LOVE HEALS PORN - 30 Days to Greater Freedom from the Habit

The first time I met Greg he looked sharp in his starched blue shirt and pleated dress slacks. He was waiting for me when I arrived at the office ten minutes before our 7 a.m. appointment. He handed me a neat stack of the paperwork our office had sent him to fill out. Everything about Greg said here's a guy who has figured things out and has it all put together.

Porn, Compulsion, and Self-Hatred

As we talked about his life, a different story emerged. He'd been struggling for decades with a porn habit he'd never quite been able to kick. And he was super hard on himself about it, to the point of self-loathing. In fact, he said it straight up: "I don't like myself. How could I? I keep doing things I've committed not to do, things that hurt my completely innocent and amazingly supportive wife, degrading things that ruin my self-respect."

Over the years, my love for men like Greg has only deepened. And I know that love is exactly what they need to heal--but not from me. If someone else's love could heal them, the love of their wife, girlfriend, families, or other loved ones would surely have done the trick by now.

I'd enjoy nothing more than to access the hard drive of men like Greg, find every last line of code for self-hatred, and write over it, programming them to love themselves instead. But how do we reprogram the human heart?

Breaking the Code of Compulsion

After my mentor, Dean Byrd, and I published Willpower Is Not Enough twenty years ago, I started spending my early morning hours poring over psychology research in an effort to create a science-based program for kicking habits and recovering from addiction. Obviously, it's taken much longer than I'd hoped, but our new Love Heals Porn program is the result of that process. Along the way I've learned many things from the peer review literature on the topic, from other professionals who have mentored and taught me, and even more from the clients I see every day in my office.

Often, the research would tell me something ought to work, but field testing by my clients showed me it didn't. When my brilliantly designed and enthusiastically shared homework assignments not only failed to bring results but didn't get used at all, I was tempted to blame my clients. "They're resisting the process." "Deep down they don't really want to change." "They lack desire and discipline."

Desire and Discipline... Are Not Enough

However, you wouldn't have to spend much time with my clients to see that I'd be dead wrong to blame them. Look into their eyes as they describe how their porn habit crushes their confidence and self-respect and you'll see that they want nothing more than to change. Knowing how hard they work for their money and the amount my office debits out of their account every time we meet screams that they're eager, not resistant. And discipline? My clients have shown more passion and follow-through than I'd ever be able to muster. All the way from the academic and professional dedication it takes to become a surgeon, professor, or magistrate to the mental discipline it takes to be an airline pilot or on the SWAT team. Since I only lasted a half day of practice before I was barfing behind the bleachers and deciding I didn't want to be on the high school football team after all, I've been particularly impressed by those clients who've accomplished athletic feats and withstood physical challenges like the rigors of Navy Seal training, success as a professional athlete, and nailing V15 level rock climbs.

A heightened respect for my clients and their strengths didn't diminish my frustration when they wouldn't do their homework or, when they did but it failed to help them kick their porn habit. So in an effort to figure out what was breaking down, and based on the belief that I shouldn't ask someone else to do anything I'm not willing to do, I road tested these science-based homework assignments for myself. And discovered, to my chagrin, that I didn't complete most of them either. Once I was out of the office and living regular life, my autopilot routine took over and I dropped the ball. Sometimes I simply forgot exactly what I was intending to do differently. Sometimes the pull of old familiar behavior pattern was simply too strong to resist.

How to Have a Change of Heart

As we've created this set of interventions, we've thrown out more exercises than we've kept. Those that made the cut have been honed over the years, boiled down and condensed to their essential core. Each one will take you approximately ten minutes to learn and two or three minutes to apply. There are 30, so don't sweat it if they don't all work for you.

This program is about cultivating more love in your life, so please, please be patient and compassionate with yourself as you go through the process. Don't get down on yourself if you end up skipping days and the program takes you two or three months to complete instead of one. And don't get too anal, trying to stack each habit on the last until you've built yourself a tower of blocks that's bound to topple. Some of the tools you'll try only once, others not at all because they just don't resonate. Others will be great for you eventually, but too much of a stretch the first time you learn about them. In other words, just keep plugging along. Don't let yourself get so enthused that your motivation burns out too quickly... and don't let yourself get so discouraged that you stop midway through the program.

Be forewarned: sometimes all it takes is a firm resolve to take concrete, effective steps to make changes in an important area of our lives... for all hell to break loose. Chaos descends. Stress at work ramps up. Relationships threaten to unravel. Old fears rush back to haunt us again. Wavy mirrors and shifting floors populate the funhouse of our minds. It's almost enough to talk us out of trying to change. Would it be better to just accommodate this porn habit, perhaps tame it a bit, rather than keep trying to kick it altogether? If any of this happens to you--or all of it!--just remember the key message British citizens whispered to each other and plastered on their buses and shop windows during World War II: Keep Calm and Carry On. Because, to borrow two other slogans from His Majesty's Stationary Office from that period, "Freedom is in Peril’ and only "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory’. And, I might add, your love. Especially your love.

That, my friends, is how you will go about reprogramming your heart.

Do This

Take a few minutes to consider making this resolve today: "Throughout the coming month or so I will keep spending a little bit of time most days learning how to infuse more love into my life and learning about the difference that will make in my efforts to get free of porn. I will try out at least some of the ideas and tools and hang on to the ones that seem particularly helpful. I will trust that, with practice over time, they will naturally become more permanent features in the way I think and live. In the process, I will feel more love, both for myself and others, and that will be a potent boost in my efforts to kick my porn habit."

If you're willing and ready to act on this resolve, go to my new website, Love Heals Porn, and sign up for our new 30 day program. You'll get an email each day with a brief lesson (5-10 minutes) and an actionable step you can take now to apply that lesson in your life.