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 Lornes 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. We are so glad that you're listening today, and we are in-studio. Happy podcast day, Doug.

Doug Lornes: Happy podcast day, JJ. I am so ready to just keep going.

JJ West: Today, we want to answer some of the questions that have come into our email inbox: EMBpodcast@newlife.com. If you have questions, especially after you've heard this episode, if it raises new questions for you, we want to hear from you because, as we say it all the time, we want this podcast to serve the needs of the audience.

We want you to gain something from this, not just be two guys sitting in a room pontificating. We really do want this to meet your needs. So, if you've got questions for us, please email them to EMBpodcast@newlife.com and let us know, and we'll tackle them in a future episode.

Today, we've got a few questions to answer. At the outset, I want to say this: these are real people with real questions, real challenges, and real pain that's represented by these questions. We want you to know that we take these seriously. We want what we offer to be helpful because we know there are some people that are hurting. We also know that though we're tackling specific questions from specific listeners, they represent a lot of people who are hurting in the same ways.

If you're watching this and listening to this and there are questions about these questions, let us know. We want to be able to be a good resource. No question is off the table. Even if you say, "Oh, well, they've already dealt with that," it doesn't matter. Send it to us anyway because I can guarantee you someone else is thinking the same thing; they're just not saying it. We can tackle those as they come in.

We're going to dive right in. Our first question comes to us from Terry. Terry says, "I'm having a huge challenge in my life trying to restore safety and trust in my marriage after betrayal, specifically pornography. I know I still have a lifetime of work to do. I've been sober since D-day; it's been five and a half years since D-day. I feel like no matter what I do or try, I am still stuck emotionally.

"I'm not able to show empathy towards my wife. She doesn't receive the remorse and empathy she deserves from me. When I show empathy towards others, I question myself as to if it's real or not. I haven't had a real emotional challenge since my best friend died in a car accident when I was 25. Shortly after that, it was a horrible 12-year marriage. My first wife died from cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism. I haven't cried about her death yet.

"When any of my four grandparents died, no crying. When my current wife's mother died, no crying. When my father passed away two years ago, no crying. I've read books, listened to podcasts, had online coaching, therapists, psychiatrists. I'm in a 12-step group, but to no avail. Even my prayers seem unheard. But I know God hears. I don't feel human anymore. I feel like I'm running out of all options. I fear my marriage will die because of my failure. Is there an episode or information available that may shed some light on my condition? Hopelessly, Terry."

Terry, and those who may find similarity in Terry's story, thank you for writing this. Thank you for having the courage to be this vulnerable and to share with us. Truthfully, the fact that you did write this question, the fact that you're wrestling with these truths and this pain, tells me that you're not a monster. You said in your question that you don't feel human anymore, but the step of writing this question and asking this and wrestling with it is very human.

I want you to hear that this is not evidence of you being fundamentally broken; this is evidence of you being stuck.

Doug Lornes: That's a really difficult place to be when I've done A, I've done B, I've done C, I've done E, and now where do I go? Well, sometimes we have to take the courage to go outside the box. Sometimes it's, "Well, I saw this therapist or this coach or this clinician," whoever that may be, but we know not all clinicians are made the same.

Don't give up. As I was listening to the email, I could just feel myself sinking down and down and down hearing that. I can certainly identify with some of his emotional challenges, as he says, with friends passing away and parents passing away. My dad died when I was 21, and I didn't cry. So I get that. That resonates with me.

Part of my journey has been to get in touch with my heart and that emotional side of myself that I kept at arm's length. I was acting in, as we say at our intensive, but I wanted to keep that as far away from me because it was uncomfortable for me. When we talk about surviving these losses, they're hard. These are just hard to almost believe in reality.

JJ West: The fact is, Terry, it's not that you didn't feel something when your dad died. It's not that you didn't feel pain or you didn't feel sadness; it's that you didn't express it. To me, what Terry's describing is not a lack of remorse, willpower, faith, or effort; clearly, there's been tons of effort. It is revealing a long-standing emotional shutdown.

There's something somewhere along the way that he and you and I and countless others who listen to the podcast have done, which is we learned early on something: emotions weren't revered, they weren't normal, you were ridiculed, shamed, shut down, hit, kicked, slapped, punched—whatever it might be. It wasn't just one time; it was over and over and over.

As kids, we don't have the brain power to push back on that. So eventually, we get the message: okay, emotion bad, performance good. We become little performers rather than being real with how God created us to be. We can't look through the tunnel of time and go, "Oh, when I'm 30 or when I'm 45, this isn't going to work so well for me."

