Porn Kills Intimacy by Sathiya Sam

Hey, what’s up everybody. It’s Sathiya Sam here, founder of DeepClean and I want to welcome you to this premier event called Porn Kills Intimacy. My goodness, what a title and what a subject we are diving into today.

A little bit of background about me. I struggled with porn for about 15 years, I would say for five of those I was properly addicted. And I grew up in a pastor’s home, I went to church, I was pretty involved and really had everything set up for me to make good decisions in life. I got exposed to pornography in the computer lab of my Christian school, just to give you the extent of how kind of twisted my experience was and my first exposure.

But I did eventually get free. February 2016 was the last time that I watched porn and since then I’ve had the privilege of helping hundreds of guys get free through our coaching program, our weekday podcasts, and our weekly newsletter. We really believe in resourcing people which is why I’m super excited to be with you and be part of this event. And I do have an exciting project coming up that I’m going to tell you about a little bit later on that you might be interested in if you’re looking to get more resources into your corner to help you get rid of porn and other unwanted sexual behaviour from your life.

Now today we are talking about not just, you know, pornography, which I think you and I probably understand is bad for you. It’s not just that it’s biblically, you know, forbidden or prohibited, it’s not just that it kind of violates the rights of other individuals and that, you know, it really is exposure to awful content. But there’s actually terrible ramifications of porn consumption on your physical body and on your relationships, and it really is the relationship part that we are focused on today of course with a title like Porn Kills Intimacy.

So I’m excited to dive in and I’m kind of assuming that we all understand why porn is destructive. I don’t think that part needs an explanation. What we’re really going to focus on today is the intimacy component. How does that even factor into the subject because I think porn is often reduced to just a physical thing, a sexual thing, just getting my needs met real quick kind of thing, but the ripples and the ramifications of porn are widespread, and they go far beyond the activity itself.

A lot of the guys who come to me to get our coaching services, their relationships are in disarray. So their fiancé has said, “If you want to get married still, you need to get this taken care of.” That’s actually a pretty good case scenario. We see situations where guys have been kicked out of the house because their wives have caught them looking at porn and they’re sick and tired of it. They know it’s been going on for a while, they don’t see an improvement and they want something different.

And so guys come to me in really challenging relationship situations. And I mention that just to show you and kind of illustrate that porn clearly plays a role in the intimacy we experience in our lives. And that’s just with our loved ones, but of course it has an impact on our relationship with God and we’re going to talk about that a little bit later on in this clip.

Now for starters let’s just define the word intimacy and give a little bit of context. I believe there are four core needs that every single person has in their life. The essentials which is food, water, safety. Security, which is kind of just that security within yourself, the idea that you are protected and looked after. Significance, the need to know that your life has purpose, your life has value, your life has meaning. And fourthly, intimacy.

Now and maybe in another event we can talk about the other three, but for today we are talking about this fourth one, this really critical one here which is intimacy.

Now to give you a definition, this is a definition one of my mentors gave me that I really liked over the years. The definition of intimacy is actually in the word, it’s into-me-see. The idea of intimacy in any relationship is that you are being seen, known, and understood by the other person while equally seeing, knowing, and understanding that same individual.

This is intimacy at its finest and if you think about the relationship between a husband and a wife where there is intimacy, it’s not just about sex. I mean sex is really a small component of intimacy in marriage. The actual essence of intimacy in a marriage is that you see each other, you know each other, and you understand each other and that you have regular habits, practices, and intentions to grow in these areas to simply see, know and understand the person and to be seen, known, and understood by that person.

This is our working knowledge of intimacy, and it is the definition that we’ll be abiding by for the remainder of this video.

So the question then is how does porn kill intimacy. Like how does porn stop me from being seen, known, and understood. And I think that’s actually a really good question. I think you can kind of see the relationship, but I want to really connect the dots and drive home this idea today.

