Episode 57: Life-Changing Healing Mindset

You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 57, Life-Changing Healing Mindset.

Welcome to the Overcome Pornography For Good podcast where we take a research-based, trauma informed and results focused approach to quitting porn. This approach has been revolutionary and changed thousands and thousands of lives. I’m your host, Sara Brewer.

Hey, you guys, welcome to the podcast episode this week. Before we dive into it I want to make sure that you guys know that I have a free, a brand new free masterclass this upcoming Thursday. I was going to do it last month and I had mentioned in a podcast episode but, you know, life happened. And it was just kind of a rough go with Covid happening.

And anyways, we didn't get to it last month. But here we are, we're doing it this month, the second week in February. It'll be on February 10th at 6pm. If you can't make it, go ahead, and sign up anyways and you can get the recording, or make sure you're on my email list. Go ahead and sign up just to get on my email list so that you can get information when we are doing another one, because we're going to be doing three of them this month.

This is a new live masterclass called How to Overcome Pornography Without Willpower. And we're going to be covering, one, how to stop giving into urges without willpower, we're going to really dive into that. Number two, how to stop giving up after a few months. And number three, how to make a life without porn easily sustainable and permanent.

Now, at the end of this class I'm going to be doing a live Q&A where you can come and ask any questions that you have for me, and I'll answer them live. I get a lot of messages on Instagram and Facebook and in my email that I don't get to, that I don't have time to answer. So I wanted to make sure that I had a live event so that if you're not a client and you still have questions and you want some help, I'm going to be available to you during this free live masterclass. And at the end we'll specifically do that live Q&A.

So to sign up, go to sarabrewer.com/freeclass. And yes, it is free. Sometimes I get messages that are like, “Is this really free?” I’m like, “Yes, this is totally free.” I put a lot of effort into my free stuff. I know not everyone wants to become a client, but I want to make my material and this information as accessible as possible to everyone.

And so I put a lot of effort into the podcast, I put a lot of effort into these free classes. I try to make them really, really valuable so make sure if you're going to sign up, bring a piece of paper and a pencil. Come listen, come learn a lot, come answer your questions, and it'll be really fun. So again, it's sarabrewer.com/freeclass to go sign up for that.

Let's talk about our topic today, which is healing. And I titled this podcast, Life-Changing Healing Mindset because what I talk about today, you guys, is going to be game changing. It's going to be this mindset shift that will change the way you quit porn, change the way you do everything in your life, and make it more effective, make it more healing, make your life better all around.

Okay, so remember, we've talked about this a lot on the podcast, and you can always go back and listen to episodes if you want a refresher on this. But when we are quitting porn, what we're really doing is we're solving the root of the problem. If you haven't been able to quit porn it’s because you're using band-aid solutions or you're not really getting to the root of the problem.

Think about a weed, if you just pull the leaves off the weed or even just pull the weed off at the dirt, it's going to grow right back. But if we pull it up by the root and really get it out by the root, then the weed doesn't grow back. And so that's what we're doing here. And I do talk about this in depth in that free class. We're going to talk about specifically what those roots are and how to solve for the root of the problem. So if you want to learn more about that, go sign up for that free class.

But for the purpose of our topic today, just remember that we are changing from the inside out so that you can stop the struggle forever. And in order to do this we have to change the focus from we're quitting porn to we're healing and we're healing ourselves.

And as we heal ourselves, pornography goes away. Our porn habit goes away, and we quit viewing porn. Okay? That is the root of the problem, and very generally put the root is that there is specific healing that you need to do with yourself in your life. And as you heal that, your pornography habit will go away.

And what happens is most people when they're trying to quit porn, they're only focused on okay, I'm not going to look for 30 days. And then I'm not going to look for 60 days. And then I'm not going to look for 100 days. But that's just focused on not looking at porn, and you're going to keep going back to it unless you do the healing that you need to in order to quit porn for good.

A lot of us think of quitting pornography like we're forcing ourselves to comply and we're making ourselves change. And it's really intense and masculine, and we're going to make ourselves be different, right? And instead, what I want to invite you to do is to, at least for this podcast episode with me, imagine that we're not forcing ourselves to change. What we're doing is we're healing a broken wound.

We're loving it, we're healing it. Imagine if your finger is wounded, you're going to be careful with it, you're going to give it the medicine it needs. You're going to bandage it up, you're going to be patient with it. You're not just going to chop it off and try to make it go away, right? We want to heal it.

And so what specifically – If you're a little bit new to the podcast or if you haven't heard me talk about this before, what specifically are we healing? And it could be a number of things, right? It's going to be different for every person.

But remember pornography use, at least unwanted porn use, unwanted porn use doesn't come because you're not strong enough or not good enough or because you're just indulgent. It comes because of escape and you're escaping things in your life if you're viewing porn and you don't want to be doing that in your life.

So we need to heal these emotions that we're buffering from. Maybe your porn use starts after a bad divorce and there's a lot of healing that needs to happen from that divorce. Maybe it starts after a lot of stress, just something happens in life and that's just how you're typically used to dealing with stress, is through pornography use.

Maybe porn use starts after coming home from a missionary experience where there's some negative emotion about coming home, stress, or fear or shame or a whole number of things. And there needs to be some healing from that for the porn use to stop.

