends. So if you have questions about that, come see us at the webinar. I'd love to chat with you. I'd love to, get to know your names and your faces and just help you start this process. If that's all you do is come to that free call, please do. It's next. Like I said, it's next week.

Sign up at zachspafford.com/freecall. I'll put a link in the description. You guys are awesome. Come. Participate, take the next step forward. Be committed to a change in your life in a way that you've never been committed before. All right, you guys, have a great week. I'll talk to you soon.

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