392: Why is it so hard to quit porn!? | Dear Men

Jason Lange: As our system gets larger, we don't need certain crutches anymore, so to speak. And so there's this thing where it can be like I need to stop this specific behavior. And oftentimes that's really hard. If you're not changing the structure of your life around it, that's creating the conditions where you're turning towards that. So in this case, porn. Jason Lange: Yeah, I would say a lot of men actually, that have come in, I think have come in because they know my porn story, right. That. Deeply addicted to porn really since high school, when broadband Internet, you know, kind of came into the. The living room, so to speak, and was my primary tool for self regulation. And I think a lot of guys just resonate with that. And so we have a lot of men who really want to handle that in. We def. I. We definitely see it in both arenas, right? We. We often see it in single guys who are aware that it's. It's not even a moral thing sometimes for them, it's just. It's not creating the life I want. Right. When I put time and energy here, it doesn't actually shift my life in the way I want. And then we'll have married guys who also realize it's not leading to the relationship I want that I'm already in. And this is such a tricky one, you know, like you're saying porn is so hard to quit because it's actually a lot of things. There's the physiological that's going on where, you know, many men come, come to us and they don't really know what to do with all their sexual energy. And porn is the quickest, easiest outlet for that. Then more subtle than that, they don't know what to do with their emotional energy. And for most of us guys, right, porn and ejaculation is our primary tool for dealing with our emotions and self regulating. And then there becomes these deeper layers of. Yeah, whether it's cultural, family, religious, these other kinds of external shame that come in and make us feel bad about ourselves and what it can do. And what I've seen with guys we work with, where the actual addiction isn't porn, it's the shame they feel when they use porn. So porn is a way to recreate the shame spiral that they're actually kind of addicted to. And that is one of the most challenging ones to really work with because it, it's so much deeper than just unwinding a habit. It's unwinding an identity. Right. And a belief in. I think, you know, we're just outgunned in a sense as men. You know, the there, there was even layers, right. Of this. Like when I started, you need to sit down at a computer, which was often in a public room in the house or something like that. And now it's in our pocket anywhere we go. Right. And that requires a level of awareness and boundary and structure and discipline that a lot of us men are just completely unequipped for. Just totally unequipped for. How do I handle this when I can be anywhere anytime of day and if I start feeling stressed out, here's a quick way I can use to change my state. That in some ways I think is even more challenging than some of the traditional substances because it doesn't quite have the same type of hangover. Right? Yeah, you might, your hormones change, you might get tired, but it's not like you're going to get a DUI or walk into a meeting or walk in to play with your kids and you're drunk or something like that. You can hide it even more, I think. And that is one of the really big challenges of porn that then ties into the shame and the beliefs about ourselves and the very real consequences it can have. On just where we're putting our attention in life.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, thank you for speaking to that about that. That moment of stress, like the moment of feeling stress. And what do you reach for? I really want to emphasize this idea of. This is not a quote that I made up. It's Joanne. Joanna. Joanne. Hari. The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety. It's connection. And I feel like there's this thing that happens when we're talking about addiction of anything, whether it's a substance or behavior. Let's say anorexia. Right. And there's such a. There. There has been, I think, such a fixation on the thing. So not eating or bulimia, overeating or, you know, gambling or whatever. Whatever it is, there's such a fixation on that. In the past, there's been such a fixation on that, and a lot of the ways to address it have been really focused on that thing. Right. How do you stop overeating? How do you stop undereating? How do you stop gambling? How do you stop. It's all about the gambling. It's all about the gambling. It's all about the gambling. When really it's about the person's life and in particular, the quality of connection. The quality of connections. The quality, the depth, the love, essentially, that is present in that person's life that they can feel. Right. The level and depth and quality of connection. The reason I'm emphasizing that is because in that moment that you described, of a man feeling stressed, feeling anxious, feeling out of control, or what does he reach for or who does he reach for? Does he have safe connections, whether that's with a spouse, a family member, a friend, or community that he feels held by, that he feels loved by, that he feels engaged with? Does he have that. Is that in place? And I think of it kind of like scaffolding. Like, I feel like for a lot of the men that we've worked with, they come in with very little scaffolding. They just don't have that much connection around them. Meaningful, deep connection. Maybe they see people at work, but it's not the same as meaningful, deep connection. And when you build out that scaffolding, then your life changes. And that's very different than focusing a lot of energy and attention on porn or whatever your thing is. In this case, we're talking about porn. So what I feel like I gathered in, you know, doing research for this episode and thinking about this concept, is that a lot of the. A lot of the energy