Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] A couple of years ago, my therapist told me that porn is like an old friend. It just sits there in the corner, leaving you alone. But it's there. And when life gets tough and you begin to emotionally crumble inside, it comes to you and offers its presence and friendship again in moments of hardship. And the reason he was telling me that is because I was dealing with some temptations of my own that I hadn't dealt with in 10 years plus years. In fact, I wrote Live Free from the posture that I am free.
[00:00:38] The bondage that once gripped me through my youth to pornography was completely gone.
[00:00:45] And that was genuine and true.
[00:00:47] But then some events in life happened. I experienced some burnout. I experienced an emotional crumbling. In fact, to be honest with you, as I kind of reflect back on my life, I can see how I think all along there were pieces of my own emotional and mental well being that weren't whole yet.
[00:01:09] And to be fair, maybe they never will be. Maybe wholeness is a journey that we take through all of life.
[00:01:17] But it kind of blindsided me and I wasn't sure what to do with it. And it was humiliating and shameful. And that's part of why I found myself talking to my therapist about pornography again.
[00:01:33] And when he said that porn is like an old friend, something clicked inside of me. And today on Unfeigned Christianity, I would like to tell you more about that.
[00:01:45] This is. This episode is the first of a three part series I'm doing called Free for Real.
[00:01:52] And part of the framing say Free for Real.
[00:01:56] Well, what is freedom? Because one of the things that I bumped into was that just because we go through a decade or more of freedom, which feels like this isn't even a temptation anymore, freedom actually goes deeper than just the absence of temptation.
[00:02:17] You may bump into the temptations again. There may even be failures along the way at times. But Free for Real is an ongoing journey of healing and wholeness that we are intentionally taking and participating and not, not just trying to coast.
[00:02:31] That's what I want to talk to you about.
[00:02:34] And that's what we're going to dive into in today's episode called Porn Is like an Old Friend. So often when it comes to porn recovery efforts, one of the things that we focus on the most is how do we stop the bad behavior. And quite frankly, for many, that's the most important piece right now.
[00:02:55] The porn use is ruining relationships. It's an addiction, it's unhealthy, and so you really have to just stop the behavior. So you take some sort of drastic disciplinary action.
[00:03:06] I use a dumb phone instead of a smartphone, or I don't use computers or put on accountability software on our devices, which I do think is valuable and important.
[00:03:19] But what can happen is we leave the recovery portion to those sort of behavioral changes, those tweaks in how we're doing things. I get accountability partners and all of that. And the reason accountability partners are things that we're told to pursue is because at the bottom of it all, we're needing connection with other humans. And accountability can be a way of rhythmic confession, rhythmic shar, where we are acknowledging our brokenness and we're carrying burdens one with another.
[00:03:54] As James talks about, I'm sorry, Galatians, as Paul talks about in Galatians, that we bear one another's burdens. And he's specifically speaking to the types of burdens that lead to sin.
[00:04:07] And so those are all important pieces. But when pornography has become a way of life, when it's become the default thing that you go to when you're alone, when the world gets quiet, when light dims and it's dark, something deeper is going on that we also need to address the behavioral changes is like putting on a band aid and that's important to stop the bleeding. We're going to bandage things. It's like putting on the splint to help the person while they're transporting to the hospital.
[00:04:43] But there's a deeper surgery that needs to take place. And where you're at in this journey differ. Some, some people are, are just kind of, maybe they stumbled into pornography or maybe they. It's. Pornography is kind of a new thing.
[00:04:57] And in that way there may not be habits that have been formed and developed, but if you found that it was like something inside of you just reached out and grabbed and pulled you in and you, you couldn't stop it, no matter how much you said you didn't want to do it.
[00:05:14] Then I invite you to consider something deeper that is going on.
[00:05:19] Something that this friend put friend in air quotes there because it's obviously not a healthy friend, but someone who offers presence there, offers pleasure, offers a sort of relief.
[00:05:34] It's tapping into whether it's a first time experience or whether it's been years of developing.
[00:05:41] There's something aching and not whole in your life that it is feeding.
