Episode 49: Pillar Four: Becoming a New Person

You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 49, Pillar Four: Becoming a New Person.

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. I am excited to talk to you today about this last pillar. We've talked about four pillars to overcoming pornography for good and the last one is this idea of becoming a new person.

And this is really, really important for you to be aware of and for us to talk about. And it's usually a natural step that happens as we learn to quit porn. But if we don't do this, if we aren't aware of this, and if we don't put some effort into this aspect of quitting porn, you'll self-sabotage.

And I'll get into all of that in a moment. But we have to keep this in mind, this idea we're not just quitting porn, but we're becoming a new person. We have to keep this in mind in order to really quit for good and to quit effectively and as quickly as possible.

And I don't like saying as quickly as possible because sometimes that gets us in the wrong mindset. If we’re really rushed and trying to do it as fast as possible, usually we don't take time to learn from our mistakes, we don't take time to learn how to feel worthy and good right now. And then you quit porn and you go back to it and it's a cycle.

And so I always encourage my clients to drop their timelines and to focus on the results that they want from learning the skills, and focus on learning all the skills instead of having this time frame in their mind of, “This is when I'm going to be done with porn.”

But with that said, when we do that we actually quit porn quicker. When we drop the timelines we learn how to quit porn quicker because we don't have all the pressure and we don't have the rush to get through it as quickly as possible. And learning how to become a new person and having this in mind is a really, really important aspect of that.

Okay, so quitting porn is about so much more than quitting porn. It's about changing yourself from the inside out. And too often we're too focused just on that one aspect, like we're just going to have porn out of our lives, and we miss all of the depth that really is what quitting porn is.

It's learning how to become a person who doesn't run away from emotions. It's about learning how to become a person who is committed to creating instead of committed to consuming in their sexual lives. It's about becoming a person who follows through with themselves, who can manage discomfort, who is more emotionally mature.

And one quick note. Often people will use this story in their mind that they have about themselves. They have this story about themselves that they just don't follow through and they don't stay committed to stuff. And they've tried a bunch of things in the past and they haven't followed through with it, so they're not going to do it with porn.

And they talk about it just like it's a part of them that they can't change and like it's just an identity. I'm just someone who doesn't follow through with themselves. And so listen, if that's you, if that’s a belief that you have about yourself that is keeping you from quitting porn and getting the help you need to quit porn, really listen to me here, okay?

That is not just an identity, that is something that you can learn. And so the fact that you haven't followed through with yourself in the past, it's not a good reason to not learn how to follow through with yourself right now. And it doesn't mean that you won't do it in the future. And it doesn't mean that it's not something that you can learn to do.

That's like someone saying, “I'm not going to run a marathon because I've never ran a marathon before.” You're like, of course you haven't ran a marathon before. It's something that you learn, and you train to do. And so it's the same thing.

Quitting porn is about learning how to become someone who learns to follow through with themselves. And listen, you guys, I used to have that belief about myself. I used to have that thought about myself and that limiting belief about myself that hey, I'm just not someone who stays committed to things.

And then I realized that I was taking that on as an identity and using it against myself instead of being like, “Oh, okay. I have a lot of life left and I want to learn how to follow through with myself.” And then I invested in coaching, and I invested my time, and my effort, and my energy, and learned how to be someone who follows through with themself.

And it's such a cool, cool thing to be able to say that about yourself and to see that you learned that. And that's one reason why quitting porn is so much more than quitting porn. One part of that is quitting porn is about learning how to become that person who follows through with themselves and does hard things.

And if you can do this with porn, I get so excited thinking about all of you listening to this podcast, and I'm excited about you learning how to quit porn. But even more than that, I'm excited for you to learn these skills, apply them here, and then take them into the world and do amazing, amazing things in the world.

Quitting porn is also about learning to become someone who has deep love and respect for themselves. Learning how to become someone who's kind and full of grace, instead of always defaulting to negative, mean, unkind thoughts about themselves. When you can learn to do this for yourself, that's when you can project it into the world and do it for other people. The kinder you are to yourself, the more you learn to give grace to yourself, the more you can do that for other people.

So I really want to paint this vision of something and someone who is so much bigger than someone who quit port. Quitting porn is an amazing, worthy, worthwhile goal. And you can do it. But we're doing it not just to quit porn, that's an awesome side effect. But we're doing it so we can learn how to become this person. Get that into your mind, and you will have so much more commitment and so much more motivation to quit pornography.

And so this last part, this last step of learning how to quit porn is to become someone who doesn't struggle with porn and to see yourself as someone who doesn't struggle with porn. So it's about becoming all of this and taking on that new identity of someone who doesn't struggle with pornography anymore.

Okay, do you see the difference here? There's like you can quit porn and you can stop looking at porn, but in order to really quit for good you have to take on that identity as someone. For example there's a difference between talking about myself as I work out and I went and did this workout, and talking about myself as I am someone who moves their body every day. It's an identity, instead of just something you do.

