Thought Management Will Not Solve Your Porn Problem
In the world of life coaching and some therapy modalities, thought management is a very popular practice.
To be honest, when we first started our coaching practice 4 years ago we focused heavily on thought management and how you needed to change your thoughts to create the feelings you want which lead to the actions you take and ultimately your results!
In our experience working with hundreds of clients over the last 4 years including our lived experience, we have found that managing your thoughts alone won’t create the results you are looking for.
If overcoming porn was as simple as changing your thoughts then you probably won’t be struggling with porn anymore.
Today we are going to discuss 2 reasons why thought management will not solve your porn problem.
And then, we are going to teach you 2 things that will help you deal with unwanted thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
#1 Our thoughts happen automatically and we have very little if any control over them.
I know in a past episode we discussed how many thoughts we have a day, how many of them are negative, and then how many of them are repeats each day so we won’t go into the details of that on this episode but if you are curious you can go listen to them.
I’m sure some of you if not all of you had the experience where you were doing something very specific like writing an email and then out of nowhere your brain offers you the thought, “You should go check out porn.” You were not actively trying to come up with the thought “you should go check out porn” but your brain automatically offered it to you.
Another example of this might be you are out to dinner for date night and your waitress comes up to take your order and your brain thinks, “oh man she is attractive I wonder what my husband is thinking right now. Or maybe our brains will remind us of the last time our spouse choose to look at porn because we were triggered by this attractive waitress.
#2 If we try to get rid of our thoughts our brain will hyper-focus on them.
The pink elephant experiment has shown us that this is scientifically going to happen.
What this means for most people is that they try to stop thinking about something, and that thing keeps coming back into focus.
For wives this might mean that they are trying to not think about their partner’s pornography choices during intimacy and it keeps resurfacing.
For those who are struggling with pornography, maybe you have tried really hard to change what’s on the stage of your mind and found that you keep coming back to it.
This was one of the things that would happen for one particular client. He’d be out on a run and see a woman running. He would tell himself that he couldn’t think about her or it wasn’t right to see her as beautiful because his wife is the only woman he’s allowed to think about that way. But, try as he might, his brain would just keep coming back to it all day. That was one of the really important parts of the process that he and I worked on in individual coaching. And I know Darcy works on this very issue with wives each time she works with them.
So what can you do?
Here are two ways to deal with unwanted thoughts with scientifically sound practices that our experience has confirmed are valid.
- See and interact with your thoughts, feelings, urges, and sensations as curiosities that your brain offers you
- Take action toward your values from a calm, clear-headed place.
Let’s start with #1. See and interact with your thoughts as curiosities that your brain offers you.
One of the reasons Darcy and I built Thrive Beyond Pornography was to give couples a framework to address and completely eliminate unwanted pornography from their relationships. The first pillar in that framework is to reframe the pornography struggle.
Most people see their thoughts that come up around pornography as threats. We see them as the enemy and as such we fight them, trying to push them out of our minds. As was mentioned, that strategy is not only unsuccessful for most people, it actually backfires, creating a negative loop of unwanted thoughts around the very thing we are struggling to eliminate.
On the other hand, when we reframe the thoughts that we have from a threat to curiosity, we begin to set ourselves up for success by reducing the emotion behind the thought.
For instance, many of my clients have said that when their mind offers them the idea that “Now would be a good time to look at porn” in whatever way their brain says it, they have often begun to tense up, feeling their body react in a fight or flight way. I know, I’ve thought that I have to get rid of this idea, I can’t be thinking that, this is wrong, and so on.
But, when I learned to think about my thoughts from a position of curiosity, I began to be able to get to the root of the issue instead of fighting with my brain to eliminate a thought.
If we take the example from earlier, as you’re writing an email your brain offers you the idea that you should go look at porn. Instead of fighting that thought, becoming curious about why the thought is there leads me to see what is going on for me emotionally. For me, it very likely would have been that writing that email was not very interesting or it could have been that the email was difficult to write because I needed it to convey a very important message.
