Episode 14: Iceberg Emotions

Uncategorized Apr 18, 2021

 

I’ll preface this by letting you all know that I am not an iceberg expert. However, I do know that we only see 10% of an iceberg, while the rest of it lives out of sight. And the same is true of your pornography habit. There is always so much more going on that isn’t immediately obvious, so if we only work on that 10% we can see, there is always more waiting to come to the surface.

There are always emotions lurking deep inside of us that are responsible for the things we don’t like in our lives. So in this episode, I want to shed some light on how you can address these unresolved thoughts and feelings, and ultimately break them down so you can create the lasting change you want to see.

Join me on the podcast this week to discover what is lying beneath the surface of your porn habit. I’m sharing the emotions I see coming up for my clients that they never wanted to see were at play. And once you can get clear on what’s causing the behavior you want to change, that’s when you can start working on overcoming pornography for good.

I have amazing news. If you want to take the work I’m sharing on the podcast deeper, I’m running a masterclass on April 29th. It’s called The Top 3 Mistakes That Keep You Stuck in Pornography and it’s 100% free! All you have to do is sign up here and I will see you there. 

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why understanding what’s going on below the surface is so important.

  • What is probably lurking beneath the visible part of your porn habit.

  • How to bring what is going on beneath your habit into the light.

  • The emotions that we bury deep that make quitting pornography impossible unless we address them.

  • How to work on the part of the negative emotion that lives under the surface, piece by piece, in a way that will help you quit pornography for good.

Listen to the Full Episode:


Featured on the Show:

  • Click here to sign up for my free mastermind called The Top 3 Mistakes That Keep You Stuck in Pornography! 


Full Episode Transcript:

You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 14, Iceberg Emotions.

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 the podcast episode this week. So glad you’re here. This week, I am recording my podcast with a new fancy mic, and I feel really like a legit podcaster. Up until now, I’ve just used my headset that I use when I coach people on Zoom. And it’s been fine. It’s worked out fine. But this is a real big fancy microphone.

And I remember, I got the best advice from someone when I was first starting my podcast. I was feeling really called to do it for, like, six months before I even did it. I wish I would have jumped in and done it sooner.

But as I was trying to figure out how to do it, someone said to me, “Just get it out there however you can. So, even if you’re just recording on your phone, even if you just bring your phone up to your mouth and you talk into your phone and the sound is kind of iffy, it doesn’t matter, just get it out there. That’s the most important thing. It’s much more important to just put it out there than it is to make sure that it’s perfect and that the sound quality is perfect and everything is perfect.”

And you know, three years ago, four years ago, I probably would not have done a podcast because I would have tried to make sure it was perfect and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to perfect it. When in reality, that’s just not required. And now, here I am. I have a fancier microphone and I have a team who is helping me edit and produce it.

Of course, before, it was probably a little choppy, but it did the job. I got the stuff out. And I know it’s blessed and helped a lot of you. So, if there’s something going on in your life, maybe some project or some school project or some work project or some personal project, or anything that you’re feeling stuck on, you’re feeling that, “I don’t know if it’s good enough. I don’t know if it’s good enough…” remember, B-minus; B-minus work.

That’s my new mantra. I heard it from Brooke Castillo. B-minus work. We’re not shooting for A work. We’re shooting for B-minus. B-minus is always better than A work because B-minus gets the job done. B-minus is good enough, it’s inspiring, and keeps you going, keeps you putting stuff out there. That’s my little snippet for you guys today before we get into the content.

And really quick, before we get into the content today, which is going to be great, I’m really excited that we get to talk about these iceberg emotions, I want to talk about two quick things that are coming up.

So, first, number one, I have a masterclass at the end of the month, April 29th. It is titled the Top Three Mistakes that Keep You Stuck in Pornography. If you are struggling with pornography, you have to come to this masterclass. It’s going to be fabulous, sarabrewer.com/masterclass. It’s 100% free. It’s April 29th, Thursday night. It’s a great opportunity for you to come and learn some more from me. We’re going to talk about those top three mistakes that will keep you stuck viewing pornography, and it’s a great opportunity for you to connect and interact with me because it will be live, so you can ask me questions and I’ll stay there as long as you are there. As long as you are there asking me questions, I will stay and answer them.

Okay, the second thing I want to talk about is I just want to share a review that one of you left me here on the podcast. And I better read it quickly because my phone is about it die. It’s on 1%.

The title of it is Beyond Pornography. They said, “I listened to the entirety of the catalogue in one day, eight episodes at this time. It’s that good and I’m ready to apply it to my life. I’ve heard some of these concepts before, but never in such a concise and loving manner. It’s important to realize that the information extends beyond quitting pornography. It’s applicable to all our habits and vices that we seek to quit. I have a feeling that I will continue to revisit this series for further internalization.”

