Welcome to the Reclaimed Recovery Podcast, where men are banding together to overcome porn. If you're struggling with porn, our podcast is going to help you rewire your brain and overcome the shame so you can move on with your life and live porn free. So this is about becoming porn resilient. And of course, we're leaning on faith and science in order to get results.  

I'm your host, Kolton Thomas. You're listening to Episode ten. Welcome back, guys. It's a dark, stormy, rainy night here that I'm recording this podcast. I actually just played some basketball and I have tons of energy. Normally at this time I'm going to bed, but instead I decided - Now's the time! Let's record this podcast because we've got a big subject and a heavy topic today, and that is the problem of pornography in our society, and just how bad it is. And we're going to look at why. 

What are some common root causes for the reason that so many men are struggling with porn and seem to be stuck in that rut where it runs so deep that we're hearing stories about guys who are so desperate to have this taken away from them? They're saying things like, I'd rather be blind. You know, guys who could look you straight in the face and say, at this point, I'd rather have my eyes taken out than have to continue to deal with pornography in my life. And I want to stop right here and say that, friends, God wants to do something so much deeper in you, a transformative work, and He'd rather do that than to simply blind you or take out your eyes.

God wants to do a deep, transformative work in you so that you will become ultimately a person of greater self-awareness, who's capable of greater intimacy, who can take on a wide variety of challenges that come up in life. Because you have decided to invest in yourself and work on yourself in order to overcome porn. This is what it looks like to be transformed in the image of God.

And like so many friends in my church say, there's a certain depth of peace that you will find by growing through what you're going through. All right. That's what we believe is at the heart of all this. And at the heart of the struggle with pornography is that you will become better, a better person than you were before you started the struggle.

But it starts with being aware, it starts with being armed with the right knowledge and information. There's a lot of information out there right now about pornography and that's why we are going to cover several of the root causes of pornography here in our podcast, in our upcoming episodes, because you deserve to have well-organized, accurate information about why you are struggling with porn.

So we've got to start by asking and examining what is it that makes it so incredibly hard for so many men to break their porn habit? What is it about pornography that makes it seem so permanent, that makes it seem so hard to quit and has so many men in that place of despair kind of on that slippery, steep pit where it feels like the more you try to get out, the further down you slip.

So we're going to talk about that. And what I want to present to you today is an overview of about ten common root causes for why men struggle with pornography. What we're going to do is we're going to drill into each of these more in future episodes. And so let's get started. One root cause that's pretty obvious that we've covered in depth in recent episodes, in previous episodes, is the nature of habits and the effects, the powerful effects that porn has on the brain is undeniable that our brains are wired with this primitive desire for sex and reproduction.

It's one of our most basic instincts, right? And it's powerful in the sheer amount of dopamine that real sex and pornography emit when compared to other things. It just releases and triggers things that have a strong chemical effect on our decisions and on our actions. A lot of times it's hard to even think straight when you get triggered right and the brain gets trained right.

We talked a lot about classical conditioning, the conditioning of the brain that neuroplasticity, how those grooves get created in the brain and things get wired a certain way and then those grooves just get cut deeper and deeper over time as you train your brain to come back to pornography. Right. So there's a scientific aspect to it that explains why so many men are struggling with porn so we know that.

And I think that it's really important that even though we've done several episodes focusing in on just this, that we zoom out and recognize that this is one reason of many that often work synergistically together with several other things to keep people stuck in the habit. And before we move on to the next root cause, I do want to offer some hope and good news.

And that is science has proven that just as it's possible to train your brain, to crave and expect something like pornography, it is just as possible to train or retrain your brain to not want pornography and to live a lifestyle without it. The second thing I'd like to mention is actually just curiosity and imagination. Our ability to imagine things is so powerful.

Curiosity is something that drives us a lot of times subconsciously, more than we realize is such an important fundamental element of what it means to be human. And think about all the times you dreamed and imagine things as a kid that you were the hero in that story, that you were in, that movie that you saw, and that you were pursuing something significant on a great adventure, or you were rescuing someone or something for a just and noble cause.