This survival technique that is working for me right now, or I think will work for me, is not going to work for me down the road. We can't know that. It's not a decision that we're even making. It is survival. It's what our emotional and nervous systems get hijacked by, whatever's going on in our life. Many times, it is that kind of family of origin stuff, which we've talked about in previous podcasts ad nauseam.

We'll continue to do so because they play such a vital role. But something happens, or a series of things happens, and my emotional and regulatory system gets hijacked. I shut down as a way to survive, as a way to protect. I do that over and over and over again. Now, that's the habit, and it's years, sometimes decades later, that I go, "Oh, this isn't working anymore." But I don't know anything else to do, and it doesn't feel like I have any other choice because my system has so regulated itself or gotten in the habit of that being the response.

Doug Lornes: It performs under that neuro-pathway. So when pain appears, I go to the "push my emotions as far away from me as I can" part of my brain, and I just follow through until the thing passes. Okay, now then I get back to my real-world life as it was before. Go to work, make some dinner, watch some TV, rinse and repeat until the next crisis.

I got to a point where I said, "Something's not right here. Something's wrong with me." I can remember night after night my mom crying after the funeral, and I would just listen and I would go, "Why is she crying?" instead of going, "Her husband of 33 years is not sleeping next to her anymore. Oh my gosh, how horrible that is. That must feel abandoning. That must be almost a God-rejecting moment."

It's wrecking your world, though. Her world is coming apart, and I'm sitting there going, "Wow, I don't even know how to react to it." I don't think it's a function of not necessarily not knowing, but I think it's a function, like you're saying, of wounding. Dan Allender talks about it in his books; Jay Stringer talks about it in his books. We talk about it in countless intensives and podcasts.

We talk about the woundedness of how our heart gets wounded early on, and we don't know that. It's my life. So, I learned to adapt over and over and over. But I think as we grow, hoping that that's part of this, we start asking these questions: "What's wrong here? Something's not right here." Our spouses, family members, significant others, people are being emotional or showing emotion—see, I did it; that's the way we say it: "You're being so emotional. Quit being emotional."

That's so degrading to someone who is going through a difficult place in their life. I didn't get that until I was about 45. The light came on and the whole world of emotion opened up. My life went from walking in black and white to color. Oh man, it was great. It was great. We both hear this a lot: "All of these things happened, yet I soldier on. I move on. I don't have time to feel it. I don't have time to express it. What good would expressing do?" I'm sure you've heard that. "What good would that do? I've moved on."

There's work to do. I've got bills to pay. Why am I wallowing in the past? I don't have time to wallow in the past. That's not the point.

JJ West: The other thing that I think is important here—so there's family of origin stuff, wounding like you talked about—and then there's this cultural piece that most men in, at least in our culture, don't learn to grieve with tears. In fact, the only time I ever saw my dad cry was at his mom's, my grandmother's, funeral. It's the only time I ever saw my dad cry ever.

It shocked me because he got up and he did a brief—not a eulogy, but people were just getting up and talking—so he said a few words, he sat back down, and then all of a sudden, just this unbelievable sound came out of him for like a minute or two. It so stunned me because I'd never seen him ever cry. That's what a lot of us grow up experiencing: that men don't cry.

We even are sometimes uncomfortable around men who are crying. So there's this cultural piece to it as well, that somehow that's not welcome. It doesn't mean, though, even if the tears aren't there, it doesn't mean that feeling emotion's absent or that empathy is absent, but it does mean that it's inaccessible because I haven't ever learned to tap into that.

You're watching your mother cry, you're 21 years old, you're watching your mother cry. Intellectually, you might have been able to go, "Well, okay, kind of makes sense," but for whatever reason, you couldn't access that part of empathy in your heart at that point. You had to learn to unlock that door.

Doug Lornes: Yes, and I had to be purposeful in seeking out help for that. Grief—we talk about the grieving process, the stages of grief that we go through. I knew anger; boy, I could access that in a heartbeat. But I accessed it in the wrong way.

So, I saw someone who helped me go through those stages. A lot of it was writing, journaling through the good, the bad, and the ugly of my life with him and what will life look like from here on without him. That, over probably six months or so, I tapped into almost what we would call the impact. In betrayal, we talk about an impact letter.