Yeah, I loved that. First off, thank you so much for leaving me that review. All of you that have left me reviews, thank you so much. It really helps me get my message out to people who need it. And so, if you haven’t left me a review yet, please go and do that just on Apple Podcasts. It takes just a quick minute. I would be so grateful for that.

This person says this extends beyond quitting pornography. And yeah, it absolutely does. I tell this to my clients all the time. I say, this is about so much more than quitting pornography. For so many reasons, but one of those reasons is because if you can take this work and apply it to a porn habit, you can take this work and apply it to anything in your life; anything.

You can take this work and you can learn how to make a bunch of money. You can take this work and you can learn how to have the active lifestyle diet that you want. You can take this work and apply it to your relationships. Anything you want. Any other habit you want to quit. Any other habit you want to start and develop and foster, you can apply this to all different areas.

Pornography is just the one way that we’re going to learn how to apply all of this. and then you take it and you apply it to the rest of your life.

Listen, I know some of you wish that this porn habit would just disappear from your life. Like you would wake up tomorrow morning and it just wouldn’t be there, you wouldn’t want it. I know some of you want that. But in reality, the better scenario is that you internalize this work, you learn how to change your brain, you apply it to the porn habit, so you quit porn, and then you have all these skills to go out and change the rest of your life.

If your porn habit was just gone tomorrow morning, the rest of your life would stay the same. Which isn’t a bad thing. But if you want to really change your life and to reach your potential in more areas of your life, this pornography habit, you guys, is a godsend.

It’s funny for me to say a little bit, but really, we can look at it that way. This pornography habit is how you will learn to change your brain. And what a blessing that is. What a blessing that is.

Okay, so let’s get into the content today, talking about iceberg emotions. So, I am not an iceberg specialist, but I’ve Googled icebergs a little bit. What’s interesting about icebergs is that there’s the tip of the iceberg and there’s what you see above the surface. But 90% of the iceberg is below the surface; 90%. So, an iceberg is way bigger than we even recognize.

I want you to think about your pornography habit like an iceberg. Porn is the manifestation up on top. It’s what we see above the surface. But you know the saying, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. What’s below it is much bigger.

The pornography habit, which is above the surface, is just that manifestation of something much bigger happening underneath. It’s the emotions that you’re feeling, the emotions that aren’t handled and taken care of that are beneath the surface that create that porn usage. It’s these emotions that aren’t healed yet.

For example, feeling anxious, sad, lonely. These emotions that you buffer from, those are what’s under the surface. And the more negative emotion that you feel, so the bigger the iceberg, the deeper the iceberg goes, the harder it is to quit pornography. This is why the first step to quitting porn is always to eliminate shame, to work on shame, to get rid of shame.

Shame is one of the most negative emotions that we can feel. And if you have shame, it’s going to be almost impossible to quit pornography. I think we all have a little bit of shame in our lives at times. There’s always some little voice saying. “Hey, something’s wrong with you.” That never completely goes away.

But it’s that shame, when it’s festered and when we believe it and when it’s not addressed. And when we aren’t actively deciding if we want to believe it and talking back to it and we just let it be there and we let it keep us hiding, and avoiding that shame will always make it impossible to quit pornography.

Shame, self-loathing, disgust, those very negative emotions that you feel, the bigger the iceberg is, the harder it is to quit pornography. And here’s why. It’s because our feelings drive our actions. This is a very simple but very profound principle for you to understand, is that our feelings drive our actions always.

Our feelings always drive our actions. So, for example, I want you to imagine working out at the gym. If you’re working out at the gym and feeling shame or feeling embarrassed, you’re going to workout very differently than if you’re feeling a little bit uncomfortable. If you’re feeling really embarrassed, you’re not going to work out as effectively as if you’re feeling just a little bit of discomfort.

Or imagine making sales calls. Imagine if you’re making sales calls from a place of self-conscious versus a place of boredom. They’re going to be two very different experiences if you’re feeling self-conscious or if you’re feeling bored. And your results, the sales call experience that you have and the people on the other end of the line have are going to be very different from these different emotions.

Or imagine taking a test. Your actions are going to be much different if you’re taking a test from a place of anxiousness compared to a place of confidence. Even if the knowledge is exactly the same, if you’re feeling anxious you’re going to show up much differently than you will if you’re feeling confident.

And so, this is true with pornography. When it comes to learning the skills and processing our urges and doing all the stuff that we need to, to quit pornography, we’re going to show up very differently depending on the emotion that’s beneath the surface. You’re going to show up to quit pornography very differently if you’re feeling self-loathing compared to feeling committed or neutral or even excited. It will be so different just depending on the emotions that you feel.

