Episode 25: What to Do if Your Partner is Struggling with Porn with Lindsay Poelman
Jul 05, 2021I am so excited to bring you an interview this week with an amazing coach and friend of mine, Lindsay Poelman. I feel truly lucky to know her, and hearing from her today is going to give all of you some great insights into the work we do here on the podcast, especially if you have a partner who is struggling with porn use.
Lindsay Poelman is a coach who experienced firsthand the realities of having a partner who is battling a pornography habit. Now, she dedicates her work to empower women in their marriages regardless of what their husband is doing, or not doing. Whether your husband is viewing porn, has decided to quit, or has tried quitting and is struggling, Lindsay is here to help you live a life beyond what you perhaps believe is possible right now.
Join me on the podcast this week as I put your questions to Lindsay Poelman around what to do if your partner is struggling with porn. Lindsay is sharing the story of how she found coaching, the difference it’s made in her marriage, and how you can empower yourself in navigating the ebbs and flows of a marriage.
I have amazing news. If you want to take the work I’m sharing on the podcast deeper, I’m running a masterclass called How to Quit Viewing Pornography Even if You’ve Tried in the Past is 100% free! All you have to do is sign up here and I will see you there.
What You'll Learn from this Episode:
- The story of how Lindsay discovered the extent of her husband’s porn use.
- Why problems like pornography use don’t have to define your marriage.
- How to work through your thoughts and feelings when you don’t feel like your partner is being honest.
- The work that Lindsay does with her clients in empowering themselves despite whatever their partner is going through.
- What you can do to work through communication struggles around your partner’s porn use.
- Why resentment is a normal feeling to experience in this situation, but you can choose to let it go when the time is right for you.
- How to feel happiness, safety, and security, even if your partner isn’t doing their own work to change.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- Click here to sign up for my free mastermind called How to Quit Viewing Pornography Even if You’ve Tried in the Past!
- Lindsay Poelman: Website | Instagram | Facebook
- Lindsay’s Podcast: Latter-Day Saints Dealing with Pornography in Marriage
Full Episode Transcript:
You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 25.
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.
Sara: All right, hey everyone. Welcome to the podcast episode this week. I am so excited to have my friend Lindsey Poelman on the podcast. She is an amazing, amazing, amazing coach. We met through the coaching world. She was certified through The Life Coach School, like I was, and then we did some advanced certification together through Jody Moore. I just feel so lucky to know her, and I am so excited for you guys to get to hear from her today.
She specifically coaches, well I’ll tell you a little bit more about who you coach. But her Instagram bio is, “I've moved past the pain of my husband’s porn use, and I can help you heal in your marriage too.”
Lindsey: Yeah.
Sara: So go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit Lindsey.
Lindsey: Yeah, well, Sara likewise I am so happy to be here because any chance I get to hang out with you is just always a total bonus in my world. My name is Lindsey Poelman, and like Sara said, I'm a certified life coach. We met doing the advanced faith-based training. I'm also sexual trauma certified.
I am here to empower women in any marriage no matter what your husband is doing or not doing. So whether he’s stopped, stopping, or not stopping looking at porn, I am here to help you heal. And in turn open yourselves up to living a life beyond what you can even dream of right now. I will tell you, it is the most incredible…Being a part of it for me with my clients is one of the biggest honors of my life. It’s just so beautiful and so amazing.
Sara: Yeah, cool. Thank you. Is there anything you want to tell us about your background? How you got into coaching?
Lindsey: Yeah. Sure, yeah. So my husband and I got married in 2006. We were kind of like your typical, I don’t know, in our opinion the kind of typical check the box couple where you get the degrees, and you get the advanced degrees. Then you find the big house, and you have the babies.
It’s kind of like I think I had this idea that if I just checked off all these boxes, and I think my husband did too, that things would just kind of like work out. Like we’d have problems, but not like problems, you know? Like I think I really did believe that I could like earn my way out of certain problems or something like that. I don’t know.
Sara: Yeah.
Lindsey: So about let’s see maybe 10 or 11 years into our marriage, my husband was working as a dentist earning six figures. He texted me one day and just said, “Hey, can we talk tonight?” I was like sure. I thought I’d gotten in trouble. I thought I’d done something wrong. He proceeded that night to tell me that he’d been looking at pornography and lying to me about it over the past two to four years. I, Sara, like devastated. Was so.
