#76 - Having a Life-Changing 90 Days
In life, people say that too much of anything is bad. This phrase is often used to imply that sometimes too much of the things that we like or do can be very dangerous. Some include food, habits, relationships, money, and even social media, and many more. In other words, excess of some, perhaps most things are bad especially when it becomes an addiction, and this is to be examined because it may affect an individual on various aspects.
Now, let us look at how porn addiction, which is one of the current issues brought about by the growth of information, affects an individual's life or the life of a loved one. When someone becomes addicted to pornography, they spend so much time in it that they overlook important duties, responsibilities, and people in their lives. Certainly, internet pornography can be very damaging in that it consumes your life so if one day you suddenly feel the urge to get away from it, there are important decisions to be made.
In this episode, Benjy and Andrew talk about the significant effect of a 90-day session and understand why we need 90 days and what you can get out of these 3 months. Three months is a long period as it can destroy relationships, revive relationships, and create a big impact with that period. In this healing-recovery process, you can save energy instead of focusing on the sexual temptations, practice being honest, have integrity, and just being committed to internal digging and that healing process.
You can't make productive decisions while you're in a self-destructive mindset, so committing to that 90-day change will help you to have a better connection with others, especially to the people that matter to you. It will also allow you to see the impact of your impelling behavior until you experience change. You just have to keep in mind that changing your habit takes time and dedication. Everybody has different amounts of baggage that they have to clean up. Creating that vision, believing in it, and just working towards that vision with daily disciplines will help you overcome that porn addiction. It does not happen overnight, so you need to be patient and trust the process considering every experience is different for each individual. Join us as we tackle how to develop sexual integrity, build healthy habits, and quit porn for good.
God works in seasons
Church Burnout
Giving selflessly is sometimes the most selfish thing that you can do because it feeds your soul.
Possibilities of people changing in a short period
Working on the relationships, recovery, and healing process
Porn relationship causing you to be anxious or fearful
Making productive decisions
90-day experience as a new way of life
Associates sexuality with intimacy
Wrestling with your emotions
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life, and Legacy, a podcast dedicated to helping you walk the tightrope of life and come out on the other side, a victor, a victoress. And today's episode we're talking about 90 days. Because in High Noon, we work in 90-day stints. And our Ascend program, our recovery program is all about what you can do in 90 days. We've seen some amazing feats be accomplished in 90 days. If you set yourself up, right, growth is inevitable in that period, and if not, 90 days could just fly by and you're still the same person. In today's episode, we unpack the magic of what can happen in 90 days with me, the person whom you love the most, and also Professor Uyama a la Benjy. Enjoy.
Andrew Love
Welcome back, everybody. Benjy and I have been here for a long time since we recorded.
Andrew Love
Say hi, Benjy.
Andrew Love
Hi everyone!
Andrew Love
Benjy is sitting in the car at a bird sanctuary. I'm sitting on the ground, things are going to pop off. Things are going to be crazy today. We wanted to talk about it because this came up right now. We're having all these orientation calls because the new quarter is starting. I'm talking to young men from all around the world, helping them understand how to get the most out of High Noon. One of the things that keep on coming up is the 90 days, the fact that 90 days is this great amount of time.
Andrew Love
We wanted to talk a little bit about 90 days. Why do we do 90-day chunks at a time? The first reason is that God, God works in seasons. Seasons are three months at a time. It's like if the entire climate can change in your city from one season to the next, then your internal climate can also change for sure. Three months is this magical number where it's enough time to grow a lot. But you can still fit three months into your brain. If we were to make a one-year-long program, I think a lot of people would not join, I think most people wouldn't join because it's just such a long time, it's hard to predict a year at a time, especially these days in this world. But you know, one month it's like you're just getting started at one month. We adopted this. We've been sticking to it for a while. The reason is it takes a while for you to build momentum as an individual, but also for a group to build momentum in terms of building chemistry, speaking openly.
Andrew Love
I just spoke with one of our facilitators and he said it's their second last week before the end of the quarter. That finally, one guy that he has in his group shared what he's been holding inside the entire time like he finally got to the truth. It took them 10 weeks. But that's just the nature of this to unravel 10, 12, 15 years of a compulsive habit of porn, masturbation with self-centered thinking. It takes a little bit of time to get past the superficial desire to want to just get something negative out of your life. And to get to the deeper questions of "Why did I let this into my life and what do I want to do after it's gone?" What do you get to say about it? I'm just kind of ranting here.
