Your deeper sense of self, who you are as a human being, both body and soul, can be a profoundly helpful anchor when the brain starts hankering for superficial and inappropriate sex. My friend George Collins suggests a simple way to facilitate this anchoring in his book, Breaking the Cycle:
"As a start, just put your hand on your heart, close your eyes for a moment, and feel the essence of you. Experience that stillness deep inside yourself. Although this may sound strange, I'd like to you try it anyway. Time and time again I've seen the simple act of experiencing stillness lead clients to discover how to live their lives in new and more satisfying ways."
The Value of Anchoring
We experience so many tugs and pulls amidst everyday life that we can start living in reaction to that urgent thing over there and this interesting thing right here. We end up spending our days like a pinball, bounced from one superficial reaction to another, having completely lost our connection to who we are deep down. Unfortunately, all these other little bounces prep our mind to be bounced to porn.
But it didn't start with porn. The pinball got rolling as we let our lives become a series of mini mental hijackings. We let ourselves get riveted for a minute or two by the news on our smartphone of some politician's snafu of the day and go right from that to the caramel brownie that looked so tasty behind the glass at the dessert counter that we just couldn't pass it up. We are no longer in the driver's seat of our lives, having let our minds and bodies be driven by the daily tsunami of media and marketing.
How to Anchor
Pausing what you're doing throughout the day and placing your hand on your heart is a way to encourage your mind to slow down and pay attention to what's deeper: your essential self. With your hand on your heart and your mind oriented inward, you may start to feel more in touch with yourself or a quiet sense of peace.
Conversely, you may become aware of some unease that you hadn't noticed before. Although it might be a relief to settle yourself for a minute and get in touch with what's going on deeper down inside, it's not always pleasant in that way. The goal is not to feel better but to get in touch so that in the future you can better stay in touch.
What Flows from Within Will Look Different
When we're in touch with ourselves it changes the way we live. Our lives become beautiful as we act in ways that are in coherence with our values. And we're beautifully balanced, integrated body and soul. We freely manifest various aspects of ourselves, flashing with greater ease from one facet to another, be that sensuality, spirituality, playfulness, learning, or socializing. This is how we get our fill of a broader and more balanced panel of the soul nutrients we require to thrive.
Specifically, you may find yourself walking slower and enjoying the scenery more. You might smile and have more meaningful conversations with loved ones--or even strangers. And when people ask what you want, you'll have an easier time answering from the heart, because you're used to turning inward instead of being so caught up in what's out there.
All of this is and more is what's coming as you learn to stay in touch with yourself. For now, here is the action step you can take to start practicing:
Do This
Take a couple of minutes and put your hand on your heart. Turn your attention from all the action that's going on "out there." Listen below the surface winds and waves of thoughts. At first it might seem unclear exactly how to go about this. What is my essential self, really? How will I know if I'm in touch with my essence? Rather than worrying too much about all that, simply quiet yourself and attune inwardly in a respectful, loving way. Adopt an open mentality, perhaps with a hint of curiosity.
Approach this the way you would go into the forest to catch a glimpse of a species of animal you'd never seen before. You'd find an area they frequent, make yourself inconspicuous so as to not spook them, and sit quietly and wait. Even if you don't see the animal in the process, your appreciation for it and your overall reverence for nature gets a boost in the process.
It's not necessary to talk to yourself, but if I had to put the mentality into words it might be, "I'm right here. I'm listening now. Inner self, you may be used to me tuning you out, but I'm open now. I'm aware that you're there. I'm shining the light of my attention and interest in your direction."
Let us know how it goes as you practice placing your hand on your heart and anchoring to your deepest, most true and loving self.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Monday, March 28, 2016
Track Failure with Care to Foster Future Success
How's this for quick results: most people start noticing benefits within a month of starting to keep a simple record their porn-related thoughts and behaviors. Here are some questions I recommend you consider answering every day, but feel free to adjust this to make it fit your needs. Keep your record somewhere that it will accrue and compile over time so that you can eventually see big picture patterns you've never noticed before. These kind of insights and revelations come even to my clients who have struggled with this habit for decades and thought they were acutely aware of all its nuances and permutations.
P: Did I view porn today?
L: Was I lust-prone today?
M: Did I masturbate today? (Capital M = to climax, lower case m = self-stimulation w/o orgasm.)
C: Contributors--what went on in my day that might have helped fuel my success or failure in these three areas?
How It Looks in Action
If you had no issues today, your entry might look like this:
3/30/16:P L M C: Great weekend, rejuvenated, so not particularly susceptible.
