Quinn and Martha both look back on it as the turning point in his recovery from a pornography habit. It was when Quinn committed to Martha that if he ever lapsed back to pornography, he would let her know within sixty minutes. If they couldn’t talk, he’d let her know by code through text or a voicemail. Their key phrase would be “a problem with the credit card.”
Quinn was convinced that this promise alone would put the final nail in the coffin of his porn problem. Martha wasn’t so sure. After all, he had expected other steps in the past to be just the thing to help him put it all behind him once and for all.
It turned out that Quinn relapsed a few times during the first year after he’d committed to within-the-hour disclosure. It still bothered Martha every time it happened, and she let Quinn know that. Nonetheless, great things came from it. It changed the dynamics of the struggle between them, the struggle within Quinn, and the struggle within Martha.
A couple of months after signing their new contract, Quinn called Martha at 4:15 one afternoon. He explained to her that he’d been reading the news online during a slow time at his office. One of the links on a mainstream news website had been titillating. He clicked. Links on that site were even more edgy. He followed that trail back into familiar territory, clicking and clicking around through the smut for several minutes. Then he came to himself, clicked out, and with the effect of that potent drug still reverberating through his system, Quinn had picked up the phone and dialed his home number.
It was a victory, but it hadn’t been an easy one. “The way my heart raced when I looked at pornography again after months without viewing it was nothing compared to how it pounded as I waited for Martha to answer the phone.” He had walked outside into the parking lot so that he could talk more freely with her about what he’d done. Both he and Martha, at my suggestion, avoided asking about the nature of the content (like which celebrity did Quinn find irresistible and why? Did the women he looked at have larger breasts than her?). Instead, they talked about how many minutes it had gone on, whether it escalated to courser content over time, whether he had masturbated or not. They also talked about what had been going on in the hours and days before his lapse. Were there any warning signs that he’d been at risk? What had his thoughts been? What was going on emotionally that might lead him to hanker for an escape?
Quinn’s honesty had profound effects. (With all the benefits, it’s no wonder “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is one of the ten commandments.) Martha explained, “As we’ve talked after his lapses, I noticed things I never had before. These were things that had completely escaped me because he had never allowed me close enough to his struggle to see it clearly, to see it for what it really was. I could tell right away was that he wasn’t going to pornography as a way of turning away from me and toward other women. He’d lapse into it to turn away from life, to escape. It was a drug to him. I could never compete with porn, not because I don’t have a supermodel’s body, but because I’m a real live person. He associates me with real life. I’m not a blissful escape, and I don’t think he expects me to become one.”
Another thing occurred after Quinn opened up to Martha immediately following his second slip-up. “I was angry at him again,” she recalled. “All I said to him that time was, ‘Really?! Can I not even go to book club for two hours? Really?!’ I was so mad. He didn’t even try to talk to me about the details, and it was a good thing because I wasn’t in the mood. I just couldn’t believe that he was still going to keep going back. I thought, just like all the other things we’ve tried before, even this one isn’t going to work. However, in the following weeks, I started to notice some of the tightness inside me easing. I realized later what it was: the threat of secrecy was no longer this cloud looming over our relationship, over our lives. I still didn’t know how he was going to do today, but at least I knew—really knew—how he’d done right up to yesterday. In fact, I knew that if he’d had a problem and gone back to porn, it would have happened within the last hour. That was comforting, to at least know what we were dealing with. He might still be struggling with an addiction, but at least he was being real with me.
As I keep working with couples like Quinn and Martha, I’ll keep sharing here the benefits they report of working together to retrieve their marriages from the jaws of porn. If you’re in the same boat they are, I’d love to hear what you’re noticing and learning along the way.
Monday, September 27, 2010
The ABCD Alternative to Porn
Gary had always tried to avoid conflict. He just didn't like it when a fuss was made, especially if he was at the center of it.
He'd always been shy. As a kid, it always made it worse when someone pointed out how shy he was. The worst of all was when someone tried to help him "get out of his shell." Now he was okay being called shy. Someone had noticed the truth and he didn't view it as a negative anymore. It was his way to be a little more anxious, thoughtful, and solitary than others and he was okay with that. He enjoyed being able to do his thing, contribute in the ways he felt comfortable, and feel like that was enough.