Here’s another important principle, is that the more neutral that you feel, the less negativity that you feel, the better you will be able to quit pornography. So, we don’t always have to feel super-positive and super-happy. But just the more neutral that we feel, not the more negative that we feel, the easier it will be to quit pornography.

This applies to all areas of our life. So, for example, me and my husband yesterday… yesterday, I was listening to some audiobook, some self-help audiobook. I love all the self-help stuff. But this one, for some reason, was just triggering these thoughts that are like, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you clean your house?”

And I was going around kind of subconsciously experiencing this shame for not having a clean house. Like, “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just get on a schedule? Why can’t you just stick to a routine and keep your house clean? What the heck?”

And so, I was just feeling sort of shame about not doing enough. And I hadn’t addressed it. And I kind of noticed it, but I just kind of pushed it away because it’s like, I don’t have time for this today. But it was still there and I was still just feeling really bad, like, “What’s wrong with you for not having a clean house?”

And then my husband came into my office and he asked me if I could use it. And I exploded at him. It was the most ridiculous thing, but I exploded at him. It was so silly. It was like, “No, I’m using it. Go use your office. What the heck, husband?” Which was so silly.

You know, if I wasn’t feeling shame, if I was maybe just feeling a little bit stressed or I was feeling a little bit discouraged, I would not have blown up at him the way that I did because there were those emotions that were under the surface.

So, let’s apply this to pornography. Maybe you’re on Instagram and you’ve gotten really good. You’re not really looking at porn from Instagram anymore. But let’s say that day you’re just feeling really insecure about something that happened, maybe something with a group of friends or at work or at school or whatever it is you’re doing with your life, you’re just feeling insecure. Some thoughts are coming up that are making you feel insecure.

It’s going to be a lot harder to just keep going, when you see that porn, and to process the urges to not just give into it if you’re having a lot of insecurity underneath. The less neutral we are in our emotions, the more negative that we are in our emotions, the easier it is to give into those triggers when we feel them.

My client just said this the other day. He said, “Man, it can be just the smallest thing. Someone says something, or I say something in a group and I feel awkward about it. That triggers this negative self-talk. And from that place, every single time. I just go and look at pornography.” Which is such good awareness. I was so proud of him for having that awareness. Because once we have that awareness, we can start to change it.

But those negative emotions, those iceberg emotions underneath the surface, if unaddressed, will make it so much harder to show up and quit porn. That’s why, when my clients come to me and they say, “I’m not committed, come help me with commitment, please, I need help with commitment,” the answer is not, “Okay, let’s get a better schedule. Let’s get a better routine. Let’s just, you know, buck up and be more committed.”

No, the answer is always, “Okay, well what’s underneath the surface? What are you feeling underneath the surface?” Once we can fix those emotions, you’ll be much more committed.

This is the principle of the emotional guidance skill. If any of you know Abraham Hicks, Abraham Hicks talks about this emotional guidance skill where it’s a list of emotions with the highest vibrations, so the most positive emotions down to emotions with the lowest vibrations or the most negative emotions. It’s just kind of step by step this list of emotions from highest to lowest.

And what he teaches in this emotional guidance skill is that the goal here isn’t to jump from something super-negative to something super-positive, but just to start taking little steps up. And if we can take little steps up, we’ll be better off and it will help us get to a better state of mind.

So, for example, we can’t usually jump from shame to hopeful and worthy. Sometimes we can. Sometimes we totally can do that. But sometimes, it takes just a little bit of steps up, a little bit higher, a little bit better.

So, the emotional guidance skill I think, some of the higher emotions are passion, and then it goes to hopeful. And down to more neutral ones, content and bored. Then a little bit lower, doubt. A little bit lower, worry. And then shame, insecurity, unworthy, powerless, grief, depression. Those are all the very lowest.

And again, the idea here is just to work on those lowest emotions, bring them up a little bit. This really is the principle that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass. You don’t quit pornography by some great act. It hardly ever works. You quit pornography by small and simple changes to your emotional wellbeing.

This is important too. You don’t quit pornography by small and simple changes to your actions unless you’re also making small and simple changes to your emotional wellbeing. Remember, all of our feelings drive our actions. And so, if the actions are not followed by an emotion that will help you take the best action, it’s probably not going to stick around.

So, these small and simple changes, maybe just from shame to a little bit of doubt. And then, maybe from doubt to bugged. Then maybe bugged to content. Then content to hopeful. And maybe from hopeful, you can go up into in-control and powerful. It’s small and simple things. Small and simple changes to your emotional wellbeing, that is how you quit a porn habit.

