Episode 189: No More Band-Aid Solutions

You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 189, No More Band-Aid Solutions. 

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, everyone, welcome to today’s podcast episode. How is everyone doing? It is the end of summer. My kids are starting up school. I love this time, and I also hate this time. 50/50, right? Life is 50% great, life is 50% bad, hard, crappy, whatever. I really love that principle. 

I think I’ve talked about it on the podcast a little bit. But it does, it helps me when things are not going well, or when I have negative emotion, or instead of, oh no, I shouldn’t be feeling bad, or I shouldn’t be feeling this, I should be happy all the time, it’s like, oh yeah, no, that’s just not how it works. That’s not the experience of life. That’s not the human experience. 

The human experience is 50/50, 50 positive, 50 negative. That’s how we experience all the goodness. We have to know the bad to know the good. And so anyways, it’s really clear for me at this time of year. I’m so happy to be in routine, have a little bit of time back to myself, not quite as many stressors. Then at the same time, I’m crying because my kids are going off to school, and they’re getting so big and I just remember how fast the time is going. 

Anyways, it’s great. By the time this episode is released, it’s going to be a couple of weeks from this time that I’m recording, we will have a new free live class that I am doing in September. This live class is going to be called The New Revolutionary Way to Quit Viewing Porn, without pressure, without shame, shame-free, sex-positive, very quickly, and just without all of that pressure. I’m rambling on, that’s not the full title. The full title will be shorter than that. 

The idea here is I’m going to teach you what this process is that I use with my clients over and over again that has been called revolutionary by a lot of people, that has changed a lot of lives in a very quick, fast way. I want to give you all of that information and teach you how to do that in this live class in a simplified way so you don’t have to go and listen to 180 podcast episodes. 

We’re going to give you all of the good things and simply lay it out for you, here’s how we can do this. And here’s the great thing about this too, you guys, is that it’s really not about quitting porn. It’s really about living within your sexual values, changing your relationship with porn. When we say overcome pornography for good, it’s like so that porn has no more power over you. So that it has no more power over you, so you’re able to act within your value system, so that you’re able to feel in control and have control. 

And you can have all of this, all of these results of living in those values and having this peace and not feeling so bad all the time. You can have that without being perfect right away. Without having gone even 30 days without viewing porn, or whatever that goal is. You can have that very quickly, and the quicker that you have that peace and that confidence and this inner healing, the more in line your actions are going to be with your pornography use. 

So that’s the goal here too, is let’s teach you how to access that right now instead of, okay, you can feel good once you’ve gone 30 days. You can feel good once you’ve gone 60 days. You can feel good once it’s been six months since you viewed porn. No, we don’t want to do that anymore. We don’t want to do that anymore. 

So that class will be, I have it as September 19th, but you can go and sign up via the link. I’ll have them post it in the show notes, you can sign up there or email us [email protected] if you don’t see that link or have issues with it, we’ll send it to you right away. If you’re on the email list, you’ll get a bunch of emails about it, so don’t worry about that. But I’m excited for that. I really love doing these life classes a couple of times a year. They’re fun for me. 

Let’s dive into today’s topic, which is talking about band-aid solutions. Now, some common misconceptions around pornography and having a porn habit is that if you’re viewing porn, it’s because you’re not strong enough. It’s because you’re not spiritual enough. The reality is that these beliefs are misleading and it’s not about strength. It’s not about spirituality. It’s not about any of these external factors. 

You know, sometimes people want to blame, oh, well, it’s because of social media or it’s because of technology or whatever this is. The reality is, it’s not any of those things. When we believe that the reason that we’re having problems with pornography is because of our lack of strength or lack of spirituality or because of technology, then we get stuck in some of these avoidance techniques or these band-aid solutions like filters, relying only on filters, phone filters, phone apps, internet blockers. Or other band-aid solutions might be avoiding it, trying to sing a song in your head to make the thought go away, trying to pray it away. 

And I say this, you know, also the caveat that I do, I love spirituality and I love prayer. And just thinking, okay, if I just pray to God to take this away, to take this away, that doesn’t work. That doesn’t work for most people, 99% of people. You might hear a story here or there where something miraculous happened, but that’s just not the reality for 99% of people. 