And if you don't do this, if you don't have this identity shift, if you don't have this change of mind, what will happen is you will start to self-sabotage. And this will happen with my clients occasionally, where they'll quit, and they'll do really well. And then they'll just go back to it.

And when we talk about it and when we coach around it, they say to me something like, “Well, it’s because that's just what I do. I just am someone who struggles with porn, and I was in this similar environment and in this similar scenario, and that's just what I do.”

And it's so fascinating, because often they'll tell me like, “I didn't even really want porn. This isn't even something that I really wanted.” But they did it anyways because that's what they do because their identity was still someone who struggled with porn. Or because they think that they don't deserve anything else, or because it's the only thing that they know how to do it.

Sometimes I even have clients who will be doing really, really well for a couple weeks or a couple months and making all these changes. And they'll self-sabotage because they'll tell themselves, “Well, I should be struggling. Why am I not struggling?” And they'll tell themselves, this is hilarious when this happens in the coaching calls. And it happens, if you're in the program and if you come to the calls, you’ll see this happen occasionally where they'll come to get coached and be like, “I'm not having any problems. What's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? Because I'm not having these urges to view porn.”

And I'm always like, why are you assuming that you're doing something wrong? Maybe you're doing something right. And often this happens too, when they haven't done their 100 urges and haven't gotten through processing 100 urges. I think I've talked about that in the podcast, that's one of the things we practice and do is processing 100 urges.

And it's just really interesting to me that we put these limits on ourselves where we’re like we can't change completely until we do all these things. When often, you guys, and I see this all the time, often you can make amazing changes and big life changing changes without doing all the things.

Listening to the podcast, coming to the coaching calls, doing some of the program work will completely change your life. And you can have these incredible life shifting beliefs even from just a couple experiences of doing this. You don't have to do it all to totally change your life.

This is something I tell people too when they're concerned about coming into the program. They're like, “Well, I don't have time to do all this stuff. And I don't know if I'm going to be able to get myself to do all this work for 30 minutes.” And I always tell them like, “Listen, just start and just do a little bit. And you'll be amazed at how your life changes when you just do a little bit, and you do a little bit consistently.”

I mean, you guys know this who are listening to the podcast. Take a second and think about how many epiphanies and how much you have changed from listening to this podcast. And give yourself some credit for that.

So anyways, that was a little bit of a rant. Back to changing your view of yourself and changing your identity, and having this identity shift and becoming a new person. This is really important, because if we don't do this we're going to self-sabotage. So you got to keep this in mind as you're quitting porn, you have to give yourself permission to become someone new.

And that's really what it comes down to. Here I am going on all these rants on this episode, but this will be a quick one. Are you allowing yourself to become a new person? Are you giving yourself permission to stop struggling with this? And this is a real thing, I have stuff in my life that I'm currently struggling with.

And this actually came to me when I was meditating last night, there was a hesitancy for me to really heal. There was some resistance for me to let myself move past this thing that is really difficult for me. I wasn't giving myself permission to operate from a higher place because of fear, because of limiting beliefs and all this stuff. But you need to be willing to let yourself be someone who doesn't struggle with porn.

Many of you are afraid that if you give yourself permission to stop struggling with porn, you're going to be lying to yourself and it's going to come back and you're just going to be more defeated the next time you struggle with it. And if that's you, I want to encourage you to be willing to let yourself think differently about this.

First thing is that what you believe about yourself is what you're going to create. So if you're telling yourself you're just going to slip up in the future, so you might as well just keep thinking that you are really struggling with it, that's what you're going to create. You can also imagine a future where you really do quit this for good and it's not something that keeps coming up over and over again. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that even if you do slip up in the future, let's say you go through the work, you quit porn, you're feeling really good, you're not having any issues with it. And you're trying to step into this new phase of really seeing yourself as someone who doesn't struggle with porn. You can remind yourself, even if like six months, 12 months down the road, if I have a slip up or I struggle with it a little bit more, that doesn't mean that I have to identify as someone who has a struggle with pornography.

I can have a slip up in the future and make it mean that it was a weird occurrence. That it's a new level, just something new that I need to look at. Instead of making that mean that you're holding on to that identity as someone who struggles with porn.

There's a difference between someone who overeats all the time and binges often, and they heal that, and they heal through that. And then maybe six months, a year later they have another occurrence where they have a binge. They don't need to go back to this same identity of, “Oh, I'm just back to that same person.” No, that was just a weird occurrence and something that happened. And I'm looking at it and I'm giving myself grace. And then I move on.

Do you see the difference there? It's really just a difference in how you choose to identify yourself. And how you choose to identify yourself is going to be what you create in your life.

So how do we do this? How do you become a new person? How do you have these identity shifts? And I'm going to simplify it for you. I'm really, really going to simplify it for you. Okay, listen, you become a new person by thinking different thoughts. That's it. That's it. That's it. Yeah, you do different things when you're a new person, but the only reason you do different things is because you're having different thoughts and different feelings.