and attention needs to shift from the fixation on the thing to the environment that we are held in. And that's a more complex thing, but it's also way more effective. And I want, I'm just going to cite one study, I don't know about how to describe it with a study, but it's called Community Reinforcement Approach. And there's another sort of variation called community Reinforcement and Family training, which is CRAFT is the acronym. And essentially this is a way of working with people that have substance use disorders that doesn't focus at all on the substance in any way. So they are not focused. They don't even care what the substance is. What they do is they train people on how to connect with family members and other loved ones. They teach communication skills, they do talk about, about trauma, but they're really focusing on strengthening the relationships in that person's life. They're basically increasing the amount of love and, and often these are relationships that are pre existing. These people already have these kinds of relationships and they're basically just strengthening them. That's their focus. And I would say that similarly, you know, in our work, you know, a big part of the focus of our program is community and, and love and, and getting men more connected in a deeper, meaningful way with other men so that they feel that sense of brotherhood and team and that they're not alone and that that fundamentally can change your psychology and how you actually feel in your life in general. So I'm wondering, and by the way, the rates of efficacy for that program are very, very high. And that kind of perspective has been backed up many times that basically the solution to addiction is connection. The solution to addiction is not sobriety. The solution to addiction is connection. And then the sobriety is a byproduct of connection. So it's not we're going to focus on sobriety, it's we're going to focus on connection. And then sobriety is going to happen. Right. It's kind of like once you address the root cause of the virus, the symptoms go away. Rather than you're trying to treat the symptoms, you're trying to treat the symptoms, which to me that's how it feels sometimes. If you're trying to stop porn, you're trying to stop porn, you're trying to just stop using porn. If you're not focusing on building the connection, it's probably not going to work. And then you're going to feel frustrated and even worse about yourself. Any comments on that section? And then I have a question about your personal journey.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, I think this ties into A frame we work with our men around. And that I got from one of my mentors. And he used to always talk about it. I mean, it's right here in kind of the title of what we're talking about. What you're also speaking to is the shift from stopping or quitting to this idea of actually outgrowing. And what he always framed that as. And certainly what I experienced is as our system gets larger, we don't need certain crutches anymore, so to speak. And so there's this thing where it can be like, I need to stop this specific behavior. And oftentimes that's really hard. If you're not changing the structure of your life around it, that's creating the conditions where you're turning towards that. So in this case, porn, right. And this idea of outgrowing really dovetails into everything. You just surfaced where my personal experience, right. The, the. The year I really transformed my relationship to orgasm and porn, the shift that ended up happening was my life got really full. I was putting my attention on really important things I was engaged in and passionate about, art projects we were leading, authentic relating. I was working out really powerfully. I was in a men's group, I was taking better care of myself, I was meditating. And essentially as my connection bucket got full, as my life got bigger, as the system of my life got bigger. It's not that I had to quit porn during that time. It's how I've described it to guys is like porn usage. In my case, this kind of goes for any addiction. It's like a trip switch of I hit a certain level of stress and my body does this. My nervous system wants to find ease and change its state. And my programming was. Wants to look at porn and jerk off. Now what started to change was not that I had to like stop that so much, but I changed my life. So I wasn't hitting that trigger switch nearly as often. And the experience I had a few months into this at one point was, oh, wow, isn't that interesting? It's not that I've had to create blockers or prevent myself. It's it just that whole program didn't even arise in my consciousness once in the last three weeks. It just wasn't in my awareness as something I needed or wanted to do because I had changed my life and filled it up more with connection. So I wasn't hitting that kind of isolated, lonely, really stressed out spot. And so I think this is one of the biggest shifts we can make to God as men because the, again, the idea of outgrowing is it just even gets beyond the moral, the right or wrong. It's just, okay, I no longer need this. Right. It's just a simple thing. It's like there was a time in I have to do. You know, we often do work with men around this where it's like, there's a time I did need it. Right. Paradoxically, there's a part of me that's quite grateful for the relationship I had with porn because it was my primary relationship for a number of years of my life, and it helped me navigate some very challenging times. Now, do I want it to be my primary relationship now? Hell no. Right? I've outgrown that. There's much better relationship available to me now in my marriage with my friends, with my kids, with my men's group. So it even starts to unwork some of that shame we were talking about when we just see it for what it is. And, you know, I'll just also say this is a big edge a lot of times for guys in marriages to start to communicate with their spouses.