Now let me just stop for a moment and ask you. When you think about intimacy and, you know, having intimacy in your life, in your relationship with Christ, in your relationships with your loved ones, with your family, maybe even having intimacy to a degree with your friends – obviously, it’s not the same form but some degree of being seen, known, and understood – does that sound enticing to you, does it sound interesting? Does it sound a little bit icky, like why are we talking about intimacy or maybe is it somewhere in-between where you’re just not sure how you really feel about it but you’re pretty sure it’s something you need.

Let me maybe ask it to you this way, is it something you want? When you think about your future marriage if you’re not married or your current marriage right now, when you think about your relationship with God, do you want to have a close personal intimate connection?

For me, I actually answered that question no for a very long time. I was scared of intimacy. To me, that was such a feminine term. You know, I didn’t understand how a guy could want intimacy with God, it just seemed so strange. It’s like if God’s a dude and I’m a dude do we really need to go there, is that really necessary. And I thought, you know, in my personal relationships with my loved ones and this was when I was single that I had these thoughts, so I was thinking, you know, with my future wife well yeah, of course we’re going to be intimate, we’re going to have sex but, you know, does it really go beyond that. Like what is this whole intimacy thing and why do I really need to care about it.

It’s interesting. If you read the scriptures, if you look at the Book of Exodus where, you know, God is leading the Israelites through the wilderness into the Promised Land – and we know that’s a very tumultuous journey – along the way the Israelites become disillusioned and they start to worship idols and God becomes incensed. He is really very upset with their decision to worship idols after, you know, all he’s done for them and of course after all that lies ahead for them, here they are choosing an idol instead.

And it’s interesting, if you read some of the scriptures where God is sort of reprimanding the Israelites for their poor decision making, you know, and for turning against him, he doesn’t use the word idolatry. Which of course is how we would describe idol worship, that’s idolatry. You had an idol before God, broke one of the 10 commandments, we have a term for that, it’s biblical and everything, it’s called idolatry, right. That would make sense to us.

But God actually uses a different term, he uses the term adultery. Idolatry is adultery. And, you know, idolatry feels very logical, left-brain for those of you who are maybe more into the science part of this. Idolatry is sort of this – it’s a concept we can understand with our heads. But adultery is something that takes place in the heart and all throughout the scripture, I mean Jesus teaches very strongly on the subject of adultery.

That, you know, it’s not just that you sleep with another person, but if you look at a woman lustily in your heart you’ve committed adultery. All throughout the Bible we see there’s sort of this warning and this caution against anything that is adulterous in nature. And I didn’t know if you know this, but even idolatry is considered adultery and we have to understand why to really gain perspective on why porn kills intimacy and it is simply this, God is meant to be your first love.

We’re going to get into all the details of it in just a couple of minutes here. He is meant to be your first love and anything that violates that first love is not just an idol, it is actually adulterous in nature. That’s how God perceives it. So that’s why the subject of intimacy is sort of intertwined into our wellbeing as a man, and certainly in the area of our sexuality.

Now porn and other sexual misbehaviour go into a specific category of intimacy for me, and that category is called fast food. Now about well jeez 15, 16 years ago my parents had said, you know, “Sathiya, it’s time for you to get a job. We love that you’re doing well in school, we love that you’re involved in athletics, but there are certain skills you’re not going to be able to acquire anywhere else unless you just start working.” So I threw some applications out and lo and behold I got hired at Wendy’s.

Now to this day, I am still an avid fan of Wendy’s. If you listen to my podcast or read my newsletter, you’ll see just how much I love it. I love their junior bacon cheeseburger and personally, I’m a Twisted Frosty kind of guy. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s a swirl of vanilla and chocolate equally mixed and it’s fantastic.

Now porn is fast food intimacy. Now as much as I love Wendy’s, I know that if I’m genuinely hungry and I need a meal, Wendy’s is probably not going to satiate me. It might temporarily but, like most fast food, after a while you’re hungry again and you get hungry a lot more quickly than if you had the real thing or food that wasn’t so processed and quickly prepared.

