How to never fail again at overcoming pornography forever

One of the biggest issues that every person who works to overcome pornography has is that they often feel like they are failing if they have any sort of setback or make any sort of mistake in the way that they are handling themselves. So today we are going to talk about two ways to ensure that you never fail again when it comes to overcoming pornography. A guy that I was working with told me the story of when he was doing a physical challenge of some sort, I think it was a multi-day race, and he stopped at a home that was part of the race support.  I heard this story a long time ago, so the details are a little fuzzy for me, but the message is clear.  He goes into the house, they point him to a bedroom and since it’s the end of the day and he’s been racing all day, he goes in, faceplants into the bed and goes to sleep. Fast forward to the next morning and his wife, who, for some reason didn’t sleep in the room with him, comes in to wake him up.  As she does this, she notices that the wall above my friend’s head is a mural of a naked woman. I imagine some of you are right now thinking of your partner or yourself and wondering how much trouble that guy was in.  Turns out he was in quite a bit of trouble. His wife was quite furious with him that he had slept in that room and let him have it. So my friend defends himself by saying that he had no idea, he had just come into the room, it was dark, he hadn’t even gotten undressed, that he had just slept in the room without even looking around because he was so tired from the race he had been running. This is key number one making your journey to overcoming pornography forever fail-proof:Learn to recognize what is problematic and what is incidental. Too often, we become hyper-sensitive and hyper-focused on the ways in which pornography intersects our life and this intense management of the thing we want so badly to avoid creates a reality where we are more likely to notice it, and often, we beat ourselves up over it reinforcing a negative reality. Just the same way you notice every car on the road that looks like the one you just bought, your brain is constantly looking for ways to reinforce itself.  This happens in ways that are positive and valuable and it also happens in ways that reinforce negativity in our lives.  In the case of my friend, the fact that there was a mural of a naked woman on the wall above his head was a non-issue until his wife made it into a big deal, reinforcing a number of negativities that seem inescapable.  I don’t know what her thoughts were, but I imagine she felt like we can never get away from this, that no matter what, we always have to be diligent, and maybe any trauma that she experienced was being dredged up and relived in that moment.  For him, it might have been that he will never be able to do enough to stay away from this, that even when he isn’t doing anything, he still gets in trouble because of his past behavior, and maybe even that his wife will never get over this and that it is a hopeless issue. Think about what you’ve felt over the time you’ve struggled, what would you have thought or felt.  I know that I would certainly have felt attacked for something I didn’t do and that I had no control over.  If you want to overcome pornography forever, you need to be able to triage what has happened in order to understand if there is something more to do. In this case, there really wasn’t anything to be done.  My friend had no idea the mural existed, and as such, nothing happened and there was nothing to learn...