Every Man’s Battle Podcast

Voiceover: 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 Barns 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: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Every Man's Battle Podcast. We are continuing our discussion from last week where we began to answer some of the questions that were sent in by listeners. We want to continue to do that.

By the way, if you have a question and you want us to try and tackle it, all you have to do is send an email to embpodcast@newlife.com and send us your question. We want to hear them all and we want to answer them as best we can, at least to begin a discussion around them. So, we're going to jump back in.

Doug Barns: Happy podcast day, JJ. I'm looking forward to some more questions.

JJ West: I am as well. Let's do it. So, our next question comes from Tom. Tom says, "If someone has had a significant amount of exposure to pornography and voyeurism over a lifetime, would it cause that person to have problems sexually? Specifically, I am thinking of erectile dysfunction. If that is the case, is it possible from a scientific standpoint to rewire the brain and reverse that problem?"

Great question, Tom, and thanks for sharing and for your vulnerability.

Doug Barns: The short answer is yes. Porn, voyeurism, and lots of sexual acting-out behavior can and does lead to erectile dysfunction. The short answer to the second half of the question is also yes; healing is possible. We can rewire our brains.

It does take time, but yes, those things do happen. Why is it that looking at pornography, voyeurism, exhibitionism, strip clubs, massage parlors, or any sexual acting-out stuff would lead to erectile dysfunction?

There are a few different things that we need to keep in mind here. The first is that type of sexual acting out—and I'll say porn often, but when I say porn, you can just put your thing into that slot—trains arousal around novelty, escalation, and emotional distance. It's not about connection.

Whereas, when we talk about having a sexual relationship, especially in a marriage context, arousal is about being present. It's about safety, connection, and mutuality. They are diametrically opposed to each other. I'm training my arousal system to respond to this kind of content or situation, whereas a sexual relationship in marriage looks almost the opposite of what I've trained my arousal system to respond to.

JJ West: That dichotomy upsets so many men and so many husbands. They've had all of these years of excitement and arousal and the thrill of the chase. It’s that energy they get when they do that, but with their wife, it becomes dull and boring.

Wait, we're not looking at this like apples to apples. You're looking at apples and oranges. You're looking at something that I created. Oh, by the way, what inside of me needs arousal, escalation, excitement, oxytocin, adrenaline, and norepinephrine? All those good drugs in our brain, what's going on in me that I point toward my sexuality instead of something like rock climbing or whatever your thing is?

Why have I adjusted my life to seek that change in how I feel? That's one of the first questions I would ask. The second one is that marriage wasn't created to be that way. Marriage is about connection, my heart, compassion, intimacy, and relationship. There's not a one-to-one switch between what my acting out does and my sexual encounters with my spouse. It was never meant to be that way.

Doug Barns: You said a key word there: intimacy. It's the difference between intimacy and intensity. Having a healthy sexual relationship with my spouse in the context of marriage is all about intimacy. Sexual acting out, porn, affairs, strip clubs, and massage parlors is all about intensity. We've exchanged intimacy for intensity.

The intensity is about me. Intimacy is about the "we." I've trained myself to be selfish in my sexuality. We've spent for some of us a lifetime using our sexuality sinfully. We are using our sexuality to meet legitimate needs in illegitimate ways outside of God's will and desire.

Because I've spent a lifetime doing that, I've trained my arousal system. I've trained my brain, my body, and my genitals to all respond to this intensity rather than intimacy.

JJ West: What are needs? We do have legitimate needs for connection. I've raised myself, like in past episodes we've talked about latchkey kids and parents working hard for us. I say tongue-in-cheek, but you said that I'm exchanging legitimate, healthy needs that I have for this intensity.

Part of our journey is when I'm triggered through my preoccupation, what am I really needing? That's where we need to pull back and stop. Put on all the brakes and go, "Hold on, something's going on here. If I don't figure this out, I'm going to be unhealthy yet again." It goes back to what we talked about last week starting with awareness. I've got to go inward and I've got to pay attention to what's going on inside of me that I even want to be drawn to that. I've got to be willing to do that work.

Doug Barns: It comes back to willingness. Am I willing to stop and sit, take a deep breath, and ask what's going on with me? I'm finding out that we live in this anaerobic, "I can't breathe" society where I'm too busy being busy to stop and take an inventory of just the present moment and what's happening right now.

JJ West: Then I go through my life like an automaton. I end up in places and go, "How did I get here? What in the world is happening? I don't understand. I made all the promises that I would never do this again, I would never end up here, and yet here I am again." It's because I haven't paused, taken those deep breaths, and thought through what wound or what need I am trying to meet in illegitimate ways.