Benjy Uyama
Yeah, it's pretty challenging, I must say. I think I'll speak from the perspective of the facilitator. We have so many facilitators, were just selflessly giving their time every week to help these men and women overcome pornography. Not only that, but trying to somehow help them heal and recover from this like you said, just decade or more long habit, addiction, behavioral addiction, and it's really hard to get people to open up. It's really hard within just a three months period, a 12-week period to get people to take action, but not only that to heal and recover and give them a sense of community and brotherhood or sisterhood. I really want to commend anyone who takes on that kind of mission. It's really not easy, but I must say and I'll share a bit more, I think. But just giving people that opportunity to share for that amount of time is like that in itself is way beyond anything anybody possibly could have found anywhere else in their life.
Benjy Uyama
There are very few opportunities like that, that people would actually dive into and actually work on this. Yeah, it's a challenge, but it's really just creating that space is super, super valuable. From what I've seen, it kind of happens naturally over time. Over three months or even shorter to get people to a place where they just feel comfortable to share with each other. And that's such a healing experience to have that environment.
Andrew Love
Yes, well, that's a good point. Because from the facilitators' perspective, it's pretty crazy. Because in the beginning, they're like "Whoa, I don't know about volunteering. I volunteered for church stuff before or nonprofits. "And a lot of times it's the old dynamic where somebody's like "Yeah, yeah. I can give you five minutes a week." And the church is like "Okay, five minutes.That means 10 minutes. That means an hour. That means give me your life. "And it's just a never-ending commitment that you give a finger and they take the "arm" thing.
Andrew Love
We were very careful of that because we know that there's a lot of burnout. It's not just our church, but it's like churches in general that are volunteer reliant, that it's hard to ask for the right amount, something that's challenging, but not too challenging. And when it's in three months, we're asking for volunteers for three months at a time. And if somebody is feeling burnt out, they can absolutely take a break, but just commit to three months. But the cool thing is, it's really only an hour, hour and a half a week, which is absolutely doable. And that hour to hour and a half a week, compounded over three months, can really help somebody. Do you know what I mean?
Andrew Love
If you just randomly, do something once a week. Like let's say you learn the guitar, and you just do it once a week for an hour, you're not going to get very good very quickly because you forget a lot in between those weak sessions. But somehow, with the healing process, there's this coming together of forces when people start to invest a little bit more. They start to do a little internal digging, like the participants, and they start to feel they're surrounded by good people, then what a facilitator can help with is so much more than just that one hour a week. It's like one hour a week could feel like 10 hours of healing, just later in the process. Does that make sense?
Benjy Uyama
Yeah, for sure.
Andrew Love
Yeah. It's like from all sides. From a participant's perspective, it's like, we want to make sure that people don't get scared off by being overly committed. Then same with the facilitators. But yeah, we wanted to go over.
Benjy Uyama
I was just going to add that I think it's really pretty incredible that I would say maybe you know better, Andrew. But a huge percentage of facilitators do sign up to go again, to run another group of participants with the Ascend program, even though we don't push people to write. It's not like we're trying to, we're operating on volunteers alone. We're really just trying to provide a helpful experience where they can, facilitators themselves, can get inspiration every few weeks in the form of a group call and just hearing from each other and sharing what's working. It seems like people genuinely enjoy the experience. Even though it's sometimes challenging, a big responsibility many times, the experience of just pushing themselves to help people and then seeing the impact that actually makes on their lives. For me, at least that's a huge bonus. Basically, that's the reason I do it as well.
Andrew Love
Yeah. It's a little bit crazy that for some of our facilitators, this is their life of faith. They don't really go to church, or they don't really participate in that kind of sock. But this kind of keeps them connected to our community, but also to giving, the act of giving selflessly. In many ways, saving their own souls. Because otherwise, they'll just be immersed in their own lives and they don't really have a connection. But I know a few people who are kind of, it was termed "church burnout", like stepping back from just a church activity. But they've committed to one guy I know committed to the entire year at a time because he gets so much out of it himself. He's a facilitator, but he's like, this is saving me more than anything.
Andrew Love
Giving selflessly is sometimes the most selfish thing that you can do because it feeds your soul. That's really cool. Yeah, it's like a lifeline for some people. Because again, they might have had bad experiences where they were working too hard. They didn't know how to say no to volunteer stuff. But when the parameters are set, and they're really clear, just three months at a time, once a week calls, they're this long. Now we have a curriculum. We have a lot of stuff done for you. It's really just for your own sake, too.