[00:05:49] And in this episode, we're going to take off the first layer and kind of uncover what is going on. What's going on underneath there. I've spoken with so many young men and even women who have dealt with pornography over the years, and they found freedom.
[00:06:09] And then eventually it kind of came back and it pulled them in. And there can be a lot of disillusionment around that, especially depending on the setting where you found the freedom. Some more deliverance focused kind of where it's all about praying over and casting out, closing off doors and so forth, which can all be helpful parts of the journey. I don't think it's ever the totality of the journey, but sometimes at a conference like that, or even just through some counseling, it is helpful to understand where this thing was first introduced and to just invite God's holy Spirit into deliverance.
[00:06:52] And there are some stories where people find lifelong freedom from that, but there are also stories where people found freedom for a while and then it snuck back up on them and that almost derailed their faith. Because sometimes within deliverance sort of teachings, there can be this insinuation that if you can't cast it out, if you can't pray it out.
[00:07:19] Getting ahead of myself a little bit, then maybe there's some sort of demonic spirit at work and that leads someone who bumps into pornography or lust again, that leads them into this crazy negative cycle of like, maybe I'm demon possessed and I can't count on my hands how many stories of young men I've talked with and interacted with who really thought that about themselves.
[00:07:45] And so, first of all, we need to just lay on the table that pornography use is evil. The pornography industry is evil. It not only destroys the men who consume it, but it destroys the women.
[00:07:58] It is an act of violence on the women that are, or the men, the people who are posing.
[00:08:05] It is an act of violence on them as human beings. But to unpack this deeper, we need to understand why does that grip us so?
[00:08:15] Because so often the framing is that we have such an obsession with pleasure and self pleasure, and then we cast shame as though, like we get a hold of yourself. How can you do this?
[00:08:30] As though that's somehow going to free someone from going back over and over again. But that's the cycle for most people, at least, that is the cycle of self condemnation. Like, how can I do this over and over again? They don't want to. Especially if you're watching this, I'm assuming you're a follower of Christ. I'm assuming you're wanting to walk in freedom to be a faithful disciple of Jesus. And there's a frustration, maybe even despair, from the fact that you can't find lasting freedom. There's plenty of psychopaths out there, that. That is not their goal. I'm not talking to them. What lies at the heart of all broken expressions of sexuality is the fact that there are parts of us that are not whole.
[00:09:14] There are parts of us that want to be whole and grasp for anything to help us feel whole. And so at some point in our life, there's this person, this thing that enters into our sphere of influence, our sphere of things influencing us.
[00:09:37] And we spend some time with it, and we dabble with it. We realize it gets a hit.
[00:09:43] That is amazing. It's like, wow, if I'm feeling lonely, all of a sudden, I don't feel alone. I don't feel the loneliness at the time. If I'm feeling afraid, I can kind of escape and forget feeling afraid. If I feel like I'm powerless, that sort of naked, explicit exposure gives me this weird sense of power, weird sense of having autonomy.
[00:10:10] If I'm feeling like there's nothing that I can do, well, if I'm feeling smothered by the world, looking at porn kind of makes me feel on top of the world.
[00:10:22] And so this friendship develops, and so some of us then feel guilt about it. And so we confess it.
[00:10:30] And I would say probably 90 to 95% of us mistake confession for freedom, because confession is the first step, and boy, is it so relieving to get it off our chest.
[00:10:52] The secrecy is what holds us in, and the secrecy builds the darkness upon itself.
[00:10:59] And when we confess it, it's brought to light. And we think we're free because we're no longer weighted down by the secrecy and the darkness, but we're actually not free. We've simply started the journey. Confession begins the journey.
[00:11:16] And there's something deeper that needs to be healed and mended in our soul. And so many men and women who get into pornography and then confess it or find someone to talk to about it, just leave it there without continuing the deeper work.
[00:11:38] And so as long as you're confessing, maybe you've joined an accountability group, maybe you've set up some software that monitors what you do on your devices. All helpful things. All things that I have in place and embrace having in place. But they're mere guardrails. They're mere.
[00:11:57] In finance, they talk about make the bad behaviors difficult and the good behaviors easy.
