108: Why Positive Thinking Isn’t Enough to Beat Porn Addiction—And What Works Instead

When I was stuck in porn addiction, I kept hearing the same advice: “Just be more positive. Believe in yourself. Visualize your freedom.” But here’s the problem—positive thinking alone doesn’t heal porn addiction. In fact, it often makes things worse.

In this episode, I dive deep into the psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality of why forcing yourself to “just think positive” can actually increase shame, suppress your real emotions, and fuel relapse. We’ll talk about the trap of toxic positivity, the failure of the “law of attraction” in recovery, and why pretending to be fine when you’re hurting only keeps you stuck in the cycle of cravings.

Instead, I’ll show you a mindset shift that actually works: facing your pain head-on, learning to process negative thoughts and emotions honestly, and using practical tools to rewire your brain for long-term recovery. You’ll discover why the real solution isn’t blind positivity—it’s courageous presence.

We’ll cover:

• The psychology of toxic positivity and why suppressing pain drives porn use
• The neuroscience of stress, dopamine, and why fake positivity backfires
• The spiritual truth that freedom comes not from escaping pain, but transforming it
• A simple recovery exercise to ground yourself in reality and break free from cravings

If you’ve ever felt frustrated that positive thinking isn’t working—or worse, that it’s made you feel more ashamed—this episode will help you see the path forward with clarity and hope.

Porn recovery isn’t about “positive vibes only.” It’s about building the strength to face reality with courage and rewire your mind for freedom.

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Recommended Episodes: 

How Negative Thinking Fuels Porn Addiction

The Subtle Lies that Keep You Relapsing

Addiction, Identity, and the Illusion of Brokenness (with Jason Shiers)

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Transcript

Jake Kastleman (00:13.836)
If all it took to recover from porn addiction was positive thinking, you wouldn't be listening to this right now. You could just say, I'm free, I'm healed, I'm strong, and boom, problem solved. But if you've ever tried that approach, you know it doesn't work that way. In fact, for a lot of people, forcing themselves to just be positive backfires.

You end up feeling like a failure because you can't stay positive all the time, or you believe the lie that if you still have cravings, it must mean you don't have enough faith, willpower, or belief in yourself. In this episode, I'm going to explain why positive thinking alone can't free you from porn addiction. We'll look at the psychology, the neuroscience, and the spirituality behind why it fails. And then,

I'll show you what actually works instead. Before we dive in, remember to follow the podcast, tap the notification bell, and leave a quick rating so others who are searching for help can find this show. And if you wanna go deeper, you can grab my free ebook and workshop at nomordesire.com on the homepage. They're packed with the practical steps I wish I'd had when I started recovery. Now, let's get into it.

Jake Kastleman (01:43.71)
Stop.

Jake Kastleman (01:56.29)
First off, want to apologize. I do have a cold right now, so I'm doing my best to speak clearly and I'll try not to snort or sniff too much into the microphone. The first thing that I want to talk about is last week's episode, I did talk about negative thinking and how it can be directly intertwined with addiction. Now, because of feedback that I got, I really tried to make it clear that I wasn't saying positive

positivity is the answer to addiction recovery. So I try to make that really clear in that episode that positive thinking can be an excellent tool, but I want to address in this episode why positivity, trying to be really fixated on positivity can actually hinder our recovery and more details about that, how that works and really the nuance that we're going for in utilizing positive thinking.

but also not leaning into toxic positivity and much, much more. So we're gonna dig into that. We'll dig into practical solutions, reflection questions, et cetera, all the good stuff. So starting there, forced positivity often leads to shame. It leads to denial. It leads to inaction. I wanna define toxic positivity, because this is something that a lot of us are not really familiar with.

So toxic positivity is the belief that you should focus only on positive emotions and suppress anything negative. This can sound noble and it goes right along with the law of attraction type of movement that's gone on over the last couple of decades. In practice though,

This teaches you to ignore real pain instead of healing it. And the only way to actually overcome addiction is to learn how to relate to and feel painful emotion. Feel painful emotion. That's a very deliberate word I've just inserted there. Not to know it logically or in your mind, but to feel it emotionally. That's why with my clients, we do emotional mindfulness. We do embodiment of emotion. I teach people.