Melanie Curtin: I think it's really important. What you said about the trip switch. I'm not sure I have that term correct, but yeah, that. That sense of pot boiling over or there's a certain level. Right. There's a certain level degree to which one can respond to the stresses that are occurring. And then after that point, I guess that's what the flip switch is. It's like, okay, well, there. There goes the valve. Now it's overflowing. And it's. It's too much for the system to handle. And that's when you. I think the way you phrased it was when my stress level gets too high. This is what my body does. And I would. I'm wondering if you can describe a little bit about your experience when you were back in this cycle of the sh. The shame spiral. Because what I. What I imagine is that there's. There's not a lot of compassion for oneself. Right. It's like, oh, I have so much compassion. I was really stressed out and my body. To do this thing. No, it's going to be a lot more harsh. It's. It's. Can you describe a little about what your experience was? And then let's talk about kind of the expansion effect that can happen when you can expand, how much your. Your system can take.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I mean, the, the, the first one in particular, like I was just talking about with this kind of neurology, you know, there's a meta term for this that was pretty big, like a decade ago called supernormal stimuli, which is. So our bodies evolved to be sensitive to certain types of stimulation and rewards because it meant good things in the natural world. But what always happened in the natural world was there was boundary and limit, right? There was actual natural confines to what something tasted like or how much sugar you had access to. Because back in the day, sugar came from fruit and it was only available on the tree or the bush for a certain period of time. It wasn't available on demand all the time. And it's the same thing with porn, right? I mean, until the creation of porn, right, Genghis Khan was probably the only person that had a lived body experience of that much access to women. Right? It's not something normal we were wired for. Used to be a rare, smaller, naturally limited thing, and now there's this endless variety in stimulation available to us that then Gets stacked, right? Because as it went global, the. The global body around arousal starts to go up and up and up and up, right? So you're not just seeing the most attractive woman in your village, you're seeing some of the most attractive human beings that ever been born based on, you know, all these cultural things that we've, you know, co created in that sense. But it starts to heighten things and it does create that distortion that a lot of guys do notice of. Like my expectations for what a woman's body should look like are kind of crazy. And you know, this goes for men too. In the Marvel and the cut superheroes and stuff, this is just something our culture is doing. But that, this is what I say when we're kind of outgunned, our biology actually doesn't have the antibodies in a lot of ways for instant access to on demand dopamine like you're talking about. And I totally remember, right. You know, part of I, when I, when I was at my most addicted, you could say it would be marathons, like hours. And part of it would be the, the joy of the hunt, so to speak. Like going and trying to find someone I was really like 10 out of a 10 attracted to. And you never knew was I going to find someone that night? Something new, something novel. And then the huge spike if I did. Right. And life can't really compare to that in a lot of ways, right. It's just not normal in that sense that we can really deal with. And then I think you started to name another thing too where it can be about regulation. But you know, to, to be fair to the other side, sometimes it, there can be relational elements in it. And two, two places I've seen this show up are. One, the thing about porn, particularly even like live porn, like, so there's another kind of subset of that many men we've worked with, have dealt with of like cam girls, where they're actually paying for live interaction and there's no vulnerability, right? You get exactly what you want and you can't be rejected. And for some of our men, that's the thing that is actually the most precious about that experience is there's no threat of rejection in that. And so they get to feel really safe in their sexuality. And that's pretty hard to