Episode 129: What Does It Mean to Quit for Good?

You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 129, What Does It Mean to Quit For Good?

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, you guys, welcome to today’s podcast episode. I am very excited to talk about this. I know I say that every week, but that’s because I am. I just am always excited to come and talk to you guys each week. So, let’s see, I’m trying to think if there’s any announcements that I need to make. We have some really awesome stuff coming up that I’m really excited about. 

One is a podcast roadmap we’re going to be releasing in a little bit for those of you who may be joined in late or are just starting and are like, I don’t even know where to begin. There’s 129 episodes, that’s overwhelming. We have like a roadmap of the 12 most, I don’t know if the most important is the right word, but just the 12 best ones that are going to get you on the right foot and get you all up to speed. And then you can go and listen to whatever else you want to or just continue to join in with us each week. 

I have a new free training that I’m releasing and it’s a three video series training. So for those of you who have listened to my free masterclass, it’s awesome, but it is kind of long. And I haven’t had pause buttons on it, I don’t know why. I just barely put pause buttons on it, so you can actually pause it now. That’s so annoying that it wasn’t there. 

Anyways, I’m doing like three videos. And so they’re shorter videos that you can just watch in succession three videos, and it’s called How to Overcome Pornography Without Fear and Shame. And it’s just awesome. It’s really awesome and it’s a lot. It’s similar to the without willpower one, but with a little bit more stuff. And it’s a really great refresher just on the basics of how to quit porn. And then we really dive into the fear and shame in this class. So that’s coming out soon. 

And then I’m also going to be doing a training for ecclesiastical leaders, hopefully at the end of September. I don’t have links for you yet, but go and get on my email list if you’re not on my email list yet. If you go to sarabrewer.com and scroll down, you’ll just get on it and then you’ll get all the announcements when that stuff comes out. Or you can just go sign up for my class and go and listen to that if you haven’t yet, my free masterclass, and you’ll get on the list that way. 

I also just want to say thank you to all of you who have left me reviews. If it’s helpful to you, if the podcast is helpful to you, I would love it if you’d leave me a review if you haven’t yet. It’s very simple, they make it very easy. It takes just a minute and it really helps me get the word out there. So thank you for all the great reviews we have on the podcast. I hope you guys are enjoying all the amazing interviews we’ve been doing this year and the What’s Possible interviews this year. 

Anyways, let’s get into our topic today. We’re talking about quitting porn for good and what that really means. And how do we define this? And quitting porn for good, this has come up a lot recently and I really, really want to address it. And at the beginning, this idea wasn’t quite developed and I wish it would have been and I wish I would have been able to express this a little bit earlier in my business. 

Like what does it mean to quit porn for good? Because what I’m finding is that with this wording, there are a couple of reactions. For some people it’s exciting. It’s great for a tagline, for good. But then sometimes it turns into pressure, fear, disbelief when we think of it like, how can I quit porn for good? How can I make sure that I never ever, ever view porn again? 

And so sometimes in past interviews with people, you’ve even heard them bring that up. Like, I don’t totally know if I’ll never, ever view porn again. But I haven’t in a long time and I feel amazing and my life has totally changed. But there’s like a part of us that holds back from feeling our success because we’re like, for good, how do I know if I do that? Will I ever know if I do that? Will I ever be able to say that I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever view porn again, right? It creates pressure, fear, disbelief. 

And this also came up in a recent training that I did with Jill Freestone, who I’m going to have come on the podcast sometime, who is amazing. Oh my gosh, you guys, Jill Freestone, if any of you just want a coach who can just help you, I mean I’m sure she can help you with the porn stuff, but come to us with the porn stuff because we really specialize in that. 

But Jill is so good with inner child work and trauma work and bodywork. And if you need some extra support and just want someone to talk to about life. I don’t know if she has a specialty but she is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant and so wise and I just adore her. We’re going to have her on the podcast so you can hear her. 