And of course, we're going to use our curiosity and imagination towards our sexual desire, towards our sexuality, and many commonly referred to these as sexual fantasies. But really what it is, is just curiosity and imagination. That same curiosity and imagination that we had when we were children, even before we hit puberty and we had this sex drive. And so I think it's really important to acknowledge that sexual fantasies, sometimes they get a bad rap, especially when we're struggling with porn.

But the truth is they are inherently good. And when they are within their proper boundaries and directed in their proper ways, these fantasies can actually serve to color our lives and lead us to more intimacy. And they can complement our lives. Right. And so we have to believe we have to have faith that God would not have created us with such an empowerment for imagination and curiosity if it weren't to serve a greater purpose if it weren't able to point us towards our creator, and if it wasn't able to be used for good, and if it wasn't fundamentally redeemable, there is something so powerful in our abilities to envision a better future for ourselves, to make goals, to see the end. Start with the end in mind, right? Who do we want to be ten, 20, 30 years down the road? What do we want people to say at our funeral? These kinds of exercises can have enormous effects on the way that we are choosing to live right now. They can bring motivation, they can bring inspiration.

And so that's just one example of how curiosity and imagination work powerfully in our lives are powerful tool, and they're used for many, many good things. Now, sadly, a lot of times the way that so many men get into porn and begin a porn habit is because it's curiosity and imagination that kind of led them there first. I mean, this was my story.

I heard about it from someone at school. In fact, I got a very direct prompt from someone that said, Hey, you should go type in this site and check it out at home. Right? And I didn't forget about that. And I was just curious about it at the time. I was so young, too. I just I didn't have all of these evil plans in my mind or, you know, things weren't that complicated then.

I just had this simple and I'd say even innocent curiosity to know what that would be like, to get on to a site where I could see that kind of stuff, you know? And I didn't know what I didn't know. But still there is something good and innocent there. I believe that had been taken and warped and of course led me down a path I didn't want to go.

And it reminds me of something that C.S. Lewis talks about. I believe he talks about it in Christianity some, but he talks about how Satan doesn't create anything evil, per se. He's not creative. In fact, he mentions he believes that Satan has a poor imagination and a poor capacity for creativity, because all Satan can do is simply take things that are good and twist them and warp them and make lies around them.

Right. It's like the concept of light and darkness. Well, darkness isn't something that's created. It's simply just the absence of light. So it's robbing away from the light that creates this darkness. But it's not darkness itself isn't really the act of creativity. And so anyways, I think about that when I think about our curiosity and imagination. That is the story of so many men.

When we were young, defenseless, powerless and we were preyed upon by a multi-billion dollar industry for our innocent curiosity and imagination. And we have to have some compassion towards ourselves, because at that age, at that time, so many of us were just curious or we had been shown something or told something, and we wanted to look it up.

So we have to be able to forgive ourselves for that because in most cases, the matter of the fact is that a lot of parents were unprepared for the epidemic of pornography and the access that would become so available on smartphones so quickly. Like as soon as smartphones hit the hands of teenagers and young adults, that access was already there.

So it would take a lot of foresight and preparedness from parents to understand, comprehend and have a plan of action for this unprecedented joining of curiosity and pornographic content at the fingertips of so many kids. 

And so from here, I'd like to pivot quickly into number three. The third root cause is a lack of vision, motivation, and purpose in our lives. And this is related to curiosity and imagination, because if we're lacking healthy outlets for curiosity and imagination, then we are likely going to lack vision and purpose in our lives and something to think about that could be very revealing for you and your overall mental health and wellness right now is to think about how much time are you able to spend on dreaming and imagining a better future for yourself? Are you excited in any way about your future or where your life is heading? Are you content with the way that your skills, gifts and abilities are being used right now in your work? Because if you are watching pornography regularly, a lot of times what happens is that it festers in your mind, and sexual fantasies take over to a very unhealthy degree and they begin to hijack a very unhealthy quantity of your thoughts and your imagination.

And as a result, I find that men have a really difficult time connecting with a better vision for themselves and for their future. So futility, lack of purpose is a huge root cause of pornography, and it creates this constant state that we're living in where it feels like we're spinning wheels but not going anywhere. We're stuck doing the same old thing day after day.