Jake Kastleman (04:15.36)
one-on-one how to process through painful motion, hold space for it and a healthy way of being present with it and letting it work through you. And there are specific ways we can do that, many of which we are just not taught in today's Western society. So we need to feel painful motion and sensation in an effective, healthy way. And to share a bit about my personal life, when I first overcame

pornography addiction, I spent a few years, maybe two to three years in a toxic positivity mindset. I didn't realize it was that way then. I just thought that I was trying to do the right thing and really being very, positive, being very grateful, always looking on the bright side, framing everything with a silver lining, framing everything from a positive mindset. I thought that I was being proactive. I thought that I was taking initiative.

thought that I was being very vigilant in this what I saw back then as a recovery mindset. If you didn't catch it from the way I just posed that, I was very, wrong. And here's how I was wrong. Today, I utilize gratitude. I utilize positive thinking. I focus a lot on gratitude and good outcomes for other people. All day long, I'm rechecking in with that and resetting my intentions through prayer.

through meditation, gratitude and good outcomes for others. But I also do not shy away from painful emotions like anger or cravings for, for me at this point, cravings for masturbation, something that I still experience in life, obviously. Pretty rare for me to experience a craving for pornography unless something very...

Drastic happens in my life like a tragedy or something that's extremely stressful But cravings for masturbation these things can come up and it's not the craving that's the issue It's how I relate to it and so in the past I would just use utilize gratitude and positive thinking and distracting myself with you know focusing on being productive being a being positive and What that led to was a death grip on recovery I

Jake Kastleman (06:39.138)
death gripped recovery. was, I was obsessive about always staying positive. That made me a very difficult person to relate to and a very difficult person for my wife to interact with because when she would express fear or negativity or complaining or anger or any other kind of emotion that's painful, I would shy away from it. I'd be, I would

try to control and kind of push back like, well, why don't you think about it this way? Or like, why don't you see it this way instead? Instead of thinking about it negatively, maybe you could see it positively like this. And she would become resentful because of that, understandably so, because she wasn't being heard or understood. And this led to a degrading of trust in our relationship. When it comes to both our external and internal relationships, trust is

Fundamental and we all know this But what does it take to trust? To trust we we have to be able to relate to both joyful and painful emotion in ourselves and others We have to hold space for and listen to it and we also need to believe in the goodness at the core of each other's intentions and the goodness in the core of every part of me I have to believe in that

And again, this is one of the main things that I work on my clients with one-on-one is how to really get in touch with, because there are steps we follow. I follow a formula that comes in an unlimited number of forms, but there's a structure to it of how do I break down and relate to painful emotions so that I can see the core goodness underneath. If I want to recover, I need to gain this self-understanding.

And if I'm constantly fixated on positivity, I cannot relate to painful emotion. I cannot hold space for discomfort. And for me, I actually became addicted to gratitude, addicted to positivity, addicted to this proactive mindset of needing to always look on the bright side. I had replaced my addiction to porn with an addiction to positive thinking. This can sound so bizarre to us.

Jake Kastleman (09:00.13)
But it was yet another escape mechanism that I was utilizing to avoid pain, avoid fear, avoid shame, avoid sadness. I cannot avoid these things. I am going to feel anger. I'm going to feel shame. I'm going to feel grief or sadness. I'm going to feel fear. These are part of everyday life. And when I try to hide from them or suppress them, they just stay stuck. These painful emotions just stay there and then they run my life.

Whereas if I'm willing to be deeply self-aware, to be present with these painful emotions, then I can process through them. And again, there's a framework that we can use for that. So why does this backfire in recovery? When you tell yourself, I'm fine, but deep down you're not, you create internal incongruence.

what I feel inside versus what I'm saying on the outside. There's dissonance between these. And my subconscious knows that I'm avoiding something important. So the tension builds and builds and builds inside of me. It may come out as anger. It may come out as cravings. It may come out as other addictions. Maybe I'm free of porn, but maybe I'm now acting out with food or I'm acting out with TV. I'm acting out with video games. I'm acting out with shopping or again with, you know, being being addicted to a certain mindset.