So, the last thing I want to talk about and mention is, how do we change our emotions? Okay, we know that our emotions, that all of our actions are driven by our emotions. And so, the next natural question is, “Okay, well how can I change my emotions? How can I change those feelings?”

And the answer is always, always, always that we change our thoughts. I used to think that in order to feel better about myself and about my life and to feel more fulfilled and to feel more productive, I had to do more. I used to think that it was my actions that caused my feelings. And that was really – that just put me in a really hard place.

What it led me to do is just doing more and more and more and then feeling worse and worse and worse, and then thinking, “Well what’s wrong with me? I must not be doing enough. Or I’m not doing good enough things.”

Listen, I know that there are a lot of you – because my clients do this and we coach on it all the time. But I know there are a lot of you that have your lists. It’s like, “Okay, this is the perfect routine for me to follow today. And if I follow this routine to a tee, I will feel so good about myself.”

I wish that that was true. But it’s not. And actually, I don’t even wish that that was true. It is the most freeing, beautiful truth that your feelings are caused by your thoughts, not by your actions. But you can feel amazing and you can feel great just by changing what you’re thinking, even if you’re lying in bed watching Netflix all day.

And think about it because the more that you do, you do not feel better. You do not feel better when you do more. Or how many of you have done nothing and have felt really great? Or how many of you have done tons of things and still felt awful?

Your actions do not cause your emotions. And you know what that means? That means the act of quitting porn, the result of not having porn in your life does not, will not make you feel better. It will be your thoughts that make you feel better. And that doesn’t mean, you know, let’s not try to quit porn.

We can still totally try to quit porn because that’s who we want to be as people. But if we’re searching to quit porn so we can finally feel better about our lives, it’s not going to work. I promise. You’re going to quit porn and then you’re going to self-sabotage and go back to porn.

You’re going to quit porn and you’re going to think, “Oh, I shouldn’t even have done that in the first place. There’s something wrong with me.” Or you’re going to find something else to feel bad about. We change our emotions by changing our thoughts.

That might look like, instead of, “What’s wrong with me? There’s something wrong with me,” change that to, “I don’t like this, but I’m a human, and humans make mistakes. And I love other humans, so maybe I can love myself in this mistake too.” It just takes practice and it takes coaching.

Come join my program. Come get coaching. Let me help you with this. Okay, so that’s how we change our emotions, is we change our thoughts. A great way to think about this too, sometimes we can’t change our thoughts necessarily very quickly. So, another way to think about this is to let go of your thoughts.

I once heard this great example where a professor walked into a room with a glass of water. She held the glass of water out and the students thought, “Oh, we’re going to do the glass half-full, the glass half-empty spiel today.” But she didn’t.

Instead, she said, “Look at this glass, everyone. How heavy do you think this glass is?” They made guesses. She said, “It doesn’t matter. What matters is how long I hold onto this. This glass of water gets much heavier the longer I hold onto this. If I were to hold onto this for one minute, I’d be fine. If I was holding onto it for five minutes, it might start to feel a little bit achy in my arm. If I were to hold onto it for a day, my arm would be shot. It would be so painful and in so much misery.”

This is the same with our thoughts. We can’t control every thought that comes in, obviously. No matter how good you are at thought work, you cannot control the thoughts that come in. But what you can control is how long you hold onto them.

This relates to thoughts that bring shame, to thoughts that bring self-doubt, “What’s wrong with you? You’re such an idiot.” You can just let go of those. You can practice letting go of those.

This also applies to thoughts that bring desire for pornography. You are going to have triggers and thoughts about people or when you see images or videos that trigger you to want to go and look at pornography. Those are fine. We can have those and we can let go of them. We don’t have to hold onto them. But it’s a very peaceful, mindful practice. It’s not a, “Go away, dumb thought,” practice.

Alright, you guys, that’s what I have for you today. Just a quick little recap. Number one, our emotions under the surface create our pornography usage. Number two, your emotions drive your actions. Number three, the more neutral that you feel, the less negative that you feel, the easier it will be to quit pornography. And number four, in order to change our emotions, we have to change our thoughts or be willing to let go of our thoughts.

Alright, everyone, really quickly before we end today, don’t forget to go sign up for that free masterclass I have. You have to sign up in order to get access to it. It will take just a minute, sarabrewer.com/masterclass. It will be here in the show notes if you need to click on the link. Otherwise, we’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

If you’re ready to apply what you’re hearing in this podcast and finally overcome pornography for good, I’d love to be your coach. I’ve created a virtual program with the intent to give you everything that you need to quit. Once you join, you have lifetime access to the content and lifetime access to individual support through coaching calls and coaching boards. For more information check out sarabrewer.com/workwithme.

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