Now that I see why my brain is offering me porn, I can understand it and reframe the problem from one of unwanted pornography viewing to one of discomfort overwriting an email. By the way, that discomfort may simply be because it’s boring and not particularly difficult. But no matter what it is, when I can see the problem clearly then I can take action. Which we’ll talk about here in a minute. But the only way to see the problems in our lives clearly is to be curious enough to follow them to their roots.
I often use this example with the men I work with, when you are working on a big project at the office and something goes wrong before you fix it, what do you do? Everyone I’ve spoken to says before I can fix the problem, I have to figure out exactly what went wrong.
Too often we think porn is the problem or our thoughts are the problem. The reality is, we don’t know what the problem is, so we keep trying to treat the symptoms, rather than getting to the root of the problem and dealing with it there.
Start by getting curious.
Now, taking action toward our values.
This might seem like an obvious idea and maybe one that you will have dismissed because someone in the past has simply said, “You know better than this, do what you know you’re supposed to do.”
That is not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about getting to a place where you have calmly and curiously sought to find out what the actual issue is. Understanding why your brain is offering you an escape from your current set of experiences by choosing pornography, then facing that issue head-on.
Along with seeing the actual issue and dealing with it directly, knowing what your values are is essential. This is one of the first exercises that our clients do in our course. They learn the difference between goals and values and begin to articulate what their values are in concrete ways. A lot of us believe we know what our values are, but if I were to ask you, what are your 5 core values, would you be able to tell me what they are off-hand?
It’s really difficult to move in the direction you want to go if you don’t have a compass. Your values are your compass.
In this case, here’s how I would handle my mind offering me porn. After identifying the reason that my brain was trying to save me from my discomfort, let's say that writing the email is boring. From a clear, comfortable, calm, and curious place, I would ask myself, is always being entertained one of my values? No. What are my values? My God, My wife, my kids, my work, and myself.
If I were to go through the boredom of writing this email, which of my core values would I be engaging in? My work.
Ok, What action would I take if I were to engage in my value of my work? One technique I like to use when I’m faced with a task I don’t really want to do, but that will bring me closer to my values is to try the five-minute rule. Tell myself, I can do this for just the next five minutes and I don’t have to go any further.
The key to this idea is that you are choosing this action from a calm,
Transcript
Episode 179
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[:Zach Spafford: Everybody and welcome to Thrive Beyond Pornography. I'm your host, Zach Spafford. Today is, it's just, you know, it's just another day, right? This is, um, this is one of my favorite days of the week because I get to talk about pornography yesterday.
Darcy and I wrote this together. Uh, she's not joining us today, but I wanted to give her credit because she wrote At least a good chunk of this, and I'm grateful for her and the work that she does, because the voice that she brings to add to this conversation is huge. In this week, I want to talk about a couple of things.
Really, what is thought management, and whether or not, and how thought management is useful or not useful within overcoming pornography. And in the, in the life coaching arena and in the therapy arena, you've got a couple of what they call modalities. You've got these ideas that people use. So there's act, which is what we use mostly.
There's cognitive behavioral therapy. And then most. Um, and there's Freudian therapy and, and a few other things. Most people who go to the life coach school, they essentially use cognitive behavioral therapy. The work that we do is really well backed by acceptance and commitment therapy, so there's a lot of, there's, but there's a lot of cross over there.
And to be honest, you know, when we first started our coaching practice about four years ago, we focused heavily on thought management and how you need to change your thoughts to create through the feelings you want, which lead to the actions. You take and ultimately your results in our experience working with hundreds of clients over the past four years Including our own personal lived experience.
We found that managing your thoughts alone won't create the results that you're looking for So if overcoming pornography was as simple as just changing your thoughts, then you probably you know You probably wouldn't struggle with pornography anymore today We're going to discuss two reasons why thought management will not solve your porn problem And then i'm going to teach you two things that will help you deal with unwanted thoughts feelings sensations, urges.
I'm probably just going to call those thoughts, but, uh, it covers the entire gamut. Number one, our thoughts happen automatically and we have very little control over them. That is one of the reasons why thought management does not solve our pornography problem. And number two, if we try to get rid of our thoughts, our brain will hyper focus on them.