This is not the answer. We still haven't changed to a recovery mindset. A recovery mindset embraces both joy and pain. So the tension building, an example of this would be a man has an urge and he tells himself, I'm not even tempted. I'm not even tempted just to sound positive, right? I'll just change reality. I'll just look at it a different way.

but the unacknowledged craving grows and grows in the background until it eventually wins. A better way of going about this would be to fully acknowledge and turn your full focus and attention to the part of you that's feeding you the craving and to understand what its messages are and why it's feeding you that craving. Okay, why is this coming up? And underneath, you're always gonna find some kind of stressor in your life as to why that is.

Jake Kastleman (11:22.968)
So to speak to this specifically from a parts work perspective, forced positivity is often a manager part of you, a part that seeks for control in life, trying to control your system by silencing firefighter parts of you. Firefighter parts are parts that are about, well, they're parts that get in a role of escape or comforting or fantasy. Ultimately not who those parts are, but that's the role they take on.

But these manager parts try to silence that, control the firefighters, control the exiles. And exiles would be parts of you that are really suppressed. They're really down deep in your system. They carry unconscious pain, fear, shame, grief. And when we don't take the time to get in touch with that, just, again, it just runs our lives.

Suppressed exiles, the hurting burden parts don't just vanish. They get louder until they're heard. And so you're going to see these, these emotions pop up in your life. These could come out as depression. They could come out as anxiety. They could come out as symptoms of ADD. And as I use all these terms or these labels that we utilize in current modern psychology, which I find them insufficient to really describe how the mind works and what's behind these.

I'm not I want it to be understood. There are multiple pillars of wellness Genetics play into this your neurology plays into this your biology plays into this. This is not just all an emotional thing, but the emotional end when I do not Process through these emotions through prayer through meditation through journaling on a daily basis When I don't actually get in touch with the pain and express it in other words confess it as it said in a religious term, but

within the psychology field, it's emotional processing, right? Same exact principles in both those scenarios. And when I say confession, mean confession to God, confession to myself, confession to another person, getting deeply in touch with emotion, the what and the why behind emotion. When I don't do that, these parts, they will show up in really destructive ways in my life. And I'll get this surge of painful emotion.

Jake Kastleman (13:45.806)
It's a really intense emotion. I'm like, where did that come from? Like, why do I feel all the shame all of sudden? It's always there. It's just buried. So you have to work through it utilizing this daily processing of emotion. So healing comes from listening to hurting parts, not from pure positivity or this willpower, this can-do mindset. Those are great tools as additions, but we have to listen.

to the hurting parts of ourselves, not pretending that they aren't there. And it is important to note that firefighter parts of you, parts that can point you to addictive behavior, want to be acknowledged. Think of these parts like a signal. This is like a signal, right? A part of you is saying something's wrong, I'm trying to fix it, utilizing the addiction. This part is trying to get your attention, is really what you want to think of it like. It's a signal, it's a sign.

It's not a bad part of you that's terrible and trying to destroy your life. It's actively trying to help you. It's just doing so in a way that is causing the problem. It's trying to fix.

So I want to talk a bit about the law of attraction trap that we can get into. Many of us are told if you just visualize freedom hard enough, then it will happen. Just visualize it. Just believe. Believe in yourself. I remember when I would listen to these speeches of people who would talk about positivity and the law of attraction and just believing in yourself and just visualizing the life you want, I would feel so ashamed because I would think,

man, I must just have really little faith. I must just not be good enough. And I would focus and focus and believe and visualize my life as I wanted it and I could never advance forward. I would always get stuck. I would fall short. And it really just led to a worsening of my life. So when cravings or triggers would hit me, I would think I must not be believing hard enough. This just compounds the shame.

Jake Kastleman (15:52.504)
So the results of this can be you start thinking recoveries about magical thinking, not about consistent action. You also are shocked when all your efforts to think positively don't yield the craving free life that you expected. And of course they don't. Look, I'm 10 years into sobriety from porn and I still crave masturbation sometimes every day.

at some point during the day, and this is shifting and continuing to change for me, so who knows what it'll look like within a year or two, but I experienced this, and what's important is that I learned how to relate to the feeling, how to see it, how to understand it, rather than fighting it or denying it or beating myself up for feeling it, really learning how to relate to it in a loving way. So you can't think your way out of pain that you haven't faced.