So like anytime I'm talking about my past, it’s just where I was at the time. I just want to be really real about that too because it was heartbreaking. It was earth shattering. Like it literally felt like a dagger had gone into my heart. It was so painful and so hard for me at the time because I didn’t know what I know now. But also, I think, sometimes like that betrayal, it felt really big and huge.
I think another reason it was so hard is I took it really personally. Like incredibly personally. So through therapy and things like that, I got to a place of general apathy and acceptance. But I just remember being hungry for more, and just thinking like, “There has to be more than a marriage of general apathy and acceptance towards my husband’s behavior and the marriage.” So that is when I found coaching, and that is when everything changed for me.
Sara: Yeah, I love that. Because I think that that’s probably a point that a lot of people get to. It’s apathy or maybe just trying not to think about it, or just acceptance that, “Okay, well this is just going to be how our marriage is.”
Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. Like I remember talking to very trusted therapists and professionals. Like is it just always going to be like this? Is it always going to be like a problem in our marriage? They kind of looked at me like with a little bit like it was like loving pity, but it was like, “Yeah, it kind of is.” So the reason I bring that up for the listeners is that is just absolutely not true. Like it does not have to define your marriage. You really can heal and evolve and be happier than ever if this is something that you're working through right now. So.
Sara: Yeah, which seems to be kind of a similar message for people struggling with pornography, right? Just oh, this is something you're just going to have to struggle with forever. Bummer.
Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like alcoholics. Like the idea of being an alcoholic. It’s like, “I'm 20 years sober, but shouldn’t go into a bar anymore.” Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. I just totally don’t think that’s true. Like your behavior doesn’t have to identify you. For us women, our husband’s behavior absolutely does not have to identify us either.
Sara: Yeah. Good. So let’s hop into it. I have a whole bunch of questions that I want to just spend time talking about that are the big questions that I get about this from the spouses or from the partners or from the girlfriends or the boyfriends or whoever it is. So first one is how to have trust again when you're not sure that they're being honest?
Lindsey: That is such a good question because I think that’s where a lot of people come to me, Sara, is they're like, “I just, I don’t know what to trust. Right? I don’t know when I should trust, and I don’t know when I shouldn’t trust him?” I wish there was like a really quick answer. Like you just do this and you're good. What I want to offer is the good news is is that the trust starts with you. So it starts with you, and it always has.
In my program, I have like this self-trust triad that almost helps my women have like a 360-degree way to develop out their self-trust so that they can be more assured in their decisions about trusting him. Because the thing is is like when we’re deep in our own self-trust, we can have our own back as we navigate the ebbs and flows of our marriage whether he’s behaving “trustworthy” or not.
So I think sometimes we think the trust has to be there or else blank, blank, blank. What I want to help my women see is that either way no matter what he’s doing or not doing, lying or not lying, I can trust that I can have my back and show up and support myself no matter what he’s doing or what he’s not doing.
Because usually we want the trust to have some sort of certainty or safety. So, for me, I like to teach my women how to create that for themselves. So even as he’s feeling things out and we’re feeling things out around like what we want in our marriage, we can still kind of have a stake in the ground for where we want to be. Does that make sense?
Sara: Yeah, that’s so good. Just this idea that it starts with us, and that we can create the safety and the security that we want to feel even if our partner doesn’t change what he or she is doing.
Lindsey: Yeah. Because I think that’s where we feel so powerless sometimes is we’re like, “I just need to trust you so I can feel okay.” Then that leaves us in like a position where we don’t have any power because we’re totally dependent on their behavior. I like to turn it around for people so they could feel more empowered.
Sara: Yeah. Is that possible Lindsey? Is it possible to feel that?
Lindsey: Yes.
Sara: Even if your spouse doesn’t change?
Lindsey: Oh my gosh, yes. Yes. Like 100 times yes. Here’s the thing too is I think that it only takes one person to change the dance of your marriage. So a lot of times like our perception of our marriage is just that. It’s our perception of the marriage. So us being willing to do the work on ourselves to take those steps, I think it helps. Honestly, like when we put a stick in the ground for our own self-love, self-trust, self-confidence, and acceptance, what it does, in my opinion Sara, is it helps us see more of what the true essence of our marriage is.