It was really writing to God: how did this impact me? That led into how I can express that appropriately through those stages. Because I got stuck in anger at that stage of grief. I learned how to express that early, early on. But again, no one taught me how to express it appropriately and that there were emotions underneath, the vulnerability came under the anger. Mad always protects sad or scared.

I had no idea before I actually had this happen in my life. I would see people around me who would express emotions and tears, you would give them a hug, and they hold on tight, and then you hug them back, and then you let go a little bit, and they don't let go, and so you hug again. It was kind of that process of learning: oh, how does this affect someone else? And then learning how to tap into that for me.

JJ West: But the grief work, the trauma work that you're describing, you do need some help with that. If you've never learned how to do that, you're not going to just all of a sudden know how to do it. You need some help, some guidance on walking down that path.

I know he said in his email that he's gone to different coaches and therapists and psychiatrists and whatever, but I do think it would be really important for him to find a trauma-informed therapist. 100%. Possibly doing some EMDR or ART, some sort of trauma therapy that's going to help him to take that step into the pain that his nervous system has told him his whole life is to be avoided at all costs.

We know the body keeps the score. When there are stuckness situations happening, there's a greater than zero chance it's in me somewhere and it wants to come out. It wants to get processed. For me, I found out it was harder work keeping it at bay. It was harder for me to keep it locked down.

When you get that—like you talk about skinning your knee, right? When you fall off your bike and skin your knee and you're going home, you go, "I'm not going to let them see me cry. No, not going to—" and every little baby step, I'm choking back those tears, I'm choking back that hurt further down and further down. No one is going to see this.

That becomes a learned behavior. Learning that it's okay. If we look all through scripture, emotion after emotion after emotion, from the God of the universe. That's really—why did He express those, number one? Why did He give those to us, number two? And why do we not act if we are in God's image, which we are? Then why are we not given the freedom to express the same emotions He did?

The most famous verse in the Bible—Jesus wept. Are we silly thinking that Jesus didn't know that Lazarus had, number one, already died, and He was going to raise him from the dead? Of course, He did. Yet, He engaged in their pain and their grief with them. I think that's part of Terry's journey here: finding those clinicians who have more of a specialty in grief and how to really process it and to unlock those stuck places inside of us, because it gets stuck in our body. It gets stuck because we learned a certain response, which is good news because we can learn a new response. We were surviving in that old response, and we did great, and now we can learn to connect, which is always the antidote: connection, connection, connection. I think that may be something that's missing.

JJ West: I think it's important to recognize, because these things happened to you, because your nervous system, your regulatory system got hijacked, that's not a moral failure on your part. It's a learned response that can be unlearned and new responses learned, but it's not a moral failure on your part.

It doesn't mean that God isn't near. If you're numb, your prayers feel flat, that doesn't mean that God is distant. God is present; you may not feel it, but God is present. Terry even says that he knows that God hears, but it feels like God is absent, it feels like God is not listening.

But that gives us—going back to what you said—we learn how to do everything in our life. We don't come out of the womb knowing how to talk; we have to learn how to talk, we have to learn how to crawl, learn how to walk. By the time we get to a certain age, we think we've got it figured out. Okay, I'll own it: I thought I had it figured out. I learned that I didn't, and I needed to learn how to surround myself with people who could give me what I lacked, what I didn't have.

You can't give what you don't have. So if I'm learning to grow, then I need to find those people and surround myself with those people. For me, it was like one at a time and just learning how to feel my emotions, learning how to journal about my emotions, learning how to express them properly. Emotions are not bad; they are given to us by God.

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JJ West: The other thing I want to get to before we jump to the next question is: okay, so does Terry's wife need empathy? Yes, of course. 100%. But as he's learning that, what she really needs is for him to keep showing up.

One of the ways I think that Terry, you keep showing up, other listeners that similarly can relate to Terry's story, one of the ways you keep showing up is by saying, "I know that I haven't given you everything you need. I know that my wounding is now wounding you, and I'm working on, even if I don't know the path, I'm working on finding the path to healing."

One of the things I've noticed, especially the men that I work with: it's almost a, "I want you to see my pain, too." But first, my bias is that we learn how to show up for our spouses, significant others, people in our lives. But it's learning how to recognize this is my pain that's coming up.

I'll tell husbands: why do you get dysregulated when she's in pain? And that's always a "What do you mean?" And so then we go into his pain. But I think, to a guy's credit, I think at some point there's a recognition of, "I'm in pain here, too," which is valid. And in that moment, how do I set that aside a little bit so that I can be present?