Porn is fast food intimacy. Your need for intimacy cannot actually be satiated by pornography, but we are disillusioned in those moments where we give in to temptation to think that it will. And when I say it’s fast food intimacy, what I mean is that it gives you temporary satisfaction. It gives you that feeling of being accepted, of having an intimate sexual connection with another person on the screen and afterwards, you’re left feeling worse. You feel emptier, hungrier so to speak.

Porn is fast food intimacy. And as a matter of fact, the research is now showing that porn increases rates of infidelity. It shows that even in relationships where porn is introduced – you know, some couples will watch porn to kind of spice up their sex life – what it’s shown is to be exhilarating initially, it kind of adds that spice but long-term it is much more likely to lead to relationship dissatisfaction. That’s the actual word that was used in a scientific study that was just conducted in the last two years.

Now I want you to really think about that, relationship dissatisfaction. Maybe if you’re struggling with porn you’re experiencing some relationship dissatisfaction in your marriage, your dating relationship, maybe in your connection with God.

When you engage in fast food intimacy over and over and over again, the same way that your physical body would start to deteriorate – your physical health would be impacted by you eating fast food on a regular basis – your heart also is impacted by your choice to watch porn on a regular basis, and it starts to wither and eat away. And your capacity for a long-term meaningful relationship, your capacity for day-to-day intimate interaction with another person, whether it’s on an emotional or a physical level, starts to get hampered by your choice to engage in fast food intimacy or pornography on a regular basis.

So you and I carry a responsibility to get our need for intimacy in a healthy way. See here is the key about all four of those core needs that we mentioned, about the essentials, about security, significance and about intimacy. Those needs because they are so fundamental to our well-being they will get met. The question is how and it’s our responsibility to find healthy and Godly ways to get these needs met on a consistent basis.

Now I have really good news for you. If you feel like, “OK Sathiya, I get it, porn is fast food intimacy. It’s killing my actual relationships with God and with my loved ones, but like I’m at a loss here. I don’t know how to turn the corner or what the next step is.” Well, that’s what we’re about to tackle here as we start to kind of wind down this video.

Here’s what you need to know. There is no person on planet Earth who can perfectly satisfy your need for intimacy, OK. I want you to hear that statement one more time. There is nobody, not one person on planet Earth who can perfectly meet your need for intimacy. That is the way God has designed us.

He put a group of imperfect people on planet Earth, not so that they would fumble their way through lives and be broken and struggle all the way, no. He did it so that we would learn to of course build a healthy relationship with each other but to never lean too much on imperfect people, instead to turn to him who is perfect to get our needs met perfectly.

And that is the invitation you and I have every single day that we are on planet Earth, which is to commune with the living God, to go to him first to experience intimacy and here’s the incredible thing that happens, guys. When you and I prioritize God OK, when he becomes our first source of intimacy and of connection we become satiated, we become satisfied and fulfilled, and our desires and the lean and the pull that we have in other areas – even on our loved ones, but certainly towards pornography and other sexual misbehaviour – starts to decline.

It’s this beautiful thing that as your needs get met, as you start to consume in a healthy way, so to speak, as you start to engage with God and develop an intimate and personal relationship with him, that fluidity of relationship doesn’t leave your heart wanting more. It’s like the Bible says and I love this verse, it’s so often quoted for a good reason. Psalm 23:1, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.”

The idea that when we are under the Lordship of Jesus, when we’re in that kind of relationship, we’re letting him lead us, shepherd us and of course we’re having that fluid connection to him, we have no want. We don’t need to go elsewhere to get our needs met because they’re satiated in that intimate and personal connection with him.

Now if you maybe are hearing that conceptually and you’re thinking, “OK that’s great, Sathiya, but what are some practical things? What are my next steps, where do I go from this,” I want to give you three things for you to really think about.