Recently one of my clients didn't masturbate to ejaculation but spent more time than usual sudsing up his genitals in the shower because he was loving the stimulation. He didn't look at porn but found his gaze lingering on the cleavage of the women in the photos accompanying the suggested links at the bottom of a couple of the news articles he read. Here's how his record for the day looked:
3/13/16:P L m C: Weird weekend. Wanted sex and resented my step-kids being at the house for so long so we didn't have alone time. Frustrated and lonely even though around people.
Bonus Extra Credit Journal Topics
I am hesitant to include these because I don't want record keeping to become such a big task that you start out strong but then fail to follow through for days at a time and eventually drop altogether the habit you're trying to develop. Go ahead and try adding these if you think they'll help, but it's okay not to, especially early in your record keeping. Some clients who go most days without giving in to temptation reserve these bonus questions for digging deeper into failure on the days they slip up.
O: Other--what other unwanted habits did I indulged? (Procrastinating, losing my temper, overeating or unhealthy eating, skipping exercise, slacking on chores, oversleeping, not getting to bed on time, etc.)
T: Thinking--was my self-talk healthy and constructive or did I let it deteriorate into resentment, negativity, or unproductive brooding?
And Now, for the Most Productive Topic of All...
E: Emotion--what feelings--enjoyable and distressing--did I experience throughout the day today? What thoughts, events, or interactions spawned those feelings?
Even though it takes more practice to become conversant in the arena of emotion than it does to simply record your behaviors, over time you'll find it to be the most fruitful exploration of all. One of my friends who has been in recovery from sexual addiction for decades now once told me that he attributes his success to "the Feelings Journal I started keeping early on in my recovery and have kept ever since."
Put It All Together
A journal entry a clients shared with me today encompassed all of these elements:
P, L, M
C: Not sure why I was susceptible to lust today. Mainly it was over some Spring Break photos on Facebook
O: Stayed up late. Tried to study but didn't get much done after about 11. Binged on Instagram.
T: Worried I might not do well on my Anatomy and Physiology final.
E: Some feelings of failure, discouragement. Hard to keep believing in myself when I can't seem to kick my porn habit and struggle semester after semester in school.
Do This
If you're not already keeping a record--or if you've started and then stopped again in the past--I would encourage you to commit today to start keeping a simple, basic daily record of your recovery efforts and your successes and failures. Then, when you do fail, I beg you to approach that failure in a loving, patient, attentive way so that you can extract all the wisdom you can from it.
Please share below what you've learned from your failures or what role record-keeping has played in your recovery.
P: Did I view porn today?
L: Was I lust-prone today?
M: Did I masturbate today? (Capital M = to climax, lower case m = self-stimulation w/o orgasm.)
C: Contributors--what went on in my day that might have helped fuel my success or failure in these three areas?
How It Looks in Action
If you had no issues today, your entry might look like this:
3/30/16:
Recently one of my clients didn't masturbate to ejaculation but spent more time than usual sudsing up his genitals in the shower because he was loving the stimulation. He didn't look at porn but found his gaze lingering on the cleavage of the women in the photos accompanying the suggested links at the bottom of a couple of the news articles he read. Here's how his record for the day looked:
3/13/16:
Bonus Extra Credit Journal Topics
I am hesitant to include these because I don't want record keeping to become such a big task that you start out strong but then fail to follow through for days at a time and eventually drop altogether the habit you're trying to develop. Go ahead and try adding these if you think they'll help, but it's okay not to, especially early in your record keeping. Some clients who go most days without giving in to temptation reserve these bonus questions for digging deeper into failure on the days they slip up.
O: Other--what other unwanted habits did I indulged? (Procrastinating, losing my temper, overeating or unhealthy eating, skipping exercise, slacking on chores, oversleeping, not getting to bed on time, etc.)
T: Thinking--was my self-talk healthy and constructive or did I let it deteriorate into resentment, negativity, or unproductive brooding?
And Now, for the Most Productive Topic of All...
E: Emotion--what feelings--enjoyable and distressing--did I experience throughout the day today? What thoughts, events, or interactions spawned those feelings?
Even though it takes more practice to become conversant in the arena of emotion than it does to simply record your behaviors, over time you'll find it to be the most fruitful exploration of all. One of my friends who has been in recovery from sexual addiction for decades now once told me that he attributes his success to "the Feelings Journal I started keeping early on in my recovery and have kept ever since."
Put It All Together
A journal entry a clients shared with me today encompassed all of these elements:
C: Not sure why I was susceptible to lust today. Mainly it was over some Spring Break photos on Facebook
O: Stayed up late. Tried to study but didn't get much done after about 11. Binged on Instagram.