It seems like we can't break through any of our current problems, and part of that stems from pornography, but it feeds right back into pornography and makes us feel like, well, we will never be able to quit porn either. So feelings of hopelessness and futility are really important to acknowledge in the conversation. All right. Now, number four is that we live in a hypersexualized society.

We live in a culture that puts sex out in front of us through all these different forms of content and media and is bombarding us with messages about sex and its significance and what it's supposed to mean for us day after day after day. And when we accumulate exposure to the messages of our culture about sex over a period of years, how can it not affect the way that we're thinking about things and how can it not affect our relationship and attitude towards pornography?

Right. It totally is. And if we were men and if we remain passive and we don't stop and think about and examine what our culture is trying to tell us about sex and pornography, then guess what a passive attitude mindset is probably going to mean that we're being influenced and affected by these messages. So we have to think for ourselves.

We have to reason through: what is our culture telling us and what are the values and the virtues that we want to attach to sex that we want to stay grounded in, despite what culture is trying to tell us? This is a huge underlying cause for why men struggle with porn because they don't give this enough attention.

And without getting too far into the weeds of this, here's one specific example that will really benefit us to think about, and that is this message that we get from culture, that sex can be more of a leisure activity for the pleasure of the individual or for the selfish pleasure of an individual. Two individuals can come together seeking pleasure only for themselves, not looking for commitment or any kind of attachment, and then they can walk away from the act of sex and cut that person off from their lives, perhaps never see them again and not have to deal with any kind of mental, emotional, social, spiritual, physical consequences. And really, this is in direct contrast to our biblical or faith-based view of sex, that sex is sacred. Sex will have rippling effects into multiple areas of our life and into our health when we treat it properly, when we're doing it in the right context, in the context of marriage, in a mutual, committed relationship, it can actually enhance the family unit and serve, obviously, for the practical purposes of reproduction, but also for the purposes of creating more and more of a bond over time, an attraction between a husband and a wife and so what happens is over years, we consciously or subconsciously buy in to the culture's notion about sex and we allow it to erode the values that should be there. And as a result, sometimes we lose our compass for the ways that we should be thinking about sex and the respect that we should have for it.

Like we don't even know anymore which direction to go or how far off we might be from it. And in that case, I would encourage you to turn to the Lord in faith and in prayer and bring that form and just ask humbly, because it takes a lot of humility to acknowledge this, but just ask that he would point you in the right direction towards his heart and towards his view of sex.

Because for some of us, it seems like we can get so far off and we need like a miracle to get back into this healthy, proper, sacred view of what sex is. And so it's also something that it's just going to take time. But I will say one thing that's really going to help you to heal is to surround yourself with some people in your life who have experienced more sexual wholeness and freedom for example, I've grown so much by having conversations about sex and sexuality with my wife, who has not grown up struggling in some of these same areas as I have.

And so she's been able to help point me towards more truth. And in some areas, in some ways, when I haven't been sure if I could trust myself in my way of thinking about sex, she's been someone who can help balance me and ground me in my view. So that's one way that she's making me just a better man.

But that kind of relationship, that kind of growth can be experienced in friendships as well. And so it takes a lot of honesty and transparency and courage to get out there and heal through relationships. But relation ships hold so much power for healing us in this area and helping point us in the right direction. When culture and society has for so long and so often point us in the wrong direction.

And one more thing that I'll say here really quick is that our culture has also made sex like a rite of passage. So basically, you know, I can speak for men. Men just it's unspoken in a lot of times, but you just get it through extracting meaning from like millions of comments and things that you see in media, basically saying that like you're not a man, you haven't achieved one of the most important rites of passage until you have sex.

And in a way, we could say that sex is a rite of passage, but when we attach it to marriage and when we attach it to relationship and commitment, it takes on a whole different meaning. But when we detach from all those things and we just say Sex for selfish pleasure is still a rite of passage, and it's a huge, important thing for all of us.

No wonder we're going to long for it. We're going to long for acts of sexuality. We're going to feel powerless and inadequate in our culture when we don't get them. Because it's so attached to status and it's so attached to approval. That man is really hard for us to separate ourselves from that narrative. But we can do it.

We can do that thanks be to our identities and Christ. That helps ground us to a narrative that says like we don't need this in order to mean something and we can way and be patient and sex can be experienced in its proper time. Next, I want to move back in to more internal reasons for struggling with porn.

