The Mindset Shift That Gets Men Free From Porn for Good

Most men trying to quit porn don't have a willpower problem. They have it backwards. 

In this episode, Michael shares the story of Rob — a lifelong Christian, serving in ministry, hiding a porn addiction for 10 years. Not because he didn't try hard enough. Because he was trying to earn something that had already been given to him. 

This is the mindset shift that most men miss. And it's the one that actually makes recovery possible. 

In this episode: 

• Why willpower-based recovery keeps failing you
• The thing Rob got backwards — and how it kept him stuck for a decade
• Peter walking on water and the 3 positions every man finds himself in on the recovery journey
• What porn is actually promising you (and why your soul knows the difference)
• The moment Rob's shoulders finally dropped — and what that means for you
• Perfection vs. participation: the trick question that changes everything

If you've been white-knuckling this for years and going nowhere, this episode is for you.
 
Ready to stop carrying this alone? Book a free call at rscky.com/get-started

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, welcome to the Restoration Soulcare Punk Nest, where we have ominous conversations about faith, neuro summonance, and hope. I'm Michael Camper, a relationship and recovery coach.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

And I'm Nick Buda, a mental health and relationship coach. If you feel stuck in shame, addiction, or pain, you don't have to face it alone. Join us for some real stories, real tools, and a real path forward. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hey, welcome back to the Restoration Soul Care Quit Porn podcast. My name's Michael. I'm a relationship and recovery coach, founder of Restoration Soul Care, the Soul Care Practice where we help men and women, families, couples work through all manner of relational and spiritual disruptions. And specifically one of those things that we often work with is sexual addiction, sexual, unwanted sexual behavior like pornography. Today I want to do something a little different. I'm flying solo, but I want to tell you about a guy named Rob. And I want to share with you one of the foundational things that not just Rob, but all of us have to grasp if we are going to make long-term significant progress in the recovery. Significant progress in the journey of recovery. And this is true of me, specifically. This is true of Rob. It's true of Nick, I'm sure it will be true of you. Let me tell you a little bit about Rob. Obviously, Rob isn't his real name, and I've changed some of the details so that this is private. But Rob had been hiding a porn addiction for about 10 years when we first met. And that entire time, he had never never told a single person. Nobody knew he struggled with it. He was pretty good at keeping the secret. Nobody knew. Here's what you need to know about Rob. He wasn't some guy who had uh wandered away from the faith. He never questioned God's goodness. He grew up in the church. Uh, he'd been a Christian basically his whole life, uh, which means he'd he has categories for what we call sin. Um he knew what it was. He knew that pornography use uh on any level wasn't good, and he knew what it meant. And he knew that what he was doing fell into that category. So there wasn't uh like a this thing's okay as long as nobody finds out. Like he knew that there was a there was this line that he would cross is basically how he would say it. I know that I'm crossing the line were his words. Um and when you're a Christian, when you're growing up a church and you have these categories, you have you have this problem. Uh sometimes uh it's referred to as a besetting sin, something you can't get past. Something starts to happen inside you when you deal with that over and over and over and over again. You start to feel hopeless and you start to believe that you're a worthless piece of crap, that you are lovable by God, and that if anybody, uh your friends, family, spouse, uh loved ones, if anybody really knew the truth about you, that they would reject you and they would hate you. And uh what it becomes is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we'll talk about shame more in a minute. But what happens is you have that narrative going on in your head, and as long as you keep that to yourself, that's the only narrative you hear, so you don't have any other option than to believe that that narrative is true. So, what do you do? You do what Rob did, you hide, you manage, you show up on Sunday, perform, you act like you got it all together. Um, he, I mean, he was serving a little bit in ministry, so he would show up, be in front of people, put a smile on. He was the perfect church guy. Nobody would ever question it. Monday hits, and uh it all falls off. You act out, you go to porn, and by Tuesday you hate yourself thinking that you're never gonna get through it. But here's the thing about uh Rob nobody had ever actually said any of those things to him. Nobody had ever looked at him in the eye and called him worthless. If you had asked him, point blank, hey, does God think you're a worthless piece of crap? He would say what a lot of us would probably say. Of course not. I don't believe that. But he lived as though that was true. And that was the problem. His beliefs didn't line up with his actions. And one of the things that I love that I've heard one of my dear friends Cliff