So, for me, choosing to turn inward and look at coaching. I remember like a very, very low point where I think honestly my words were probably something like, “I can't control anything. I have no control over what he ends up doing. He may do this. He may never do this again.” For my husband, he’d stopped working because of some childhood trauma and anxiety and depression that came to a head. So I was really frustrated after a certain amount of time because he wasn’t healing on my timeline.
I remember getting to like this pivot point which felt like a low point at the time where I was like, “I just can’t control him. So I really just have to figure me out.” Once I just stopped expending energy on what he was doing or not doing, everything changed from there. I learned how to do the work on myself to get to that space that’s available to anyone that has the desire for sure.
Sara: Yeah. I'm assuming too like what a blessing that probably was to learn how to do that. You're laughing and nodding your head like, “Oh my gosh.”
Lindsey: Yeah, like I can't even, and I'm getting emotional thinking about it. I am so much happier than I have ever been, even before I knew about the porn. Before I knew about the porn, I think I was happiest I’d ever been with the capacity that I had. But I'm just in this place where my life, I feel so much more alive and full in my own life. I'm just so grateful for these God given tools that have helped me so much.
Sara: Yeah, awesome. Well, tell us about your marriage now. How’s your marriage?
Lindsey: Oh my gosh. It’s amazing. If you would have told me 10 years ago, “Hey, by the way you're going to be living in the south of France, and your husband is going to be working from home. Your kids are going to be doing this and this and this.” Like if somebody would have told me that, I would have just kind of like laughed in their faces. Like no. Like that’s not possible, right, because my brain wasn’t looking for…I never tried to send my brain down that evidence path to evidence that something like that could happen.
So me doing the work on myself, and I think something important to share too, is I chose to do it first. I don’t want to say first because he was doing his own healing in his own order, and everything happens in the way that it’s totally meant to. But I was willing to take my own step into coaching before him.
This doesn’t happen in every single marriage. But what I do feel like it did is it opened up space for him to figure himself out without worrying so much about my emotions and how I was going to react and how I was going to feel. Because he was already in this shame spiral show where if he told me he looked at porn, I would react and withdraw.
It is absolutely okay to respond that way. There are plenty of like, I have a lot of resources to help women take care of themselves when that happens. That they can like know that they're going to be okay. Also, I feel like it opened up space for him to just kind of feel himself out in his own healing while I was doing my own independent healing.
Then ultimately, we were able to like come together interdependently in this really like beautiful loving way where we don’t need each other to be something for us to be happy. We can just both sustain and love ourselves enough, and then come together in like this really beautiful hybrid that’s better than I could have ever pictured.
Sara: Yeah, cool. I love it. I love that. What a blessing for him too that you were willing to go through that. Because I mean a blessing for you, a blessing for him. So many of my clients are just so worried about their spouses and feel so much shame because of their thoughts about their spouses and their spouse’s reactions. Which is fine. Like you said, it’s not a bad thing to react and to be upset. What a blessing that is for you to also want to take care of that. Thank you.
Lindsey: Yeah, of course.
Sara: Okay. “What can I do when he won't talk to me about it? We have communication struggles.”
Lindsey: That’s another great question because there's like a myriad of reasons why he won't talk about it. So if I were to think of like my husband…Well first of all, I think I’ll talk about where my husband’s brain might have been when he didn’t want to talk about it sometimes. There might have been times where I tried to push an agenda of some sort whether it was around porn. Or for us some of the struggles were around like him working, him not working, me working, stuff like that.
I will say like my husband was just so worried about my response to how he was doing or not doing that he would just, like he couldn’t always handle it. Because I think we forget how conditioned men are to “make wives happy”. I think we’re conditioned as women, and I'm being general. But like generally speaking, I think a lot of women are conditioned in other ways too, to like believe that our happiness is conditioned on what he does, and that we’re supposed to make him happy in certain ways.
I think a lot of times it can just be really tough because he might just be in shame. And he’s like, “Well, if I tell her then she’s just going to withdraw.” Actually, if you think about it too, you’ll have to tell me what your thoughts are, but like there are women who don’t want to have sex when this happens. Then there's some ideas and beliefs that have been passed down by society that men actually need sex.
Then they get in like their own little like catch 22 where they're like, “Well, crap, if I tell her, I don’t get this thing that I need.” Then he’s like, “But if I tell her, she can't handle it.” So they get really stuck. So, of course, I want to just make sure it’s very clear that men don’t actually need sex to survive. I think it can just be helpful to have a little bit of understanding where he might be coming from, right?
