Avoiding Pornography

This week we are going to discuss your cycle of avoidance and how to recognize what is going on for you around this cycle and a few things you can do to help remove yourself from the cycle.  We’ve talked about experiential avoidance or buffering in episodes https://www.zachspafford.com/blog/episode-5 (5), https://www.zachspafford.com/blog/episode-6 (6), and https://www.zachspafford.com/blog/what-is-pornography-addiction (135).  I’ll link to those episodes in the show notes.  Humans have a unique ability to problem-solve. From the very beginning of human existence, we have learned how to survive in the world.  ONE OF THE 3 THINGS our brains are designed to do is avoid pain. If you have listened to this podcast from the beginning, this is not a new concept for you. If you think back thousands of years ago when we had to hunt and grow our own food, and physically provide safety and shelter from the elements of this world avoiding pain was a very essential part of everyday life. Over the years we have learned that avoiding pain helps keep us alive! In the physical world, this is VERY important. Imagine if your house was on fire. What would you do?  I imagine I would make sure my loved ones were safe and run out as fast as I could. I would do everything in my power to avoid the hot flames and in doing so it would keep me safe. By avoiding the fire it makes it possible to continue living! We tend to react to our psychological pain the same way we react to our pain in the physical world.   For instance, You might have a stressful workday, and instead of dealing with the stress in a productive way, you might avoid your feelings by engaging with pornography. Another example may be that you approached your spouse for physical intimacy and felt and received a no answer which made you feel rejected. Instead of feeling rejected, you might seek out pornography. You might have a stressful day with the kids and turn to chocolate to relieve some of that stress. Our brains think that avoiding pain inside of our head is the same as avoiding pain on the outside. When we try to problem solve psychological pain in the same manner it often leads us further down the path of discomfort in the long run.  Every one of us has a cycle of avoidance. For some of us, it is a cycle that circles around avoiding parts of our lives through eating.  For others, it is a cycle that revolves around pornography, and others still avoid their lives through shopping or other behaviors that run contrary to our values. Here’s what that looks like in real-time: instead of working on your project’s upcoming due dates, you scroll social media avoiding getting started on your work and putting yourself further behind.  Or: rather than get studying for your upcoming exams like you planned on, you open a browser on your phone and start looking for sexually explicit material. Or, finally, instead of getting your house ready for the week by doing a load of laundry, you hide in the pantry and eat a sweet snack so your kids don’t catch you. Darcy and I use a system called acceptance and commitment coaching, a key component of which is the word acceptance.   Often, the main reason we suffer is that we are not accepting our lives and our unpleasant or unwanted feelings.  This desire to avoid discomfort leads to experiential avoidance or the avoidance of the experience of being uncomfortable.  If we really want to avoid pornography or any other unwanted habit that we have, we must accept these uncomfortable feelings and learn how to deal with them directly.  These kinds of avoidance behaviors are like getting stuck in a roundabout where each exit point that is available to us means that we will have to be uncomfortable while moving toward our ultimate goal, so instead of getting out of the cycle, we stay put, circling around...