Andrew Love
But we wanted to get into some examples of some people like "What can happen in three months?" Because although it's a short period of time. When somebody uses that time well, you can get a lot done in 90 days. You can get a whole lot of growing done in that period of time. We just wanted to kind of swap stories about different breakthroughs, because I was looking at a couple of the groups that I facilitate, and there's so much stuff that happened in 90 days. A couple of people moved countries, a bunch of people changed career paths. Obviously, they were working on their sexual integrity, but just the fact that they were living with more intentionality, they were thinking about their life in more depth than the rest of their lives started changing too. I just wanted to get into some specific stories for you, listeners, for you, our fans. We're nothing without our fans. We wanted to help you guys understand what's happening. Some of the possibilities of people changing in a short period of time. So, Benjy, I'm going to pass the mic off to you for the first one.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, thanks, Andrew. I would definitely say from the groups that I am doing now and that I've done the last few years, they've all been of the nature of individuals who want to prepare well for marriage, want to prepare well for their future spouse. And I think High Noon generally attracts a lot of them but not all of our members. Our participants are in that category, but all of the groups that I do have that nature, particularly because of the work that I'm passionate about how to help, especially young men and women, but I'm running groups for men who prepare well for marriage. This is by far if they were to identify true self, identify what the biggest roadblock is, it would simply be the inability currently or this roadblock of pornography and just a constant battle back and forth and relapsing and just feeling like garbage all the time.
Benjy Uyama
It really became apparent to me when I was working with high school students. I started working with high school kids ages 13 to 17 years old, and I was really moved because they started whenever we start a group, I always asked them "Where would you rank yourself on level 1 to 10 in terms of your relationship with pornography your addiction scale?" And most of them, in that age with a four or five in terms of how frequent they act out and how deep they feel like they're in it. Then I asked them again, at the end of their semester, and most of them said that they're around a two or three or one, even in some cases.
Benjy Uyama
What was interesting is that I think this is really just inspiring and beautiful. Because honestly, in my group, there are only six guys, six brothers, and high school students. Of all of the people that we have in High Noon, of all the high schoolers that are in the world are in our movement. Only six of them this last semester, stepped up to the plate. When we got started, they kind of firstly, one of them was feeling really ashamed that he had to join a High Noon group and I was like "Are you kidding me? You should be proud. Your parents should be proud of you. Because 100% If not, 98%, 99% of your peers are struggling with the same thing, and none of them have the courage to step up and actually address this and work on this and kick nip in the bud, so that you can actually just cut it off at its knees before it gets escalated info on addiction, before you even begin a relationship, before even consider marriage and preparing for the blessing matching process, etc." By the time of it, I was just like "Man, you guys have just grown so much." And I really saw that they did cut back a lot on their habits.
Benjy Uyama
But not only that, what was really interesting is their relationships with their parents, specifically, I feel like was the biggest healing point and recovery point, because it's really not enough to just abstain from porn for the sake of abstaining from it unless we're actually actively working on the recovery process itself. The healing process and working on the relationships that are important to us. It's like simultaneously addressing their habit and flipping up and giving them the tools and the method to overcome it. But also asking them to do homework, "Okay. After a call, go report to your mom or your dad, and especially their dads, because I found that that's a more difficult relationship for guys regarding porn.Go to your dad and just tell them about your group call and share how was your experienced from it, and just start a conversation there."
Benjy Uyama
Through that, just connecting them more with their parents, they were able to have more honest discussions and open up that relationship and from that just recover. Because when you start talking with your parents, or not just a parent, but anyone that loves you, and you start showing yourself vulnerable and show all your flaws, and then you realize that "Oh wow, they don't judge me. They don't chastise me. They don't think I'm a terrible son or human being, they actually still love me. And that is like probably the most beautiful expression of receiving unconditional true love, God's love, essentially. And that is where the healing recovery process happens.
Benjy Uyama
I feel like that parent-child relationship, especially in the context of young people, I mean, it's not just for high school. It is really what this program offers is having these kinds of healing relationships with each other within the group with the facilitators, but also within their own family.