Sara: Yeah.
Lindsey: I think a lot of it just has to do with not being able to handle wife’s response and feeling really guilty. What do you think? What do you see a lot?
Sara: 1,000%. It’s the shame. It’s the shame, and then that will trigger some more shame for them. Then when you're feeling shame, what you do is you hide, and you avoid. So you're going to hide and avoid from your spouse. You're going to hide and avoid from God. You're going to hide and avoid from yourself. That might be what's happening.
Lindsey: Yeah. It’s like that person you so want to disappoint the least. Like when you know they're going to be totally disappointed every time it happens, and here you are like, “I'm trying to stop, but I don’t know how.” Because as Sara teaches, this is like a mental skill set that we’re teaching. How to follow urges, how to process emotions. If we don’t know how, I could see it feeling really hopeless too, right.
Sara: “Something’s wrong with me. Why am I not strong enough to do this?” When it has nothing to do with.
Lindsey: Right.
Sara: It’s about your skills.
Lindsey: Yeah. I think a lot of times, I would with most of my clients, it’s a matter of that not feeling safe to, not wanting to, feeling shame, disempowered, and feeling like there’s not really a good way out. I think sometimes, just to be totally straight, there might be some sort of like entitlement that some men might feel. Like whatever that might be, there might be some entitlement here or there.
I think for the client and for a woman, if the woman is the one wondering it’s just being willing to ask why. I would just say like if you want to have these conversations, try to do it from a space where you know that like you can have your own back or you can take care of yourself afterwards.
Because I think sometimes what happens with women is we don’t know how to handle our pain or our own shame around a lot of this. Then we ask lots of questions, but it’s like literally wanting details to punch ourselves in the gut. So I think just being really clear beforehand. Like what makes sense for me to know? What do I need to know? What actually doesn’t matter for me to know? But what were you going to say? I always love hearing what you have to say.
Sara: I was just going to say that’s a good transition into one of the big questions that I hear a lot is, “Why am I not enough? Why am I not enough for him?”
Lindsey: Yeah. So my opinion, Sara, is that this is just total conditioning. So I would say the majority of cases, the husband does not believe that about you, right? Well first of all, every time he looks at porn, it has nothing to do with you. So it’s very likely that this habit was around before you maybe even came into the picture. So I would say if it wasn’t a habit before spouses came into the picture, I think sometimes men use a lot of willpower because they’ve been told it always gets better after you get married. That’s just a myth. Not true.
Sara: It’s not true.
Lindsey: So I guess my point is like I think there's just this idea that’s been passed down by, I would say, the porn industry and by men and women that if we were enough, he wouldn’t need to resort to that. What I want to offer is they're actually not connected even though a lot of people believe it is. I think the fact that most men are looking before marriage provides a lot of evidence that it really doesn’t have to do with you.
Sara: I once read this amazing quote. It was from a bishop. It was called Confessions from a Mormon Bishop. I don’t remember who it’s by. But if you google it, you'll find it. He says, “I've learned that pornography is not about sexual appetites. It’s about escape.”
Lindsey: Totally.
Sara: So that’s exactly what it is. It’s kind of the same thing as if your husband was out drinking a bunch of Mountain Dew. Am I not making enough food for him? Am I not giving him enough food? It has nothing to do with that.
Lindsey: That’s such a good, yeah. It took some time for me even after getting certified as a coach. It took some time for me to wrap my mind around that too that it actually could be that. Like as simple as men wanting to escape from emotions.
So what I want to offer too is like if that feels too farfetched for you to believe, you don’t have to believe that yet. You can always offer yourself these open-ended statements or ideas. Like if that’s possible that’s true, I want to learn more. Or something like that. Like I don’t believe that’s true right now, and that’s okay. Something where we’re--
Sara: Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong that this has something to do with me.
Lindsey: Yeah. What if I was wrong? Yeah. So good. So good. Bringing in that curiosity. Love it.
Sara: Another thing too is sometimes we think that pornography is a replacement for sex with a person when in reality it’s so different. The ideal experience with you is connection and vulnerability and all of these things that he couldn’t get from pornography. So even if you're having a hard time comparing yourself to the people he might be seeing, it’s just so helpful sometimes to see it in this way that that’s not what sex is about. Sex isn’t about looking this way. Sex isn’t about having this certain body type. Sex is about this connection and vulnerability that that can't replace.
Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Again, I'm always like even if men do think that, right. Even if women do think that. A lot of these ideas have just been passed down. So I think just checking in with ourselves. Like if we’re thinking about some belief that we have and we pause and check in with ourselves. If it’s not feeling that great, it might be worth questioning is this true? Maybe it’s not true. What would be different for me if it wasn’t true? You know.
Sara: Yeah. So good. I love it. Thank you. Which one should we talk about now? I have so many.
Lindsey: You're fine.
Sara: “Is it considered cheating? What about our covenants?”
Lindsey: I think that’s a good question. If I was talking to the person asking this question, I might ask something like you know why are you asking? Just out of pure curiosity. Why do you want to know? Like how will knowing this answer serve you? Because I think sometimes we look for like this black and white explanation outside of ourselves so we can know what to do, right? So it could be worth just asking yourself like do I want to know so that...what?
Sara: So good.
Lindsey: So I think there's that. One thing my husband has said is like sometimes it’s like human nature to want to make something sound as bad as possible because we think that will motivate us to stop more. So that could be something too. Do you want my opinion?
Sara: Sure.
Lindsey: I would actually love to hear your opinion. In my opinion, it’s not. I'm going to say that being very clear that when I was going through it, it kind of felt like it. That was before I found coaching and stuff like that. So if it feels like that to you, it’s totally…I just want to say I think any response to anything about what your husband is doing or not doing is totally normal. If you're open to exploring other ideas, it could be worth it just so that you're not beating yourself up about things.
Sara: Yeah.
Lindsey: And if we decide to think about it as cheating, then I think some people might think well there’s some grounds for divorce. What I like to help my women do is get to a place where they can stay married from a place of love and abundance, and they can get divorced from a place of love and abundance. So spending a lot of time deciding the semantics of whether that’s cheating or not, like how is that helping you develop your intimate loving relationship with yourself? You know?
Sara: Yeah. So good. We don’t have to justify divorce based on deciding that it’s cheating or not. We can still divorce without all of that if we want to.
Lindsey: Yeah. Which I think brings up a good point. You'll have to tell me what your thoughts are, but I feel like I remember as a kid hearing that all the time that there was a divorce. Like, “Oh, he was doing this. Oh, he was doing that.”
Sara: Yeah.
Lindsey: So could you imagine being a man who’s like told like never, never, never. Don’t do it, don’t do it. It’s so bad. It breaks up marriages. Then having that habit. Could you imagine? Like if my husband literally thought he’s going to go to hell and lose everything, and she’s going to kick me out of the house.
Like the night that he told me, he’s like, “She might kick me out of the house. I might never see her again.” Right? So scary. I think for women the problem is too I think there are great intentions with these ideas and teachings about not looking at porn. But when we’re believing some of that, it’s really scary for us too. Like oh my gosh. Our internal family. Things can get broken up, and we can go down. It’s different, but a similar fear into our own fear cycles too.
Sara: Yeah. Something that I've been sitting on and thinking about and sharing with my clients too is that it’s not pornography that breaks up relationships ever. Sometimes people like to use that. Like, “Oh they got divorced because someone was looking at porn.” It was never that. Because there are also lots of marriages that are not broken up and someone’s looking at porn.
I'm not saying that one way is better than the other way, but people end relationships because of people and what they decide. Or because of all the other stuff going on below the surface. I mean I know you experienced this with your husband. There was so much going on below the surface that was causing the pornography. The pornography wasn’t the root of all the problem. There was stuff going on below that was causing it.
Lindsey: Yeah. It was more of like a side effect. Well, here's the thing too. Like I will say like he had a lot of childhood trauma that he was working through, and a lot of anxiety and depression. There was some family history there.
Again, I say that, but you don’t need to have that to have a porn habit. We don’t need an excuse for a porn habit. He had had porn introduced to him. It was inadvertent, but he had had it introduced to him as a young teen or whatever. I actually don’t know how old he was. So it was normalized in a way for him. So it was a way he knew to escape. I think that happens to a lot of men. So, for my husband, it really was an escape or like a numbing thing.
Sara: Which helps us not make it about ourselves as spouses.