Positivity is powerful, but only when it's built on truth. I constantly talk about truth and love, things that can sound very cliche, but in order to love yourself, you have to be present with both painful and joyful emotion. You cannot just choose one over the other, value one over the other. Painful emotion is there as a gift to help teach you something if you know how to approach it and be with it.

And that's a skill that we can all gain. Not one that I thought I could gain in the past. I had no clue that you could do that, but we can through practices of parts work, emotional mindfulness, embodiment. Recovery is, is founded on being true to yourself, to others, to God. It's founded on principles of confession, bringing our painful emotions to the surface so we can understand them deeply, laying them at the feet of God, as we will say in a religious context, right? Surrendering them.

In other words, seeing them as they are, accepting them, finding compassion for the perspectives and feelings of different parts of myself.

Jake Kastleman (17:56.642)
So now I want to talk about the neuroscience perception of all of this. Why positive thinking alone doesn't rewire the brain? The brain changes through emotionally charged repetition plus aligned action, not just happy thoughts. So neuroplasticity requires experience. Neuroplasticity, what does that mean? The brain's ability to change and rewire. You can actually form new habits, form completely new neural networks in your brain.

I've done this, many people have done this, it's totally possible to change. So thinking a thought does begin to strengthen neural pathways, but the brain rewires it best when the thought is paired with a felt emotional state and a new behavior. This is why I emphasize emotional mindfulness and emotional embodiment so heavily with my clients. It trains you to dive into painful emotion and learn how to relate to it without running or trying to control it.

Neither escape nor control. There is a middle path. There is a straight and narrow path in the center that we follow. see, straight and narrow path would be a Christian perspective. The middle way would be a Buddhist perspective. There are many philosophies in many different faiths and religions that have talked about this, how this is done. Neither control nor escape. Instead, self-awareness. That's the center path. Self-awareness. So an example would be

Thinking if you're thinking I'm confident thinking I'm confident won't create confidence unless you also take confident actions and you learn Excuse me. You learn how to admit when you don't feel confident and you can find self-acceptance and act through this feeling of uncertainty You can come to accept yourself in feeling that

and how to bring acceptance and compassion to the feeling. Right? And then, once you're able to do that, then try to bring in some of the positivity, the gratitude, focusing on good outcomes for others. These are all excellent tools, but don't ignore the underlying feeling. Get to the what and why behind it, and then utilize that positive thinking. It's great. And so if you affirm, again,

Jake Kastleman (20:22.73)
If you affirm I'm free of porn while your brain's reward circuits are still wired to crave it, the mismatch creates cognitive dissonance. So cognitive dissonance can trigger more stress hormones, which ironically increases cravings. Why? Because you're not being authentic. If you don't address the painful emotion, if you don't get in touch with it, you're not being authentic or true to yourself. You don't trust yourself. Parts of you don't trust you.

It sounds a little abstract or a little strange. But once you start experiencing this internally, you can start to see it. You're out of alignment with yourself in this case. And when that happens, who you are versus what is actually happening are not aligned. And this necessarily leads to tension between parts of you. Because one part of you says, I'm not OK. And you say, shh, quiet. Another part of you says, shh, you are OK. You're fine. You're fine. Right?

And this can then lead to craving and relapse because another part shows up and it's like, there is way too much pressure in here, inauthenticity, there's no trust. And I don't feel OK. And we're not dealing with painful emotion below the surface. So I am going to bring us to a behavior that will help soothe us and make us feel better, hence porn addiction. So the other thing I want to talk about is dopamine.

We always want to address this, dopamine is highly involved with all addictions. Positive thinking can give a temporary dopamine bump, but without action it fades quickly. Your brain still defaults to the most familiar high reward habit of porn eventually. But this also gives some explanation to why I could become addicted to positive thinking and to gratitude.