I die to self in that; I don't need to have my wound cared for first. I can, in this moment, show up for you. But in my wounding, I want you to care for me first before I care for you. So there's this juxtaposition there: learning how to own our stuff and feel it, and so how can I be present for my spouse first?

Well, I need to recognize: what is she struggling with? What is she going through? Is it anger, frustration, rage, rejection, abandonment? What is going on with her? Can I recognize it? And then we've talked in past episodes about God, self, and others. This is a great "others" piece, not to exclude God or self, but I need to get in touch with myself to know: okay, this is making me uncomfortable. Emotions have made me uncomfortable most of my life. Do I need to be uncomfortable when her pain shows up? No. She needs me to be present so that she can process her pain. I can take my pain to God, self, and others at the appropriate time and learning how to do that and bridging that. Again, clinicians can help, trauma clinicians can help with that. But you're right, it's learning how to unlearn and relearn.

One final thing I would say to Terry is: listen, yeah, you've been stuck for a while, for quite a while, and it can feel then like this is never going to change. But it's not a death sentence. We know that God is able to do far more than we can ask or even imagine. I've got a really good imagination; I can come up with a lot of stuff, and God way exceeds that. It's a season, not a sentence. Keep going. Don't give up even though it's been five and a half years and you don't feel like you've made progress. Don't give up. God does want more for you and for your marriage.

Our second listener, Anonymous, says he's an oilfield hand and he's needing a fresh start in his relationship for the past nine years. "She forgave me for having an affair five years ago, but I guess I became comfortable and almost slipped up once again. She caught it before anything had 'happened' and was completely done with me. So, I promised her that I would make a complete change in behavior and creating an emotional connection between her and I. So where do I start?" Great question.

Doug Lornes: Awareness is the key to change. You have a great saying that you use; ever since you said it, I've never forgotten it: we can choose our choices, but we don't get to choose our consequences. The consequences are real. Ownership goes a long way, and that's where awareness comes in. I cannot change what I'm not aware of.

If I keep looking at the external way my life is going, I'm going to miss the work that I need to do on the inside because I'm redoing my life externally to the consequences. How do I make it land softer? How do I redirect and redivert and make it so she won't be as mad or she'll stay, even though I screwed up?

That's natural. But I'm missing the recovery and growth out of that. She didn't do anything. I need to look at what is driving these choices, because it's not her job as my spouse to police me. He said, "Before anything had happened, she stopped—" something had already happened. Anonymous, whether it was I was texting her but we hadn't met for a hookup, I was looking at porn but I hadn't masturbated, something had already happened. My heart was already straying.

That comfort for her was a false sense of security. When the truth came out again, it confirmed her worst fear. So, being aware of what's driving this: why was I open to that? What was going on inside of me? Not "She batted her eyes," the external triggers. It's not about someone else. "She flashed her eyes at me" or "She sat in my lap"—whoever the she or the he or whoever. So, it's not about the external factors.

Why was I even open to that? What was going on inside of me? Our addiction is like negotiating with a terrorist. That's what's happening in that moment: I'm opening my heart up for that onslaught, and I get to pick and choose which one, and I'm calculating: okay, if I take a chance here, what's the percentage I'm going to get found out? If I take the chance here, what's the percentage I'm going to get found out? How can I get away with this and still do this? We're negotiating with our addiction.

JJ West: "Before anything had happened"—well, a whole lot had already happened. So, whether it was texting, looking at porn, heart straying, that comfort for her was a false sense of security. When the truth came out again, it confirmed her worst fear.

So, being aware of what's driving this: why was I open to that? Why was I looking for that? What's going on in my heart? I'm going to do the work of repairing the connection with you as much as you're allowing, because we don't have any guarantee that the marriage is going to survive.

But I'm going to learn how to do authentic connection. That I can commit to. I can't promise that tomorrow is all going to be different. What I can do is say, today, I'm committing to my recovery. What kind of man is God calling you to be today? One day at a time.

So often we want to correct the consequences as the goal. "I'll stop texting her, I'll stop looking at porn, I'll put a filter on." So the goal in that scenario is I'm going to do these things because I want to save my marriage, right? Making it about her instead of, what kind of man is God calling me to be?

He wants me to integrate that old and that new together, because that's all I've got. I am the one person. There's no old and new man. Scripturally, okay, it talks about that, but there's an interpretation there. That guy that was doing all of that bad stuff is still inside of me. If I don't find the awareness of what drives that for me, then he's going to be knocking on that door to get out. He'll be kicking the door down. Eventually, those behavior changes—which, by the way, change the behaviors 100%—but if that's all I do, eventually he's going to kick the door down and those behavior changes will not last.