Some other band-aid solutions would be other avoidance techniques like, oh, you’ve just got to go exercise more. Whenever you’re thinking about it, just get out of the house and go run around the block. How many of us have heard that before? Or something similar, replace it with something else. The desire for porn, you got to replace it for something else. 

Now these all come from a good place, but they are band-aid solutions and they do not work and are not effective long-term. Instead, what we want to do is get to the root of what’s going on with your pornography use. Now I talk about the iceberg a lot. Y’all have heard me talk about the iceberg, and porn, looking, viewing, a porn habit is there at the top of the iceberg and what’s underneath it is what we really want to be looking at. 

One of the main causes, the very, very main causes of viewing pornography is buffering. Buffering is just another term we use for escaping emotion. Now, if you’ve listened to me for a while, you’ve heard that term before, but I don’t want you to tune out here. I want you to really tune in because it’s worth the reminder. And as much as we think that we’re really good and we understand the buffering, there can be a lot of application that’s missing to help us really click it into place even more. 

So buffering is any action that we take to escape emotion. Now, this idea alone can be really life-changing for people when they find out, oh, it’s like it clicks for them. Like, wait, my porn use is because I buffer. And then it makes so much sense. It’s not because I’m out of control. It’s not because I’m not spiritual enough. It’s not because I’m weak. 

It’s because, oh my gosh, every single time or almost every single time, there’s some negative emotion underlying this. So I feel stress. Oh, let’s go view porn to escape stress. So I feel lonely. Oh, let’s go view some porn to stop feeling lonely. Even an emotion like feeling antsy or maybe just a little bit frustrated. 

That’s something that I noticed in myself, recently I’ve been noticing it myself, is like 3pm hits and then my body, it just, it feels a little tense. And like my jaw starts to feel a little tense. And what I do, I go try to chew some gum because my jaw is just tense because the emotion that I’m feeling is just a little bit stressed, a little bit stressed. 

And so if we’re not used to noticing what emotion we’re feeling, and a lot of us weren’t taught to do that or how to do that and we didn’t have examples of people in our life who knew how to feel emotion. So this is a skill on its own, but if you’re not used to being aware of what you’re feeling throughout the day, then buffering just, you know, it kind of becomes a pretty automatic thing. 

And then you might blame yourself for the buffering or blame it on you being weak, when the reality is, oh, let’s just pay attention to what we’re feeling throughout the day. Oh, okay. So this feeling, me trying to avoid this feeling is what led to me buffering. 

Now, let me make a little caveat here because there is nothing wrong with buffering. There is nothing wrong with it. We all need some relief from some of our emotions. We just want to make sure – I mean, there’s like balance in all things is what I’m trying to say. So that we’re balancing, that we do feel in control, that our buffering is lining up with whatever our values are. 

It’s okay to tune out and to like go numb for a little bit and just veg out. Sometimes our brains and our bodies need that, especially after a long day or a long week. And so I want to be careful here that that part of us in our bodies that wants to buffer, we don’t go immediately into shaming that part of us that wants to buffer. 

Instead, we can thank that part of us that wants to buffer. Hey, thank you. Like, thank you for telling me that it’s been a long day. Thank you for telling me that my body needs rest, for telling me that my mind needs rest and it just wants to zone out and veg out. 

I didn’t talk about this, let me talk about this really quickly because there are a lot of examples of buffering and so I should have talked about this before, but here we are. We’re going to talk about it now. There’s lots of examples of buffering. Buffering can be viewing porn. Buffering could be like binging Netflix. It could be scrolling on social media. It could be over shopping, over eating, over drinking. 

Now, a lot of these ones that I just mentioned, they’re probably buffers that we wouldn’t want to do, right? Like if our buffering habit is over shopping, that’s going to create a problem for us. If our buffering problem is over viewing porn, or viewing porn at all if that’s not what we want to be doing, that might create problems for us. If our buffering is over drinking, that’s going to create problems, right? 

So without shaming buffering, noticing that our body is telling us something, when we want to buffer it’s our body telling us something, we can choose actions and listen to our body and say, okay, my body needs rest. What do I want to do to give it the rest it needs? 