Gary had settled into patterns that worked for him in most areas of life. However, his current job is creating some problems for him. He manages computer systems for an insurance company. Most days and most weeks, he has more to do than he can get done. With so much on his plate, he's often frustrated at the end of the day. The worst part of it for him is when he doesn't get everything done on time. If it's bad enought that his boss or a customer complains, that's torture for Gary. He tries to avoid that at all cost.
Unfortunately, sometimes it costs Gary a lot to try to avoid disappointing other people. When things got busy sometimes he comes in to work early, stays at his desk through the lunch hour, and stays late trying to get caught up.
Unfortunately, he can't stay in that wound up mode for long before he needs a release. The primitive, surival part of Gary's brain knows an "effective" one: pornography. He is at a much greater risk of relapse during such times of stress.
Gary tries to combat the urges to view porn again, and he succeeds most of the time. However, every time he lapses (lately that has only been once every few months) it's almost always during or right after a particularly stressful day and week.
For Gary, avoiding porn is like closing down the Queensburrough Tunnel. It's probably not going to work unless we make sure to direct drivers to the Brooklyn Bridge so that traffic still has a way out of Manhatten.
What could be Gary's alternate release?
I knew it would go better if that new and different release came early on, before his brain and body had a chance to work themselves up into a state of reactivity. He needed something to do as he was getting in to work early or instead of skipping lunch. I encouraged him to try the ABCD technique to help shift his body and brain out of reactive mode and back into a state of mastery.
A is for accept. Try accepting whatever it is you find threatening. I encouraged Gary to accept that he might disappoint his boss. Surrender to the possibility that he wouldn't get everything done rather than wasting so much time and energy and expending so many stress hormones bracing against that possibility throughout the whole day. Accepting the dreaded outcome doesn't mean that it will happen. In fact, once we allow that things may very well go poorly, it frees us up to work more effectively on the tasks at hand. We've let the final outcome go, and thus we can plug along at the nitty gritty details, the very place where we can work most productively anyway. Accepting the worst improves our chances that things will actually turn out just fine.
I encouraged Gary to take acceptance one step further. "When your anxiety hits, instead of thinking 'Oh, no!' say to yourself, 'Oh, good. I'll practice mastery.' Anticipate those bad moments as great opportunities to recondition yourself." Conditioning is a simple process, it just takes repetition. Pair a response with a trigger often enough, and the response will eventually be generated by the trigger. It got to the point that Pavlov could make his dogs salivate just by ringing a bell. The automatic response we want is mastery when we usually rise into reactivity. If we practice the ABCDs of mastery enough when we start to feel anxious, eventually our body and brain will pair the two. It will start making the shift on its own, automatically generating some of the elements of mastery when we feel anxiety coming on.
B is for breathe and notice. Take a nice, full breath and notice something that's real now: a sight, a sound, or something you can touch. Breathing insures that the body and brain are getting oxygen, which helps calm the nervous system out of reactive mode. Noticing some concrete and specific aspect of the physical reality helps bring us back to the here and now. Here and now is where Gary lives and can exercise power; he can't do anything to directly influence that imaginary future where his boss is ready to fire him for what he failed to get done.
C is for commit. Commit to a mental image of how you want to live. For Gary, this wasn't a vision of him checking off all his tasks off the list at the end of the day. Rather, it was the image of living a life not driven by tasks. He didn't want work to dominate his mind and his life. He wanted to get his work done, but keep his primary focus on what really mattered: his life after work, with his wife and two kids. That felt very compelling to him. They were the reason he was going to work. He wanted to be able to remember that in the middle of the day, to really feel it, rather than getting so focused on and caught up in work that it seemed life or death.
D is for do. In reactive mode, energizing chemicals are coursing through our systems. Even when we resist the urge to act on a destructive impulse, that may not dissapate the energy driving that impulse. Spend some of that energy by deciding on an action and then taking it. Even if it's just getting up for a minute to take a quick little walk. Gary spends a lot of time in meetings, so he may have to do something while sitting still. I encouraged him to tense muscle groups in his body briefly, for instance by pressing his toes up toward his shin, pressing his heels into the ground, and then also tensing his thighs, hamstrings, buttocks, and even his abs. Just for maybe 15 seconds before releasing. He can do all this without anyone else at the conference room table noticing. It will burn off some of those energizing chemicals and he'll feel a little less compulsive and driven as a result.