And that's the second reason. So I know in the past. In, and in past episodes we've discussed, I've discussed on the podcast, how many thoughts we have a day. I think it's something like 60, 000 a day, 80 percent of which are negative thoughts and 95 percent of which are repeats. I'm not going to go too deep into that, but so that's already the, the landscape that your brain operates in.
It's constantly looking for negatives and it does this on purpose for very good reason. It's trying to keep you safe. That's why it does this. So, any sort of situations. So those repeated thoughts are important to help you keep an eye out for what's going wrong in the world. Now, the problem here comes with this hyper focus situation.
Which is, there's a pink elephant experiment that was done many years ago. And has been oft repeated in studies. But basically the gist of it is, if you take a thought. So if I say to you. Hey, I don't want you to think about pink elephants for the next 10 minutes, and if you think about pink elephants for the next 10 minutes, I'm going to take your family and put them in jail, right?
So we've got really high stakes and we've got a really inane thought. We've got this weird thought that we can't have. What do you think your brain's going to do over the next 10 minutes? Your brain is going to. At some point, not simply think about pink elephants, but it's going to become obsessed about that thought, and it's going to work to try and push it away, and it will bring it back, and then it'll push it away, and it becomes this negative feedback loop.
Here's the, here's what you're dealing with when it comes to pornography. What that, what that means for you is when you think I can't think about this thing, right? So for wives, this might mean that they're trying not to think about their partner's pornography choices during intimacy and it'll keep resurfacing.
It'll keep coming back endlessly. Whatever it is, the thing that you are trying to. Get rid of is going to come back into focus for those who are struggling with pornography. Maybe you've tried really hard to change what's on the stage of your mind and you found out that it keeps coming back. This was, I had a client who, for whom this was happening a lot.
than she's uh, just running. [:Try as he might, his brain would just keep coming back to that experience all day long. That was one of the really important things that he and I had to learn to process. He had to learn to process and I had to guide him through processing as we were in individual coaching. And I know that Darcy does this for wives as well.
Taking those thoughts and dealing with them directly. So how do we do that? What, what can we do? So here are two ways that you can deal with unwanted thoughts with scientifically sound practices that Darcy and I have experienced. And we've confirmed this with our own experience. So this is not just, you know, here's an idea, here's a theory.
Let me tell you that they need to do this. And then I don't know how to make it happen. This is exactly what we do. So the two. Ways that you can deal with unwanted thoughts are, first, see and interact with your thoughts, feelings, urges, and sensations as curiosities that your brain offers you. And second, take action toward your values from a calm, clear headed space.
So let's start with number one. See and interact with your thoughts as curiosities that your brain offers you. So one of the reasons Darcy and I built Thrive Beyond Pornography was to give couples a framework to address and completely eliminate unwanted pornography from their relationships. The first pillar of that framework is to reframe the pornography struggle.
Most people See their thoughts that come up around pornography as threats. If you have grown up, especially members of the church, but in any sort of religious context, or even if your wife or your mom or somebody reacted poorly to any sort of sexuality for you, and that was kind of a meaning frame that you were given, you might see sexuality in particular pornography as a threat.
It's a threat to your safety. It's a threat to your capacity to live a normal and healthy life. It's, you know, we might think that it's going to destroy us, that sort of thing. We see them as the enemy. And then what we do is we fight them. We fight those thoughts and we try to push them out of our minds.
Now, as I've mentioned here previously, that strategy is not only. Not successful for most people, it actually backfires because it creates a negative loop of unwanted thoughts around the very thing that we're struggling to eliminate. On the other hand, when we reframe the thoughts that we have from a threat to a curiosity, we begin to set ourselves up for success by reducing the emotion behind that thought.
For instance, many of my clients have said that when their mind offers them the idea that now would be a good time to look at porn in whatever way it is that their brain says it. So, you know, think about your own brain, think about how your brain offers you porn. It, it might be as clear as, hey, this would be a good time to look at porn.
I know, I, I know for me, I've had moments where, and I've I've mentioned this on the podcast before. I'm walking in the house and I know it's completely empty, which is a very rare thing, and my brain's like, hey, you should look at porn. Or, hey, we can get away with something. Whatever it is that your brain offers you, think about the way that that works.