But she really specializes in OCD as well. And she has had struggles with OCD and she has been diagnosed, I think she has been diagnosed with OCD. Anyways, she has tons and tons of experience with OCD. And so she came and trained my coaches around OCD because we see OCD tendencies quite a bit and we also see scrupulosity tendencies quite a bit. Scrupulosity is like a religious form of OCD. 

And even if you’re not diagnosed OCD, you can still exhibit scrupulous or OCD tendencies. And a lot of times that comes from, you know, cultures can breed it, very high demand, all or nothing thinking stuff can breed it. Anyway, she was doing this amazing training for us on OCD and she brought this up during the training. She said, “For good, it can really be an issue for people with OCD tendencies or with an OCD diagnosis.” 

And she talked about how you can get really fixated on this idea of quitting porn for good, and what does that mean? And how do we define that? And how will I know if I ever get there? And get really fixated on that, stressed out about it, and very hyper fixated on that for good, for good, for good, for good. And it can become something that holds people back and keeps people stuck a little bit and in fear and in disbelief and in pressure. 

And so I really want to address this, and I’m going to address this here on the podcast. And then I also am going to create a video in the program to address this so that we can make sure we’re starting off on the right foot when we’re quitting porn for good. 

So I kind of want to talk about reframing this idea of quitting porn for good because a lot of people, when they hear that, they think for good, which means knowing and being completely sure that I will never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever view again. And it becomes a length of time. Quit porn for good, as in a length of time. 

And I want to make sure that you know that I believe that you don’t have to struggle with porn forever. But a more helpful reframe here that’s going to feel more powerful and more in your control might be for good as in, it doesn’t have power over me anymore. I’m overcoming porn for good, as in it doesn’t have power over me anymore. So I can have a slip-up three years down the road. 

Let’s say I haven’t viewed porn forever and then something weird happens and I view porn three, five years down the road. And it doesn’t have power over me still, because I don’t go into binging. Because I’m not afraid of it. Because I don’t go into those shame cycles. And those fear cycles and those, oh no, I’m going to have to struggle with these forever cycles. 

It’s not taking over your relationships. The shame isn’t controlling you and it’s not a problem for you anymore. Not because you know for sure you’re never ever going to slip up again, but because you have trust in yourself, you have power over yourself and power over your actions. You completely trust yourself. And we can just breathe, that no matter what the future brings, we know we’re going to be okay. 

Okay, this type of thinking reminds me of owning a business. And especially in the beginning, when I was trying to make money and support our family, and my husband has a business too, right? So we’ve always been in the entrepreneur space and we love it. We adore it. 

But in the beginning when you’re just, like the work in the beginning is just can I hold on to this belief that I can do it? Even though everyone else thinks that it’s a little crazy, even though no one else really thinks that. We’re not doing the traditional path and we should be doing these other things. Can I hold on to this belief? 

And when I got into the mindset of like, oh, I’m making money. I know I’m never going to have to, like I’ll always be making money forever, right? We’ll never struggle again. I’ll always be okay, right? That becomes very pressure field. And it puts a lot of pressure on your individual businesses, whether that’s this business or it’d be fun to bring my husband on sometime and talk about – We have a lot that we could talk about here on the podcast. 

But he did barn doors and then we had a belt business where we sold belts. And then he started OTF knives and that’s a whole story where his OTF knife business got shut down because he was selling them on Amazon and Amazon doesn’t like you selling OTF knives. 

So he was selling tons and tons and tons and tons, having tons of success. And then the next day it was just gone. It was just snap fingers, gone. There wasn’t anything we could do. We hadn’t built a list. We were really new to the business. There were some things that we hadn’t done very smartly and it was really scary. And we were fine. Like it wasn’t terrifying, it was just like a big bummer. 

And then he went on to build Axial, which if any of you know Axial Knives, my husband owns Axial Knives. It’s a growing new OTF knife company. So he’s really into that knife space. I know a lot of men really like that fun knife, man toys space. So look up Axial Knives and you’ll see what he does. 