Here’s what can happen if we just push down, push down, push down, push the stress down, push the negative emotion down and keep pushing it down and we don’t notice it. We don’t recognize it. We don’t do something about it. What it will do is it will explode. And that’s when it typically results in us doing these big actions that might be outside of our value system. 

When we push down anger, push down anger, push down, push, push it down, what happens? It just explodes, right? And we start doing something, we start yelling, and it’s like a release from some of the anger that’s been building up inside of us. We yell and we scream. Oh, but that’s not what we want to do, right? 

So without shaming the buffering, we want to make sure that our buffering activities are not having a net negative effect in our life. So for example, if you’re feeling lonely, and that’s like your main emotion that you buffer from, viewing porn might get rid of that loneliness for a minute. But then afterwards, you’re still lonely. 

And maybe you’ve used up your time viewing the porn, when what you would really rather be doing is using that time out and about or getting to know other people. Or you’re using your energy, your money on the pornography, when that’s not something that’s going to help you solve that loneliness, it’s making it worse. So we want to make sure that our buffering doesn’t have a net negative effect. 

Or another example would be over drinking, right? So we don’t need to shame alcohol, we can keep alcohol as a neutral thing. But if we’re overusing it in a way that is creating a net negative effect, that’s especially when we want to look at it. 

For example, if you’re antsy at the end of the night, a little bit stressed, and you use alcohol to feel better, does it really help us feel better? Or is it having a net negative effect? That’s a question you’ll want to ask yourself. Or am I waking up in the morning feeling bad? Is it really helping me, or is it just making me escape my life and then nothing is getting better? Or maybe it’s even getting worse because of this habit. 

Now, the thing about buffering and specific habits, specific buffering habits that we have, is that it’s kind of how our brain and our reward system in our brain is trained to handle discomfort. So again, if this is you, if you feel stuck in a buffering habit, like pornography, there’s nothing wrong with you. This is just how you have subconsciously trained your brain to respond to these negative emotions. And that’s okay and we can train it to not do this anymore. 

So we have a reward system in our brain that is really smart and brilliant. Anytime there’s negative emotion, if we flood it with some dopamine, your brain is going to remember where and when it gets that pleasure, where and when it gets that dopamine. And then when that negative emotion comes back, your brain’s job, its only job is ease and pleasure, ease and pleasure. That’s what it wants to do. That’s what this reward system in your brain, the lower part of your brain wants to do, is it wants things to be easy for you, and it wants to create and help you feel good. 

And so you can subconsciously train your brain to want these specific habits. This is why I have sometimes people come up and say, why porn? Why is porn my go-to thing? Why couldn’t it be gaming? Why couldn’t it be shopping? Why couldn’t it be, so why is it porn? And there could be a number of reasons for that, but one of those reasons is because you trained your brain subconsciously to remember that’s the one. That’s the one where we get this good flood of good emotion. 

And so the beautiful thing about that is yes, you trained your brain to really crave that, but it’s not stuck like that forever. It’s really not. Similar to sugar. A lot of us, we train our brains and our bodies to want a lot of sugar, but eventually you can, you can train yourself out of that where you aren’t craving as much sugar. It can be the same thing with porn. 

This is not an addiction that you are stuck with forever. If you follow me for a while, you know that I don’t even like the term addiction here. And we don’t use any of the addiction model stuff. And I have a whole beautiful research page that’s easy to read if you want to learn more about that. It’s just centerforovercomingpornography.com/research-page. If you just go to the main homepage, it’s on the top too. 

But this is not something that, oh, right now you want to view porn every single day. That does not mean it’s going to be like this forever. It does not mean that way. This is not something you just have to deal with for the rest of your life. 

So if the root cause of viewing porn is escaping negative emotion, what is the solution? You might think the solution is let’s not feel negative emotions. Let’s get rid of as much negative emotion as possible. 

Now, unfortunately that is not how life works, right? What I talked about at the very beginning of this podcast episode is 50/50, life is 50% positive, 50% negative. There’s always going to be ups and downs and ups and downs. And you can heal in your life to where those ups and downs maybe aren’t so extreme, but there’s always going to be some negative emotion and some positive emotion. 

And so the solution is not to not feel negative emotion, because guess what happens when we do that? When we try to just not feel negative emotion, we go back into those band-aid solutions or those avoidance solutions. So instead the solution is to not not feel emotion, the solution is to get really good at feeling emotion. 