Lindsey: Yeah. I will just say like I think even as you hear us say this. If you're like, “Yeah, but I'm different. Or yeah, but it’s different for me.” I just want to let you know that it’s really normal. Sometimes there's so much dissonance between how we’ve been conditioned for decades with the thousands of messages we’ve received from media and other places in our lives that sometimes just hearing, “Oh it’s you. It’s not about you.” There's so much dissonance that our brain is just like, “Just discard, delete. That’s not true. You're different.”
I do want you to know that a lot of that is just conditioned into you or into us. Anything conditioned into us can be totally deconditioned or conditioned out of us.
Sara: Yeah, good. Thank you. I love that. What about resentment? How can I not resent him?
Lindsey: That’s a great question. I think that resentment can come from a myriad of places, right? It can come from not setting proper boundaries, and it also can just like simply come from our thinking. I think ultimately it really does come from our thinking. That being said, if you are the type of person that blames yourself a lot, you don’t want to blame yourself for all the resentment you felt because guess what? You didn’t know. You might not have the skills, or the skill set to work through this. So I think it can come from those places.
I guess my question might be what is spending time resenting him keeping you from doing, accomplishing, creating? Is it keeping you from your healing? Is it affecting your day to day? Is there somewhere else you’d prefer to focus your thinking?
So I want to be clear. I think that resentment is okay, and it’s really normal to be there. Then if you get to a place where you decide like, “Hm, I'm ready to move on and feel something else.” It could be worth exploring the why behind it, but also not judging yourself for your resentment too.
Sara: Yeah, I love it. The message here is it’s valid. It’s okay. And we can have something different if you would like or if you're ready.
Lindsey: Yeah. That’s a great way to say it in the shorter version. It’s okay. It’s normal to feel it. When you're ready, there's plenty of other emotions available to you for sure.
Sara: Yeah. To go about healing resentment or working through resentment, what would be one thing you would say about that if you are ready for something a little bit different? I know it will be case by case and person by person. So this is very general.
Lindsey: No, I mean I think a lot of the resentment might come from our perception of how things should be or some sort of expectation or manual we have for our spouse and how they should behave. Sometimes we’re not taking responsibility for our own emotions, and we feel like he has control or power over us. So we feel like our emotions are in his control, but we know we don’t have control over him. So it makes sense that we might like to resent him because we feel really powerless.
So I just want to say it’s very normal to feel it, but you absolutely can choose to just kind of ask yourself like…Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, I think I did a post or something recently about I think sometimes resentment might come. I think there's like that should or that expectation piece, but I also think there’s a little bit of fear or lack of belief in ourselves around creating what we want to create.
If we don’t believe that we can create our own happiness or have that power over ourselves and our emotions, sometimes we might just fall into resentment because we don’t know how to get to where we want to go. What I want to just offer is getting out of resentment if it’s something you want is totally available to anyone who has the desire, for sure.
Sara: Yeah. The best way to do that is kind of, in my opinion, what you were talking about before when you talked about going and doing the work on yourself. And being able to feel power and trust that you can create the life that you want no matter what anyone else in your life is doing.
Lindsey: Yeah, for sure.
Sara: Let’s do this question then. “I feel a responsibility for stopping them viewing pornography.” What are your thoughts on that?
Lindsey: So I always just like to be really clear. Total conditioning, okay. A lot of us were conditioned as teens that we could be a part of the opposite. We could be a part of dressing a certain way or showing up a certain way to help with our thoughts and behavior. The problem with teaching women that they have that power is that the other side of that coin is the opposite, right?
Sara: Right. Then it’s like you get married, and all of a sudden now you're in charge of now there's sexual fulfilment. Flip the coin.
Lindsey: Yeah. So when you try to teach someone that they're responsible for influencing for good and things like that, unfortunately we’re also seeding in the belief that we’re responsible for the other stuff too. So if that is true, just know, again, like this is just been something that’s been taught. What do I want to think about this now? Right.
We can kind of step back from the forest and just decide if we do want to take responsibility for it or not. The thing too is like some men and some spouses might actually still believe that. They can totally believe that, and you can totally decide to not believe that.
So sometimes there might be a little bit of friction in the marriage where a woman is putting her own stake in the ground for what she believes. But, again, anytime we’re like setting these boundaries or putting our own stake in the ground for our own belief, women and husbands too. I think it’s so powerful because, again, that’s where we find the true essence of the marriage.
Sara: Oh so good. What do you mean by the true essence of the marriage?