We might need to heal your broken relationship with yourself where you use porn because you don't really love yourself or you don't trust yourself. You don't feel good about who you are, and about your worth, and about your worthiness, and about your enoughness. That's something we might need to heal.

We might need to heal trauma that causes unwanted porn use. Or heal this broken relationship you might have with your life. Maybe you don't like your life, you don't like your job, you don't like your relationships, you don't like where you are, you don't feel good about your life in general. That's something we need to heal.

And, of course, healing from the guilt and the shame tactics that you've used on yourself, or that others have used with you throughout your life. That damage and brokenness that there is from thinking that there is something wrong with you, that will always create more problems and more porn use.

I'm not going to dive into that too much, because I think I've done like five podcast episodes on that. So if you're interested in learning more about that, make sure you go and listen to my shame episodes where we really dive into why shame makes more porn use, the shame cycle, how to get rid of that shame. But these are all things that we might need to heal from in order to quit porn.

Now do you see how that's such a different perspective than we're going to make ourselves quit porn and we just need to stop. And there's this part of me that is stupid, and I need it to go away. Instead, we're switching this focus to no, this is a part of me that is wounded, and the porn use is the result of this woundedness.

Everyone has some brokenness and some woundedness, it's just a part of living here on Earth and part of our Earth experience, right? And people use different things to cope. Some people use food, some people use drugs, some people use alcohol, some people use over shopping, some people use social media, some people use Dr. Pepper, right? And you use pornography, that's it.

We don't need to make your unwanted porn habit mean anything more than that. We don't need to make it mean you're anything worse than other people who use other things to cope, or that there's something wrong with you for using this specific thing to cope. Again, I want you to imagine this visual of healing a wound. Okay? And healing is going to take patients and it's going to take a lot of love.

I recently heard this example from a therapist that I am doing some trauma  certification with. And she said the difference when we're trying to barrel through things and force ourselves to do things, it's like you're driving down the freeway and you get stuck in traffic. And instead of waiting it out, you refuse to stop, you veer off the highway, the freeway, and you take the back roads without really a plan. You're just not going to stop, you just got to keep going, you got to force yourself to get home.

And what happens is you end up home way later and a lot more exhausted than if you had just waited through the traffic. Okay? This isn't something that you can force yourself into. It's something you have to heal yourself into. Do you see the difference? You have to love and be patient with yourself through this. And it's not going to feel good, right? It's going to hurt.

Now, this is a really beautiful perspective and a really important thing to try to wrap your mind around. And it's different than how we've been taught, typically. But the reason that we act against our value system isn't that we're inherently bad. Okay? The reason that we act out against our value system is that we are wounded, it is because we are wounded.

I'm going to say that again, and really hear me as I say this. The reason we act out against our value system isn't because we are inherently bad, that there's something wrong with us, that we're not good enough, okay? The reason we act out against our value system is because we are wounded, and we need to heal.

Think about this, one of my favorite things to say is that people who feel like crap, treat people like crap. People who are wounded, those are the people who are rude, and angry, and hurtful, and harmful. People who make change in the world and people who do good things are people who are healed, at least in some way or another.

And again, how different of a mindset is this than I have this habit that is evil, and it needs to be removed, to I have this habit because I am wounded, and I have some healing that needs to be done. And so I really want to encourage you to change looking at your progress as days without viewing porn, okay?

So we're not looking at days without porn as progress. But asking yourself, am I healing? Am I becoming more healed in these specific ways that I've been causing my porn habit and causing my unwanted porn use?

This is why in my program, Overcome Pornography For Good, we don't count progress as days without porn. We know that that doesn't work because what happens is you go right back to it, or you use willpower. It's not a real indicator of overcoming pornography for good. It might be an indicator of overcoming pornography for a month, but we want to overcome pornography for good.

The real indicator is the skills that you're learning and the healing that is taking place. So that's why in the program we have specific milestones of commitment, of emotional management, of mindfulness, of changing your beliefs and your thoughts about yourself that I want you to focus on instead. Because as we focus on those things, that's when the healing starts. When we ignore those things and just try to quit porn, that's not actually doing any healing.

All right, you guys, so instead of your goal being I'm going to quit porn in 60 days or whatever it is, I want your goal to be I am going to heal from these things that are causing my unwanted porn use. And that'll put you on a whole new trajectory. A trajectory that will actually help you overcome pornography for good.

And if you don't know exactly what those things are that you need to heal, I want to encourage you to come to this free class that I have on Thursday. We'll talk about those things specifically. And I'll be there to answer some questions that you have there at the end.

Okay, you guys, have a great week. And hopefully we'll see you on Thursday at that class. Bye bye.

I want to invite you to come and listen to my free training called How to Quit Viewing Pornography Even if You've Tried in the Past. If you like the podcast, you will love this free training. We talk about, number one, how to not rely on willpower or phone filters so that you can actually stop wanting pornography.

Number two, how to guarantee that you won't fail no matter how many times you've tried in the past. And number three, how to feel good about yourself while becoming someone who doesn't struggle with pornography. You can access this training at sarabrewer.com/masterclass.