recreate in the actual world where you might have to approach a stranger or approach your wife, who, depending on the time of day, just might not be open to sex. Right. Then might not be open to your Vance, even though she wants you. Right. There's there's always that threat of kind of rejection that can sting. And then also for some guys, I've also seen in particularly in that kind of more cam girl thing. It's a place where power dynamics can play. Out of nowhere else in my life do I feel comfortable being in the masculine directive. But here I tell her what to do and she does it. And I get to feel the power and joy of that actually, which again then links into. And there's no vulnerability attached, so it's really safe. But I get to actually feel the. I want you to do this. And then the, the, the woman does it. And that is rewarding to the masculine. You know, in a sense, part of all of us that, that, that has fled. So it is so, so powerful and challenging that the, the tension can be. Yeah. The level of arousal we can get now is often much higher than it ever was before. Right. And there is a process. There certainly has been a process. Was a process for me as I came off of it and kind of slowed down on masturbation was. I noticed I resens to holy crowd. Just like seeing a woman's bicep was like massive turn on, just a little bit of skin versus before it was like, no, I need full X rated nudity to get turned on. And I think that's a challenge for some of the men too. Which again just points to these kind of neurological patterns that get tied into our comfort in our reward system that, you know, these companies are more and more intentionally jacking into as well because they can make a lot of money off of it.

Melanie Curtin: I'm really glad you brought that up about. Well, you didn't use this word, but part of what I picked up from that was just a lot of compassion for that. Especially what you said about risk free, you know, like getting my need met around sexuality or connection without the risk of rejection. I think I really felt that more deeply in my heart somehow. What you just said of wow, I can really see how that would be intensely attractive if, if a man. Yeah. Doesn't feel empowered and doesn't feel like agency, I guess is the word. Right. That, that sense of agency. I can create connection. I can receive love. I am, you know, filled up in this way or I have that sense in my life. If that's empty and lacking, then. And it feels really risky. And if I've experienced rejection before, then I don't, I don't want to take that risk. But I still need this, I need this need to get met. So here's a place where I can have that need met. Oh. Just really felt that in my heart. Um, and then I wanted to bring in one brief thing which I may have shared on the podcast before, but I. I'll never forget it. I remember dating a man once or relating with a man once who said, yeah, porn is. One of the things I've noticed is that. And I think he struggled with premature ejaculation. He came really fast, and he said, you know, with porn, I can hit pause. I can hit pause in real life. And so there have been times when I've been with a woman and she's making certain noises or she's rolling her hips or she's doing a thing, and that's it. I'm done. I can't control the scenario in the same way that I can with visual porn. And I guess that's a bit different than live porn, what you're talking about. But that has always stayed with me of, oh, wow. I'd never thought about the level or the degree of control that is available with. With visual porn, and then how different that is from real life. And I also really liked what you said about re. Sensitization, because I've heard this from multiple men, particularly around arousal, ED and pe, but especially Ed, where they've said, yeah, I quit porn. You know, I stopped watching porn for 30 days, 60 days, but even 30 days. And they said my erection came back. And that's anecdotal. I've tried to find research on that, and it, frankly, is hard to study this stuff. I feel like we still live in such a prudish culture, and we're not. I don't think we're not. I think we're not studying the right things in the right way. And this is one of the things that we should be studying. And again, I think that tying it more to connection, fulfillment, love in the. In the person's life is critical. If you. If you're not talking about that, if you're not doing something around that, then you're missing the boat. Anyway, my point there