Andrew Love
Yeah. Relationships are huge ones, like how a relationship can flip around in three months is insane, for better or for worse. You could destroy a relationship in three months. But you can also revive a relationship in three months, if that's your intention by practicing, being honest, having integrity, the five High Noon virtues. That's a good one. I wanted to mention one too, which is about relationships, but it's specifically so I obviously can't say the guy's name. But he's an amazing guy. He's married, he's blessed. He has kids, but he's been on the long road to recovery. We took a break last year. We were in-house facilitators, and then we took a month's break at the end of the year. There's some weird time period. For whatever reason, he didn't have a group for like a month.
Andrew Love
And in that time, he got lazy and lost a lot of his routines, his regimens that were keeping them focused, and so he slipped. He wasn't feeling so confident. In these past three months, it's insane. He not only regained his sexual integrity, that was just the foundation then to go through a lot of important life decisions that were to do with his wife and his kids because they'd been separated due to circumstance. He's a nervous guy, like an anxious guy. He doesn't like making decisions so much, but because of his foundation of being grounded in himself, he could then focus on "What does my family need from me?" Like "What can I step up and be of service to for the sake of my family?" And he decided.
Andrew Love
He went through this couple-week process, which basically, he was certain that he wouldn't move to, he decided he was going to move. And now he's all in on that. And he's basically quitting his job, and he's moving to where his wife and kids are. And he's doing it with total confidence. That's the thing. It's like, he would not have been able to make that decision if he was not in a good place if his mind was all over the place. Because his emotions were all over the place because he couldn't keep a stable life going forward. If he didn't have any momentum in his life, I guarantee you, he'd be freaking out right now.
Andrew Love
Maybe he would have come to the same conclusion. But he wouldn't be feeling the same way about his conclusion, he'd be freaking out if this is wrong, and that could easily bleed into accusation. Blaming his wife, and could really be cancer in their relationship. But instead, I see the guy walking with total clarity, like "This is what I'm going to do. It's not my first choice. But I'm going to do this for the sake of my wife, for the sake of my family, I'm going to own it. "He could do this because he had the extra bandwidth to tackle important issues rather than wasting all of his energy, just trying to stave off his sexual temptations.
Andrew Love
He was above that low-hanging energy, and he was above where he could see clearly what needed to happen. He just did that. And that's super, super cool. I was really proud of him. Because I know the guy's similar to me in many ways. I just know when we're anxious, we're useless, basically. When you reach a certain level of anxiety, no matter which way you go left to right, they're both going to be bad because you're in a bad state. All you're seeing is the potential hazards instead of the opportunities that live before you.
Benjy Uyama
How do you say that? How does a porn relationship in your mind result in being more anxious or fearful?
Andrew Love
Because it's connected to self-centeredness and short-sightedness and emotional immaturity? Especially for somebody who's been wrestling with sexual integrity for a while, for somebody to take a bunch of steps backward in their journey is, it's just overwhelming with the sense of being a failure and shame and all this stuff. From that place, you can't make productive decisions while you're in a self-destructive mindset. Do you know what I mean? When you hate yourself, you're going to make bad decisions for yourself, like food.
Andrew Love
I know a guy that whenever he struggles with sexuality, like when he's really down on his sexual integrity, and he's making bad decisions regarding porn and all that he also starts making really bad food choices because he just stops caring about himself, Do you know what I mean? And then, he also stops caring about how he talks to other people. He's grumpier. They're just basically self-destructing. And I know that that is true to varying degrees. I remember other guys like 10 years ago, who were in my life. I could tell very clearly based on how they said "hi" to me, whether they were struggling, whether they just watched porn, or they're just recently masturbating. Because they were just, they couldn't wake up in the morning, they had like this foggy cloud around them, and they just weren't enjoyable to be around.
Andrew Love
But when they were sober sexually, then they were sober spiritually, and they had a lot of clarity. It's like in spiritual terms, the low spirit world is really like you just comparing yourself to other people, you're judging other people, you're thinking about how much stuff you don't have. It's like, lack, lack, lack. "All the things I don't have." and then you get so frustrated with life to make a decision from there. It's not going to be good. This dude just put himself in, he handled himself, like with his sexual integrity, just kind of dealt with that got stable, and then kind of went to a higher place to start making his decisions. And when the difficult stuff came up, he could address it in a relatively short time with a lot of clarity.
Benjy Uyama
Yeah, I have someone of similar nature, who made a lot of changes to his life basically, because of joining High Noon. He did a few, this is a brother in my group right now. And whenever we check-in, during our weekly calls, we ask "How is everyone doing? How's your week going?" A lot of the guys are really all over the place in terms of their integrity level, their energy level throughout the week. Sometimes it's really high and then the next call, it's really low. But this one guy, this gentleman is just super consistent, every single week is just the same. Really, his sexual integrity is just on point, just feels really good. He has his routine, his daily schedule, his morning routine down, and he's just super consistent.