Doug Lornes: You mentioned something just a second ago about being authentic with her, with you, as our spouses. What's the practical way of being authentic? I think if we're sitting like this and we're drinking coffee or at a cafe or bistro and we're talking and just having conversation, that I'm being authentic. Not guaranteed. That's not what we're talking about.

Because if no one has ever really taught me how to be authentic in my conversation about what's going on inside of me, my experience, I'm not going to be able to connect to her experience. So, it's really learning how to maybe in some cases be coached on: how do I hear her heart and learn how to connect to that? Put myself in her shoes.

We had the D-day five and a half years ago, and then I made all the promises, but then I got comfortable and started doing stuff. For me to sit down and think about how that feels for her, that false sense of security that just got blown up again. She took a risk to trust me again, and I betrayed that trust again, and now she feels so foolish and angry and hurt.

Am I willing to sit in that pain? You talk about the steps: the awareness and working on the stuff that's inside of me, but then also being able to empathize with her and to own: yeah, it wasn't just "Oh, yeah, I shouldn't have texted her. I was a bad boy." But "I broke your trust. You allowed yourself to trust me again, and I broke that, and that is devastating to you." For me to own that for you, that's one of the main places to start.

By the way, that doesn't mean, "Oh, if you do that, that'll save your marriage." Because that's not the goal. The goal is to be a changed man that may eventually eventuate in a saved marriage, but it may not. But even if the marriage ends, you can still be a changed man.

I wish in our churches we would address that a little bit deeper. The question coming in itself—we haven't even addressed what did I need to do five and a half years ago that I didn't do other than promise. If all I did was promise, again, that's that negotiation bit. Never promise anything. Not because I can't keep it, "I promise that man is dead"—no, we can't promise that. Number one, she's not going to believe it, nor should she.

I tell most spouses in my office: don't trust another word that comes out of his mouth. Watch his behaviors. That will tell you everything about where his heart is in his recovery. So, it's the first step of awareness, of course. We need to be careful what we say, things like, "Oh, I promise, I'll never do that." "I'll be passive-aggressive. I won't do that ever again, and here's why." No, those things need to happen immediately because I have to do the work of why I was even wanting.

With awareness, it's not just, "Oh, I'll make sure that I don't text another woman secretly," or "I won't go to that strip club or the massage parlor," it's "I need to do that deep dive of awareness to find out why was I open to that? Why was I looking for that? What's going on in my heart?"

I'm going to do the work of repairing the connection with you as much as you're allowing, because we don't have any guarantee. But I'm going to learn how to do authentic connection. I'm committing myself to become a man worthy of your trust, whether you ever offer that or not, whether you stay or not. I'm committing myself to that process. I'm not promising. As long as I'm becoming. If I'm looking at a destination or an outcome, then I'm missing the mark, I'm missing the point here.

JJ West: So, stop negotiating with the terrorists and stop negotiating outcomes. That awareness, radical honesty with not only your spouse but other good, safe men. Let her set the boundaries. You don't need to be in control of everything right now because, clearly, you don't have a good track record of that.

Allowing some other people that you trust to help you because you're not going to be able to do it all on your own. Realize that some of those boundaries are not punitive; those are areas where she wants to feel safe now that she knows that I cannot be trusted. In order to be trusted, I need to be trustworthy, and that's my work. When she sets a boundary, it's not to hurt me; it's to protect herself.

She gets to move that goalpost whenever and wherever she wants to based upon the hard work that I'm willing to do. We talk about willingness. I'm going to prioritize your safety over my comfortability or discomfort. Absolutely. That's a big thing because, "Hey, that's not fair." We're not talking about fair. Who said it was fair? Marriage isn't fair. God didn't create it to be fair. We have abdicated our leadership role by our behaviors. Earning that back just takes time. It takes a long time. Time and hard work.

So, we've got through half of the questions that we wanted to get through in today's episode. What we're going to do is we're going to take a break and we're going to pick this back up in next week's episode and continue on with listener questions.

If you have questions, if our answers to your questions raise more questions for you—and we know they do—or you have questions that you've been pondering and you wish that we would tackle, send them in. Send an email to EMBpodcast@newlife.com so that we can tackle those. Doug, this has been a great discussion. Lots of content. Good questions, guys. Thank you for sending those in. We're going to tackle a couple more next week. Until then, guys, let's keep walking in integrity.

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