[00:12:05] That's a large, like, 80% of finances. Just, you know, automate your savings, automate your giving. You know, all of this make it easy to do. And then if there's. That's part of the argument. For using cash over credit card is it's harder to spend more than you have.
[00:12:23] And so if we use that same concept for life, especially when it has to do with sexual compromises that can happen digitally, then I think it's valuable and helpful to make the good behaviors easy and the bad behaviors difficult.
[00:12:41] But just because you have those kinds of guardrails in place does not mean you are someone who's free.
[00:12:49] It doesn't mean you're someone who's whole and healthy.
[00:12:52] And even though you're going for a period of time in a level of freedom and transparency doesn't mean that you're not gonna walk through a season of life where all of a sudden you feel alone. All of a sudden you've not just feel like a failure. Maybe you did fail.
[00:13:10] Maybe business venture you pursued or a ministry venture or a relationship just totally failed and you are a failure and you're trying to overcome and not just be too down on yourself. Maybe you got fired from a job, maybe you failed at your pursuit of wholeness. When it comes to sexual health, all of that compounds upon itself.
[00:13:37] And in that moment we discover, oh, this friend, this thing is back in my presence again.
[00:13:46] And it's offering friendship, it's offering to give me something that nothing else is giving me right now. And willpower alone does not hold it at bay.
[00:14:02] Sometimes I get in conversations with people who are really, they're. They're kind of anti understanding psychology and how emotions work and how they're inter. They're anti soft sciences especially specifically or more honestly. And they're all about like, you know, it's sin. We just put it away. Paul says to flee the lust of your, the youthful lusts and to walk in the spirit.
[00:14:31] And Those are all 100% true. We are to flee sexual immorality. We're to flee the lust of our youth and we're to walk in the spirit.
[00:14:43] But the question that I have for these people that often they find a little hard to respond to is how is that going?
[00:14:52] How is that working? Are you able to walk in the spirit?
[00:14:57] Or does it feel like you're walking with, as Bruce Langman said in his book to kill a lion, as though there's a lion inside of you trying to get out and you're just trying to keep it caged up? No, I'm going to look away. I'm not going to do the fleshly thing that my flesh desires. It is true that we fight a war that is not visible, it is not physical. There are realms that we cannot see, that are trying to not just dissuade us from walking in the way of Jesus. They are trying to steal, kill and destroy. Scripture tells us that plainly, but it's also. And part of that journey is learning to recognize temptations that are evil and recognize that that is evil, that is flesh. And we walk faithfully in the way of Jesus. But the way of Jesus, when Jesus says, I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly, that is a life that we don't have to just squelch everything. Jesus in his sermon on the Mount, he invites us into the kingdom of God by calling us to hunger and thirst for righteousness. He wants our desires to be directed at the way of Jesus. And so if we're constantly battling internal desires that do not align with the way of Jesus, that do not align with the kingdom of God, it begs the question, why?
[00:16:25] What's going on? And so if you're someone here listening to this or watching this, and you can identify with, yeah, it happens without. It seems like it happens without my control. At times I go along fine, and then there's an ad that I see, or maybe I see something in my junk mail, or maybe there's a movie that I watch and I've watched it many times, but this time it, like the arousal is peaked and I don't know why. And then I just spend this time, like, fighting against my flesh and then eventually just give in.
[00:17:01] If you can identify with that, then I would like to invite you into something, into a deeper work than just written bare. Porn is like an old friend.
[00:17:13] You're not gonna kick it out and it be gone for good.
[00:17:18] It'll come back. You'll go through times in life that mirror the setting and the stage of when you first got into it. And it'll be. Maybe there will be several things that present themselves, but it'll likely be one of them. And while all of us desire that God's spirit so rule and reign in our hearts that we choose him over that old friend, if we have not let Jesus into every area of our soul, bring healing into the wounds, to bring healing into the messages that are contrary to the truth of God and how he's made us and designed us, then we are likely going to.
