Every Man’s Battle Podcast

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Every Man’s Battle Podcast brought to you by New Life Ministries. In this podcast, you’ll hear honest conversations and encouragement for living a life of sexual integrity. In every episode, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist JJ West and Licensed Professional Counselor Doug Barnes break the silence around sexual integrity struggles that millions of men face, but rarely discuss openly. Each episode offers practical strategies and genuine hope to dissolve the shame and isolation that keeps men trapped in destructive cycles. Let’s get to today’s episode.

JJ West: Welcome back to the Every Man’s Battle Podcast. I am your host, JJ West, and I am sitting alongside Doug Barnes, as always. We are so glad to be with you. We get to be in studio today, which is always a joy. We really love it when we get to be face to face. There’s a lot more synergy here, and we’re excited about today’s topic, probably the beginning of a couple episodes, probably the beginning of a couple-week discussion on safely using technology in recovery.

It’s a really important topic because the truth is, we’ve got a lot of technology in our world. We really can’t escape from it. There’s technology all over us. How do I navigate a world that has technology, which has some challenges with it? How do I navigate that in terms of my recovery? How can I be healthy in recovery in a world full of technology?

Doug Barnes: Right, and no matter how much we try to ignore it, change it, or avoid it, we can’t outrun it. There’s a saying in recovery circles: “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems.” The quicker we accept the fact that we can’t outrun it, the quicker we can embrace the parts that we need and then set up healthy guardrails for all the rest.

JJ West: I think a lot of our discussion today, and perhaps next week and the week after that, goes back to some earlier episodes. In season one, we talked about the difference between sobriety and recovery. I think we’ll tie in some of that today. Back in season two, we talked about measuring recovery success. I think we’ll tie into some of that today. Earlier this season, we talked about key elements of transformation. I’m certain we’re going to tie some of that into today.

There are some things you could go back to if you feel like you want to have that background information before you dive into this. That was January 22nd for season one and January 27th for season two if you want to go back and relisten to those, and of course, earlier this season we did the Key Elements of Transformation. Those could be helpful to listen to to kind of set the stage for what we’re talking about here.

Doug Barnes: You know, I have some guys in Sustained Victory who are in other groups, and what they do is they take these podcasts and they listen to them and then make that the focal point in discussion for that particular meeting. I thought that was really cool.

JJ West: I love that. I love the fact that guys are doing that. I think it’s a wonderful way, a different way to process the information. It’s great to listen to it on your own, but we’re not going to get everything on our own. The truth is I can only hear and see things through my lens, and so when I discuss it with others, I get to see and hear it through their lens, which gives me a different perspective.

Doug Barnes: Right, and community. We’re doing what we’re called to do. There’s a verse in Colossians that says, “But we have the mind of Christ.” So, corporately, none of us individually has the whole truth. None of us individually has the mind of Christ, but we corporately can have the mind of Christ because we get all these different perspectives. So yeah, I love the fact that guys are doing that. I hope more guys will do that. Maybe you’re already in a group that’s doing that. Great. Maybe you’re not. Maybe that would be something you could recommend to your group to say, “Hey,” or start a new group. Get a group of guys from your small group at church or from your community and say, “Hey, would you guys be willing to? Let’s listen to this and then have a discussion about what we’re hearing.”

JJ West: Right. I mean, if we’re honest about this, some of this is cross-pollination. I mean, we’re talking about it in sexual integrity terms, but it could be used in very generic life terms, like what kind of men is God calling us to be? It can be used that way too.

Doug Barnes: Agreed. I’ve actually heard from some listeners whose struggle is not sexual integrity. In fact, I’ve heard from several female listeners who are dealing with either a substance addiction, an eating disorder, or other behavioral addictions. What we talk about you can extrapolate out to some other areas. So, it doesn’t have to just be, “Hey, we’re all getting together because we all struggle with looking at porn or whatever.” It could be that we all have some struggle, some hangup in our life, and let’s talk about some of these points together. The concepts are going to go together.

JJ West: Jumping in then to today’s discussion about using technology safely or safely using technology. I think we want to start off by saying, listen, technology itself is not neutral. It’s powerful, it’s formative, but it can be either dangerous or redemptive depending on how it’s used. That’s the critical question. It’s not that technology is bad or technology is great. It can be great; it could be bad depending on how I’m using the technology.