Number one is I would highly encourage you to read the Bible. The purpose of that book is getting to know the author and it’s allowing the author to get to know you. And I want to let you know that as you read the Bible and as you invite the Holy Spirit to really bring life to the words on those pages, to get to know God more, he will reveal himself and it’s a fascinating way.

Now you may recall from our initial definition of intimacy it’s a two-way street, right, of each other being seen, known, and understood. So while the Bible is a great way to get to know God, it is also important that God gets to know you. And I think that’s where our prayer life can be really impactful.

If you look at the Book of Psalms, you know, that’s kind of like written words of David’s prayer life. And you can see that he was raw and honest and vulnerable and, yeah, there were moments of strong bold decrees, and other moments of real weakness and doubting and just about everything in-between and our prayer life can look the same.

It’s OK to pray honest prayers to God. In fact, that’s what he wants from you. But in that transparent prayer life – and just so you know, prayer life doesn’t mean that your hands are folded and you’re on your knees and your eyes are closed. I pray, you know, driving in the car. I pray while I’m mowing the lawn.

I mean you can have these dialogues with God throughout the day but, when you do, make sure that you are being transparent. That you are letting him in, that you’re being honest about your perceptions, about your feelings, about the thoughts you’re having, about the decisions you’ve made. God knows those things, yet he invites us to share them so that we can grow in intimacy with him. And when you do that, in those moments let him love you.

Let him love you through those moments. That is the essence of intimacy, it’s being loved while you are being seen, known, and understood. And it’s really uncomfortable at first, it’s a bit of a stretch but it becomes a lot more comfortable over time and eventually what happens is you realize that this is actually what you need to really have success in life and certainly to avoid porn and other sexual misbehaviour.

And lastly, I want to talk to you about a resource that I have, it’s called The Last Relapse. It’s my brand new book that’s coming out and it details my system for how guys overcome pornography. We actually talk extensively about the subject of intimacy, both kind of how it impacts the human heart and how you can grow in your intimacy with God. We get really practical, and we talk just beyond what we were able to cover in today’s video.

So if you’re interested in that, you can go to my website. It’s sathiyasam.com/books and that will just allow you to find out more information or you can order it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all of your major platforms.

Now guys to summarize I want to let you know that – or I want to remind you rather that our call is to lives of intimacy and when God is our primary source of intimacy, our wants and our desires are reduced elsewhere. Our pull is less and our draw to things like pornography becomes dramatically reduced.

Now intimacy is one of our four core needs, and it will get met it’s just a matter of how. And the goal for you and I is to instil healthy habits and healthy ways of getting that need for intimacy met. When we do, it is not just that we are satiated and that we no longer, you know, seek out porn or whatever else, it’s that we show up in our relationships, we are present.

We’re not looking to get something; we’re actually coming to our relationships to give and that is an incredibly beautiful thing and that’s going to channel greater intimacy in those connections as well. And when you do this really well, over time – it does take a little bit of time – but your heart and your mind start to wander less, they start to seek things like porn less and your overall quality of life starts to dramatically improve.

Hey, I want to thank you guys so much for listening. We’re going to answer some questions in a little bit here but if you ever have any other questions beyond the scope of today’s event, you can always reach out to me. I’d be happy to answer them. We’ll put our email in the description there and I look forward to talking to you guys very soon.

[Pause] Hey guys, it’s Sathiya here again and what we’re going to do in this section is just talk about some really commonly asked questions around the subject of pornography specifically.

And one of my favourite things personally about the line of work I get to do is in our coaching calls and, you know, elsewhere as well – when I go to speak or on podcasts – I get asked tons of questions, you know, because this is such an under-discussed subject. And it’s really interesting just to hear what people are curious about and some areas just where there’s not a lot of information, you know, because people haven’t been taught, maybe the science hasn’t done the research or whatever it may be.

And what I’ve done in this section is I’ve basically identified some of the most commonly asked questions that I think are going to be really valuable to you. My prayer is that these are some questions you’ve maybe wondered yourself, either for your own situation or perhaps you are in a position where you’re helping other people through their own journey of dealing with unwanted sexual behaviour. And one way or another I think you’re going to find this really, really useful, and really, really insightful.