I want to talk about negative emotions. So when I say negative emotions, I'm talking about fear, anxiety, depression, and our natural tendency towards avoidance. We want to avoid bad feelings. So negative emotions and avoidance are a big thing that gets men stuck in the trenches. This one especially deserves its own episode, and we will do an entire episode on this.

But the fact of the matter is, a lot of men just don't even recognize the emotions that they're trying to avoid. They're not even aware that they're trying to avoid them a lot of the time. And at times when we maybe someone asks questions, maybe we're having problems in our marriage or with friendship or we're starting to feel the pain of some of those emotions.

We get a brief glimpse of them, so we might start to recognize that there is some fear there, there is some anxiety, there is some depression. And a lot of times if we don't have a community to lean on, if we don't have some healthy friendships where we can express and process those things, man, we just end up stifling them right back up.

Internalizing them, right? It's this message of like, we're men, we're going to be strong. These are the kinds of feelings that we have to push down so we can be fearless, lead our families. And this is just what men do, right? And men, that way of thinking needs to get outdated for the church and just for men at large.

We have to learn how to process through the feelings and emotions rather than try to escape them and avoid them when they come up. It's such an important skill. It's self-awareness. It takes courage, it's vulnerability. These are things that we need to start taking pride in, like we need to identify these values. And instead of being, like, ashamed or viewing them, I don't know, some may view them as more like feminine.

Like being in touch with your feelings, man. We've got to take them on and own them as men because guess what? We live in a society where there are more things out there to drown ourselves out, to drown out these feelings than ever before. Right. Consuming media, the rise of technology, smartphones. We can drown out our feelings almost like never before.

And we also live a lot of times isolated from communities. A lot of times we're scattered. We see different people throughout the week. We don't see the same group of people again and again and again. A lot of times that makes us easy for us to avoid conversations or to present ourselves differently to different groups of people so that we don't have to put the telescope inside and get into these conversations where we dig deeper and we work on that self-awareness.

So, you know, that's what we cultivate and reclaimed. And everyone who does our ten-week program, they intentionally get paired with a small group of guys who, you know, the whole thing is designed to have an opportunity to express what your emotions are, what you're struggling with, if you've got fear, anxiety, whatever it is, and how that is driving your actions and behaviors and how you can plan to do something about them, how you can process them, how you can anticipate them, and what some healthy things are, some new tools you can learn to honestly use them to grow from honestly use them to become more self-aware.

And you're going to grow as a person because that's deeper work getting into those emotions and things that you normally want to avoid. And so anyways, avoidance is a big one and I'm looking at the time right now we're actually over 20 minutes in this episode, so this seems to be the theme in this podcast. This keeps happening.

Originally, what I had planned to be one episode we're going to break up into two because we've covered five root causes of porn addiction or porn habit. And those five, just to recap, were the nature of porn and its effects on the brain. We talked about curiosity and imagination, and number three was lack of vision, motivation and purpose towards your future for was a hypersexualized society placing sex above so many other things, not holding it and its appropriate context. Five was negative emotions and our tendencies to want to avoid them, run from them and hide from them rather than step up, process through them and take them head-on in the safety and context of community. 

A lot of these things work hand in hand, like I said before, and work synergistically. But when you get on this journey towards healing and overcoming porn, you can find that you can flip the script there and you can have a lot of things working for you if you have the right tools, the right information and the right people.

And that's what reclaimed exists for. So you guys, if you're interested at all in going on a healing journey and flipping the script on this in your life, then please reach out to me. Please get ahold of us through the website. You can join the app and send us a message. You can email me at Freedom at Reclaimed Recovery dot com and just want to hear from you guys.

But in the meantime, stay tuned for our next episode where we're going to cover five more root causes of a porn habit. And I also want to say really quickly, thank you so much for those of you who have begun to support the podcast, that support is so felt and so needed. It's a huge strategic piece and me being able to get high-quality content out to men who need to hear this and it would not be possible without your support. So thank you so much. 

All right. So stay strong, guys, until the next episode. And thanks as always for listening to the Reclaimed Recovery podcast.