Lindsey: Oh it’s a good question. So a lot of times spouses are coming together kind of like in a codependent way. I don’t mean that with the negative connotation a lot of us have been literally raised from like age two that we could make people happy. Like by sharing a toy or not sharing a toy. So a lot of this stuff, again, conditioning.
What I will say is like as women or men when we are developing our true selves and really tethering ourselves to who we want to become. Like we are allowing our truer self to come through. While we’re doing that, we’re giving our spouse an opportunity to decide, “Oh, I like that. Oh, I'm not sure about that. Oh, that’s not cool.” Right?
If we’re both constantly people pleasing and it’s like a game where we’re keeping score or trying to make a decision based on what they're going to do, neither of us are letting our true selves come through. So we’re not able to see what’s actually there.
That’s where I think the healing individually for the woman and the man can be so, it’s like just a total win/win. Because either way they've developed out their own self-concept in a really loving and accepting way. They're going to feel better than ever. They're going to see that their spouse is what they want. Or if their spouse responds from this space of entitlement like with an attitude of entitlement, it can be helpful to be like, “Oh, maybe this is what my marriage is, right?”
Like for me personally, me working on myself like through coaching and everything. Like after three or four months and me going and getting certified and everything. At first, my husband was like, “Oh, she’s just on a high.” It’s like coming back from EFY. Like it will just go. But after a while he was just like, “Whoa. Like she’s different. What does she know that I don’t know?” Right? He was just like wow.
So me working on myself and turning inward helped him to be like, “Hm, I liked that.” Right? You know there might be some urges where the spouse is like, “Mm, not interested in that.” The thing is either way it’s a win because you’ve gotten yourself to this place where you know you can be okay no matter what. Then we don’t bring our fear about what could happen, what might not happen. Then we don’t bring that in the present anyways, and then not act from our own authenticity as well. Does that make sense?
Sara: That makes so much sense. We hear this quote, “Fill your own cup so it will overflow into other people’s.” Or we hear a lot. We need to take care of ourselves so we can really take care of other people. The way that you're saying it is probably just another little bit deeper way of that concept. Especially when it comes to pornography, it’s really easy to go into powerless, feeling very powerless.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Sara: But the message here, and you're such a great example of this, is that you can come back to a place of full power in your own life and full fulfilment in your own life no matter what. No matter what’s going on with your family or with your spouse.
Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I just like taking that “feel your own cup” thing a step further. Like I always like to drive home this idea that like you are worth filling up your cup just because of you. Because you exist as a human, and that’s enough. And a beautiful side effect of that is you acting in your own self-interest is in the best interest of your marriage and your other relationships and your mothering and things like that, you know?
Sara: Yeah, and your family. That’s something I've really been learning this last year, especially with my business growing and just having so much fun with coaching. At first there's a little bit of guilt.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Sara: Then I heard some mom. I think it might have been Brooke Castillo in one of her podcasts says, “My business makes me a better mom. Spending time working my business makes me a better mom.” I saw so much evidence for how that was true. It took me a while to get there, but now it just is like a total true belief.
That’s what's so amazing too about the things that Lindsey and I have been talking about. They might not feel natural for you to believe right now, and they might feel tricky and hard, but it’s so amazing what our brains can do with new beliefs. How they can really become an ingrained belief where one day you just wake up, and you just believe something different because you’ve practiced, and you’ve worked at it. One day you wake up, and you feel powerful and love and fulfilled in your relationships because you’ve done the work on yourself, not because you changed the other person.
Lindsey: Right. It’s so good.
Sara: So let’s do one more question for just a few minutes. This last one, “I feel like I'm missing out on a real relationship. My husband says he prefers masturbation and pornography instead of sex with me.”
Lindsey: Mm that’s a great one too because I think there's, again, a myriad of reasons why this could be happening, right. For some humans, it might be easier for them because they don’t have to worry about vulnerability and connection when they're masturbating and looking at porn, right.
Like for some reason with men, and maybe you can explain more than me Sara. I’d love to hear your thoughts. But there is something about what they make it mean if they get turned away for sex, not all men, but some do. So it feels very vulnerable for them to approach their wife for sex. Then when she’s taking space and figuring things out, he, again, makes that mean something about him. So, for him, he’s like, “Well that felt horrible. I might as well do that then try to engage in this complex thing.” Right?
So when guys don’t know how to manage their emotions on their own, to bring another human in the picture who could say no and then make it mean all these things about themselves, yeah. Like it.