say is that in the work of recovery, uh, while working with pastors, we try to help pastors believe their own claims. And I live that. Listen, I was a pastor when I would be in front of people teaching on a Sunday or having uh speaking about the love of Christ in front of people, and I would say thing like, say things like, God loves you unconditionally, there's no sin that keeps you from God, and then all the while I was hiding this part of me, just like Rob. And uh what we believed internally was like, Oh, yeah, there is something that makes you unlovable and uh that God will reject you for. And man, that's just um a tension that's hard to live with. When Rob came to see me, uh he's sitting across from me and he's already believing that there's nothing that he can actually do that's gonna help, nobody that he can confess to that's actually gonna love him well in that uh because, like many of us, he tried to quit porn a lot over the years, and every single time he failed. He kept going back. And think if think for a second about what that can do to a person. It's it's genuinely hard to risk trying something new, especially when you believe you're gonna fail, especially when you've proven yourself over and over again for the last 10 years that you have failed. Every attempt at quitting um just becomes evidence for why you can't and why you won't. Um, and every relapse confirmed uh that verdict that Rob had already reached about himself. And uh man, if that's you, I just I want to just acknowledge with you that that's a pretty dark place. Uh, but here's also what I want you to hear because this is the thing that most men miss. Rob didn't have a uh a willpower problem or a faith problem. And it's not that that's not why he was stuck. He was stuck because he was trying to recover in order to earn something that had already been given to him. He was trying to get clean so that God would love him and so that he would finally be worthy, so that he could stop feeling like a fraud every time he walked into the church. Uh, but the reality was that he had it backward and it was killing him. I want to take a diversion briefly here because the scriptures come into mind. There's the story of um when Jesus and Peter walk on the water. Um it's middle of the night sometime. The disciples are all on a boat. Uh Jesus comes walking up to the boat in the middle of the night. And at first the disciples are a little scared because they think it's a ghost. In fact, they say that that's a ghost. And Peter says, Peter speaks up and he says, No, no, I think that's Jesus. And he says, Watch, I'll prove it. Hey, Jesus, if that's you, command me to come to you on the water and I will. And so Jesus says, Come on, Peter. And so, like, think about how crazy this is for a minute. Peter, for the first time in his entire life, swings a leg over the side of the boat, touches the water, and is expecting something different to happen. He's a fisherman. He's been on the water his entire life. There is absolutely zero logical reason why anything different would happen other than Jesus being there and inviting him out of the boat. But here's what you need to see. Peter does get out of the boat, and this miraculous thing happens where he is with Jesus on the water, and this is this beautiful miracle. None of the other disciples get out of the boat, and they're watching this all play out in front of them. Not one of them says, Oh, me too. They are happy to let Peter take the risk and fail in front of them because they were also probably too afraid to take the risk and fail. Um, because what was at stake? Death. They could, uh, they could have drowned, they could have, I mean, Peter was risking embarrassment, right? Because he was trying to convince them this isn't a ghost, this is actually Jesus, and I'm willing to stake my life on it, which maybe there's more metaphor there too. Um, but Peter gets on the water and he's having this moment with Jesus, and then he looks down, and for a brief moment, he remembers, I'm human, I'm on water, I'm supposed to be sinking right now. And then he actually does start to sink, and then Jesus grabs him and says, Hey, why do you have such little faith? Uh, but again, there's there's three positions or three categories in this story that I think sort of outline the path of the recovery journey. First, you're in the boat. You're watching other people in the boat, everybody's in the boat, we all got the same problem. Who's gonna do something about it? Well, not me. That's too scary. Uh, I'd rather settle in and suffer and struggle with the problem that I know rather than have new problems for myself because that feels risky. I've never done that before. Then you got the one crazy dude who believes that something can change, and so he gets out of the boat. And the guy who gets out of the boat is doing something scary, it's super risky, nobody else is gonna follow him. In fact, maybe other people are chiding him and maybe uh giving him grief about it. But the guy who gets out of the boat gets to do something that nobody else does. He gets to walk on the water, he gets to be a part of some great transformational thing that God is inviting him to. And then he gets to have this beautiful moment with Jesus where he is doing the thing that Jesus is doing. So there's Peter. So there's the people in the boat who don't do anything, there's Peter who gets out of the boat, and then there's the ghost walking up to the boat in the middle