Transcription
[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Help is Here podcast, brought to you by the Beyond Compulsion Academy.
Today, I'm going to be talking through the three ingredients that you need to overcome a porn addiction. So, I was on a mission trying to overcome this problem for years and years. You've probably heard my story at some point before, but if you haven't, essentially, I felt like I tried everything. And I get messages all the time from people who have read like, just hours and hours of content on how to overcome porn addiction. And they've gone in all these different directions, trying their best, but then eventually, there's this moment, and we call this the inevitable moment of compulsive desire. It's that moment where part of your brain goes, "Ah, to hell with it. I just want to give in." You know, I just, I can't do this anymore. You know, maybe one look, one look will be okay, and then I'll stop.
Okay, it's in that moment that you have a critical choice. And a lot of people, unfortunately, in that moment, they don't really know what to do because all this content they've read, all these podcasts, everything they've learned hasn't actually trained them to deal with that one specific moment. The truth is, even these podcasts, even this stuff on YouTube, really is probably not going to be the adequate training. And we have like, hours of training to go through, and it's like a full process to go through to understand exactly what to do in that critical moment. The best tip I can give anyone is to just really have a prepared plan in place. You know, I use a very, very specific A4 piece of paper, one script with five facts on it. When that moment comes, I go to that script. I think through the choice. I understand exactly what to do in that moment because I know I have two options.
One option strengthens the addictive part of the mind. Keeps me stuck in addiction for the rest of my life. Keeps those neural pathways, you know, just wired to crave and want porn. Keeps me feeling shame, low, lack of self-respect, annoyed at myself, disconnected, shame, just all of that, right? But equally, in that moment, I have another option, right? I can willingly accept a bit of temporary discomfort. You know, it doesn't last forever, it's just an urge, and I think it through and make my choice. I do that with a very, very specific script based on a thorough education. Now, what most content is going to do, unfortunately, they're going to ignore this moment, this critical moment when part of the mind just wants to do it. Part of the mind doesn't really care about the consequences because you know how it works. You know that a lot of the time, you're thinking rationally. You're cracking on with your day. You're doing your work. You're studying. You're seeing your friends, your family, whatever. You're taking care of business. But then suddenly, you know that your brain just switches and it just feels like, what the hell? Like, how is my brain just transformed from one mental state to another? You get these relentless desires, and all you can think about is doing this thing, and and then you're just all consumed by it, and you're resisting, and you're pushing it away, and then suddenly you snap, and you're back in the addiction, and you're doing this thing. It's all over. You finished, and you're like, "How the hell did I end up here again?" Right?
So, you know all about that, and you know that, you know, all this content that you're consuming on this problem, a lot of it anyway, is not actually dealing with that one critical moment. That needs to be the focus. That that needs to be the focus because that's the problem. A lot of people struggle with porn addiction recovery because they're misdiagnosing the main problem. You know, Einstein talks about this, how if he had like an hour to solve a problem, he'd spend like 55 minutes just trying to figure out what the problem actually is. And and this is where people go wrong. Is they're sort of doing all this random [ __ ] like the self-improvement, you know, like just watching random videos on porn addiction recovery. Um, you know, consuming like information on self-improvement, like getting in better shape, like, I don't know, making more money, spending more time with friends, or working hard at their job, or just doing all this random stuff. Then suddenly, you're still going to have that critical moment. You're still going to have that moment where part of your brain is like, I don't give a [ __ ]. Like, I just want to do this thing.
So, that's the thing is, what we want to do is start by diagnosing what the real problem is, which is that you have compulsive desires. Okay? Compulsive desires. That's what we call them. It's essentially that moment where you say, "To hell with it," right? Um, and these compulsive desires, the interesting thing about them is they stick around. I was talking to someone very recently who had actually spent years, years of their life without watching any porn. Years of their life without watching porn, and they managed to do that because they'd had a bit of a breakthrough in different areas of their life. But then one day comes along, and they end up relapsing again. They end up relapsing, and they're right back in that addiction, just stuck in it, going round and round in circles. And the thing is, I've actually worked with quite a lot of guys now who've gone down a similar route where they've actually stopped the behavior for a period of time, and quite a long period of time, but then once they do it once again, they're back in the addiction, and they have no idea how to get out because you do it once, you're going to want to do it again and again and again.
And so the absolute key thing is, is not to, you know, live on some self-improvement treadmill where you're always just trying to run away from the problem, and you're doing all this random stuff that's nothing to do with addicting your pathways, but instead, we face the problem head-on. And the skill that people need to be taught is, what do you do in that moment? It's how do you deal with compulsive desire? That is the number one thing I would recommend anyone, you know, focus their attention on, is how do I understand all the tactics, strategies of the addicted part of my mind because there's going to be this part of your mind that wants to do this thing that also destroys your life. So, it's dealing with that which is the number one problem. So, that's where my attention would be going if I was to, you know, start off on all of this again.