I'm hoping that this tool will help Gary stop getting so wound up that he's at risk of falling for that old, self-defeating release of pornography. I'll let you know how it works for him. Please feel free to try it out and let me know if it works for you.
He'd always been shy. As a kid, it always made it worse when someone pointed out how shy he was. The worst of all was when someone tried to help him "get out of his shell." Now he was okay being called shy. Someone had noticed the truth and he didn't view it as a negative anymore. It was his way to be a little more anxious, thoughtful, and solitary than others and he was okay with that. He enjoyed being able to do his thing, contribute in the ways he felt comfortable, and feel like that was enough.
Gary had settled into patterns that worked for him in most areas of life. However, his current job is creating some problems for him. He manages computer systems for an insurance company. Most days and most weeks, he has more to do than he can get done. With so much on his plate, he's often frustrated at the end of the day. The worst part of it for him is when he doesn't get everything done on time. If it's bad enought that his boss or a customer complains, that's torture for Gary. He tries to avoid that at all cost.
Unfortunately, sometimes it costs Gary a lot to try to avoid disappointing other people. When things got busy sometimes he comes in to work early, stays at his desk through the lunch hour, and stays late trying to get caught up.
Unfortunately, he can't stay in that wound up mode for long before he needs a release. The primitive, surival part of Gary's brain knows an "effective" one: pornography. He is at a much greater risk of relapse during such times of stress.
Gary tries to combat the urges to view porn again, and he succeeds most of the time. However, every time he lapses (lately that has only been once every few months) it's almost always during or right after a particularly stressful day and week.
For Gary, avoiding porn is like closing down the Queensburrough Tunnel. It's probably not going to work unless we make sure to direct drivers to the Brooklyn Bridge so that traffic still has a way out of Manhatten.
What could be Gary's alternate release?
I knew it would go better if that new and different release came early on, before his brain and body had a chance to work themselves up into a state of reactivity. He needed something to do as he was getting in to work early or instead of skipping lunch. I encouraged him to try the ABCD technique to help shift his body and brain out of reactive mode and back into a state of mastery.
A is for accept. Try accepting whatever it is you find threatening. I encouraged Gary to accept that he might disappoint his boss. Surrender to the possibility that he wouldn't get everything done rather than wasting so much time and energy and expending so many stress hormones bracing against that possibility throughout the whole day. Accepting the dreaded outcome doesn't mean that it will happen. In fact, once we allow that things may very well go poorly, it frees us up to work more effectively on the tasks at hand. We've let the final outcome go, and thus we can plug along at the nitty gritty details, the very place where we can work most productively anyway. Accepting the worst improves our chances that things will actually turn out just fine.
I encouraged Gary to take acceptance one step further. "When your anxiety hits, instead of thinking 'Oh, no!' say to yourself, 'Oh, good. I'll practice mastery.' Anticipate those bad moments as great opportunities to recondition yourself." Conditioning is a simple process, it just takes repetition. Pair a response with a trigger often enough, and the response will eventually be generated by the trigger. It got to the point that Pavlov could make his dogs salivate just by ringing a bell. The automatic response we want is mastery when we usually rise into reactivity. If we practice the ABCDs of mastery enough when we start to feel anxious, eventually our body and brain will pair the two. It will start making the shift on its own, automatically generating some of the elements of mastery when we feel anxiety coming on.
B is for breathe and notice. Take a nice, full breath and notice something that's real now: a sight, a sound, or something you can touch. Breathing insures that the body and brain are getting oxygen, which helps calm the nervous system out of reactive mode. Noticing some concrete and specific aspect of the physical reality helps bring us back to the here and now. Here and now is where Gary lives and can exercise power; he can't do anything to directly influence that imaginary future where his boss is ready to fire him for what he failed to get done.
C is for commit. Commit to a mental image of how you want to live. For Gary, this wasn't a vision of him checking off all his tasks off the list at the end of the day. Rather, it was the image of living a life not driven by tasks. He didn't want work to dominate his mind and his life. He wanted to get his work done, but keep his primary focus on what really mattered: his life after work, with his wife and two kids. That felt very compelling to him. They were the reason he was going to work. He wanted to be able to remember that in the middle of the day, to really feel it, rather than getting so focused on and caught up in work that it seemed life or death.