of the night. And at some point on the recovery journey, you move from just participating in the work to uh walking alongside other people in the work and doing the crazy stuff, like coming up to people in the middle of the night telling them to get out of the boat. So I don't know where you're at on that journey. Some of you might need to get out of the boat, some of you might need to move toward helping other people get out of the boat. But either way, I want you to see that because it can feel lonely when you're the only one who sees that this is a problem and that something needs to be done because you are intimately aware of how this is wrecking you on the inside and maybe even outside in your life. Um, so I hope that connects. Here's the next part I want to talk about. I want to talk about an inversion. Um, like I said a second ago, the typical way this works is that what we want from other people is the the reward of relationship without doing the work because the work is risky and people might reject us. And what is the reward? Well, it's a depth of relationship, it's a depth of knowing I know you deeply and I love you, you know me deeply, and you love me. Pornography comes to us and says, you can have the reward without the work. You can have everything you want. You can feel at peace, you can feel free from your problems, you don't have to worry about stress for a minute. Your uh marriage is going sideways, and your spouse is always arguing with you. Hey, you don't have to think about that for a minute. You can come over here and feel good and relax and get all kinds of endorphins and dopamine will push you toward that, and uh you can masturbate and have an orgasm, and it's just great, you feel good. Um, but here's here's what's actually happening. None of that actually satisfies and it doesn't satiate these deep soul needs that we actually have. Pornography is lying to us, telling us it can fix that. Because before you can get that reward, you have to have real depth, real knowing, real intimacy. You have to put in the time, you have to be present, you have to be vulnerable to another actual person. You have to risk something. And the risk is real because you don't know how it's gonna go. You don't know if this person is gonna receive what you give them or reject it. So you're always doing these little calculations in the head. Is this reward worth the risk? Is this reward worth the risk? Is this person worth the work? Is this gonna go the way I think it does? Why do men turn to porn? Or why do people turn to porn? Because I know porn isn't just a men's problem, it's women too. I've learned that recently. One of the highest listened to episodes was the one where we talked uh with our friend Lindsay about what porn addiction looks like with women. Um here's why, because porn promises the reward of relationship without the work and without the risk. There's no vulnerability required. There's no chance of rejection, just the hit on demand, whenever you want it. But it but it promises even more than that. Uh, like I said a second ago, porn promises to set you free from uh from pain, from stress, loneliness, hurt, shame from whatever you walked in carrying that day. It says, Come here, let me take care of that. It it really reminds me of that scene. I think it's in one of the Indiana Jones movies. I think it's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Somebody can fact check me on that. Uh, it's in the temple where he's trying to swap this uh the gold statue that he's after for this bag of sand. And you know, he weighs it out and tries to get it just right, and he thinks he's pulled it off. He makes the swap. He thinks he's gotten away with something, but the temple knows the difference. The weight is wrong, and everything starts to collapse, everything starts to collapse. That's how porn works. Your body is that temple, and it knows the difference even when you're trying to convince it of the lie. It porn does not satisfy the way that real, genuine connection does. It doesn't solve anything, it doesn't satisfy anything. It it just comes up empty every single time. And this is how you know, because the evidence of that is the shame that you feel at the exact moment that it's not over. You don't experience freedom, you don't experience um relational connection, you don't experience a depth of intimacy. It's shame. That's the temple collapsing. Here's the inversion. This is what we have to grasp. Um, what we get in Christ is the opposite of that framework. We get the reward of the relationship before the risk and before the work. Christ actually gives us what porn promises us: the depth, the knowing, the intimacy, the acceptance. All of that comes first. It's given to you even before you earn it, before you deserve it, and before you've done anything to warrant it. And I want to be clear the work is not absent. Um, you still, there's still risk inherent because recovery is still hard. It's not a shortcut, but the reward is guaranteed. Your standing, your future, your eternity is secure. So the outcome is taken care of. That's not in question. Because when you have that foundation that God in Christ is for you, that changes everything. It creates the safe place to actually do the work of recovery because the cost of failure just changed completely. The weight of the failure is null. Now, because you have received grace and mercy, that creates the safe space, the good fertile soil for you to do the work