Doug Barns: That awareness is one of the first steps in that neuropathic rewiring of the brain that Tom is talking about. Can it be rewired? Yes, of course. I need to be purposeful in that process. It doesn't just happen internally; I need to be the co-conspirator in that process. I am looking to live a healthier life, not just take a pill, watch a show, hear a podcast, or read a book. Those are all good things, but it's my brain.

It's not just thinking that as long as I eliminate these behaviors, that will rewire my brain. That's not enough. Subtraction needs to happen; I need to eliminate these behaviors, but I have to do that work of being aware, being present, and looking inside. I have to do that work in order to rewire my brain so that I am now pursuing intimacy rather than intensity. I need to get all those good-feeling chemicals we talked about—epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin—but I'm getting them in healthy ways rather than in unhealthy ways.

JJ West: For the engineers who are listening or watching to this, this should make sense. Have you ever wired something up that didn't work? For those who have said no and they've gotten it right every time, okay, I can respect that.

But for those of us who haven't gotten it right every time, what do you do? You unwire it. You take apart the wires and then you redo it. You connect them to the proper wiring so that whatever is fixed is running, cooling, or heating. The outcome does not meet where we're going with this because I'm not rewiring this for the outcome. I'm rewiring it because it's good for me.

The engine runs smoothly at that point; it's not faulty wiring. For a lot of us, we get into our adulthood and we've experienced that faulty wiring because we didn't know that the wires were getting crossed when we were younger.

Doug Barns: On that point, I think it's important for Tom and for others like Tom to recognize it's going to take time to do that rewiring. It's going to take time to reshape our brains. There's a neuroplasticity to our brains and to our nervous system. In other words, we can change the structure of how the neurons fire in our brain and our nervous system.

We can change that, but it doesn't happen immediately. It takes time. I've got to have the training for a marathon perspective rather than training for a 100-yard dash. I've got to train for it and I slowly increase over the weeks and months of training. Eventually, I get to that point.

JJ West: That's what makes the athletes elite because they're training over and over and over. It's almost muscle memory; I'm doing the same things right over and over. When I rewire my brain that way, some of those adverse behaviors and those triggers for adverse behaviors have a tendency to decrease in the way that they affect me because I'm living my life in a healthier way by pursuing those good, healthy behaviors.

It just takes time and practice. You're not fundamentally broken or defective. You don't need to go to the Island of Misfit Toys. You have a broken pattern; you've developed a broken pattern over time. Now you're going to develop a functional pattern, but over time.

Doug Barns: Let's get real. Inside that rewiring, there may be some time when I'll think about wanting to do something, go someplace, think about somebody, want to text, or go to a place. That may come into my brain. Okay, I can respect that. We learn that we're not negotiating with our addiction anymore. I need to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, which is follow the rewiring.

Do I want to take a machine apart, take the wires that work, and cross them over again so that the machine doesn't work well again? No, I want to keep that same machine running smoothly. It could possibly be triggering, if we're real with ourselves, but the longer we are continuing to do the right things, the less likely I'm going to entertain negotiating with those things that got me here, those old behaviors where I misused my sexuality.

JJ West: I hope, Tom, you hear in this encouragement that what you're describing is true and it's common. Lots and lots of guys have had a similar experience, so you're not fundamentally broken. But I also hope you hear the encouragement not to give up because the change didn't come quickly. Keep with it and keep doing that internal work of awareness.

When you are triggered, ask those questions of what's going on with me that I'm being triggered right now, rather than, "Oh, there I go again, I'm being triggered, I must be broken." Don't let the enemy come in and convince you of a lie that you're fundamentally broken.

Doug Barns: Or someone else, for that matter. "You're still thinking about that?" See, there you go. The enemy can use lots of means in order to plant that lie into our heart because that borders on shame. Shame is about our defectiveness, not about who we are. We need to keep our identity intact during this process because there are lots of places to get derailed.

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JJ West: Okay, let's tackle another question. This one comes from Mark. Mark asks the question: "Is there any data that supports a 90-day abstinence from sex with your wife results in better outcome during recovery?"

This comes from something that we present at the Every Man's Battle Intensive, which is that we talk about doing a 90-day reset for your sexual arousal process, a 90-day reset in terms of this neurochemistry and the neural pathways. It takes about 90 days and that comes straight from our dear brothers in 12-step programs.

If you've ever been in a 12-step group, one of the very first things they'll tell you is to commit to a 90-and-90: 90 meetings in 90 days. They didn't just magically go, "Oh, we think 90 days will be good." They said that because there is good evidence that it takes about 90 days to rewire our brains, to break an old habit and establish a new one.