T: Worried I might not do well on my Anatomy and Physiology final.
E: Some feelings of failure, discouragement. Hard to keep believing in myself when I can't seem to kick my porn habit and struggle semester after semester in school.
Do This
If you're not already keeping a record--or if you've started and then stopped again in the past--I would encourage you to commit today to start keeping a simple, basic daily record of your recovery efforts and your successes and failures. Then, when you do fail, I beg you to approach that failure in a loving, patient, attentive way so that you can extract all the wisdom you can from it.
Please share below what you've learned from your failures or what role record-keeping has played in your recovery.
Friday, March 25, 2016
Resolve Now to Start Loving Failure
Failure can be amazing! (Even though it's not very fun.) It's how we learn what went wrong and how to get it better next time. And the power of failure never expires, even if the experience itself gets old. Each next failure is equally fantastic. It's going to either put an exclamation point behind our last lesson or teach us something else altogether that we may not have seen before. Providing that we approach it in the right way.
Love Failure At Least Enough to Learn from It
Looking in an interested, clear-eyed, honest--and I would even add loving--way at failure is how the elite become the elite. Tom Brady goes over game film again and again watching every little detail of what went wrong. He's not beating himself up for it. He's extremely invested in success, so he's scrutinizing failure.
Think about how you succeed at a video game. You hate it when you die, but you also tend to remember particularly well what happened right before you died. That enables you to see that same danger coming the next time. And your second time in that situation you live... or you learn even more about exactly how to die--and by extension how not to die in the future.
It really works to watch game film and take in the details of how our video game character dies. Unfortunately, these processes have nothing in common with the way we usually respond to failure in our self-control efforts.
Our Usual Unloving Reactions to Failure
After relapsing to porn, one of my clients used to beat himself up for a day or so, feel miserable--like a loser--for a day or two more, and then on about the third or fourth day after a slip try to pick himself up, dust himself off, try to forget about it and go on with his life, vowing to "try even harder from now on" not to give in. And hoping against hope that he could keep that resolve later when cravings were strong again.
What a waste of a failure! Fortunately he learned to track his failures in a more loving way so that he could learn from them.
Another client, after lapsing to porn, used to tell himself "Wow, I was doing so well but fell back into it. I guess I'm never going to get over this. Maybe that's how it is for all of us who are into porn! That guy at the 12-step meeting, he had to be in his seventies! Apparently none of us ever get over this problem, do we! I guess we're all hopelessly addicted."
What a waste of a failure! Fortunately, he too is learning to track the details of his failures so that he can learn from them. It's the most loving thing to do.
Adopt a More Loving Mentality
Think about the way Jane Goodall approached her work studying the chimps she lived among. She was a curious scientist, but when you watch footage of her in their midst, there's no question that she loves them. Watch the way Augusto Odone, played by Nick Nolte in the film "Lorenzo's Oil", responds to his son's deterioration from ALD. It's obvious that he hates the disease his son has, but he loves his son and that fuels his fascination with the human body and chemistry to the point where he spends hours in the library and dreams about molecules and ends up helping to discover a cure.
I have some experience in this arena. I've had a "bad back" since my early twenties. For the first fifteen years I bemoaned the fact that it kept going out, regretted my genetic vulnerability to back pain, and spent a pretty penny on straps, braces, and cushions for bed, my chairs at home, the chair in my office, and the driver's seat in my car. All the while noting very little progress in my back pain.
Then fifteen years ago I decided to take a different approach. A therapist I admire said that pain is the best teacher, and we can treat pain as an opportunity to have a learning experience.
Loving Attention Healed My Back
I decided to learn more about the back and spine. I studied the anatomy and physics of the human body. Among other things I discovered that if you have tight hamstring muscles, when you bend down your back muscles must stretch even further to make up for the lack of give in your hamstrings. But since lower back muscles aren't as strong as the hamstring, they're the ones that give out. I learned about yoga stretches that loosen the back and hamstring muscles.
I learned about the importance of core muscles and learned some core-strengthening exercises. I started keeping a journal of the times my back went out and discovered that, sure enough, it was typically when I'd slacked off on my yoga and ab-ripper routines. That provided more motivation to stay consistent.
Over the last several years I've gradually had fewer and fewer back "tweaks" that leave me listing to the right for days at a time. In fact I can tell you exactly from my "back tweak journal": It happened four times in 2013, three times in 2014, and once in 2015. Okay, so I've already had a minor tweak in 2016... but in the last few years these "tweaks" affect me less and less each time because I'm more limber and my core is stronger.
