Today I want to lightly dig into the the topic of pornography when it comes to the effect that it has possibly had in your life and your relationships.
As a life coach, my aim is to help my clients look at current belief systems around the things in their lives that are causing problems for them. Beliefs that are keeping them stuck and unable to move forward. We look at beliefs that aren’t serving them in their life and do the work of wiggling those beliefs into something that can start moving them towards the results they desire, results they haven’t been able to move close to. In order to do that I will often challenge beliefs that keep us in our past life and we work on moving forward into the person we want to be in our intimate relationships.
That’s what I’m going to talk about here with the topic of pornography.
For me, I have spent most of my life holding on tightly to a belief about early exposure to pornography. A belief that has kept me stuck in so many ways, but most evidently in my relationships. Nothing seemed to help me get out of the past, out of the resentment, out of the anger, blame and disgust. Life coaching is what enabled me to start the process of letting go of the story I was holding so tightly to, the story that was only destroying me, the story I made a part of my identity. My coach enabled me to let of my story and start creating my own beautiful story around me, my relationships and my sexuality.
A big part of that beautiful story is that my experience allows me to help other women. I am able to understand how much pain other women are around their past life stories and able to help them out of that place, into a life of relational and sexual freedom. I want you to know that I am not by any means a sex expert, I am only using my story to help others with their journey and struggles so they can start healing and create a loving relationship that they have been keeping themselves from having.
Let’s start with what pornography is: sexually explicit videos, photographs, writings, or the like, whose purpose is to elicit sexual arousal.
Basically, pornography is a form of buffering or escapism, similar to alcohol or drug use or overeating, over Netflixing. Buffering is when we are putting something between ourselves and something we don’t want to experience. It starts with seeking some sort of pleasure to escape from a negative emotion, an emotion the person doesn’t want, or know how, to process, immediate gratification sounds like a much better idea in the moment.
Pornography allows a person to escape that negative thing going on in their life. It’s cheap, it’s readily assessable and highly gratifying. As human beings we are genetically wired to be sexual, it’s in our DNA, it guarantees procreation and, let’s be honest, sexual gratification feels good. When we have an orgasm our brain creates a huge dopamine deposit into the blood stream telling us that what we just did was amazing and that we should do it again, and again. When used the way God designed it to be used it’s amazing, when we abuse it, well, that’s when things happen that don’t make us feel so good. That dopamine hit is highly addictive and when we don’t know how to deal with the root problem that is driving us to other sources for sexual gratification, we will seek more and more of our buffer of choice.
Pornography use and exposure becomes hurtful to us, and our future or current, partners for many reasons, with these being a few:
- Distorted expectations of what sex looks like in real life
- A higher sexual gratification threshold
- Distorted expectations of what the human body should look like in order to be appealing to the opposite sex
- Distorted ideas of how to get attention from the opposite sex and what their values might be
- It distorts our own perceived value
- It distorts ones view of a healthy sex life creating future relational disconnect
Let’s start by looking at pornographic exposure for young minds who are developing their ideas about relationships, themselves and their worthiness. Early exposure without education can be an influence of how to get attention from the opposite sex, it can drive early experimentation, it can create unrealistic expectations of how to behave and possibly turn into a learned tool to attract or get validation from the opposite sex. Pornographic exposure is more real today than ever which means that our children need help maneuvering through the experience they will come across, expect it sooner than later. We can help them by talking openly to our children, helping them to understand why it is unrealistic and damaging. We can help them by keeping lines of communication open instead of closing them down by shaming, guilting or scaring them. Teaching our next generation about the gift of sexual desire and what healthy relationships look like opens up the secrecy and makes it less interesting to developing minds.
Next let’s look at when we have people in our lives who are having a pornography buffering compulsion. Our typical reaction to loved ones in our lives who are dealing with a sexual compulsion is to shame and guilt them, avoid them, blow up, constantly checking up on them, sneaking into their computers or phones, withdraw intimacy, blame them for the problems in their relationship and, of course, to think that we’re not enough, that we’re the reason they are using porn. The truth is that pornography is actually neutral, it is real in our world, it is factual, by itself it’s nothing. We are the ones who put meaning to pornographic use or exposure, that meaning will create an feeling that will dictate how we act and the results we will get in our relationships with ourselves. When we think thoughts like “they spend more time watching porn than paying attention to me”, producing the emotion of resentment, we’re showing up in ways we aren’t really proud of in an effort to try and control them. The end result is us spending lots of time complaining about how someone else isn’t treating us right which gives us the result of us mistreating ourselves.
We could totally skip the part that creates us beating ourself up. We can totally skip to empathy so we can show up for our partner. We can totally decide that someone else’s problem is for them to figure out and that we’re here for them, no matter what.
Please don’t misunderstand me. If I could eliminate pornography I would be all on board with that, unfortunately that isn’t in my control, nor do I want it to be. What is in my control is how I’m thinking about it and what that will do for all of the people around me. I want to be able to open up clarity around what is real and what is real is that our children are being exposed to it and our loved ones are using it to avoid what is happening in their life. When we come at pornography from a place of wanting to be able to help our children, to be able to not make it mean anything about us when our spouse is buffering with it, wanting to have open conversation instead of hiding in shame, that’s when we will need to feel self confident, empathetic, compassionate and certain. Our thoughts will need to be thoughts of how you want to help your children or spouse through their life, which allows you to show up with unconditional love, as your best self, and that my friend is a beautiful result.
When looking at one’s own personal experience around pornography and sexual dysfunction, the self coaching model will help you create awareness with what is happening for you so that we can then see how it might be affecting our relationships.
My journey to awareness around pornographic material, my journey of re-writing my story has empowered me in my own relationships and has led me to help empower others in their own journey. Being able to use my story to teach others how to let go of the chains from their past and their own sexuality has been one of the most rewarding parts of what I do.
I have a passion to create awareness and openness around the topic of pornography and it’s affect on people’s most intimate relationships, instead of sweeping it under the rug creating long term dysfunction. Let my passion allow you to finally let go of the story you keep telling the world. Let my passion allow you to tell a new story, a story of who you really are and a story of who you are becoming. Let me help you become the person who is intimately in love with their committed relationship.
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My Awaken(TheTrue)You program is for women who want to stop hurting in their most intimate relationship. I show you how to stop settling and bring back the love, connection and excitement you crave. Let’s re-ignite your marriage relationship today!
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