The other key thing is, we need to understand that thoughts create our feelings, and feelings create actions. And so we want to start looking at the thoughts a lot closer because there's going to be a lot of thoughts that come from the addictive part of the mind, which is just complete [ __ ]. And you're either going to get pulled around by these thoughts like an absolute puppet on a string and end up wondering how you've ended up back at porn, or you're going to be the one taking control and assertively answering back to this [ __ ] that comes from the addictive part of the mind. Right?
So, what I'll do now is, I just want to talk about three absolute core key ingredients, which I think anyone would need to actually overcome a porn addiction. Right? Number one is the education. So, the education would be not on random transcription factors and dopamine and neuroscience and KB and delta phosp, and you know, I could talk about that stuff for days, but it'd be utterly pointless. Um, I spent years understanding addiction in detail and the actual neuroscience of it. Um, I I don't have a degree in it. You know, I'm not going to act like I know everything. I I definitely don't. But I I know that that isn't actually useful because in that moment, as I say, like there's going to be a moment where you have these urges. You have this compulsive desire. And understanding the ins and outs of dopamine and how that works isn't actually going to help you answer back to this part of your mind that wants to engage in a compulsive behavior. It's not going to be useful.
So, when I say education, what I mean is the education on your own mind, and more specifically, the ways in which you're thinking about things which are actually keeping you trapped. Very, very quick example of that is, a lot of people will tell themselves on some level, "I can't watch porn." But that isn't true because they are watching porn, which actually proves the point that they can watch porn. And we go into a lot of detail of that in phase one of our program and teach people very specific scrap uh scripts so they can actually start to rewire their neural pathways correctly. So, education, understanding that actually a lot of your thoughts are probably going to be irrational when you're in the addiction, and you know, you have these thoughts that actually lead to relapsing. And so it's identifying the thoughts and changing those.
The second ingredient I would say would be a script. You know, I've talked about scripts quite a lot, but yeah, you definitely want to have a very specific script in place for dealing with the urges. We train our clients to use a very, very specific five-fact script so they can think through the full desire, make a rational choice in that moment, but that does require quite a lot of thorough training to even have that script in place. But you definitely would want to have something in place so that you can actually deal with that urge and think it through rationally in that moment. If you don't have something for that critical moment, well, the addict part of the mind's basically going to choose for you, and you're not going to feel like you've really even got a choice. That's absolutely critical.
And then the third thing, and this is really important. I've not actually talked about that uh this one thing that much on this podcast yet, but it is willingness. I mean, you have got to be willing to go through some discomfort. You know, if you don't have any willingness in you, if you're not that bothered, if you're just like, ah, you know, porn addiction isn't that bad, and you kind of just like, you're used to it, and you're like, ah, I can't really see any sort of change for me. This is just who I am. And and you let the addictive part of the mind actually convince you that those thoughts are real, which they're not. They're just coming from the addictive part of the mind, then you're not going to be very willing.
And so that's why it's really important to have the education first because a lot of people come to me, you know, we work with clients from all over, and a lot of people come to us, and at first, there's so much doubt that they can actually ever overcome this problem. There's like these feelings that like there's something wrong with them to the core, like they're going to be hopeless and never actually overcome this problem. They're going to just be stuck managing and reducing frequency of relapsing and all of this [ __ ]. But all of that doubt, all of that uncertainty, all of that future thinking, they're they're junky thoughts. They're coming from the addictive part of the mind. And so that's why you need the education first so that you can actually have the right level of willingness to realize that moment by moment, you can experience the discomfort. And you just do that repeatedly. You experience that discomfort. You think it through repeatedly over over. Do that enough times, and I can absolutely assure you, your life's going to change. Like everything's going to shift. You're going to have this absolute paradigm shift where you realize that you can be in control of your choices, and you just build up that evidence over time.
So you get to a position where you're like, "Yeah, I know I'll never ever go and watch porn again." Like, obviously, I won't do that. Um, because it becomes becomes so clear in your mind. Like, to me now, going and watching porn in my brain is like the same as going and punching a police officer. I'm like, the consequences are severe. It's like, yeah, one would lead to me being in a physical prison. The other one would lead to me being in a mental prison. Like, what's really the difference? You know, so you want to get so so clear on this. But you do this through retraining, reconditioning your brain. Like you have to start understanding how much this problem is harming you. And also start understanding that the reason you feel trapped is because there's a part of your mind, the addictive part of the mind, that wants you to feel trapped. And so it's going to come up with a load of [ __ ]. And you want to have the right education so you can counter that [ __ ] and actually see the truth, which is that moment by moment, you always do have a choice, and you never have to consent to helplessness and be stuck in a porn addiction.
Hopefully, this helps someone. Thank you so much for listening or watching. I'll leave a link in the description to the compulsion test. I recommend going ahead and getting a score out of 100 so you can see how much this problem is impacting you right now. Thanks again, and we'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.
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