Sara: Yeah, similar. I mean it’s not your fault that they're saying that they would prefer that over you. That doesn’t mean that you’re not as good as the things that you're seeing. It has nothing to do with that and everything to do with, yeah. I think it’s maybe a little bit similar around the conditioning of being the breadwinner, right. Some men get really self-conscious or upset if their wife starts to make more money than them. It has nothing to do with the wife. It has everything to do with some of their own healing that needs to happen and some of their own deconditioning, their beliefs need to happen.
Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I think you can also just like keep in mind too. When we’re taking care of ourselves and turning inward, we might actually decide that we want more out of our relationship than a relationship where he’s turning all the time too. That can be done from like a place of love as well. So I just love the idea that like there isn’t always like a right or a wrong.
Like I've had these amazing breakthroughs with this one client in particular. When we first started working together, she always wanted to know when he was looking, but it was very fear based so she could beat herself up and go into panic attacks and stuff. So we took a break asking him so she could really just focus on herself, right. She was wanting to ask him so she could beat herself up.
Then we’re getting near the end of our coaching, and she’s just like in this beautiful place where she’s like, “I really care about our intimacy and our connection. Now the reason I want to know is so that I can just kind of gauge what's going on and know more about my marriage.” So can you kind of see the difference there?
Sara: 100%. That’s going to be so helpful for so many people to hear. Like what is the result that you're looking for from asking them all the time if they're looking at it. Is the result so that you can, like this client of yours, the result of trying to figure out if he’s looking at porn was to find reason to feel bad.
Lindsey: Right. It was like to beat herself up and to take responsibility. Honestly, it’s kind of like one of those things where you try to figure out how to prevent it again. I think sometimes we try to like analyze how it happens from this kind of fear based space. Because we’re like, “Well, maybe I should have done this. Maybe this. Maybe if I weighed five pounds less. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe if I looked like her.” Then ultimately like that’s just the way to like keep punching ourselves in the gut and beating ourselves up.
Now it’s more coming from this place of like, “I personally love myself so much that I want to have this really intimate connected relationship with my spouse. Now I'm ready to hear it because I know how to take care of myself either way, and I can decide in a really loving way like what made sense for me as far as like how much he tells me or doesn’t tell me.” It’s insane. It’s beautiful.
Like this took her less than six months, and it took me like three years. Because there weren’t coaches around teaching this kind of stuff when I was going through it.
Sara: So good. So the moral of the episode, you guys, go hire Lindsey. From my perspective. Or at least like you deserve to take care of yourself, and you're going to get so much further. You're going to be so much happier. You're going to heal so much quicker if you focus on that instead of focusing on changing or controlling or anything with the other spouse.
Lindsey: Yeah. I think, again, as women, a lot of us—again, I'm being general of course. A lot of us, I think, have been conditioned to discount our emotions. We’re like, “Oh, but his problem’s this big. So let’s throw everything at this problem.” My problems aren’t as big. My emotions don’t matter as much. But the thing is is pain is pain. It’s not comparable. Your pain gets to be real and valid, and you're totally worth finding and creating your own healing too. Sometimes it happens before him, and that’s okay. That doesn’t have to be a problem.
Sara: The best thing you can do for him is to do that for yourself and allow yourself to be where you're at and allow yourself to feel the pain, and then allow yourself to move past it when you're ready.
Lindsey: Yeah. I love it so much.
Sara: Thank you so much. Okay Lindsey, how can we find you? How can we hear more from you? How can we work with you? Where’s those details?
Lindsey: You're so sweet. So on my website, I have this awesome guide. It’s called Find Relief Right Now. It’s a guide to ground and take care of yourself regardless of what he’s doing. Because we want to make sure we can get present so we can think more clearly about things. I also have an upcoming webinar in July on body image.
So anyone on my email list, which you can get on if you go to lindseypoelmancoaching.com. Anyone on my email list will have like the first access to the webinar as it comes up. It’s going to be amazing. Because a lot of times that’s where we go to body image stuff. So there's so much amazingness happening over there. I just can't wait to see where we keep going as women.
Sara: So good. Awesome. Okay, thank you so much for being here. I know so many people got a lot of great goodness out of this episode. So thank you.
Lindsey: No, thank you Sara.
Sara: All right you guys. Have a great week. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye, bye.
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