[00:18:05] It's like that image of somebody kicking and screaming, stubbing in their feet, not wanting to go, and yet still being pulled in that direction. And sometimes it's not even that. Sometimes we willingly go and just go back into it to numb the pain or to feel good about ourselves or whatever. And there's even like these weird mental games that we can play. It's like, oh, you know, I know I shouldn't do this, but I also know God's grace covers me and I'm broken and all this. And we're like playing these theological games.
[00:18:37] All the Arminians suddenly become, you know, grace filled Calvinists in the middle of their personal struggle towards holiness.
[00:18:46] I'm just sharing stuff that I've definitely dealt with, I've definitely battled with.
[00:18:51] And so what I want to invite you to is to pause and consider in that moment.
[00:19:00] Get curious. Get curious around what's going on. There's a, there's an acronym called HALT H A L T. It stands for hungry, angry, lonely, tired.
[00:19:13] And whenever we find ourselves compelled or struggling with an addiction, compelled into a bad behavior we know is bad, we know is ultimately harmful for us, but we do it anyways.
[00:19:24] Often psychologists have noticed, often it has to do with one of those four things. We are hungry for something, we are angry about something, we are lonely about something, or we're tired of something from something, maybe even just physically tired. And so that's one thing, one simple practice that we can put in place is when I'm feeling like, whoa, I saw this ad and it was like my eyes were magnetically pulled to it.
[00:19:59] Hey, I don't want that. Or I've been going X amount of days or weeks not feeling tempted at all. Why am I feeling tempted now? Just halt. What am I? Am I hungry about something? Am I angry about something?
[00:20:15] Am I lonely?
[00:20:16] Am I tired?
[00:20:18] Get curious. There was an example of. This is somewhat of a silly example, but this just shows from my own life how this plays out. Tends to play out. We have peach trees in our yard and a couple of years ago they were ripe and ready to pick. And they were really good. We had lots of them. And one evening I grabbed a box, like a peach box, fruit box, and I went out the door and me and the kids were going to pick some peaches. And on my way out the door, my wife said, hey, be sure that you don't pick any green ones.
[00:20:57] And something inside of me just like, what the world, Do I look like an idiot?
[00:21:07] Why would I pick green peaches? You know what, I'm just going through this mentally. Like what?
[00:21:14] It just felt like this jab at me as though I don't know what I'm doing. And that was an arrow, not intentional. My wife didn't even know.
[00:21:25] Both of us have been Interested in learning how to grow fruit. We've got multiple fruit trees on our property. And so together, we have often talked about how to tell when something's wrong. Ripe and ready to pick, and all of this. She's going off of that. But I was going through a season in life where I felt like I had nothing to offer, like I had nothing on the table, and nobody really wanted to know if I did have anything to offer. And I'm not trying to blame anybody.
[00:21:53] Rather, I'm sharing with you how to understand what's going on inside of ourselves.
[00:22:01] That, hey, be sure you don't pick any green peaches. That was like an arrow right into the message that you don't know what you're doing. You don't have anything to offer. You're this little guy, right?
[00:22:13] And that's the kind of thing that could cause me to cycle into, Wait, what is going on? I want to share with you in the next episode how I processed through that so that it didn't turn into a time of emotional disconnect and struggling with lust or anything.
[00:22:33] Those are the kinds of events in my life. The specifics are going to be different for you, and even the messaging that is wounding or that triggers you is going to be different for you.
[00:22:44] But get curious. What's going on in that moment? Why do I feel this? I felt like just slamming the door, just shutting her out.
[00:22:54] Why? Why did it provoke those negative emotions in me?
[00:23:00] Getting curious and getting curious early is when we can start to say, friend, I see that you're here again, but I'm not gonna. You don't have power over me. Right?
[00:23:15] So that's the first thing. Get curious. The second thing is make the pivot. And that's kind of along with getting curious is simply acknowledging, hey, the friend is back.
[00:23:25] The friend is here. The friend is offering its services again and recognizing that probably the reason because it's back is in our life, we had made a habit. When I am feeling this way emotionally, before I used to go to pornography, or maybe I would go to a way of escape through music and YouTube or whatever, which would then eventually lead to unwanted sexual behaviors. That's probably why the friend is showing back up again.
[00:23:56] It's a habit.
[00:23:58] It's time for entrance, has been triggered, has been reminded.
