Learning to Thrive Beyond Pornography use was the greatest challenge of our life and marriage. It had rocked my self confidence, tainted all of the most important experiences of my life and become the most impossible challenge I had.

With this podcast or at https://www.zachspafford.com you'll learn about the struggle, how to overcome pornography use, and where to find additional resources to begin to thrive beyond pornography with your spouse.

At some point I took a step away from all the 12 step meetings and councilors and started to figure out my own brain, to look at my issue as something that I had the answer to and I was going to figure it out. Here I share those lessons and give you the power to start your own journey free. Whether you struggle with unwanted pornography use or are the spouse or partner, whether you feel stuck or just don't know where to start, here I will teach you principles, tools and skills that you can use today to change how you think and, in the end, what you do.

You'll hear interviews with my spouse, with experts on human sexuality and with former and current pornography users on how you can overcome your own struggle with addictive behavior.

The Thrive Beyond Pornography podcast will bring new perspective to your struggle and keep you coming back to improve all aspects of your life. (formerly, The Self Mastery Podcast: Overcome Pornography Forever)

Strategies for Renewal in Your Marriage

Welcome:

Zach: One of the most difficult parts of marriage is the tension between belonging to our spouse and belonging to yourself.

On one side there is a desire to be on the same page, comfort or meet your spouse’s needs, and be an indispensable part of their life and on the other side a need to be your own person, not always servicing your spouse and willing to own positions that your spouse may not like or agree with.

Darcy: Yes!!! how many of us want harmony in our home so much that we just get with the program even if we don’t agree so we can be on the same page and keep the peace? Or put our spouse’s and children’s needs before our own in order to feel needed and wanted in our relationships or even earn or value and worth and justify our desires.

This tension naturally exists because we choose to be in a relationship and it's one of the greatest sources of conflict within marriage.

One of the skills that we teach couples in our program is called hugging until relaxed. While couples practice this exercise it helps them see how comfortable they are within their relationship and it gives them a space to practice quieting their minds down while engaging with each other in a close intimate way.

Zach: We learned this skill from Dr. David Schnarch’s book Passionate Marriage, he also describes how to do it in detail in his book Intimacy and Desire. This skill is essential for renewing your marriage and building it into a stronger, more resilient relationship that can weather the difficulties that life brings, including a pornography struggle.

It’s also a pretty difficult skill to master because of how revealing it is to ourselves and our spouse.

Darcy: Let’s just start with the how and then we’ll talk about what it can do for you.

It’s pretty simple really,

Stand facing each other close enough to hug (Dr. Schnarch recommends taking your shoes off.)

Next, embrace your spouse

Third, focus internally, on yourself and what’s going on for you. Start observing your inner dialogue

Finally, get quiet. As quiet as you can in your own mind.

That’s it, stand, hug, observe, and quiet.

Zach: This is about a 10 minute exercise so, for some of you this will be heaven. Some will start wondering when it’s gonna be over.

What you are looking for is to be able to handle yourself, not get lost in anything that might be making your spouse anxious, and observe your own mind for insights as to what is going on for you.

Darcy: When you do this experiment it will provide you and your spouse the chance to practice observing and handling your internal dialogue while choosing close, intimate contact with each other. One of the most valuable things we see this experiment doing for ourselves and our clients is that it gives us the opportunity to practice calming ourselves down when something we’re upset about comes up.

If you are engaging with this practice on a regular basis, the odds are that at least some of the time you are doing it there will be a conflict between the two of you and this will give you the kick in the pants that you might need to choose to be close to your partner even in times when there is not perfect harmony.

this can give each of you moments to practice speaking up for yourself as well as moments where you internalize meaningful feedback without getting defensive or withdrawn or any of the other strategies that you might use to win arguments with your spouse.

Zach: Using this process opens up a window into your relationship and will help you see yourself and how you’re operating in suboptimal ways to collude in the things that are making you unhappy but that may be stabilizing in your relationship.

For instance, in our relationship, in the early stages of working through our pornography struggle, while we didn’t have this technique at our fingertips, I can tell you what it would have shown us.

Thinking back on the long hugs we did have we would have seen that I was always working to prove myself to Darcy by overcompensating for my pornography choices and working to control her perception of me. I would probably have been taking on more of the balancing in the hug, meaning I would have let her lean on me and made it my responsibility to make sure we didn’t topple over. I would sway with her to make the hug more about the motion than the closeness. This is a good indicator that I didn’t want her to really see me. I wanted her to see that I was doing something, and I think that something was always trying to soothe her.

Darcy: For my part, I could see… how much I relied on him to hold me up especially when I was emotional.

Darcy: When pornography impacts your relationship, so much of what needs to be done to put porn in the past is building a relationship that can thrive beyond it. The marriage that you had is gone, it’s time to build the marriage you desire. if that is something you are ready to do, go to thrivebeyondpornography.com and set up a free breakthrough session to get started.