But anyways, back to this idea of if our mindset was, we’re never going to struggle again or we’re always going to be able to make this money, or our businesses are always going to be able to bring in this much money. That was scary, that was pressure-filled. But when it turned into, oh, no, I know that no matter what happens, I’ve built these skills that we’re going to be fine. I’ve built the skills that I know I can go out and sell what I need to sell for us to be fine. 

This really happened for me in my business when I realized, oh, if I need to, I can go and hustle and I can do a bunch of webinars and get my message out to more people. And I know there are going to be people who need this help and want this help that I can help. The confidence isn’t in the assurance of the future, but the confidence is in the skills that I’ve built as a person that I know if something happens we’ll be fine because I have these skills. And these skills can’t be taken away from me. 

This is why I talk so much about investing in your brain, because you can invest in things outside of you, but if you invest in your brain, your brain is never going anywhere, unless there’s an accident. And maybe that’s why you want to invest in disability insurance, too. But your brain can’t be taken from you. 

And so I also love watching there’s like TikToks and different stories of billionaires or millionaires who they have everything stripped from them or they just pretend, even if it’s just like a game. They see what they can do from the ground up with no resources, no money, no connections, nothing. And they are very successful very quickly. 

And it’s not because they had money or they are using their resources, it’s because they had the skill set. Because they spent years and years and years building the skill set to create resources, to create value, to create sales, whatever that is, that they were going to be fine. And so this is a similar idea here where for good isn’t this assurance that no matter what we’re never going to slip up or we’re never going to view porn again. 

But for good, where I’m not afraid of the future anymore and it doesn’t have power over me anymore. And I know that no matter what happens, I can get right back here. And it’s even going to be easier because I’m not relearning everything. So we’re going to talk about that more in-depth here in just a minute, what those skills are that can create that for you. But I want to talk about this other idea really quickly of “for good” as in for the good of you. 

So instead of we’re quitting porn for good, forever, making sure absolutely never again, but for good as in for the good of me. For the good of my mental health, for the good of my self-image, for the good of my relationships, for the good of society, right? Because porn, I mean, there’s a lot of icky stuff porn does with our society, right? For the good of my health, for whatever that reason is, for my good. 

Because once we can let go of this shame, and it becomes less important to never view again so that we’re finally enough and worthy enough, and we can let go of that shame, that’s when we can grasp onto for the good of my life. For the good of these things that I just listed; mental health, self-image, relationships, society, health, whatever. 

So the length of time doesn’t matter quite as much because the attachment of your inherent goodness is not tied to whether or not you viewed porn. And then this makes it so much more doable, right? It’s really hard for us to be like, oh, I trust myself that I’m never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to view porn ever again in the future, especially if you’ve gone through years and years and years of trying to quit and you haven’t really quite built up that trust in yourself yet. 

You’ve quit and then you’ve gone back, and you’ve quit and you’ve gone back. And then you’re here and you’re in the program and you’re doing this work and you’re like, I feel better than I’ve ever felt. I have these skills I’ve never had. I’ve gone the longest I’ve ever gone without viewing porn. You’re having all this great success, there can still be that little voice that’s like, yeah, but what about in three years? 

You can quiet that and be like, even if in three years, we’ve quit for good because I know that no matter what happens I have the skill set to get right back to where I am. And this is stuff that we can measure, okay? This is where the power and the confidence in yourself and it feels much more doable because we can measure some of these things. 

So we might not be able to measure if you’ll never, ever view porn again. But we can measure how you feel about yourself and if you believe those voices that tell you that you’re not good enough. And if you believe the voices that tell you you’re always going to struggle with this. 

And how you talk to yourself, and if you’re holding yourself back because you don’t believe that you deserve certain things. You don’t go for the promotions because you don’t believe you deserve the promotions. You don’t go out on dates because you don’t believe you deserve a good partner, right? We can measure that. We can measure relationships and if they’re full of love, and trust, and support, and connectedness and vulnerability, and how your sex life feels. 