Do This
This affirmation may help you adopt a different attitude toward failure. Feel free to ponder or meditate on it.
"I am becoming someone who accepts failure as a part of life and eagerly learns from it. I am interested in failure and curious about its causes. I accept myself as someone who is human, and thus fails regularly. I also accept my aversion to failure--it's only natural. But I will no longer let that aversion keep me from from facing my failures and sifting through them for jewels of wisdom. I am grateful for everything I've learned from my past failures and for the strength and determination I've gained by getting back up whenever I have failed."
Love Failure At Least Enough to Learn from It
Looking in an interested, clear-eyed, honest--and I would even add loving--way at failure is how the elite become the elite. Tom Brady goes over game film again and again watching every little detail of what went wrong. He's not beating himself up for it. He's extremely invested in success, so he's scrutinizing failure.
Think about how you succeed at a video game. You hate it when you die, but you also tend to remember particularly well what happened right before you died. That enables you to see that same danger coming the next time. And your second time in that situation you live... or you learn even more about exactly how to die--and by extension how not to die in the future.
It really works to watch game film and take in the details of how our video game character dies. Unfortunately, these processes have nothing in common with the way we usually respond to failure in our self-control efforts.
Our Usual Unloving Reactions to Failure
After relapsing to porn, one of my clients used to beat himself up for a day or so, feel miserable--like a loser--for a day or two more, and then on about the third or fourth day after a slip try to pick himself up, dust himself off, try to forget about it and go on with his life, vowing to "try even harder from now on" not to give in. And hoping against hope that he could keep that resolve later when cravings were strong again.
What a waste of a failure! Fortunately he learned to track his failures in a more loving way so that he could learn from them.
Another client, after lapsing to porn, used to tell himself "Wow, I was doing so well but fell back into it. I guess I'm never going to get over this. Maybe that's how it is for all of us who are into porn! That guy at the 12-step meeting, he had to be in his seventies! Apparently none of us ever get over this problem, do we! I guess we're all hopelessly addicted."
What a waste of a failure! Fortunately, he too is learning to track the details of his failures so that he can learn from them. It's the most loving thing to do.
Adopt a More Loving Mentality
Think about the way Jane Goodall approached her work studying the chimps she lived among. She was a curious scientist, but when you watch footage of her in their midst, there's no question that she loves them. Watch the way Augusto Odone, played by Nick Nolte in the film "Lorenzo's Oil", responds to his son's deterioration from ALD. It's obvious that he hates the disease his son has, but he loves his son and that fuels his fascination with the human body and chemistry to the point where he spends hours in the library and dreams about molecules and ends up helping to discover a cure.
I have some experience in this arena. I've had a "bad back" since my early twenties. For the first fifteen years I bemoaned the fact that it kept going out, regretted my genetic vulnerability to back pain, and spent a pretty penny on straps, braces, and cushions for bed, my chairs at home, the chair in my office, and the driver's seat in my car. All the while noting very little progress in my back pain.
Then fifteen years ago I decided to take a different approach. A therapist I admire said that pain is the best teacher, and we can treat pain as an opportunity to have a learning experience.
Loving Attention Healed My Back
I decided to learn more about the back and spine. I studied the anatomy and physics of the human body. Among other things I discovered that if you have tight hamstring muscles, when you bend down your back muscles must stretch even further to make up for the lack of give in your hamstrings. But since lower back muscles aren't as strong as the hamstring, they're the ones that give out. I learned about yoga stretches that loosen the back and hamstring muscles.
I learned about the importance of core muscles and learned some core-strengthening exercises. I started keeping a journal of the times my back went out and discovered that, sure enough, it was typically when I'd slacked off on my yoga and ab-ripper routines. That provided more motivation to stay consistent.
Over the last several years I've gradually had fewer and fewer back "tweaks" that leave me listing to the right for days at a time. In fact I can tell you exactly from my "back tweak journal": It happened four times in 2013, three times in 2014, and once in 2015. Okay, so I've already had a minor tweak in 2016... but in the last few years these "tweaks" affect me less and less each time because I'm more limber and my core is stronger.
Do This
This affirmation may help you adopt a different attitude toward failure. Feel free to ponder or meditate on it.
"I am becoming someone who accepts failure as a part of life and eagerly learns from it. I am interested in failure and curious about its causes. I accept myself as someone who is human, and thus fails regularly. I also accept my aversion to failure--it's only natural. But I will no longer let that aversion keep me from from facing my failures and sifting through them for jewels of wisdom. I am grateful for everything I've learned from my past failures and for the strength and determination I've gained by getting back up whenever I have failed."
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