Doug Barnes: The internet as an entity was never meant for evil. It was originally meant to connect New York to California across phone lines to exchange information. It was never meant for me to be able to access some server in some foreign country that had data banks full of pornography or chat rooms or dating escort services or whatever. It was never meant that way.

In fact, many years ago in one of my groups, I had the brother of one of the original inventors and tech guys, engineers of the original idea for the internet. It was quite impressive, just to pick his brain about all of that. So that was cool, but it was never meant for harm initially. And of course, in our sin nature, "the woman you gave me," kind of thing. So it’s "the internet you gave me." So yeah, it has great potential, but if I’m using it sinfully, that takes us to where we’re at.

JJ West: Well, and to your point, we can’t outrun it. We can’t get away from it because we use it in life. We use technology, we use the internet, we use our smartphones, we use email for all kinds of things. For work certainly. We might use it for communicating with loved ones. There are all kinds of ways that we use technology. But even though it wasn’t initially intended for that, what do we find? The gateway is there. The open door. We go past twenty locked doors; one of them is going to be open. What we’re trying to do now and what we’re discovering is how to pull people back from 100% technology.

Because we use it to—I mean, I’ve got an app on my phone that runs my dryer at home. I’ve got one that can turn my security system on and off, one that runs the cameras, the one that does the bank account, the one that does the stock portfolio, and on and on and on. I use technology to research for the podcast. We use it to communicate back and forth about different topics for the podcast. We’re constantly using technology. And now with AI, it’s using us. But that’s a different story. We’ll cross that podcast when we get there. But the point is, yeah, it can be used for some really great things. And we, especially with our compulsive natures and the way our brains work when we’re hunting—we talked about in the past few weeks about soothing ourselves from a painful situation. So in relationships, we often times have the pain, and when I engage in technology—we’ll just call it for today inanimate objects just for lack of a better word—we’ve got robot servers. So we have inanimate objects that I can access my pain medication very easily, too easily.

JJ West: I think about when the internet came about in our lifetime. We remember a time before the internet existed, and we remember those early days of accessing the internet. Probably days, if not weeks, of first accessing the internet. Oh my gosh, look at all this stuff that I can—this is so cool, this is so great. I wonder if... and sure enough, finding the pornography, finding the inappropriate material. It was available early on, and I was looking for it early on. So the danger is real. Yes, we have to use technology for a lot of things. It can be very helpful, but the danger is real. It’s there.

Doug Barnes: Is technology the evil here? Exactly. Because I think that’s an important part of our discussion. It’s not that technology is the problem. Oh, technology is bad; I just need to get rid of my smartphone and go off the grid, and then I’ll be protected, then I’ll be safe. No, technology is just revealing my heart. My misuse of technology is just revealing my heart. Granted, I want to put safeguards in place, and we’re going to get to that, but I also want to acknowledge the fact that technology is just the canvas on which my trauma, my shame, my loneliness, my unmet needs show up.

JJ West: Right. And so it’s not—I can’t have the approach of, oh, because technology is the vehicle through which most of my bad choices come to me, if I just get rid of that vehicle, I’ll be okay. No, that’s just revealing my heart. I’ll find another vehicle. Which takes us back to our previous episode when we talked about the heart change versus behavior change. If I take technology away, okay, so that’s the behavior, but it’s my heart that’s gotten me in trouble each time. Each time when I’m not willing to address the pain that’s there, and it’s there in all of us. Great wise man Dave Stoop said, “If you’re breathing, you came from a dysfunctional home.” I’ve never forgotten that. And it’s like, well, if that’s true, then for me, I want to find it. Because what it’s doing is it’s getting in the way between connection and relationship and intimacy and connection with empathy and compassion with my spouse, my kids, my group, my therapist, my work—everything. It’s getting in the way.

So, like you talked about again, I think it was last week, you talked about blind spots. That’s part of my blind spots. Do I not want to deal with my pain, or do I want to engage in really exposing it so that I can treat it? That’s a clinical way to say it. So that I can work with it, process it. Because that’s what we need to do. But technology is not the evil villain here. It can be used as a vehicle, but it’s not the evil villain.