We want to be real careful here because this is a very good question, Mark. What do we mean when we say, is there evidence or is there data that supports a 90-day abstinence from sex with your wife will result in a better outcome? If we're talking about peer-reviewed outcome research data where they did the experimental group and the control group to see if there is any difference, no, that data does not exist. It's not that they did the data and found that it didn't matter; they didn't do that experiment. That research hasn't been done. At least to our knowledge, it certainly hasn't been published anywhere that I'm aware of.

But that doesn't mean that there's no data. What it means is that there's different kind of data that we rely on here for why we encourage this 90-day abstinence. I think it's important also to say at the outset, when we're talking about a 90-day abstinence from sex with your wife, we're not telling the guys, "Hey, go home and tell your wife: no sex for the next 90 days." We're saying go home and have a conversation with your wife about what that might look like and why it might make sense for you to do this. So, let's go to some of those other evidences or other data points that we draw from.

I think we start with the clinical convention that many recovery communities say. Look, it takes about that long. It takes about 90 days in order to break an old habit and establish a new habit. So, you want to commit yourself to a 90-day process of abstaining from whatever your drug of choice is. There is data from the clinical perspective that we've seen this work over and over and over. That's what we call anecdotal data, not research peer-reviewed data.

Doug Barns: So often we look at what we're missing. What am I taking away? What am I stopping? What am I going to miss out on? The fear of missing out term comes into this as well. It's not about just not doing something. All of our recovery is not about what we're not doing. If I'm looking at beginning to rewire my brain, as we talked about in the last question, this process of what do I need to be doing during this time? That's another way of looking at this, not from my rearview mirror, but what are we putting in place here?

JJ West: At EMB, we introduce these concepts that we're calling building blocks of intimacy. We want to establish what most of us have sexualized and now turn it toward making it relational versus just sexual. I tell guys that a lot, that it's not we're not talking about sex anymore. We're talking about life in reality, living with someone I claim to love the most, that I say with my mouth, "I love you the most."

Doug Barns: Authentic connection with that person. That goes back to what you were saying before, "into-me-see." Am I willing to have the courage to let you see into me? All the bumps and the bruises and the scars and all the places I've messed up, am I willing to do that to build something? So those sexual encounters that happen after this time are not about sex; they're about connection.

JJ West: Which, by the way, that brings us to why is it this 90-day abstinence? Why are we suggesting that? What is it that we're looking at that we would say would point us to this being a good path? A couple of things here I think are important. Number one is that early recovery tends to be chaotic. It tends to be really messy. You just feel like you're all over the place. Emotions are flying, there's huge consequences perhaps early on. There's a lot going on.

What can happen is sex, even sex with my spouse, can become my replacement addiction. I'm now not looking at porn, I'm not going to the strip club, the affair, or whatever, but I am funneling all of my emotional dysregulation, all of my anxiety, and all of my legitimate needs into my sexuality rather than making it relational. It's still behavioral. I'm still making it out to be something I'm trying to get around.

I can still use it as my emotional regulation to regulate anxiety, to regulate disappointment, grief, whatever. I can be using sex with my spouse in the ways that I used pornography, in the ways that I used the affair partner, in the ways that I used the strip club. I'm not concerned with connecting with you. I'm only using you.

Doug Barns: Here's the challenging thing: usually right after D-Day, whether D-Day is the day of discovery or the day of disclosure, relatively soon after that, there's this feeling that we are so close now because all the secrets are gone. We know each other so well. You've heard this so many times in your office. I've heard it so many times in my office, where couples say, "Our sex life has never been better. We're having sex more often and more intensely than we've ever had it."

Okay, here's why. Because I am now using you as my emotional regulation where I used to use my pornography, my masturbation, my strip clubs, my whatever. For some of us, this is the first time we've been 100% rigorously honest, which is a high level of intimacy. But because our brain has been so wired to equate intimacy with sex, of course, because I feel so close to you now, I have to express it sexually. I don't have another category for it. I don't have all those other building blocks of intimacy. I only have this one. If all you got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

JJ West: Healthy sex in marriage isn't the enemy. We're not anti-sex here. But if I'm using sex as medication, if I'm using sex as that stress reliever, whatever, then that's not going to lead to healing. In fact, it can hamper healing. It's not sustainable. It is not sustainable partly because the texture of the relationship will shift, because she will then feel that pressure to be that medication.

She feels the pressure to be that medication. JJ, I'm focusing all of that on her. It was over here, but now I'm focusing it all on her. Isn't that a great thing? Isn't that the way God intended and that's the way it was designed? Well, sort of. It's a mutation of what God designed. Yes, your focus should be your wife and not porn or affair partners or whatever. But if your focus is only sexual, you've missed the point. If I am finding personal relief and we're not connected, there's a piece missing and I'll have just substituted it, like you said.