D is for do. In reactive mode, energizing chemicals are coursing through our systems. Even when we resist the urge to act on a destructive impulse, that may not dissapate the energy driving that impulse. Spend some of that energy by deciding on an action and then taking it. Even if it's just getting up for a minute to take a quick little walk. Gary spends a lot of time in meetings, so he may have to do something while sitting still. I encouraged him to tense muscle groups in his body briefly, for instance by pressing his toes up toward his shin, pressing his heels into the ground, and then also tensing his thighs, hamstrings, buttocks, and even his abs. Just for maybe 15 seconds before releasing. He can do all this without anyone else at the conference room table noticing. It will burn off some of those energizing chemicals and he'll feel a little less compulsive and driven as a result.
I'm hoping that this tool will help Gary stop getting so wound up that he's at risk of falling for that old, self-defeating release of pornography. I'll let you know how it works for him. Please feel free to try it out and let me know if it works for you.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Former Porn Junkie Sober 20+ Years
I have lots of spare moments, chances to brush up on my reading, as I travel around the country training therapists to treat pornography addicts. I’m knee-deep in this material all the time, but I was still a bit self-conscious sitting on a bench outside the airport thumbing through a volume, Pornography Addiction Workbook emblazoned across the front in bold red letters. There was a smartly dressed man sitting a couple of seats down from me. When I glanced up he said, “I used to be addicted to porn.” I put down my book and smiled. “Got into it in the Navy. Then I couldn’t kick the habit. My wife hated it. And who can blame her: sweet young thing, thought I would have eyes just for her. I wanted to ease her mind, but I kept falling back in. So I’d hide it. Then she’d find it and around and around we’d go again.” He shook his head. “Those were hard years. Struggled into my late twenties. Life got much better once I got that under control.”
He looked to be in his late fifties. Some quick math told me he must have close to three decades of sobriety under his belt. I’d only been in the business fifteen years, so I’d never talked with anyone with that kind of recovery to look back on. What an opportunity. Suddenly I hoped our hotel shuttle would be slow to arrive. I wondered what it was like for him now.
“It still calls to me sometimes,” he admitted. Then he shrugged and laughed. “I just take that as part of life. It’s all around us these days. I pay attention to see if there’s anything I did to put myself at risk so I can avoid those problems in the future. I don’t watch TV late at night anymore. I bring something to read when I’m travelling, or some entertainment of my own for evenings in the hotel room.”
The airbrakes screeched and the door of the shuttle bus popped open in front of us. I realized we probably weren’t going to be talking about porn anymore. “How are things for the two of you now?” I asked as we settled into our seats in the bus and it lurched away from the curb. “The two of us are now thirteen. We have four kids and seven grandkids. We've been blessed. You’re from Salt Lake. Are you LDS?” I nodded and he continued, “I’m serving as a Stake President in Colorado. Help lots of people with this problem now. Life has been good to us. Couldn’t be happier.”
It was just a brief conversation, but I’ve thought about it a lot since. A few things were striking:
- He doesn’t overreact when porn sometimes still calls to him. He doesn’t let that suck him back into shame: “What’s wrong with me?! I’m never going to get over this! I’ve ruined myself for life!” He doesn’t sound the alarms: “Dang! I’m still addicted! Gotta fight these urges with all my might!” As a result, he doesn’t overcorrect. He isn’t hypervigilant, worried that every sexual cue might lead to his downfall.
- He seemed to be relaxed and at ease. I remember him shrugging and laughing about temptation being a part of life.
- He stays observant and flexible. As a result, he learns from experience. If something puts him more at risk than usual, he takes it to heart without panicking. He takes simple, sensible steps to make life easier for himself in the future. If his new approach works better for him, he sticks with it. He doesn’t assume that the mere passage of time makes him safe and knowingly put himself back in harm’s way.
His way is a relaxed, perceptive, easy-going, but committed one.
How different it is from the knee-jerk reaction we have when we’re fed up. We’re prone to fall into an uptight, impatient, put-my-head-down-and-do-whatever-I-need-to-do-to-put-this-habit-behind-me-once-and-for-all mode. Unfortunately, that way is inflexible and more of the same. It hasn’t worked for us before, why would it now? Even a good Navy man knows that sometimes there are better ways than “ @#!*% the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
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