JJ West: For me, the analogy is if I focus on technology being the problem because I keep tripping up looking at porn on the internet, for instance, so I’ll get rid of the technology, I won’t have access to the internet anymore, that’ll take care of it, I won’t have a problem. It’s the equivalent for me of having cancer. I have cancer in my knee. And I notice it because it hurts when I run. And so I go, "You know what? I’m just not going to run anymore and that’ll take care of it." No, that’s just taking care of the symptom that I see. It’s not taking care of the problem.

So if I just get rid of technology, okay, I’m not experiencing that pain point anymore, but the cancer is growing and it’s going to show up in other places. So I’ve got to do that work of digging deep into what’s going on in my heart. So the technology, it’s revealing what’s happening inside. And to the point we talked about in Key Elements of Transformation, Gabor Maté, when he talked about addiction is—we’re soothing pain by our addiction. So we don’t ask the question, why the addiction? We ask, why the pain? When we talk about technology, technology is—it provides this place, this like—it’s like a fast, frictionless way to soothe my pain. I’m walking around with that pain, and like we always joke at the workshop how we had to really work for our pornography back in the day, but now it’s so easy to soothe my pain through technology.

Doug Barnes: Well, and like you said, if I take away the internet, does my pain go away? It does not. So I’m going to find another way. We’re resourceful, we’re resilient. What’s that phrase? If I go looking for a fight, I’m going to find one. Well, it’s the same principle. If I’m in pain and I need soothing of that pain, even if I got rid of—which we can’t do, nowadays it’s just impossible. I mean, our cars are—I mean, we can’t get away from it. Everything, there’s some element of every part of our life that touches this. And so it’s going to find a different way because that’s how it works. We like to do that.

And here’s the insidious part of this: because it’s all around me all the time, it’s providing that escape from the pain constantly. I have the invitation all the time to hide from my pain, to soothe my pain, to numb from my pain, to avoid that story, that painful story that’s filled with loneliness, that’s filled with fear, that’s filled with shame, that’s filled with those childhood wounds. I can avoid that all the time because it’s always available to me.

I was talking to a client yesterday and he said, “You know, I will bust my day for three hours and then at that three-hour mark, I’ll reward myself. I’ve got five minutes. I’ll go out and, you know, play a game.” Five minutes turns into ten, ten turns into fifteen, fifteen turns into an hour. Oh, okay, oh yeah, I’ve got to get back to work. And so for four more hours, he just busts his day out and then, “Hey, I deserve a break. I’ll take five minutes here.” And five turns into ten and... and so there’s also an entitlement element of this too, of I’m rewarding myself with something that soothes me. And so my question to him was, what are you soothing? Right? Because go back to Maté’s thing, it’s I’m soothing the pain. That’s the issue.

And so you bring up a great point about all of the other negative pieces of our life too, but clearly, sometimes we use it as a way to check out, be entitled, ignore, be bored. I don’t like boredom, but I mean, that’s part of it. And so we use it in ways that really, honestly, it really wasn’t designed to. We’ve just adapted. Adapted it to our seeking soothing and comfort even if it’s with something inanimate. And so we have to make that shift to, I’m going to do the story work, I’m going to look at the brokenness, because otherwise—I mean, like, all right, so yeah, I could get rid of my phone, I could get rid of the internet, but I don’t get rid of my story. And so, as we said, my behavior will find another outlet. If I don’t have technology to do that, I’ll find another outlet because I haven’t dealt with the story. So I’ve got to be willing to do that deep work. I need to give myself permission to do that deep work. We have agency. I don’t have to.

JJ West: But we need to give ourselves permission to examine those hurt places because the pain—I always talk about this thing of well, we can go swimming with the sharks and the piranhas, but they’re killer whales in there too. And so that’s a deep place to go to when I could get bitten. And the reason it’s there is because I don’t want to get bit. I want to stay away from it. But to give ourselves permission to go in without a cage and to dive into that. But we need that with community and with connection—clinician, counselor, coach, minister, pastor, whatever. Well, and we talked about this earlier on the podcast, earlier this season, the whole idea of having the courage to do that. Like, I actually need to actually remind myself I do have courage. I can do this. And that I don’t do it alone, even if I am not doing it necessarily in a group setting. I don’t do it alone because God is with me on that journey. And so because He’s with me, I can dive into the shark, killer whale, and piranha-infested waters. It’s not too much for me. The Holy Spirit. Yeah, He gives us the Holy Spirit for sure. Good. Okay.