Benjy Uyama
After eight weeks of meeting, I wanted everyone to really dig into him during our call and really figure out what he's doing that's different from what everyone else is doing. Because it's really, it's just blatantly obvious that he's doing something well. I just asked him a lot of questions about basically how we came to be from just a year ago, he said even six months ago, he was just way off the charts. Really emotionally unstable, lots of fear, lots of anxiety, insecurities, personal insecurities. Now he's just consistent and stable. Then I was getting into it because there's something different about his approach or something that happened during his recovery process.
Benjy Uyama
I guess the bottom line for him is that what he's experiencing now is not just abstinence for the sake of absence, that makes sense. It's more of a recovery process, as in he's recovering, you're stealing parts of his life in relationships or wounds in his life during this process that makes pornography just an afterthought. It just makes it irrelevant anymore because he doesn't need that crutch to lean on anymore. He doesn't need it to fill a void or to go to when he's feeling negative emotion. I really asked him more about his family. And basically, he brought it down to his relationship with his mother, particularly when you started High Noon. He started working on that relationship and just being more open and honest with her, and especially with his siblings as well.
Benjy Uyama
That is a healing process that he needed to actually recover. Because we talked about Porn Ascend as a porn recovery program in sexual integrity. It's not a porn abstinence program, we can't claim victory from just saying that we have abstained through sheer will, for three months. Unless you're recovering, you're just going to relapse. And this happens with some of the guys all the time. It's like, they'll go months and months, and then they'll just relapse and spiral out of control. And then it's gone. They're like "What happened? Why did I go so long? "Well, it's because you were just abstaining and just cold turkey, and you didn't have the real recovery that's needed to heal."
Benjy Uyama
Anyways, the bottom line for this particular guy is he's just being really consistent with his relationships with his daily routine. And he just makes it a top priority in his life. And he just comes to the college just the same every week. Not to dismiss the other guys, they do their best, but sometimes they're all over the place in terms of their integrity, but he's just really impressively keeping it consistent. I really think it's because he's experienced healing and recovery as an individual which, like you're saying, makes his life more clear. He's more secure, he's more confident in his decision, he's more clear about his future and what he wants to do with his life. And that's just like a knock-on effect of what's happening with High Noon. And it's pretty awesome.
Andrew Love
It is. Yeah. And sometimes again, for everybody listening, that doesn't mean that your first 90-day experience, you're going to knock it out of the park because what Benjy is talking about is pretty common where a lot of people are just kicking the can. They don't quite get it the first three months. But what they're doing is they're orienting themselves to a new way of life, and it's a little bit new, it's a little bit uncomfortable at first. And little by little, you start to realize what the reality is and how to actually grow. Some people need to just not grow for a while and see themselves like "What's going on? I'm a part of this thing, but I'm not changing." So they need to do a few 90 days in order to really hit their stride.
Andrew Love
Because I also know another guy, there's another guy in the same group with a different situation, but it's interesting. You were talking about that guy who was focusing on the relationship with his mother. This other guy, he's married, he also has kids, but he's still watching porn and masturbating. And even his wife didn't seem to mind so much saliva, he just stayed away when she wanted him to stay away. And they had this agreement. In the beginning, he wasn't so clear about "Well, I'm not sure if I want to quit this kind of thing because it's not so bad. My wife lets me do this kind of thing." But what he ended up doing was identifying that he wanted to be closer to his wife.
Andrew Love
Little by little, he realized that he would love to have his wife's affection instead of a phone and his hand, right. He would love to be with her. But he also realized that when he was rejected by her, he would get livid, he would get so angry and so frustrated. And he would want to go watch porn and masturbate out of sheer anger, and kind of resentment. That boiled to this kind of heated moment where he started messaging about halfway through our three months.
Andrew Love
He started messaging us during his nighttime, and I was just having some back and forth with him. He was wrestling with like, he knows what he wants, he wants his wife's love. And he knows that maybe she's just not in the mood or whatever. But he takes it so personally, and he doesn't want to but his emotions were so raw. And he could see this internal struggle happening in real-time where he wanted something, but his emotions were telling him the exact opposite, and he didn't know what to believe. But that was this really definitive moment that helped him see himself with more clarity and then his struggle became a lot less since then. Now, he's a lot more. He associates sexuality with intimacy and closeness with his wife instead of something that his body needs regardless of whether his wife wants to participate or not.