We can look at all of that, we can work through that, we can measure some of that. We can measure your mindfulness skills and your ability to sit in negative emotion and your ability to work through discomfort and say what you’re going to do. We can measure that relationship that you have with yourself and if you show up for yourself and if you allow yourself rest and breaks and how you talk to yourself. 

We can measure if you are adding to your life. If you’re adding to your world. If you’re creating something beautiful, instead of just consuming and being stuck in consumption and being stuck in just living just a bearable life. You know, waking up and going to work and coming home just to exist, or if you’re creating something, we can measure that. We can measure your emotional health, right? 

So do you see how never viewing porn again becomes so much less important than porn not having control over you because you’ve learned these skills, because you know these skills. And it’s so much fuller and deeper and much more transformative. We’ve overcome pornography for good not because we’re 100% certain we’re never going to slip up in the future, but because we know no matter what we can build the skills. We have the skills that we can get right back here. 

We can get right back to this place of a beautiful relationship with yourself and beautiful relationship with others and being mindful and having control over yourself. Even if we’re not perfect in the future. Even if we have a slip up three years down the road. 

Can you see how we can just breathe and how that doesn’t feel as tight and as stressful and as unattainable? But here when the goal becomes porn not having control over you, instead of us never ever, ever viewing again, we can heal. We can create all of these deeper things. And we can work towards something even better. Something deeper, something that will change your life so much more than just never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever viewing porn again, right? 

Because you can, I mean, you could go and just throw all of your possessions away and live on an island where there’s no internet connection, where you’ll never have any porn, right? That’s not going to create as good of a life for you as creating all of these skills, emotional health, relational health, mindfulness, your relationship with yourself, creating instead of consuming et cetera, et cetera. 

Okay, for good. We’re quitting for good, for the good of you. For the good of your life. For the good of our society. Not for good as in for sure 100% positive we’re never ever going to slip up again, but for the good of my life. So I’m not worried about it. So I’m not stressed about it. So I’m not scared of it anymore. 

And for those of you who have been listening and might feel called to come and join us to really do this, this is what we do. This is what we teach. This is what we apply. This is what you get coached on. The results in our program are really amazing, as you’ve been hearing in all these What’s Possible interviews, and we have so many more to share with you. The results are amazing. 

And so if you’re feeling called to come and join us, please do so. Please come and join us. Remember, you get lifetime access to all of the things, all of the coaching. It’s our commitment to work with you until you quit for good, until you have these skills for good. And then even if you do slip up three years down the road or whatever, you have lifetime access to all the things including coaching calls. So you can just come hop on a call and we’ll help you. We’ll help you. 

Because of the content in the program, because of all the help in the program, because of the process and how well it works and all of the one-on-one support and group coaching support that you get, as soon as you join your porn habit is as good as done. Then we just put in the work and we work step by step by step by step. 

If you have a lot of time and a lot of energy and want to do all the work upfront, awesome, you’ll see tons of success. If you want to take it slow step by step by step by step, awesome, great, you’ll still see tons of success. I tell people one video, one milestone, one section might be all you need, and then everything else is just a bonus. 

So you can come join us, sarabrewer.com/workwithme. And in the meantime, yeah, let’s reframe that idea of for good. Let’s make it deeper. Let’s make it more meaningful. Let’s make it more attainable. Let’s make it much better than just making sure we never ever view again, but making it so that porn doesn’t have control over us anymore. So good. 

All right, you guys, have a great week. We’ll talk to you next week, bye bye. 

I want to invite you to come and listen to my free class, How To Overcome Pornography For Good Without Using Willpower. We talk about how to stop giving in to urges without pure willpower or relying on phone filters so that you can actually stop wanting pornography. 

We talk about how to stop giving up after a few weeks or months. And spoiler alert, the answer isn’t have more willpower. And then lastly, we talk about how to make a life without porn easily sustainable and permanent. 

If you’re trying to quit porn, this class is a game changer. So you can go and sign up at Sarabrewer.com/masterclass, and it is totally free.