For a lot of people, that begins this tense feeling. In your body that creates this flight or fight kind of mechanism, this, this response that is about, Oh no, I've got to get in and I've got to be really careful and I got to get really clear and, and if I don't push this away, it's going to destroy me, right?
I know that I've, you know, thought that I have to get rid of this idea for myself. I've thought, you know, I can't be thinking this, this is wrong and so on, whatever it is, however it is that you interact with that thought. So you can take your own thought on this and you can interact with it or look at how you would interact with it.
Right now. Now, think about it this way. When I learned to think about my thoughts from a position of curiosity, I began to be able to get to the root of the issue instead of fighting with my brain to eliminate the thought. If we take, you know, the example from earlier, you know, maybe you're writing an email and your brain offers you the idea that you should go look at porn.
and I didn't really want to [:Now that I see why my brain is offering me porn, I can understand it and reframe the problem from one of unwanted pornography viewing to one of discomfort writing an email. So I'm actually addressing the underlying issue. By the way, that discomfort may simply be because it's boring or not particularly interesting.
Not that it has to be difficult, not that it has to be really a problem. So you, you might want to look at, okay, what are the, what are the examples in my own life that I can see this framework in and just know, no matter what it is, when I can see the problem clearly, I can actually take action on the problem, which, you know, we'll talk about that here in a minute, but the only way to see the problems in our lives clearly is to be curious enough to follow them to their roots.
And I often use this example with men that I work with. When you are working on a big project at the office, so go back to whatever it is that you do for a living or whatever it is that you do for fun, and something goes wrong, before you fix that thing, what do you do? Everyone that I've ever spoken to says that before I can actually fix the problem, I have to figure out what went wrong.
And too often we think that porn is the problem, or that our thoughts are the problem. The reality is, we don't know what the problem is, so we keep trying to treat the symptoms, rather than getting to the root of the problem and dealing with it there. And to do that, what you have to do is you have to start by getting curious.
Now, the second component, which is taking action towards our values. This, this might seem obvious. Maybe it's an obvious idea to you. Maybe you've been told, uh, this in the past in some way. You know, maybe. You've dismissed this idea because someone has said, well, you know, better than this, do what, you know, you're supposed to do.
And that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about getting to a place where you have calmly and curiously sought to find out what the actual issue is, understanding why your brain is offering you an escape from your current set of experiences by choosing pornography and then facing that issue head on, along with seeing the actual issue and dealing with it directly, knowing what your values are.
This is one of the first exercises that our clients do in our courses. They learn the difference between goals and values, and then they begin to articulate what their values are in concrete ways. A lot of us believe that we know what our values are, but if I were to ask you right now. Stop everything right now and say what are your five core values?
Would you be able to tell me what they are offhand now for me? I'm gonna tell you hit those in a second but it's really difficult to move in the direction that you want to go if you don't have a compass and Your values are your compass in this case Here's what I would do to handle my mind as it's offering me porn as I'm thinking of writing this email.
After identifying the reason that my brain was trying to save me from my discomfort, let's say writing that email is really boring, from a clear, comfortable, calm, and curious place, I don't know if I could get enough C's in there, I would ask myself, Is being entertained one of my values? Okay, what are my values?
For me, my God, my wife, my kids, my work, and myself. If I were to go through the boredom of writing this email, which of my core values would I be engaging in? My work. Okay, what action would I take if I were engaging in my value of My work, the work that I do. Well, one technique that I like to use when I'm facing a task that I don't really want to do but that will bring me closer to my values is to try the five minute rule.
So I tell myself, I can do this for just five minutes and I don't have to go any further. The key to this idea is that you're choosing the action from a calm, clear, comfortable, curious place. That means you're not fighting with it. Now this takes practice, sometimes it takes being, having it pointed out to you in a number of ways and a number of opportunities.
en from again, from a clear, [:Place. Take action towards your values. You will be able to start to address the underlying issues in your pornography struggle quickly, simply, easily, and permanently. Now think about that. If you're here, you're listening to this podcast. That's what you want. Take some time today. See if you can practice that on your own.
If you don't, if you can't just set up a consult, zachspafford.com/workwithme. I will help you out. All right, my friends. I love you guys. And I will talk to you next week.