is, I think, a tie between sexual function and porn use. And it's not easy to tease apart, because I don't think it's just about the dopamine. I think it's about a lot of other things too. You know, I think that when men do feel more filled up in their lives and they don't need porn to regulate as much, I do think that they often will feel less shame and just that, you know, the feeling and intensity of shame is not good. For the body. So I liked what you said about resensitization because, because I think one of the hopeful things in this whole conversation is that it actually doesn't have to take very long. You know, we've seen men, multiple men, come through the program and choose to stop using porn. And as a reminder, you know, they're building up connection in their lives. They're doing self reflection work through the program. They've got connection through the program. There's a lot going on. Often they're building and strengthening friendships within the program, outside the program, with friends and family in their lives. There's a lot going on. It's, it's, you know, like you said, they have a lot of other things that they're putting their attention on. And we've had multiple men who've stopped using porn within a few months. And the, the impact on them psychologically and, and physiologically is, is noticeable. You know, it's, it's not just one or the other. It's a holistic situation. So I really liked what you said there about resensitization because I do think that it's one of those things that it's like, oh man, I've lost my erection and I, you know, feel all this shame. So I'm not approaching women and I, you know, fill in the blank, Just this cascade effect of all of these negative things. But man, the turnaround can be fast. I mean, I, I've been stunned, I think, repeatedly in witnessing men come through the program, how quickly things can shift in their lives, not just sexually, but otherwise relationally and all the rest of it. And I'm not saying that it's a magic bullet, but I'm saying that, that for the men that are ready, that are ready, that come in, that are, that are doing it, and it's not even, it doesn't even take that much time. It's pretty drastic, the kinds of results that we see. And you know, even in that period that you were talking about, to me it sounded like that was over the course of months, not over the course of years that you went from pretty severely addicted to porn to not. Is that kind of true?

Jason Lange: Yeah, for me, you know, it was four months, I think really kind of changed my relationship to it. And for me, they went hand in hand. So porn use and masturbation went hand in hand. Right. So generally, if I was looking at porn, I was ending up ejaculating. And so the transformation was twofold, both in reclaiming a large amount of time back into my life and A certain type of fire and energy where I've kind of joked about, I've told this before, but you know, four months into that I had people coming up to me who had known me and were like, have you lost weight? And I hadn't lost any weight, had not lost any weight. But my presence was very different because I had more energy in my system. I just had more energy and fire. I wasn't kind of listless and tired, both from too frequent ejaculation and the fact that it would keep me up late at night and I wouldn't get as good as sleep. Right. I mean, even just from a sleep hygiene thing. Now it's like. So I was, wow, staring into a screen late into the night is so terrible for your sleep cycle, your melatonin. This is stuff I didn't know back then. But I was kind of doing the exact opposite of what I needed to do to then go get good rest. So I mean, there's it, you know, the other big thing you're mentioning, what clients see is the shame part of porn that often gets activated directly. This is anecdotal again. Right. But I'm pretty sure you could create a study because I certainly experienced it myself. Many men have reported it. We make way more eye contact when we're not using porn, just moving through the world. We're more open and available to connection. And what I have seen in my life and experienced is when I'm deep in porn or I come out of it like I'm more in myself and I'm looking down and I'm not wanting to connect. And many guys have commented on that. I'm just, yeah, I notice I'm not using porn and I'm just like, I'm looking a lot more people in the eye. Again, you know, not a magic bullet, but it does happen to a lot of people we work with.