As long as I'm utilizing it as an escape from painful motion, I'm getting dopamine hits and I became addicted to that higher effort, but nonetheless escaping kinds of of behavior. Really quite amazing how the brain works. So recovery requires interrupting and replacing this habit loop. So there's a habit loop connection. We have a cue, we have a craving, we have a behavior, we have a

Jake Kastleman (22:45.418)
This is a loop cue craving behavior reward cue craving behavior reward, right? Positive thinking only addresses the craving moment. It doesn't address the cue or or replacement behavior So I need to get back to what was the original emotion or the thing that was hard for me? You got to look at that and then you can use replacement behaviors like like positive thinking that's great or like

going out and connecting with people, doing things that bring joy to your life. But you don't ignore the painful motion. Again, journaling, prayer, meditation, these are all ways to get in touch with painful motion. Write about it, express it, understand it. Do not ignore it. Your brain doesn't change because you believe hard enough. It changes because you experience something different enough, often enough, for the brain to rewire. So combining emotional mindfulness

moving through painful emotion with action as well to pursue new habits one small step at a time. This is key, right? Now I want to address some things from a spiritual perspective to kind of finish out here and then I'm going to give you applied practices and reflection questions. The true hope is not about escaping reality. It's about engaging true hope rather

Is not about escaping reality. It's about engaging with it from a grounded values driven place So faith right faith is not just the belief this belief that's passive and everything's going to work out just because I believe it will It's active in every spiritual tradition worth its salt Faith is coupled with aligned works hope Without engagement isn't hope its avoidance. Just thinking positive is not enough and it can create

cognitive dissonance. So some use positivity as a spiritual bypass. If I just claim victory, I won't have to deal with my cravings. They think, you know, I'll just think positively. I'll just believe one of the ways that we can get into this is we can say, well, it's God's will or there's a purpose behind this or this is happening for a reason. I understand that perspective. I played by it for a really long time. My opinion, my belief is that we are agents.

Jake Kastleman (25:10.176)
Our life is up to us. Our path is up to us. And that doesn't mean that I need to be really hard on myself and hate myself for not being exactly where I want to be. But this belief of it's just God's will or, you know, it must not be meant for me or those types of feelings are ways to try to comfort ourselves. There are ways to try to escape or ways to try to make certain about the future like God has it all in his hands. Instead, I would I would suggest

Your life is yours. You are an agent. You are the one that carves your own path and you can rely on God every single moment along the way to do the most good and to bring about the most good for the people around you. But God is not taking your agency. It's the thing that he values more than anything else. He wants you to be able to progress and to make something great out of your life. And it's up to you to do that. It is not up to him. So

this spiritual bypassing, this positive thinking of just believing like God's going to take care of all of it doesn't actually doesn't claim agency. And how does this fit in with surrender? Surrender, I believe, is about acceptance of both joy and pain. It's about finding presence with an awareness of both joy and pain, being fully in the moment to experience these things that are both comfortable and uncomfortable.

and to give my life over to truth and love. In other words, in my faith tradition, to give myself over to Christ, right? He stands for truth and love in all things. And that is to give my will, the will of the ego or the will of parts of me as IFS teaches, parts of me over to the higher self that is in connection with Christ or in connection with higher power. Truth, love, right? That is the surrender, right?

anything I feel, anything I go through, I don't associate my identity with what emotion and thoughts say. Instead, I am an agent and I am choosing the path of truth and love. I'm surrendering to that path that God has ordained as the way to the greatest joy.

Jake Kastleman (27:32.45)
That is much different than what certain parts of me will say. They will seek for escape, will seek for control, they will seek for pleasure, accomplishments and accolades that would define my worth and instead surrendering up my identity to say I am none of these things, these are all parts of me and they're good parts of me, but who I am transcends this. I'm a creation of God, I'm a child of God and

My worth like who I am in essence is this awareness. It's this it's spirit and so The surrender comes in in giving up those labels of myself Cravings are When it comes to cravings we can really misunderstand we try to you know I said in a previous I've said in previous episodes We say get the hence Satan to cravings. This is not the approach

Cravings are an invitation to understand what part of you is in pain, not proof that you're failing. It's not that you're evil or bad. In this way, they're a gift, they're an opportunity. They feel like a pretty sucky gift, no doubt, they are uncomfortable. But cravings are just a signal to us, a part trying to get our attention.

and triggers. I just recently finished Jenna Ramirez Moe's book Altogether You. I recommend it if you're Christian, especially it's a great way of giving you some basics on IFS and parts work. Triggers are our tor-mentors. So we say it's tormenting me. But if we take that word, Jenna says, and more specifically, Dr. Richard Schwartz says tor-mentors, as in

It's a mentor for me. Triggers are actually an opportunity to grow and to develop self-understanding. It's a mentor for me if I will treat it as a spiritual practice, as an opportunity to grow. So spiritual hope says I'm more than my addiction and then proves it through action. The belief that you are not defined by your actions, you have a deeper identity, then motivates you to take better actions because you believe you are worthy of a better life.