of recovery out of. Because then the risk of failure doesn't feel like it's gonna kill you or end you or up into the entire process. It says, I'm trying, I didn't get it right. That's what God's grace is for. That's an appropriate uh way to experience God's grace, not an abusive way like Paul says, where you just say, Yeah, I'm gonna use porn today, and uh it doesn't matter. Uh who cares? I'm gonna keep doing it, and I'm just gonna keep repenting because I know God will forgive me. That's an abuse of God's grace. But if you start from that place and go, no, I'm gonna try and fail and try and fail and try and fail, um, you'll have you you'll eventually start making progress. Like you just will. That's how we were created, that's how it works. I want to go back to Rob for just a minute. I'm sitting with him, him in my office, and I'm I'm starting to walk him through some of this. And I said, Rob, God loves you. And he did exactly what most people do. He said, Yeah, yeah, I know. I know God loves me. And I get it. That phrase has been said so many times, so many churches and culture, I think it's lost a little bit of its weight. Um, it's true. I think it stopped landing a little bit, it sort of bounces off. So I I pushed him one layer deeper. I said, Okay, I do you believe that God likes you? And he stopped because that's a different question, and he knew it. Because um the word like implies volition, like implies choice. I might have to love you. Um sometimes love can feel obligatory, it can feel like a duty, but I don't have to like you. Most people know what the difference between those two. Liking someone means I actually want to be around them, it means I enjoy their company, it means when I think about them, something good happens in me. And that was tricky for Rob. That's never enough. I I wanted to push him one more step. I said, Rob, God doesn't just love you and he doesn't just like you, God enjoys you. God enjoys you. And that one was really hard for him to take. And I could see it in his face. His eyes started to well up. Um it almost didn't compute because he had spent 10 years believing the exact exact opposite. That God was at best just tolerating him, and at worst was disgusted by him. And I had a similar moment years ago, uh, my friend Jack, uh, Nick and I talk about our friend Jack quite a bit. He's a saint, we love Jack. Uh I was going through particular or particularly difficult time in life between work and and home. And I called him one day because I was just at my breaking point, and I talked to him through some stuff, and I'll never forget this. He said the words to me, he said, Michael, it doesn't really sound like you believe God is for you. And I said immediately out loud back to him, Yeah, he's not. And when I said that out loud, those words hit me, and I was like, Okay, that's gotta change. And so it wasn't overnight, but I had I had to work through, I had to sit with that tension. Um, and one of the ways I did that, one of the ways I invited Rob to do that was to think about his own kids because he had two of them. I have three girls. I said, Rob, think about your kids. When they uh when they disobey or when they do something wrong, yeah, you might be irritated in the moment. Of course you might, but that doesn't change who they are to you, right? That doesn't change what you do for them. It doesn't change the fact that they are your children and you would do anything and everything to demonstrate the vastness of your love and affection for them. Uh, and he agreed with me. He sat with that. He said, uh, yeah, I get that. I said, yeah, that's you and that's God. When God calls us his children, that's a big deal because it changes the disposition, or at least it implies a different disposition. Because God is not just capable of in enjoying you, he actually fully does enjoy you right now in the middle of the mess. Think about that. Before the sobriety, before the breakthrough, before you have figured anything out, you are no less a child of God because of what you've done. Because who you are in Christ was never dependent upon you to begin with. Sit with that for a minute. Here's what can change when you when you actually wrap your head around that and believe that. Um, because I I watched this when when it started to settle in for Rob. Something shifted in him. His shoulders literally dropped. And that's the moment I need you to understand. That's what I want you to see. He exhaled like he had been holding his breath for 10 years. That this is not just like a like a nice theological idea. Um, this is something that actually makes recovery possible. Because when you believe that God delights in you and enjoys you, not in spite of your failure, but in the middle of it, it frees you from that weight of failure. And when the weight of failure drops, something in you opens up, something about your imagination, about your capacity to believe that something different can happen. Um, you change the way you think about yourself. And when you think about when you change the way you think about yourself, you actually can give yourself hope. You can see a way out, you can engage the beautiful imagination that God gave you and begin to see a path forward. And here's here's the thing you also have to grasp. The goal is never perfection. The goal never was perfection. Um, oftentimes, if you come in my office, I like to I like to ask people a trick question. There's two roles you you get one, Jesus gets