Now one subject that I’m not going to talk about is the whole thing of sex before marriage, whether or not that’s OK – it’s not, by the way, spoiler alert – but we do that in a separate video. So I think it’s a really important subject that comes up all the time, especially in today’s day and age, but I just didn’t want to repeat myself. So you can watch my other video on the website if you’re interested.

But what I want to start with is what are the physical impacts of pornography on the body? This is a really interesting one and I think it’s something that people tend to forget. We sort of convince ourselves that if we’re just watching a screen then how could it possibly have an impact on our actual physical bodies, but I want to give you a stat that I think is really going to drive this home.

In 2001 the rates of erectile dysfunction among men under the age of 40 was 5 percent, which is pretty normal. Like that’s kind of what you would expect. Erectile dysfunction we know it to be a bit more of an issue when you get into the latter stages of life. Certainly guys under the age of 40 who are in, you know, good health are going to be sexually healthy as well. So 5 percent makes sense.

Today, at the time of me recording this video, the incidence of ED in men in that same age bracket, 40 and under, is reported to be as high as 33 percent. Yeah, I mean it has just shot through the roof.

And what’s happened is basically in 2001 the internet became mainstream and so we started to see an increase, a small increase but an increase nonetheless in the rates of ED in this age group. And then in 2007 is when things really shot up and 2007 was when the smartphone was released and suddenly pornography became that much more accessible to the entire world and what’s happening is that porn is a super stimulus.

It’s completely unrealistic but when you watch it with regularity, especially from a young age, you are conditioning your brain to experience a super stimulus to be aroused. It requires a really high level of stimulation to experience arousal. So when men are actually getting into the bedroom, they’re not able to perform because their equipment, so to speak, has been conditioned to respond to a super stimulus which is just not the same as the real thing. The real thing is way better, but the level of stimulation is not the same and as a result, guys are really struggling.

And so I see this in my practice. A lot of guys who come to me have struggled to actually perform because of their porn consumption. So that’s a great example of the physical toll that pornography can take on the body.

Another question that we get asked a lot is, you know, what is the right response when I do make a mistake? We actually have this saying that relapse is a part of recovery and maybe the way I would actually say it is relapse can be a part of recovery. For some people, they join our program, they hit the ground running and they don’t turn back and porn is out of their life for, you know, kingdom come kind of thing.

Other people, you know, they do have some slips along the way and one of the things we encourage people is to really learn to leverage those relapses, and what we mean by that is invite the Holy Spirit into those moments and do two things.

First of all, learn. So allow the Holy Spirit to guide you and to figure out, “OK, why did that slip happen and what can I do differently to prevent it from happening in the future.” We want to be a little bit analytical about it so that we can learn from it and make sure that we don’t repeat the same mistake because of course if we’re repeating the same mistake over and over again, then we really have no one else to blame for our problem.

But if you bring the Holy Spirit in, you learn, “Oh, well you know what, that happened late at night. You know, I just had my phone beside the bed like I normally do, and I couldn’t sleep. So maybe I need to charge my phone outside of my room. You know, put on an alarm clock, wake up to that instead and maybe that’s something I can try differently.”

And it’s not that every single thing that you try is going to work, but the point is that you’re trying. You’re trying new things; you’re not just doing the same old and that’s the first part I suppose of inviting the Holy Spirit into those mistakes.

Number two, and this is a really, really big one, but what you want to do is you actually want to learn to let God love you in those moments. Because it’s really easy to believe God loves you when you do everything correctly, but remember his love for you is unconditional and the sooner you can invite God into those moments and just say, “Yeah God, I remind myself that in my mistake, even right now in this moment you love me. You haven’t changed your mind about me. You love me just as much now as you did a few minutes before I made the mistake, hours before I made the mistake, days, months, years. Your love for me has not changed.”