[00:24:02] And so just naming it, being like, hey, the friend is here.
[00:24:07] Why is the friend here being curious?
[00:24:10] And then making a pivot? And here's the pivot I want you to understand when you are most tempted sexually, it can seem as Though you desire pleasure, but you're actually desiring connection, you're wanting intimacy. And I don't know if you've noticed this in your life before, but when we are doing well emotionally with relationships, when we have intimate friendships, I don't mean marriage, but just close friends, people that we can talk to, camaraderie, people we do life with, unwanted sexual behavior is pretty low.
[00:24:52] It doesn't really tempt us. In fact, it's not uncommon for maybe both individuals, but one or the other maybe to struggle with lust and pornography or masturbation or something before marriage. And then when you get into marriage, it's.
[00:25:08] It's not as strong of a desire.
[00:25:12] And a large part of that is, well, one, you're now having a fully moral and ethical way of experiencing sex, right? And so for a while, that's fun, that's good, it's helpful, but you're also doing life with someone. But eventually even that relationship things begin to come in the way and we start withdrawing from one another. Or maybe we never fully finished being wholly intimate with each other, and other things start happening in life. And pretty soon we're not actually sharing intimately with each other or maybe because of previous things in our story, baggage in our story that we just find ourselves, like, not knowing how to share some of these things or how to express the things that we're wanting or the way that we're being hurt or whatever, we're broken people, it's going to happen. And then in those moments is when all of a sudden that stuff from before that it sort of appeared like marriage may have fixed, starts to float to the top, and you find yourself stuck in some of the same cycle as before. What we're really longing for is connection. And so the pivot that we need to make is naming. Okay, the old friend is here. What?
[00:26:30] Why is he here? What's going on in my life? What's being triggered?
[00:26:34] And then realizing I actually want connection.
[00:26:38] Maybe I want connection with my wife. I'm A father of six kids, married for 13 and a half years. Maybe I want connection with my wife, but maybe I need connection with other men too. The season of life. The messy middle, as they sometimes call it.
[00:26:58] Our oldest is 12, almost 13. Our youngest is four months old. We've got no time for friendships, right? I mean, I'm not saying that it's like I have no time for you, but it's like, where do we fit it in without feeling selfish? We long for connection.
[00:27:15] And ultimately you can even make time for friends. And you can go and watch the super bowl together. Right? But there's no connection in that. Maybe there's a sense of like, yeah, we enjoy the sport together, but how do you actually connect with people at a soul level? It requires us to pursue emotional health.
[00:27:39] You can't connect with people when you're not emotionally healthy. When you're not emotionally healthy, the friend is constantly offering his services and emotional health isn't a one time fix. All we go through all kinds of things in life. We're.
[00:27:55] We need to walk in emotional health. And what does that look like? And that's what I'm going to get into in the next episode. What does it look like to be emotionally healthy and to pursue emotional health? I'm certainly not intending to present myself as like I am emotionally healthy.
[00:28:15] No. I'm going to share some things that I've learned since writing the book Live Free.
[00:28:21] I'm going to share some things that I'm still learning, that I'm still processing through. And to be frank, I have never spoken with anybody who's perfectly emotionally whole. But it's this journey of walking in wholeness and just being able to recognize the things that are triggering us and to bring our whole selves to Jesus over and over and over again.
[00:28:49] And how do we do that?
[00:28:51] That's what I'd like to get into in the next episode. So stay tuned for that. But there's a couple more things I want to invite you into. If you've connected with this, if the struggle that I've talked about is real, and if you desire freedom, if you desire to be wholly able to love those around you and engage with and not be bound by darkness, by pornography or any habitual sin in your life, then I invite you to reach out to at least one friend, someone that you trust and express that desire to them.
[00:29:28] Share where you're at and what you desire to grow in.
[00:29:33] Invite them to listen to this series with you and to process it together.
[00:29:37] Because this kind of journey we can't do alone.