Andrew Love
That's like a real relationship thing, too, the one you mentioned was more mother-child, which is really important. But it's also when you start working on your relationships, In general, you see how much your sexuality is influenced by your dysfunctional understanding of certain relationships, key relationships in your life. And this dude is doing way better now. He's so much happier. He feels so much lighter because he doesn't really have nearly as much negative anger, frustration, or emotion associated with his sexual experience, which is like "I imagine how many people are stuck there eternally because they didn't get that."
Andrew Love
This guy, he'd just been doing it for, we've just been working together for three months, but he changed. He was like night and day in those three months. But he went all in. He also had a life coach, and he was just like, I think he took the marriage course. He was just doing everything he could to kind of understand himself, and he grew. I think more than a lot of people grow in their lifetime, he grew in three months. Just because he's ready for it, and put in the work, it's amazing to watch. And he keeps on saying ``Thank you." to me like I did something. I was like "Wow. I mean, you did it, you know. You did the word, bro."
Benjy Uyama
That's crazy. I've seen that a lot in my life, too. Just the act of investing in it, and not just thinking about it, or battling within our brain or our relationship, just to tell somebody about it, and to actually take action and actually invest in it. Because otherwise, we're just fooling ourselves. Honestly, we're just fooling ourselves thinking we're making the right efforts or conditions or whatever it takes to change. But in the end, we're not really doing what we seriously need to do, which is often doing stuff like that, like joining the group, joining your marriage course, whatever.
Andrew Love
Yeah. I want to clarify, too, that a lot of times I get confused when somebody is like "You got to put in the work." because it depends. Especially with online courses, that's clear. You just do that physical work, but with internal work, not always clear what that means. Like in a spiritual or religious context, or you just need to try to love somebody like "What the hell, what does that mean?" In this guy's case, it was abundantly clear that his work was to go inward and see what was true. When he's feeling a feeling that he does the work of saying "Do I want to pursue this feeling?" For him, he was like "I want to go watch porn and masturbate." But it kind of ran counter against his desire to want to be closer to his wife. The real work was he was sitting there messaging me. I asked them, "Please leave voicemails if you want."
Andrew Love
We had a lot of voice messages back and forth. And the work was, he was wrestling with his thoughts and emotions and seeing what's true, and it's exhausting when he does that. But it's not like something that you can put into a class setting and put it like 20 students in a classroom and say "Okay, wrestle with your emotions." It's not as simple as that. But the real work is nothing when you're feeling something, writing it down, inviting somebody into the conversation like an accountability partner. Talking to yourself, praying first instead of just reacting. Processing, thinking, having discussions with people in your life, is the work of understanding yourself. It's very practical when you do it, and that will definitely make your 90 days a lot more useful.
Andrew Love
The people that just show up for the calls and don't do anything in between, then nothing really happens. Because you're missing the point that this is learning about yourself. Becoming intimate with yourself is a requirement. He can't just do that by showing up to a call once a week. You got to do this work. You got to spend time with your thoughts and your feelings.
Benjy Uyama
Yeah. I want to mention something that is basically a common theme that's occurring right now in the semester. The group that I'm leading is the idea of how to respond to strong and negative emotions. It's becoming really clear to us that, especially for men, I would even venture to say that this is more difficult for men, generally speaking than women, is knowing how to deal with those negative emotions of feeling rejected, frustrated, stressed, angry in a positive productive way. Rather than the tendency we have is to and I think we can all attest to this, in some form. Try to escape that emotion- through a phone, pornography, alcohol, drugs, video games, and the list goes on and on.
Benjy Uyama
It's a really strong, tempting way to temporarily escape that emotion and not deal with it head-on and actually communicate about it with someone. If my wife rejects me or is upset at me, do not just say "You're wrong." and get angry then go on my phone or something to escape the feeling but to actually communicate about and talk about that. Like you said inwardly, have introspection and journal about it, maybe pray about it. I feel like when it really comes down to it, that's probably to me that's really what it takes, is creating the habit of addressing these emotions that are real emotions. They're not fake, or they're not. We shouldn't dismiss them, devalue them, but actually how to respond to them simply.