And the more real that becomes in those moments, the more powerfully it is going to rewire your brain and change the way that you view yourself. And when those two things happen in conjunction with one another, well that is actually when you start to experience freedom. So, you know, how you respond really matters.

I would strongly discourage you from asking for forgiveness right away. You can ask for forgiveness, I’m not against that, but initially start here. Start in these places.

And then I would encourage you lastly as a bonus don’t make it your goal to ask for forgiveness, make it your goal to repent. The Greek word for repent, metanoia, means to change your ways or change your thinking. And that is actually why we ask question one first of trying to learn and asking the Holy Spirit, “What can I do differently next time to prevent this,” that is actually a part of repentance. It is actually thinking, “OK, what do I need to do to sort of change the trajectory so that this doesn’t happen again.”

So to just summarize real quick. Invite the Holy Spirit into those moments as quickly as possible. It’s going to be challenging, especially when you’re feeling sort of the shame and the guilt and maybe even your self-loathing a little bit but invite him in. You got to do it. Number one, you want to learn from the mistake; why did it happen and what can you do differently next time to prevent it.

And number two, let God love you. Let that be an opportunity for you to experience love in a moment of failure. That is really powerful and it’s going to work wonders for you long-term. And lastly, the bonus effort is that you actually repent, and you really think about what will be required for me to change my ways, to change my thinking and to allow myself to go in a different direction from here on.

Alright. We have the privilege of working with guys who are single, guys who are engaged, dating, married, divorced, I mean the whole spectrum, and one question we often get asked by singles is do I need to be free of porn before I start dating? And I love that question because it tells me that you’re looking ahead and that already care about your future relationship before it takes place and that’s really, really commendable.

What we advise people to do is to make the most of their singleness and if you’re struggling with porn and you’re single, I would make your focus and your priority to get free of porn over getting into a relationship. However if an opportunity comes along, I don’t think you should turn that down because you struggle with porn unless you are not doing anything about it or unless you’re not doing anything to get rid of the issue.

That is the only set of circumstances where I would say look if you’re not, you know, taking courses, getting in programs, getting professional help, if you’re not actually making a concerted effort to get free of porn and kind of experiencing some growth and healing, then I would say you should not get into a relationship. I would strongly advise against it.

But if you’re making progress, you know, and it’s like, “OK, I’m not fully free yet but I’m getting there, I’m working on it,” then I think you should seize the opportunity when the relationship comes along. So that would be my major encouragement.

Now just to go one step further. If you’re dating and you’re struggling with pornography and, you know, maybe you’re thinking about popping the question, you want to get married, I once again want to really, really encourage you get rid of porn before you get married.

Again, it’s not a rule and it’s not some cardinal sin if you don’t, but your marriage is going to suffer a lot more if you bring sexual misbehaviour into it. And so I would strongly recommend at least six months of freedom before you get married. And I know that’s like a big ask but again, we want to play a long-term kind of play here. We don’t want to play a short game and just try to get married and trust that marriage will fix everything, marriage magnifies everything. So that would be my recommendation.

Now if you’re married and you’re struggling with porn and you’re like, “Well great, like I messed everything up,” no, no, no that’s not the case. Again, whatever set of circumstances you have right now, that’s what we want to deal with and that’s what we want to make the most of. And so if you’re struggling with porn in your marriage, again let this just be the impetus to get some help, to really make a concerted effort to get this thing out of your life so that you can get your marriage back on track and live the life that God called you to live.

Now on that front actually, this is sort of a follow-up, but I think it’s hard for a lot of guys to actually share with their spouse that they’re struggling. So you might be listening to this thinking, “OK, you know, this is great, but my spouse doesn’t even know. She thinks that I struggle occasionally, she doesn’t know how bad it is” or, “She thinks I’m completely free because the last time we talked about it I was, but I’ve relapsed. I’m struggling now and I don’t know how to bring it up.”