[00:29:42] We need to do it with people. The other thing is if, if you're here actively struggling, or even if you're not actively struggling, because I went over a decade with not even being tempt. I mean, I'm sure there were temptations along the way. I just, when I think of the last time I like struggled with needing to be careful not to click on something to when I struggled again, that was eight to 10 years, maybe even more than that. And then boom, all of a sudden there were Things that they had a stronger pull on me.
[00:30:22] And that's why having the guardrails like accountability software is so valuable and so important because you never know when a vulnerable season is going to come. And so to have the hard behaviors difficult obviously you'll want to halt to get curious to pursue emotional health. Wait, what's going on? Why is this surfacing again?
[00:30:45] But have something in place like accountable to you is what our family uses.
[00:30:50] You can set up. You have accountability partners that reports to or it can be internal. We use it even with our kids. Some of their devices are just sent to Teresa and I our email address and so we can see what's going on with them.
[00:31:06] I have partners that see my activity and what's going on with them. Even this video, because the title is porn is like an old friend. It's going to get flagged. And so they're going to see, oh, Asher's working on any, any Google Doc, any video recording, anything. It's all monitored and app usage gets monitored. Now this is a challenge with, with devices in general because we don't want just any company reading all our private info. Right. And so Apple' is. I mean it's been a couple of years, but they made it so that apps cannot read the specific stuff that's going on.
[00:31:47] So if you open up in a private app that's not necessarily going to get recorded. However, you can set a trigger word and so a particular app, it's like if I ever download this app or if I ever use this app, that'll get triggered and my partners can say, hey, I noticed you were using the app. What was going on. They can at least be curious about it. But anything in a web browser, anything even on YouTube, quite a bit of YouTube stuff actually gets.
[00:32:15] Gets reported to accountable to you. So put in a guardrail, something in place so that.
[00:32:22] I've heard it this way before. I think maybe Andy Stanley said it was it him somebody was talking about living circumspectly and wisely. It's like there's so many things in life where we can run it right up to the margin, you know, my time. I don't have to be at that meeting even if I'm one minute late, like who's actually going to be upset at me or whatever. So I quickly wrap up the tasks I'm doing and then I book it to the meeting or even financially with the use of credit cards, we can run it up right to the edge and maybe a little bit more. And hey, you know or even with a friend, IOU or whatever. We put on some credit and then. And then we'll pay it off the next month.
[00:33:07] An area where you cannot risk running it up to the edge is the area of sexual purity and sexual morality. Compromising sexually can destroy your life and it can destroy your relationships, your career.
[00:33:23] It's not worth the risk of running it up to the margin. And so you want to stay back. And there's been weird, like, legalistic views of like, oh, don't ever touch in courtship, or you need to wear certain clothing. So that. I'm not talking about that.
[00:33:40] I'm saying taking it so seriously.
[00:33:43] I want to make sure that I am pursuing wholeness and health, but I also want guardrails in place.
[00:33:52] I have a link for Accountable2You.
[00:33:55] I'm an affiliate for Accountable2You, but the reason I'm an affiliate for that is because I prefer that one.
[00:34:03] But just get something in place. Even having accountability partners. I told you to pull someone into your story. Like, those are guardrails in place that help us on our journey toward wholeness. They are not the essence of wholeness in any way, but they are valuable pieces to it. And then lastly, if you would like to go deeper, if you would like, support and to join a community of people pursuing wholeness, not just in sexual purity, but having real lasting freedom comes when we can grow as whole, whole and healthy human beings.
[00:34:46] That's why at Unfeigned Christianity, the focus, the vision, is to help Christians become theologically anchored, emotionally healthy, so that we can love and disciple others well, so we're whole humans, loving, being loved.
[00:35:05] If you would like support in that way, I invite you to join the formation circle of the Unfeigned Christianity Patreon membership. There's a link for that as well. It's a group where not only do you get a bunch of bonus resources that you can also access in lower tiers, but the biggest piece is you can join monthly mentorship calls where we're talking about aspects of emotional health, aspects of theology, growing as individuals and as a community in our pursuit of wholeness and health, and being able to love and engage the world in a healthy way. You can check that out as well. Until next time, my name is Asher Whitmer. I hope to see you in the next episode. Grace and Peace.
[00:36:00] Sam.