Jake Kastleman (30:00.43)
And that's a hard thing to grasp without living it. It cannot be explained so much as experienced. And hopefully you've had an experience like this in your life where you felt that worthiness and then you act according to it. God or your higher power can't work through a mask that you keep wearing. He works through the real honest you. And so that requires getting deeply in touch with emotion, both joyful and painful, and seeing what is underneath it.

So I'm starting to leak from my nose here with my cold. So we're going to do our best to get to these applied exercises. I want to combine self-awareness, acceptance, and aligned action. And again, you can head to my blog to get an exact outline of each of these. The link to the blog will be in the show notes. Step one, you want to acknowledge reality without judgment. An example would be I'm feeling strong cravings right now.

This honesty keeps you in touch with what's real. So acknowledge reality without judgment. And if part of you does judge reality of what you're feeling, whether it be cravings or sadness or fear, whatever it might be, then turn toward that judgmental part and get to know what it's trying to do for you. Is it trying to help you be more productive, more disciplined, stronger, more resilient?

Does it believe that you should be more structured, more structured, more ambitious, right? And this is getting in the way and it's telling you don't feel these weak feelings, just go about doing. It's a valuable part of you, but it does not have the whole truth. Okay, it doesn't see things in a balanced way, but it does have its perspective and that's a part of you that can be honored. So acknowledge reality without judgment. Step two, you want to listen to the pain. Okay, so this is...

Four steps, acknowledge reality, listen to the pain, identify what part of you is triggered, fear, shame, loneliness, sadness, sit with it like a friend rather than trying to drown it in forced positivity. And then step three, take aligned action, even a small recovery aligned choice, calling a friend, going for a walk, doing some pushups, doing a short meditation, reflecting on your emotions, journaling. This reinforces

Jake Kastleman (32:25.39)
the identity of someone who's healing. That's you. You want to become that man. And then step four, use gratitude as a directional tool. So you've walked through these steps. Now, gratitude, which is one of the best expressions of positivity, this comes in. Gratitude shifts attention from self-protection to service and connection. It's not pretending everything is great. It's anchoring in what is good.

while you address what's hard, right? So those are your four steps. And then a few reflection questions. Number one, have you ever tried to think positive your way through cravings? What happened? Number two, what emotions do you tend to avoid by telling yourself, I'm fine? And number three, in what area of your recovery would you replace I should feel with here's what's real right now?

Not venting, by the way, that is very different than self-awareness and witnessing emotion. Pulling back and witnessing emotion is to understand yourself without identifying with emotion. If you identify with emotion, you express it from a place of venting and this doesn't heal, it actually hurts you. So you wanna pull back to witness, feel with parts of you, be with them for a while, understand and seek for deeper connection within yourself.

So positive thinking isn't bad, it's just incomplete. It's like painting over a moldy wall without fixing the leak underneath. The real work is about getting to the root, being honest about what's there, and taking actions that align with your deepest values. In the next episode, we'll talk about what kind of mindset actually fuels long-term recovery. We've talked a lot about it, but I'll add some more details.

One that's rooted in gratitude and focusing on good outcomes for others, which I've mentioned and I'll go more into more depth on this. This is the shift that pulls you out of the self-protection cycle and into a life of purpose. So please follow this podcast, hit the bell to make sure you are updated when that episode launches. And if you want to get a breakdown of everything that I've talked about in today's episode, what I talked about in the previous episode and what I'll be talking about in following episodes, head to

Jake Kastleman (34:46.712)
the the blog lays this all out. It gives you applied exercises. gives you the reflection questions. You can find the one for this episode in the show notes. God bless and much love, my friend.