As we talked about in the video, a good relationship is really marked by intimacy, isn’t it? It’s that two-way street of getting to know each other and really seeing each other on a deep, personal level. So as long as there are things hidden from your wife, you have put a barrier in your intimacy. So the question is not how do I tell her, or should I tell her, the question is do you want intimacy in your marriage?

Do you want to have a strong stable connected marriage and if the answer is yes, then it’s a matter of figuring out what is the best way to communicate this information to your spouse. And you might think, “Yeah, but it’s going to cause all this pain and distrust and it’s going to probably make a bigger mess.” Yeah, it might actually and that is a consequence of your decisions.

And as long as you’re avoiding the consequence, you’re also avoiding the reward of making those brave choices which is if you handle it well – which I recommend getting some advice from a mentor, a pastor, a coach, counsellor whoever it is, I do recommend getting some guidance along the way about how to disclose properly – if you do it really well, what’s going to happen is eventually it’s actually going to build trust in the relationship and it’s going to lay a framework for you guys to have a stronger marriage.

And we do see this happen with couples that go through our program – not couples but guys that go through our program that then disclose in a really healthy way in their marriages, we see that with time their spouse begins to trust them and that they begin to have way better intimacy. Whether it’s emotionally, whether it’s sex or whatever it might be, their marriage generally speaking is a lot healthier as a result.

So that would be my recommendation, but I can’t give you the specifics of it just because it is a little bit case-dependent. So I encourage you to get some professional help, but hopefully this gives you a bit of a paradigm of how to go into that process.

OK, now I want to go one step further which is, “I’m free of porn, but my wife still doesn’t trust me, what do I do?” So maybe you did the program, you know, you did the stuff and it’s like ta-da, “I’m free, we should be good now, right. Like let’s start having dates again and having sex regularly” and, you know, I think it’s very easy for a guy brain to go there.

What you have to remember is that porn has left a destructive trail in your relationships. And getting free of porn is awesome, congratulations, well done, keep the momentum going but that is only one part of the puzzle. And what we see is that for guys to get free of porn it can take anywhere from eight to 24 months, it really just depends on the process. But for guys to heal their relationships, especially their marriages, can take a couple of years, anywhere from two to five years.

So I say that to let you know that while getting free of porn can happen a little bit more quickly, healing the relationship long-term takes a little bit more time and that’s because it involves another person that person has to go on their own healing journey. They have to work through some of their own pain, and they have to reach a place where they’re ready to trust and they’re ready to bring their all into the relationship again and that can take some time.

So, you know, if you’re still like a little bit frustrated and you’re thinking, “She should forgive me, she should move on,” actually it just takes a little bit of time. Hang in there, it will get better. Keep the momentum going. I promise if you keep showing up for your wife, if you keep loving her well, it will go a long way.

And as a bonus, if you really, really, really want to make a difference in your marriage, in addition to getting free of porn take all the courses, read all the content, get all the professional help you can improving your emotional intelligence. That is going to work wonders for the overall health of your relationship and usually guys who really struggle with porn and lust have low EQ.

They have low EQ and that’s what causes their problem in the first place. So they fix the problem, they think everything should be better, but they haven’t necessarily improved their emotional intelligence. So if you improve in that area, you’re going to find it will actually strengthen your relationships quite a bit as well.

Another question that we get asked is, you know, people kind of hear about our inside out approach to helping guys recover and so they’re like, “OK Sathiya, this is great. I’ve realized I need to transfer my heart and as I transfer my heart, my behaviour follows” and, you know, yada-yada-yada, “But are there are any practical things, like surely there’s got to be a few things I can just do right now that are really going to go a long way to helping me begin my journey?”

Absolutely. Let’s talk about a few really practical things. I mentioned this already, but I will mention it again. Number one, charge your phone outside of your room. You can buy an alarm clock on Amazon for $20, $30, let that be your alarm, keep your phone outside of your room. Your bedroom should really be only for two things, sleep and sex. And that second thing is only if you’re married, OK.

