In the world of life coaching and some therapy modalities, thought management is a very popular practice.
To be honest, when we first started our coaching practice 4 years ago we focused heavily on thought management and how you needed to change your thoughts to create the feelings you want which lead to the actions you take and ultimately your results!
In our experience working with hundreds of clients over the last 4 years including our lived experience, we have found that managing your thoughts alone won’t create the results you are looking for.
If overcoming porn was as simple as changing your thoughts then you probably won’t be struggling with porn anymore.
Today we are going to discuss 2 reasons why thought management will not solve your porn problem.
And then, we are going to teach you 2 things that will help you deal with unwanted thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
#1 Our thoughts happen automatically and we have very little if any control over them.
I know in a past episode we discussed how many thoughts we have a day, how many of them are negative, and then how many of them are repeats each day so we won’t go into the details of that on this episode but if you are curious you can go listen to them.
I’m sure some of you if not all of you had the experience where you were doing something very specific like writing an email and then out of nowhere your brain offers you the thought, “You should go check out porn.” You were not actively trying to come up with the thought “you should go check out porn” but your brain automatically offered it to you.
Another example of this might be you are out to dinner for date night and your waitress comes up to take your order and your brain thinks, “oh man she is attractive I wonder what my husband is thinking right now. Or maybe our brains will remind us of the last time our spouse choose to look at porn because we were triggered by this attractive waitress.
#2 If we try to get rid of our thoughts our brain will hyper-focus on them.
The pink elephant experiment has shown us that this is scientifically going to happen.
What this means for most people is that they try to stop thinking about something, and that thing keeps coming back into focus.
For wives this might mean that they are trying to not think about their partner’s pornography choices during intimacy and it keeps resurfacing.
For those who are struggling with pornography, maybe you have tried really hard to change what’s on the stage of your mind and found that you keep coming back to it.
This was one of the things that would happen for one particular client. He’d be out on a run and see a woman running. He would tell himself that he couldn’t think about her or it wasn’t right to see her as beautiful because his wife is the only woman he’s allowed to think about that way. But, try as he might, his brain would just keep coming back to it all day. That was one of the really important parts of the process that he and I worked on in individual coaching. And I know Darcy works on this very issue with wives each time she works with them.
So what can you do?
Here are two ways to deal with unwanted thoughts with scientifically sound practices that our experience has confirmed are valid.
- See and interact with your thoughts, feelings, urges, and sensations as curiosities that your brain offers you
- Take action toward your values from a calm, clear-headed place.
Let’s start with #1. See and interact with your thoughts as curiosities that your brain offers you.
One of the reasons Darcy and I built Thrive Beyond Pornography was to give couples a framework to address and completely eliminate unwanted pornography from their relationships. The first pillar in that framework is to reframe the pornography struggle.
Most people see their thoughts that come up around pornography as threats. We see them as the enemy and as such we fight them, trying to push them out of our minds. As was mentioned, that strategy is not only unsuccessful for most people, it actually backfires, creating a negative loop of unwanted thoughts around the very thing we are struggling to eliminate.
On the other hand, when we reframe the thoughts that we have from a threat to curiosity, we begin to set ourselves up for success by reducing the emotion behind the thought.
For instance, many of my clients have said that when their mind offers them the idea that “Now would be a good time to look at porn” in whatever way their brain says it, they have often begun to tense up, feeling their body react in a fight or flight way. I know, I’ve thought that I have to get rid of this idea, I can’t be thinking that, this is wrong, and so on.
But, when I learned to think about my thoughts from a position of curiosity, I began to be able to get to the root of the issue instead of fighting with my brain to eliminate a thought.
If we take the example from earlier, as you’re writing an email your brain offers you the idea that you should go look at porn. Instead of fighting that thought, becoming curious about why the thought is there leads me to see what is going on for me emotionally. For me, it very likely would have been that writing that email was not very interesting or it could have been that the email was difficult to write because I needed it to convey a very important message.
Now that I see why my brain is offering me porn, I can understand it and reframe the problem from one of unwanted pornography viewing to one of discomfort overwriting an email. By the way, that discomfort may simply be because it’s boring and not particularly difficult. But no matter what it is, when I can see the problem clearly then I can take action. Which we’ll talk about here in a minute. But the only way to see the problems in our lives clearly is to be curious enough to follow them to their roots.
I often use this example with the men I work with, when you are working on a big project at the office and something goes wrong before you fix it, what do you do? Everyone I’ve spoken to says before I can fix the problem, I have to figure out exactly what went wrong.
Too often we think porn is the problem or our thoughts are the problem. The reality is, we don’t know what the problem is, so we keep trying to treat the symptoms, rather than getting to the root of the problem and dealing with it there.
Start by getting curious.
Now, taking action toward our values.
This might seem like an obvious idea and maybe one that you will have dismissed because someone in the past has simply said, “You know better than this, do what you know you’re supposed to do.”
That is not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about getting to a place where you have calmly and curiously sought to find out what the actual issue is. Understanding why your brain is offering you an escape from your current set of experiences by choosing pornography, then facing that issue head-on.
Along with seeing the actual issue and dealing with it directly, knowing what your values are is essential. This is one of the first exercises that our clients do in our course. They learn the difference between goals and values and begin to articulate what their values are in concrete ways. A lot of us believe we know what our values are, but if I were to ask you, what are your 5 core values, would you be able to tell me what they are off-hand?
It’s really difficult to move in the direction you want to go if you don’t have a compass. Your values are your compass.
In this case, here’s how I would handle my mind offering me porn. After identifying the reason that my brain was trying to save me from my discomfort, let's say that writing the email is boring. From a clear, comfortable, calm, and curious place, I would ask myself, is always being entertained one of my values? No. What are my values? My God, My wife, my kids, my work, and myself.
If I were to go through the boredom of writing this email, which of my core values would I be engaging in? My work.
Ok, What action would I take if I were to engage in my value of my work? One technique I like to use when I’m faced with a task I don’t really want to do, but that will bring me closer to my values is to try the five-minute rule. Tell myself, I can do this for just the next five minutes and I don’t have to go any further.
The key to this idea is that you are choosing this action from a calm,