The reason you have unwanted porn use is because you’re escaping negative emotion. It’s not because you have the negative emotion in the first place, but it’s because you’re escaping negative emotion. So the way to decrease and get rid of unwanted porn use is to stop escaping the negative emotion, and instead get really good at feeling it and processing it and letting it move through your body. 

I will talk more about this next week, but very simply, and you know if you’ve listened to me for a while you’ve heard some of these strategies before, there’s a couple of things that you can do with emotion. You can push it away. And what that does, it’s like holding a beach ball underwater and it just wants to pop up. Or you can do what it says. That’s going to be, oh, we want to view porn, let’s just go view porn. We can try to escape it by other activities, or we can feel it. 

And when we feel it, it ends up passing through our bodies and it doesn’t stick around. A lot of times people are afraid to feel emotion because they think if I just feel the emotion, it’s going to be there forever. It’s not. When you push it down, that’s when it gets stronger and that’s when it sticks around. 

I’ll teach you more techniques to do this in the next couple of episodes. But this is why things like meditation work so well, because meditation isn’t just about calming your thoughts and finding inner peace. No, anyone who’s practiced meditation knows that meditation is not comfortable and it’s not just about finding inner peace. It’s about learning how to sit with the discomfort that you feel in your body from emotion. 

We can learn how to do this without meditating too, there are other mindfulness-based skills. This is why mindfulness-based practices are so, so effective when it comes to quitting porn. And this is what our program is based off of. And this is what we work a lot on with clients, is how do we develop these mindfulness-based practices? 

It doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be something that you sit down and do for 20 minutes every single day. It’s just, we’re making little tiny changes to how we’re coping with emotion and it changes everything. It’ll change everything for you and your porn use, learning these tiny little changes on how you manage emotion. 

The first change is we want to start to even become aware of what emotion we’re feeling. Like I said, that might be a big first step for a lot of us who, like we haven’t been taught to check in with our bodies throughout the day. What am I feeling? And then the second one is what to do with that emotion. What are we doing? Are we pushing it away? How can I process this? What are some easy mindful skills I can practice? 

All right, you guys, next week, we’ll talk a little bit more about urges and feelings and strong sexual urges, like strategies to handle them so that you can feel more in control. If you want to learn these skills more in depth in our specialized program that is just amazing, I love it, come and do so. You can join us at sarabrewer.com/workwithme. 

Oh my gosh, one thing I have to mention, the price for the program is going to be increasing here in September, September 19th. So if you’ve been wanting to get in the program, now’s a great time before the price increases. There’s also an opportunity for you to come and talk and chat with us on that live call on the 19th. If you want to talk more about that price change and want to answer any questions before that goes up, you can come talk to us there. 

But anytime that you want to chat with us, just email us [email protected]. And then you can even get on a phone call with one of our program ambassadors if you’re kind of on the fence, trying to decide if it’s a good fit for you. If you want a little bit of a consultation call, we have people who can do that now. It’s kind of a new thing, we haven’t had this capability in the past. 

But I have a really, really amazing program ambassador. He went through the program himself, ended up getting certified as a coach, and now he works for me in the program and is just a really, really cool guy. Everyone just loves him, can trust him, you know, just wants to help. He wants to help you and wants to help you make a decision that’s going to be the best for you. And so he will tell you if the program’s not a good fit for you, he will tell you that. 

And so if you have any concerns, you can get on a call with him or email us and we can chat. Or if you get on the call on the 19th, that’s where I will be live and I’m happy to answer any questions with you personally live there. But of course, I’m also in the inbox. So email us if you have any questions. 

All right, you guys have a great week. We’ll talk to you next week, bye bye.

I want to invite you to come and listen to my free class, How To Overcome Pornography For Good Without Using Willpower. We talk about how to stop giving in to urges without pure willpower or relying on phone filters so that you can actually stop wanting pornography. 

We talk about how to stop giving up after a few weeks or months. And spoiler alert, the answer isn’t have more willpower. And then lastly, we talk about how to make a life without porn easily sustainable and permanent. 

If you’re trying to quit porn, this class is a game changer. So you can go and sign up at Sarabrewer.com/masterclass, and it is totally free.