Melanie Curtin: Yes, I think that's really significant because I, I think we've actually talked to multiple men who've, who've said, yeah, things like, I just feel so crappy about myself. Like, who would want me? Like I'm. There's this feeling of I'm disgusting. Who would want me? And there's a, yeah, self perpetuating kind of like, well then I'm not approaching. And so then I'm not. You know what I mean? And I'm not getting any action. And then it's, it's kind of this reinforcing thing. I want to go through the complete. This. We've, we already touched on some of these, these will just be reinforcing. But number three is porn becomes an emotional regulation tool. And psychologists say that many men haven't been socialized to deal with stress, shame, loneliness, boredom, rejection, conflict, grief, anxiety. And psychologists see porn functioning like a mood modifying behavior similar to food, alcohol, gaming. I feel something I don't want to feel. Porn numbs me, distracts me, soothes me. And then if you remove it, the person is often confronted with raw feelings with no coping tools. And I think that's really important because the raw feelings underneath do actually need to be processed. And I feel like that's part of what programs like us, ours do is they help men with that step. In other words, if you're trying to just take it away, you're trying to just take the crutch away. Well, think about taking an actual crutch away. The person still can't walk, there's something wrong with their leg, it's why they have the crutch. But if you're in a community, if you're in a support system, you're an ecosystem where you can process those things that are underneath. Well, now you're gonna heal and you're gonna get better and you're not gonna need the crutch anymore. So there's a fundamental aspect to that. Number four, the shame. And secrecy paradoxically reinforces the use. So shame leads to isolation, which leads to porn use, which leads to more shame, which leads to isolation, which leads to porn use. And psychologists call this a shame driven cycle. Shame spikes stress hormones, which increases the craving for soothing porn provides relief, shame returns. And men often don't talk about it, which strengthens that. Loop number five, escalation. Intolerance can occur. And they say this doesn't occur in everyone, but when it does, it does mimic other addiction mechanisms. And you were speaking to this Jason about, you know, there was a time when it was like the most triple X rated thing was what you needed in order to feel arousal. And then as you removed those stimuli, then little things became more arousing. Right. Just seeing someone's in a spaghetti strap top was like, oh, that's really hot. So they talked about the brain adapts, meaning it requires more intensity or novelty. And quitting then feels like an emotional crash or flatness, which can be encouraging, especially if you don't have support. You really need support for all of these things. You know, healing requires community. Number six, withdrawal isn't physical, like heroin, but it is real. Some clients report restlessness, anxiety, mood swings, brain flaw, brain fog, lower Libido temporarily. And the therapists that talk about this, talk about this as a dopamine recalibration phase and withdrawal from a coping mechanism. And you do get through it, right? We kind of know that from physical addictions as well. There's a period of intensity, you know, withdrawal, and then you. It's like a hump. And then you're through that hump. And again, having community, having mentors, having support, having a plan for that period is part of the deal. Like, you need that in order to actually do this. If you don't, you're probably going to relapse, you're going to feel like shit about yourself, you're going to be back in the cycle. You need support, you need a we, you need community, you need love in order to do this. Number seven, and this is the last one, is that habit triggers are everywhere. So porn cues, instant access, private device, boredom, late night stress, loneliness, all the things you were talking about. The brain will sometimes build a cue urge reward loop. So that means that interrupting it requires some amount of mindfulness, basically mindfulness and attention on what are the habit triggers and how do I make small shifts, gifts. But again, it's not only about that. That's part of the equation. But that larger picture that you were talking about in particular Jason, of my life was full. I had, you know, film art projects that I was working on, I was leading authentic relating. I was working on my diet and exercise. I was in a men's group. You know, you were doing a lot of relational things and bringing. And you had a lot that you were up to in your life. So there was a certain kind of, of fullness, such that you hadn't gone through your whole day feeling empty, lonely, disconnected and isolated. And then you got to nighttime and you were like, I need to sleep. I know I need to relax. I need to wind down from the tension that my body's holding from isolation and loneliness. Because our bodies do hold tension around loneliness. Then you're back in the cycle versus, wow, that was a full day. I had a lot of connection. I feel filled up. I don't even really. It's not, not. You're not going to bed in the same way. It's not the same state. And so the habit triggers are also different in that moment. So would love to hear your thoughts on that. And then there's a few things to, to start to wrap up.

Melanie Curtin: Yeah, I'm really glad that you said that, because that's the thing that I keep coming back to, is you can do this. You just can't do it alone. And what I've seen repeatedly, for most folks, whether it's porn or anything else, is that, again, there's this fixation on, well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna stop doing this thing. Fill in the blank. I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna stop. That's probably not gonna work. I can tell you from looking at the research, it's probably not gonna work. But if you bring in more connection and support and community around you, if there's a we. If there's a we, then your chances of success skyrocket. I mean, it's drastic. So I really appreciate what you. I also kind of want to point out that, you know, you. You. You said this before. I don't know if you said it explicitly on the podcast, but the program that we run, the group program that we run, Pillars of Presence, is based on what you wish you'd had, right? You wished you'd had coaching and community. And what's the third C. I'm forgetting.