Benjy Uyama
I do want to just comment about the things I mentioned about men and women. I think, honestly, that generally speaking, men do have a harder time discussing their feelings in a productive way. It's like if you've ever had an experience where someone asks you how you're feeling, and I'm like I have no idea how I'm feeling or what I'm thinking about. But women generally know exactly what they're thinking about, what they're feeling about. Like we're being interrogated, when my wife says, "What are you thinking about?" or my mom. You know, women just are better at understanding their emotions and dealing with them. And I think that's possibly one reason that men are more susceptible to addictions, pornography, video games, etc. Just more escapism methods.
Andrew Love
I'm sure some of that is cultural to a degree as well because traditionally, men have been told to suppress their emotions. But also, there's just the tendency like it's inarguable when you go to a playground with a 2-year-old, and there are a group of let's say, 12, 6, and 7-year-olds. Half of them are boys, half of them are girls. The girls will flock to the baby, "I want to take care of it and talk about how cute it is and say all these things." and the boys will ignore it like it's homework. They don't want to have anything to do with this thing unless it's useful to them in some sort of game that they want to play. It's like "Get this thing out of my way. It's slow. It's useless to me. "100%. I've never been proven wrong about this. Obviously, there's like the exception, where there's the one boy that pays attention to a kid, but for some time, and then he's off. But girls will naturally be there. Yeah, I totally get where you're coming from. There's that reality.
Andrew Love
Anyway, guys, we just wanted to kind of paint the picture. I hope it was helpful to understand why we do 90 days at a time and what you can get out of 90 days, but there are certain elements. You have to have clarity, the North Star goal. If you want to know more about that, go back to the North Star goal episode where we go into detail about what that is, but you need a strong vision, you need belief, and you need a place to practice. Meaning like a structured regimen of "Okay, my vision is I want to sleep really well and eat really healthy so that I can be more focused." Then you get more detailed about that. And then your environment is like the accountability that you create to make sure that happens. And when it doesn't happen, you tell somebody about it. And when it does happen, you tell somebody about it.
Andrew Love
When you live like that with a really clear vision, belief in your vision and congruent actions, and accountability, then growth is inevitable. And then to add kerosene on it to make the fire get really big, you can do extra stuff. Have extra accountability, take an extra course, listen to more content, challenge yourself more. You can grow as fast as you want, basically, and everybody has different amounts of baggage that they have to clean up. If you compare your journey to somebody else's, it might look totally, it will look totally different. Because we're all dealing with different heredity and different upbringing, but at the same time. Your growth can go fast, or it can go slow.
Andrew Love
That depends on how much you are able to create that vision, believe in that vision and work towards that vision with daily disciplines that inevitably come to pass. We want you to do that. We want you to experience it. It's beautiful to behold when people in our community grow, and it's possible, but you gotta put in the work. And 90 days at a time, just focus 90 days at a time. Don't worry about 10 years or five years. Don't worry about five years ago, just focus on three months at a time and you'll see massive growth. When you look back, you're like "Whoa, I was a different person three months ago." It's insane. Any last words, Benjy?
Benjy Uyama
No, you nailed it. Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew Love
Yeah, my pleasure. If you have any questions, as always, reach out to us. And we're happy to help you expedite your journey so that this world can get back to equilibrium. Because it's a crazy place right now. Good luck. We love you. God bless you. Take care.
Andrew Love
Hey, Andrew Love here. I wanted to plant a seed in your mind before you go. You see a lot of people when they start to consume our content, they listen to our podcast, they watch our videos, they read our blogs. They start to believe in the idea of freedom as a possibility for them in their lives, and it is. You can break free from porn. You can build amazing, eternal relationships. But it requires you to make the jump, and it requires you to commit to transformation.
Andrew Love
That only happens when you invite other people into your journey. You see, a lot of people think that "Because I got into porn by myself, I can get out of it by myself." And that's the wrong thinking. It's not about simply removing a negative force from your life. It's about creating fulfillment and connection and intimacy with other people. We really recommend first and foremost that you build a team of accountability partners, facilitators, group members, and we can do that. We have all of that waiting for you, but you need to first reach out to us. If you already have people in your life that you think can help you. We have online courses that will teach you both how to create a dynamic hammock that works in terms of accountability. But if you don't have an accountability partner, we already have volunteers who are waiting for somebody to help. We have groups that are waiting for somebody like you. But your role and your job are to merely reach out to us and we can work together with you to create a powerhouse team so that you can build the life of your dreams. We look forward to hearing from you.