In the program I teach you very in depth something called the self-coaching model that teaches you how to identify those thoughts and change those thoughts. And it’s super, super powerful and I'm going to have to do a whole episode on that sometime for you guys. But right now I just want to stay here focused at this very simple concept that you become someone new by changing how you think.

Now really, think about this, the only difference between who you are now and who you want to be is your thoughts. And so the only difference between someone who has a different life, and has different things, and is taking different actions is that they are thinking different thoughts.

So this is true for everything. So the only difference between me now and me years ago before I had this awesome business and this awesome job, are my thoughts and how I'm thinking about myself now. So my thoughts now is stuff like, “I can do this. People need me. I can help them. I'm really good at this. This is my calling.”

My thoughts before I had all this was like, “I'm not good enough. No one wants to hear from me. Someone else could do it better.” And as I changed those thoughts, I really prioritized changing my thoughts before I changed anything else. And as I changed my thoughts, everything else naturally happened.

What do you think an Olympian thinks about themselves and their life? And how do you think that's different from what you think about you and your life? The reason an Olympian is who they are, is because of what they think. And what they think, creates a feeling that drives their actions. So what they're thinking is creating these results of consistently training, and finding the best trainers, and creating amazing Olympian results.

I want you to think about someone who makes a billion dollars, what are their thoughts? The difference between you and someone who makes a billion dollars is just that person's thoughts. They have thoughts that helped them create a billion dollars.

So in order to change anything in your life, anything in your life, in order to become your ideal life that you can imagine, you just have to think the thoughts that your ideal version of yourself thinks. It's that simple and it's so freaking powerful, you guys.

This self-coaching model that I teach and that I talk about, it's very simple. It's that your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings create your actions, and your actions create your results. And so everything, everything, everything starts with a thought.

And if you try to change your results without changing your thoughts, it's not going to sustain, it's not going to change. If you try to change your actions without changing your thoughts, it's not going to work, it's not going to stay the same.

And that's what I'm talking about, becoming a new person. If you quit porn but then you're still thinking stuff like, “I struggle with this. I really want porn.” You're still going to be someone who goes back to pornography. In order to change your identity, all you have to do is change the way you think about yourself and change the way you think about your life.

To be honest, you guys, I'm a little nervous that I'm not conveying this truth powerfully enough, like how true it is that everything, everything, everything that you want will come as you change your thoughts. And I've done this over and over and over again in my life. I have notebooks and notebooks and notebooks of me just practicing new thoughts and looking at my thoughts and trying to change my thoughts.

Because I know, I know the only difference between who I am now and who I want to be, is how I'm thinking. And that's been true as I've created this beautiful life that I love. I got all of these things that I love so much, because I was willing to work on my thoughts and to change my thoughts.

And it's the same with you, you will be able to quit porn, but only if you're willing to change your thoughts and to think differently about yourself. You will become a new person if you're willing to change your thoughts about yourself. You will become a new person as you change your thoughts and as you change the way you think about yourself.

So I want you to take a moment and get out a piece of paper and a pen or pull out your notes app and do this exercise. I want you to imagine your ideal life. And what does that look like? What do you have?

You probably are not struggling with porn. Imagine what that's like, feeling in control. And also take a moment to think really big. What is your ideal life? What's the job that you want, the travel you want, the family you want? Whatever it is that you really want, think about that. Really think about that.

And then once you have that, ask yourself, this person that I've just written about, what do they think? What do they think about themselves? What do they think about their life? What do they think about porn?

And just journal on that question. Just write everything you can think of. You will have amazing answers come to you. In fact, I'm not even going to give you any ideas because I want this to come from you and from your future self that you're imagining.

What is it that they think about themselves? What do they think about their life? What do they think about porn? What are they telling you to do? And specifically, in regards to porn, what are they telling you to do in order to quit porn?

And then take those thoughts, take those things that you wrote down and practice believing them. Practice thinking them. Practice becoming that person right now by changing your thoughts right now.

Okay, you guys, before we end today I just want to give you a quick reminder that the price for Overcome Pornography For Good is going up at the end of the year. We have a lot of amazing things coming next year and if you join now, you'll also get access to everything that comes in the future. You get lifetime access to everything, including lifetime access to all of the updates.

So if it's something you've been wanting to do, now would be a great time so you can lock it in at this price that it is right now. And if you're kind of on the fence, if you're trying to decide if it would be a good decision for you, here's the thing, the only one who knows whether or not you should join is you. You are the only one who knows that. And so this would be a great question for you to ask that future self that we just imagined.

Think about them, think about their future life, think about what they've created, what they've accomplished, and ask them, what does my future self think about this investment? What would they encourage me to do? And what's the most loving decision that I can make for myself to help myself become this person?

So if you're interested and want to get in sooner rather than later before the price goes up, go ahead, and go to sarabrewer.com/workwithme and you can join the wait list. And I'll send out a lot of emails that last week so that you can get in before the price goes up. All right, you guys, love you so much. Hope you have a great week we'll talk to you later.

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.