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JJ West: So, yes, it’s always there. I’ve got to do the deep work of looking at my brokenness because I can’t out-software my brokenness. That’s not a thing. You’re not going to be able to do that. Filters are great. Have filters, use filters. Use some of the key guardrails later on in our discussion. So use the filters, but recognize the filters don’t heal you. That’s just protecting me from this particular intrusion, but it’s not healing the brokenness that this intrusion is revealing. It becomes a deterrent. If I know that that door is locked, okay, I just won’t try that door. But guess what? I’m going to try that door.

So let’s talk a little bit about that because that’s a nice segue into talking about the lie of willpower or just hypervigilance, like, I’m fine. I can just handle this. I’m okay. I can just say no. I got this. Right, the three-word motto of the addict: “I got this.” So, let’s talk a little bit about why is it a lie. You don’t know me; maybe I am really disciplined. I can handle this. Why is it a lie that you really can’t?

Doug Barnes: Because we were powerless. We don’t got this. If we had that semblance of doing it by ourselves, then you and I would not be sitting across from each other for one. We wouldn’t need an Every Man’s Battle Intensive or the podcast or books upon books upon books. But there’s an element of pride that goes into the way that I approach my life. Because as little boys growing up, we’re taught to be independent, to be strong, to be hunters. We’re taught to be independent of other people and to scratch and claw our way over the ladder and to be the best. Go out, hunt it down, kill it, drag it back to the cave.

Right, right. And then look what I did. I did that. Look what I’ve done and so the focus becomes selfish on me, that look what I’ve done versus being real. When I’m not in community, I believe the lies that I tell myself because we weren’t created to be isolated, alone, individual, only me, an island. We were taught to be in community. Yet I still grow up with this mindset of, I understand this, I have this. We know that knowledge does not equal understanding. That is a truism. I was never meant or created to be by myself or isolated or to do everything by myself because I’m the one. Sooner or later, that lie will be revealed because it always does. People do people things and I am power—sooner or later, something that I have power over will have power over me.

We all got into this saying, “Yeah, I’ve got this great life and I’ve got this job or I’ve got this world or I have this degree or I have these people or I have this girlfriend or wife or whatever, and I’m just fitting a little bit of my acting out inside of it.” Well, it only is a matter of time before we’re living our addiction or our compulsion behavior and then trying to fit our life back, trying to get our life back. And so it’s only a matter of time.

And to your point, it will overtake me because of just the sheer number, if you will, or the volume. So it reminds me of the movie "Antz" where the grasshoppers are the big grasshoppers and they can overpower the ants. And then there’s that scene where the king of the grasshoppers is talking to his underlings and they’re going on about how they’ve got it so good, and he’s like, “No, we can’t give them an inch because they outnumber us a hundred to one.” And if they ever realize that, they can take us out.

Technology is the ants. You may feel like you’re a grasshopper. You may feel like you’re running the show, like you’ve got a great self-discipline, willpower, but just the sheer volume, it’s coming at you all the time. And there’s nothing wrong with self-discipline and willpower. There’s nothing wrong with having some of the boundary lines that we’re going to put in place, some of the filters and all of that. That’s all good, but it’s not enough because of the sheer volume of your enemy, the devil, who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. He wants to take you out and he will do everything he can to take you out. He will throw your own flesh and the world at you and eventually, eventually—some of us that happens really early on, like within hours. “Oh, look at this cool thing. I wonder what I can do with it. I wonder how I can get in trouble with it.” But some of you, maybe you’re really self-disciplined and controlled, but eventually because of just the relentless barrage of the enemy, and especially through technology because it’s around us all the time.

Doug Barnes: So you put technology and pain together and that is a super bad recipe for success on our part. Well, but eventually the pain—he’s going to find the pain point and he’s going to squeeze that pain point. And so I may go to other addictions or other behaviors: gambling, alcohol, work. You know where I’m going. So we may go to other things, but eventually that’s going to enter my mind.