If you’re single, I highly recommend like don’t watch videos, don’t engage in really anything in your bedroom other than sleep, and if you’re married sex as well. There’s actually lots of neuroscience that backs this up, but your brain makes associations. So that’s a really practical thing is just charge your phone elsewhere, keep it away.

Number two, remove social media from your phone. A really big one, keep it off your phone by default, download it when you need to use it and delete it when you’re done using it, it makes a huge difference. So for me, we run social media with our company. So I do download Instagram almost every day, you know, to do my posts, to reply to some comments and just engage a little bit and then I delete it because when I have idle time, if social media is on my phone, I wander there and that becomes a gateway. So I just keep social media off my phone altogether.

Another really practical thing you can do is instil regular accountability. So this could be like an internet filter with an accountability component like Covenant Eyes, which I think is a great software. It could just be that you reach out to a friend that you really trust and say, “Hey, I need some accountability in this area,” but regular accountability at least weekly goes a really long way, and it doesn’t have to be long.

It could be 15-minute conversations just to check-in, “How are you doing? Did you have any slips? What are you learning” and just, “How are you doing personally? Like are there any challenges, any struggles you’re going through? How can I be praying for you,” it can be very, very quick, very, very easy but a little bit of accountability goes a really long way.

And the last thing I would say practically – and again, we’ve already kind of talked about it – but getting into a good routine with God and your daily devotionals really goes a long way.

We have a guy in our program right now and a month in his wife is asking like, “Who are you? Like what happened to you” because he has changed so dramatically and she can feel the emotional connection coming back and there’s like just this dramatic improvement pretty early on, which is really cool to see.

And we were asking him in one of our calls lately, “OK, so share us the secret sauce, man? Like what’s going on, what did you do? What’s been really helping you lately” and he said, “Honestly the biggest thing is I’m just getting my time God and when I get my time with God, I find my days go better. I’m making better decisions and my desire to really engage in pornography is a lot less.” And so he’s showing up in his marriage as a result and everything else. So what we talked about is not just like high in the sky kind of concepts. When you actually walk that out practically it’s a really great starting point.

And one final question that I wanted to answer, and I really want you to listen to this if you have a struggle with porn, masturbation, adultery, buying sex. You know, I mean whatever it might be, if you have any struggle in any of those areas, I want you to listen to me loud and clear because this is a very important question.

People often ask me, you know, what is it like to be free, what does that feel like on the other side of it and, you know, what’s the greatest benefit? And I think for me it’s not that, you know, I have a healthy marriage and a great sex life in the confines of that marriage. It’s not that I get to help other guys get free, although I love that I get to help guys get free.

It’s not that I get to, you know, I guess just present an achievement or an accomplishment to the world that I was able to do something that is, you know, actually really hard to do. Like it’s actually very challenging for guys to be free of porn in this day and age. But what actually to me is the greatest reward is the security in myself and it’s not that I did it all myself, it’s that security that comes from God.

But what I mean is I don’t have a fear of being found out and that’s an incredible feeling, you know, to know that my wife can scroll through my phone. That I could, you know, speak somewhere, put on a presentation, I don’t have to worry about something randomly showing up. It’s that when I walk down the streets and there’s attractive people around me, I don’t go into panic mode. I can stay within myself, stay secure here and not wander. My eyes don’t wander, my thoughts don’t drift.

That’s a really powerful thing and being able to walk with that security and that confidence every day is incredible. And I want you to hear that if you’re struggling because that just casts a little bit of vision of what lies ahead for you if you really start to implement some of the things that we talked about in this video.

And so I want to encourage you, don’t just be a consumer, don’t just take in the content, I want you to apply it, execute it, try it and if it doesn’t work try something else. But continue to take massive action and as you do, in due time, in due course you will reach that place as well where you’re confident within yourself, you’re secure within yourself and you don’t have to live day to day with the fear of being found out. It’s a beautiful thing, I highly recommend it