Doug Barns: Then there's the pressure for the spouse. "Oh, I need to fulfill this role." That can come internally for her. "Oh gosh, if I'm not providing that for him, he'll want to go astray." Sometimes it's coming externally. Many husbands have told their wife this: "Well, if you would just have sex with me more often, more exotically, whatever, then I wouldn't be acting out the way that I'm acting out." Sometimes they've heard it from pastors. No offense to pastors.

"Oh, you're not having enough sex with your husband and that's why he cheated." You really do need to be working with a counselor that understands the betrayal trauma process and helps you walk through the process of restoring that relationship so that it's not obligatory sex. What are we doing here when we do have a sexual encounter? What's the purpose? Are we really looking to be intimate? Are we looking to connect?

JJ West: If I'm aroused and I'm wanting to have sex with my wife, is it that I'm wanting to have sex with her because I'm connected to her, or is it I'm just aroused and she's present? Contextually, that's going to come out in how it feels to her and that's not going to go well because she's not just an object.

Until we understand the difference between that objectification piece and what a sexual encounter was meant to be, we're not going to get that. How much secular work from a long time ago would say, "Yeah, watch an XXX-rated film or get some magazines or get with another couple or whatever; it's good, healthy sex." Well, we have since discovered that maybe it's not as healthy for some of us.

Doug Barns: Two other things I want to say here. We're not suggesting using abstinence as a punishment. "You were bad and so we're not going to have sex for the next 90 days." We're not suggesting using it as punishment. It's a time period to retrain my brain and my heart to respond to intimacy, not intensity. But then thing number two is where a lot of couples get this kind of twisted; they use sex as proof that they're okay. "Oh, if our sex life is good, that means we're good." No, it might be. It might be that your sex life being good is an evidence of you guys being good, but it might not be.

We're wanting to not just equate, "Oh, as long as we're having sex, as long as that's frequent and powerful, then our marriage is great." No, there's a lot of stuff that could be going on that we're not looking at because we're just focused on sex. How do we judge where we are in our marriage? Because if it's not in our sex life, then what is it in? Then you get these deer-in-the-headlights look. Then we begin to unpack some of the real foundations that are missing. That's why we want to focus in that 90 days on connection and intimacy and with humility and compassion for what's happening.

JJ West: If I hadn't done what I had done, what I brought into this relationship from a sexual acting-out perspective, we might not be having this conversation of basing the nature of our marriage on a sex life. Does that make sense? All other things being equal, this wouldn't even be a question because we would be using it in the way that God's designed it to be used.

But most of us have been affected by the fact that we've misused our sexuality outside of God's will and desire to try and meet those legitimate needs in illegitimate ways, and it's led to a whole lot of pain and it's led to a whole lot of confusion.

Doug Barns: So when I'm searching in this 90-day time, it's realizing, what are my real legitimate needs? What do I really need from her? And how can I help her meet some of those with her? In the church environment, we talk about fasting. Fasting isn't just, "Oh, I'm just not going to eat for X number of hours or days or weeks." It is learning to recognize when I have a hunger pain, my stomach growls. Am I actually hungry and or am I wanting to reach for—that's a better way to say it—am I going to reach for the donut? Am I actually hungry? Am I actually wanting fuel or am I doing this out of habit? Am I eating my feelings?

When I sit with my need long enough, I can look at what it's attached to. I can discover what it's attached to. When I'm doing this fasting from sex, this abstinence from sex, it allows me to start to identify, oh, what's the need underneath that I'm trying to meet? I'm meeting it through sex, but it could be met through authentic connection. It could be met through going mountain biking. It could be met through sitting still and enjoying God's presence. It could be met through all these other things. But I didn't sit with the need long enough. I just felt the need and my pattern has been to sexualize it, so I go to sex.

JJ West: That is a great point because sometimes we need to learn that we can unattach needs if it's unhealthy and then attach it to what is healthy.

Doug Barns: Good job. These have been some great questions. Guys, again, thanks for sending them in.

JJ West: If you're out there in the audience and our answers to those questions raised more questions for you, or you have questions of your own, please send an email to embpodcast@newlife.com and let us know. As we've said many times before, we want what we talk about on this podcast to serve the needs of the audience. So let us know. Next week, we are going to have our good friend Laura Mangia-McDonald join us. We're going to be talking about when she's triggered, how do I respond? How do I respond in a way that doesn't make things worse? We're looking forward to Laura being back in the studio with us. Until then, guys, let's keep walking in integrity.

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