In fact, I’m working with a couple now where I was talking with him about the affairs he was having. Unprovoked, she said, “Oh, well, I look at porn too.” Hmm. That’s what I said. I said, “Hmm, okay, let’s talk about that.” So it’s not just husbands. It’s all around us all the time. And she was like on, hanging on every word. I could see her as I was talking through his pain. She was starting to recognize, oh, when he’s having the affairs, the reasons why, the pain that he’s trying to numb through the affairs, I also have pain that I’m numbing through pornography. Right. And that was a great place for them to—they kind of looked at each other and they looked back at me and I’m going, “It’s not gender specific, y’all.”

We—and I dare say this, one of the few things I really like from psychology, but Freud said it. Somebody may have said it before him, but he’s credited with it. We run from pain and run toward pleasure. And that’s a pain point. And so if we’re not recognizing what causes us pain—parentheses, our six to sixteen and before—if we don’t recognize that, it’s only a matter of time. And I’m not trying to be apocalyptic here, but that’s the truth. That is a truism. If we don’t realize that we have pain and that we have the courage to go search for it, then it’s only a matter of time before some soothing of that pain is going to appear. It’s going to be different for everybody. So it might not be sexually compulsive behavior for some; maybe it’s alcohol. Okay, give me a home with an alcoholic family. I mean, they’re doing the same behaviors. Right, exactly. And so it’s not exclusive yet. Am I willing to have the courage to inspect my life for the pain that’s in it? Some people will say yes and some people go, “Not only no, but no.” No, no.

JJ West: You know, I was thinking about the fact that one, I’m thinking about two things: one, that we’re going to extend this conversation to multiple sessions. We knew that going into it. But two, ultimately what we’re saying: willpower is a terrible long-term strategy for recovery. It just doesn’t work. And two, there’s something Nate Larkin says in the Samson Society: “I lose the battle every time I try to fight alone.” I’ve got to work in the context of community. We always talk about that. It’s necessary because my idea of, “Oh, I’ll just say no to myself,” eventually I give up because the story of pain is relentless. The enemy is relentless in his pursuit of pushing on that pain. And so I have to be willing to dive into that pain and it’s much more effective if I dive into that pain in community. If I’m allowing other people to speak into my world about that pain and reminding me of God’s desire to heal me.

What does He say in John 10? The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. The enemy, our enemy the devil, is the thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus says, “But I’ve come that you would have life to the full.” I need people that remind me that He has come to give me life to the full. He wants me to experience not just sobriety; He wants me to experience recovery. He wants to heal the brokenness in my story for sure. Longing for that day.

JJ West: So, okay, this was the teaser. This was the appetizer, the amuse-bouche, I think it is. Anyway, the appetizer to the longer discussion on safely using technology in recovery because it’s multifaceted. Technology is huge, and so it’s going to take us a while to kind of piece through this. We do want to, in the coming weeks, we want to give you some really practical application or practical examples, practical steps to take. But we had to start with this discussion on it’s not just, “Oh, if you just do these things, put this filter on and only use your technology on Thursdays at four, then you’ll be safe.” No, I have to look at the why, the pain that’s driving me to look for the soothing that I look for through technology.

Great discussion. Continue, guys, to give us feedback. Again, we’re going to talk about this till we’re blue in the face, but we are going to talk about the email list. So if you haven’t already signed up, do it today. Right now. After we sign off here and you hit stop, go to your email and send an email to embpodcast@newlife.com. If you send that email and especially if you put “bonus content” in the subject line, that’s going to allow you to be on the email listserv for the podcast. You’ll get that bonus content. I think they send that out monthly and it will allow you to give us feedback directly. You’ll be able to ask questions. You’ll be able to let us know what topics are really hitting home for you, what topics are missing the mark completely, what topics would you like to have covered in future podcasts, in future seasons. We again want to craft the podcast around what you as the audience want to hear. So please take a moment to sign up.

I know we talked about this earlier in the season: we have the best of intentions. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a good—I want to do that. And we know we’ve talked to lots of guys at the workshop, in Sustained Victory. “Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure, I want to,” and then we don’t because life gets in the way. Before you go on to the next thing, before you start the dishes or go to work or whatever, would you just take five minutes? It’s probably only going to take thirty seconds, but sign up for the email list so that we can again get that information to craft what we’re doing.

Okay, so next week, why don’t we continue this discussion around using technology safely in our recovery? Thanks for listening, guys. Until next time, let’s keep walking in integrity.

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