Jason Lange: Yeah. Here's how I break it down for guys, right? It's. It's. It's three things. It's a course, its community, and its coaching. And so the course is really the training part. And honestly, guys, that's the easy part. These days. You can listen to what you have, like, over 300 episodes or something here. There is plenty of training. All the information you could ever want is out there. That part is easier than ever. Maybe the biggest challenge with that now is when you have unlimited access to information. It's like, where do I start? I just don't know where to start. So our course gives you somewhere to start. We made the choice, start here, and you're going to go here, here, and here. So sometimes that alone is liberating for guys. So there's the training and educational piece, but then there's the coaching. Right. Of accountability, support, co regulation they get from you and I, they get to work privately with both of us. And you know, in my case, I, I've walked the journey I'm happy to tell you about again, this is what I wish I had. Doesn't mean it's the only way. This is what worked for me. Come along for the right ride, right? And then community, the part that's way beyond you or I, that is this own self generating thing now with our hundreds of graduates of just men who are from very different walks of life but share such deep similarity underneath and just that feeling of, oh, I'm not the only one here, I could talk about anything. Other guys have been through this. In fact, the thing I'm struggling with right now, here's four other guys on the other side of the of it. And wow, they're not bullshitting us on the podcast. Like I'm actually talking to a man who did the thing and he feels differently and he's experiencing his life differently. And that is, you know, that's the magic part, I'd say even more than anything else. And it's the guys in our community that bring each other that.

Melanie Curtin: And I really want to point out the difference between the way that our culture often represents healing and it, it. I don't know about any of you listening, but it really annoys me that one of the only healing modalities we see in TV and movies is one on one talk thera, which has its uses and values and has its limitations and it's like the only thing we really see. I mean sometimes you'll see group therapy included. But I really want to emphasize what you just said, which is the course, the community and the, and the connection and, or the coaching in the community. I'm getting it wrong. But basically the community aspect, I want to come back to that because I really want to emphasize how much we live in a culture that wants to separate boys and men from each other. We live in a culture where when you hit teenage tweenhood, tweens and teens, you are, you are, you are required to compete and to isolate in order to be masculine. Like that is the man box. Don't be soft, don't be weak, don't be gentle, don't be kind, don't be compassionate, don't be understanding, don't hold a man's hand, don't, you know, like show up for him in a real way as a real friend. There are like certain parameters when that's the case. But I kind of want to emphasize how critical it is this component around healing in a group, and particularly a group of men. I cannot tell you how many of our men are survivors of bullying and having a safe place for men to come together. I mean, I honestly think at this point, more boys are bullied than aren't bullied. Bullied, right. I think the rates are over half if you actually go through a boy's entire life. Right. You know, from from zero through kindergarten through elementary school, through middle school, through high school, through college. It's. It's the culture. The culture is so harsh with men and that kind of healing. There's something magical that happens in that. I, I cannot explain it, and it seems weird that it would be associated with, you know, how do I quit porn? But I'm telling you that it is, is. There was something about connection with other men, feeling safe with other men, feeling supported, feeling that sense of brotherhood and trust that a lot of men have never had before. We have lots of men in our program who are like, wow, I've never told anyone this. I've never heard a man share what this man just shared. I've never been in a space like this and I, I think that speaks to the larger culture and how, how fucked up it is. You know, I'd really like to see that change. And in the meantime, these spaces are really important and it's the kind of thing that isn't available in a one on one space. It's just not available in a one on one therapeutic healing space. Which is part of why I would say that we constructed what we offer in the way that we did that. It does include one on one support, but it also really includes the group and the group is featured. And that sense of safety is really important to us. So if you are interested in our work, you can go to Evolutionary Men Apply. If you feel ready, if you feel the call, if you want your life to be different, you know, we're starting to wrap up 2025, moving into 2026. Your life can be different. You can do this. You just can't do it alone. So reach out if you're interested and if you want to get me, you can get me@dearmen podcastmail.com.