802 - Should you use an internet filter ever
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[00:00:00] Hey, Hey, what's up, my man? It's the Thea Sam here. Welcome to unleash the man within. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're having a great day and I'm super excited. We're going to talk about internet filters today. Yeah, a lot, a lot of questions about that. I think sometimes some mixed messaging from the show that I'm hopefully able to clarify a little bit today and look, this is an important, it's an important part of the recovery.
Now before I jump into that, I have a book. I launched it about two years ago. It is called The Last Relapse. It has reached thousands of people, and we've helped so many [00:01:00] people quit porn through this resource. And I want you guys to get your hands on it. If you want a copy of it, you can go to thelastrelapsebook.
com, download it for free, and it's going to give you a chance to basically get my blueprint for recovery. How I made porn. myself, you know, I've been clean for over eight years, but it's the same blueprint that we now walk hundreds of clients through every single month to get free of porn. If you want to be part of that, if you want that for yourself, or maybe you know somebody who needs it, go to the last relapse book.
com download it and we'll send it straight to your inbox. Okay. My gift to you. And it does come with a free workbook as well. So if you're one of those people who doesn't just want to read, But you want to apply what you're learning. Number one, well done. That's what it's all about. But number two, that workbook is there and it's going to give you a chance to do exactly that.
Okay. So I think that's everything. Let's jump in. Let's talk about whether or not you need to use an internet filter ever. You know, this is a subject that I have. Talked about I would say ad nauseum [00:02:00] since the beginning of deep clean and this podcast and my opinion has sort of morphed and taken on different shapes with time.
So, you know, when I first started out and I was like, okay, I'm going to help guys quit porn. Reflect on my own story and I thought, you know what? I had an internet filter and it was for lack of a better word, useless. It really didn't help me. So I don't think it's really that valuable of a resource. And so my, my focus and my time was really spent on getting to the roots.
That's where I got the most success. And I thought, you know what? I'm not really gonna enforce the internet filter. In fact, I'm going to help guys quit porn without the internet filter, because I quit without it and they can too. And that was actually very, very successful. What I found with time is that we were having clients who were coming to the program, they had an internet filter already installed and it was, you know, serving some sort of purpose.
It obviously didn't fix things enough, otherwise they wouldn't have needed our program, but it was doing something for them. And so [00:03:00] they would remove it and then right away they would kind of get this dip, you know, where they would relapse a bit more and their mood was off a little bit. And then it kind of took them a while to sort of reset, reset on recalibrate.
And I, I observed that and I thought that's, that's interesting. And what it made me realize is that the filter was serving a purpose and that we actually kind of messed them up by asking them to just get rid of it right off the bat. And so I sort of added a layer, which is that if you don't have an internet filter already, I would say you probably don't need one, but if you do have one and it's serving a purpose, keep it while you get to the roots of the issues.
And I think where I've landed today as we record, you know, in whatever it is, spring 2024. What I would say is I think that we need external and internal solutions to really effectively change our lives. When you are trying to quit pornography, you are trying to change your life. You're trying to become a new person.
You're trying to shut off an old identity and an old pattern [00:04:00] and embrace a new one. And that, that takes work. That takes time. That takes effort. And it takes energy on both the internal aspects of changing the heart, recovering from trauma, understanding emotions, better and emotional fitness. And on the external where we are talking about more spiritual disciplines and accountability partner and self control and internet filters.
And so, you know, our focus in our program, we still don't really like, we don't, we don't say you need to go install an internet filter to participate. But if people want to do that, we're not stopping them. And I think before we were, we were a little bit like so against it that we wouldn't, we would basically say, you know, don't waste your time.
I think there's, there's value in having the external and the internal, but I, I want to say this and I will actually answer the question of this title of this, of this episode, rather the title of this episode. But I want to say this first. If you're in recovery and you've been struggling, whether you've been struggling for a day [00:05:00] with pornography or you've been struggling for years, you have to have the internal solutions.
That needs to be the bulk of your work. The external solutions, generally speaking, are a lot easier. They're more convenient, they're more affordable, and they're usually a lot just, they're just easier. They're simpler to kind of facilitate. That tells us something right that tells us that the return from them is going to be smaller as well The inner work is more work, but it's also more rewarding It has the greatest effect or impact on the outcome and when we install both of these in our approach That's when we're gonna see the greatest results because you know We do have we do have clients who they do they do the inner work And most of the time they're fine, but they have, they have a one little weak moment and they start going to the site and then bam, the internet filter blocks them.
And it's like, wow, that filter just serves such an amazing kind of safety net for them because they got past some of those internal defenses and now an external solution was actually [00:06:00] really helpful. And that, that little blocking of the site was the jolt. They need to be like, what am I doing? I don't want to do this.
And they carry on about their day. And now they're three months or four months of freedom. Gets to continue and gets to further uninterrupted. So this approach is supremely valuable. We want to have both in place. So should, should you ever have an internet filter in recovery? I would say yes, I think it's a great thing to have.
I think if you've gone this far without it and you're still not free, I don't think it's the missing piece. That's the only thing I'm going to say is I, I would, I would be getting underneath the roots. That's where you're going to see a lot more success. And truthfully, if you, if you have it now, if you have the internet filter now as part of your recovery what are you going to do?
Like, do you still want to have that filter 20 years from now? Cause I don't know. I personally don't think there's much freedom in that. And look, if you need it, that's fine. And it's probably better safe than sorry. I, so I totally get that. But for me personally, I haven't had a filter in, you know, 11, 10 years.
I don't know what it's been. I'm not going to have [00:07:00] one ever again. I don't need it. And I think there's way more freedom in that place. You know, we, we have a six month old son. And Judah loves his soother. His soother helps him to regulate and to calm down and sometimes now he fusses when he doesn't get it.
And, you know, Shaloma and I are having to ask ourselves is this the pattern we want, you know? Do we want him to be so reliant on the soother that, you know, anytime he doesn't have it, he becomes a fussy baby? It's probably not right. And we know that at some point in his life, he's going to have to get rid of it.
And is that going to be a little bit of a mess, a little bit of a catastrophe? Could we actually prevent those catastrophic days? You know, maybe when he's two and a half, three years old from happening, if we start to just wean him off it now. So that would be the last thought here is you need to consider the longterm impact.
Where do you want to be? You know, my personal trainer gave me this little insight that was really helpful. He said, the way that you train your muscles is the way that they will grow. And what he was saying is if you have really bad form, you know, trying to lift a weight or something like that, [00:08:00] then your muscles also going to grow in kind of this unbalanced form.
And it's very similar in recovery. You know, how you approach recovery is going to dictate how What it looks like to stay recovered. And so if you have a thousand different practices you need to do, and you're super dependent on your internet filter, and then you get free, well, those things don't magically just vanish all of a sudden, once you, once you get free, because whatever you did to get free is what you'll need to do to stay free.
And so I would rather we take a more simplified approach that we really use what what's only necessarily and only required. and that we maximize our energy and our output on those things so that we can get the best outcome doing the least amount of work. That's going to be a lot easier in recovery for starters, but it's also going to be a lot easier on the other side of recovery when you are called to, you know, sustain and maintain your growth and freedom.
So that's everything for today. Thank you so much for listening guys. I really appreciate it. And look, if you don't have a copy of the last three apps yet, make [00:09:00] sure you download yours at the last. Relapsebook. com have a blessed day guys. We'll talk soon. Bye. Bye. [00:10:00]