the other, but I'm gonna let you pick perfection or participation. Which one do you want? Now the obvious it's obviously a trick question. The obvious answer is you have to take participation. Why? Because you can't be perfect even if you tried. On your best day, you were not perfect. So that has to go to Jesus. Why? Well, because Jesus was perfect, he accomplished that perfectly. So your role now in Christ is participation. How do I show up and be present to the life that God has called me to? Because the beauty of this is that Jesus said, I have come that you may have life, and that you may have life abundantly. That's not a life where we manage secrets and sin. That's not a life of white knuckling or just powering through. It's abundant life, a life where you are fully present, fully engaged with your spouse, with your kids, your parents, your friends, your coworkers. You're not checked out, you're not managing a secret or shame under the surface. You're actually there. That's what's available. That's what's on the other side of this. If that's not a goal worth running toward, I don't know what is. Here's what I want to leave you with. I want you to exhale. I want you to exhale into that truth that God enjoys you. Spend some time, not just today, but this week, resting in that reality. That God doesn't just love you, He doesn't just like you, that He actually enjoys you. Not the version of you that you curate, that you show to other people, that you think uh presents to the world that you have it all figured out, that you don't struggle, not the future version of you that maybe has some sobriety and a clean record, the you right now, today, who is struggling, who doesn't have it figured out, that's the guy that God enjoys and delights in and is moving toward. Because the reality is the Bible doesn't say uh that once we cleaned ourselves up, then Christ came and died for us. The Bible says the opposite, that at the right time, in our worst, in our mess, Christ came and died for the ungodly. Um, if you never change, if you never overcome pornography, you are no less a child of God because of who you are in Christ was never dependent upon you to begin with. Hold on to that. If you've been holding your breath for a long time, let it out. Um, if you've been bracing for uh judgment from other people, uh waiting to find out if you're gonna make it, you can exhale, put it down. You were never meant to carry that alone. If that's you and you are done carrying this alone and you want structured, guided help uh from somebody like myself or Nick, who has at this point led hundreds of guys through this journey over the years to get out of pornography, quit, and make more progress than they ever have in their entire life, um, let us know. You can go to the website, you can send us a message, rscky.com backslash get started, and either Nick or I will get back to you and we'll schedule a time to talk. Um, this is not like an immediate financial commitment. When we get on a call to talk, we literally just want to hear from you, hear your story, and see where you're at so that we can sort of get an idea about what it might look like to move forward. And if that's not with us, again, we'll tell you that. We, you know, we want to help you every every way that we can. Um, if that feels like too much of a big step, I get it. You don't know me, and so reaching out might be hard. Let's lower the bar. Uh go to the website rscky.com backslash quick start. You can download my free quick start guide. It's short, thin booklet. Uh it will, it's everything that you need to get started. I wish I, it's the all the stuff I wish I had when I first started trying to quit porn. How do I do it? I don't know. We sort of struggled our way forward and figured it out. But it's all the stuff I needed, all of the stuff I've learned in my training, and all of the stuff that I have learned from experience from walking guys through this over the years. How do you do it? This is how you do it. Um, that's free. You can go to the website and get it again, rscky.com backslash quick start. Or if you're feeling frisky and you want a physical copy, you can go get it on Amazon. I think by the time this airs, it will be live on Amazon. Paperback, Kindle, go get it. If you feel like you're at the position where you're the guy walking up to the boat in the middle of the night trying to call other people. People out into the cold dark water where change is possible. Share this episode with somebody who needs it. And if you're listening on a podcast platform, wherever that's at, um, please take a couple of seconds and leave us a review. I think that's supposed to help with other people finding us. Uh that's really our heart behind this is we want to help as many people get free as possible. So leave a review, subscribe, download, click the things that say yes, tell me when you drop new stuff, wherever you're watching or listening. Um, we greatly appreciate it so that we can keep doing this work. That's all I got. May God bless you and keep you on the journey of recovery, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you found this helpful, do us a huge favor and subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. Or better yet, send this to someone who needs encouragement.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

For more tools, resources, and information about our coaching, check out rscy dot com. Keep showing up. Yeah, we'll catch you next time.