Josh S - Illusion

In this episode, I’m joined by Josh Shay.

Josh is a coach who works with pornography addiction and the fallout that comes with it. Before that, he was what most people would call high functioning. Successful, visible, respected. All while hiding alcoholism and a porn addiction that was running his life underneath it.

This conversation sits inside illusion, validation, and what it costs to hold everything together.

Josh speaks about being an overachiever who could perform at a high level while everything underneath was falling apart. The energy it took just to maintain the image. To keep people seeing what he wanted them to see while hiding what was actually going on.

What stood out in this one is how much of his identity was built on external validation. Awards, recognition, status. Not because he was arrogant, but because he needed it to feel like he was enough. And how quickly that falls apart when the addiction catches up.

We go into the moment where everything collapsed. Losing his role, being confronted by the people around him, and having to make a decision. Keep going the way he was going or face what was actually there.

From there, the conversation moves into responsibility.

Not just stopping the behaviour.
Understanding how you got there in the first place.

Because putting something down is one thing.
Seeing why you needed it is something else entirely.

We also talk about ego.

How easy it is to chase attention.
How easy it is to build a version of yourself that looks good from the outside.
And how different it feels to step away from that and live a quieter life that is actually aligned.

This one is honest.

Not about perfection.
Not about having it all sorted.

About what it takes to go from performing your life to actually living it.

The question Josh leaves for the next guest is this.

What does it mean when something is done out of love and exists beyond good and evil?

It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME. In Session with a Psychotherapist
Hosted by Chad Taylor. Author of It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME

No tips.
No fixing.
Just real conversations.

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Email- chadtaylorpsychotherapy@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

I'm Chad Taylor, psychotherapist, author of It's You, Oh Fuck It's Me. No tips, no Fixing, just real conversations. Today I've got Josh Shay with me. So Josh, who the fuck are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Yeah. Thank you for having me here, Chad. It's nice to talk to you. I am a dude who was born not afraid to talk about my shortcomings. And in 2026, when we're recording this, if one of your shortcomings was pornography addiction, a lot of people want to talk to you because a lot of people are dealing with it, yet nobody wants to talk about it. I was born in the northeast part of the United States by 12 years old. After my cousin showed me hardcore pornography, I was quickly a porn addict. Two years later, after my first drink, I was an alcoholic. I didn't learn till years later that these were trauma responses to things that had happened to me when I was younger. But I was one of those addicts who was an overachiever. I was always top of my class. I was always the one who was promoted. I right up until everything crashed when I was 37 years old, I was on my city council as a local politician. I had created a film festival for this part of the country that one of the major magazines for movie making called one of the 25 coolest. I also created and was the editor of the largest lifestyle magazine in this region of my state here in the U.S. So I was a porn addict and an alcoholic the entire time. Rarely did a day go by where I didn't engage in either, often too much of either or both, but I was what we call a functional addict if there is such a thing. I call myself more of an illusionist. I was able to tell you what you needed to hear, what you wanted to hear, and I could wave my hands around over here while meanwhile you're not paying attention to what I'm really doing off to the side, which is just trying to keep life together. And I remember very shortly before it all crashed, there was a dentist in our town who said to me, I can't believe how much you do. You've got this film festival, you're a politician, you run this magazine, you're a father, you're a husband. Where do you find the time for it all? And I said to him something that still 15 years later reverberates with me. I said, Carl, that was his name. I said, Carl, if you had any idea that half of my energy goes just to holding my shit together, you would be surprised how much more I actually could do in life if my energy wasn't spent trying to hold my shit together. And to me, that was kind of in one of those things where it's like, yeah, I'm I'm in trouble. I I know I'm in trouble. I've been in trouble for years, but I just kept going and going and going until in 2013, I made the stupid decision to pull myself off of my medication for bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with 30 years ago. But I decided that uh the medicine was like a restrictor plate on a race car. It was holding me back. And my company had started to fail. So I pulled myself off my meds, telling myself, well, I'll tap into my creativity, I'll tap into my manic energy, I'll sleep less, I'll have outside the box ideas. I'm gonna save this company and bring it back to where it was. Well, after about two weeks and the meds getting out of my system, my alcoholism probably tripled, and my porn consumption probably doubled. And I lived that way, slowly going downhill for eight or nine months, until finally the two co-owners of the business approached me and said, We can see the numbers, and you'll remain an owner, but you're fired. And by the way, get your drinking issue checked out. Because everybody knew I was an alcoholic. That's not easy to hide. It's very easy to hide being a porn addict. And the day after I was fired, my family and some friends and a few others held a makeshift intervention. I really don't remember very much of it, but I remember there was a moment where it dawned on me that I was either gonna have to choose getting well and rebuilding relationships with my wife, my kids, my parents, my friends, or I could go away and start a new life as the five-star alcoholic and five-star porn addict I was. But I knew I was sick at that point. Eight, nine months without my meds, losing my job. I was sleeping about three hours at night tops, my hygiene had gone to hell. It was not a good scene. And I had that moment where I said, you know, these are the people who stood by me. These are the people who've always been on my side, these are the people trying to help me. If I go the other way, I'm probably going to die. And I didn't want to be the father who only saw his kids every other weekend or on certain holidays. I didn't want to be a divorced guy because I really liked my wife a lot. And I just knew, okay, it's time to go and get my shit together. While that sounded easy enough to say, sitting here with you now, almost 12 years later, boy, was it a lot of work. If I knew how much work it was going to be to get to this point, I don't know that I would have begun climbing that mountain. I might have just said, well, I'll go, I'll head west and drink myself to death. I'm so glad I took this journey. I'm so glad I'm here. I'm so glad I'm now a coach who gets to help other people on a daily basis in a way that there was no coaches when I was trying to do this, or I was recognizing I had a problem. And now instead of trying to enable my community to put me up on a pedestal, I'm not even part of my community anymore. I help people deal with pornography, I help their partners deal with the trauma and fallout of learning that their partner is an addict and how to navigate it. And it's honestly the happiest I've ever been. And where can people find you? Then this crazy Australian guy asked me to come on his podcast. I mean, here we are.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

And where can people find you, Josh? If anyone's liked what they've heard there and thinks that they'd like to reach out, or I know you're also an author, where can they find you to get everything about me is right on my website.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

It'll take you to my books, it'll take you to my social media, it'll take you to everything. Scheduling with me if you're interested in that is thatcorncoach.com. Corn like the vegetable, because social media, while it'll let plenty of nudity go through, while it'll let plenty of sexually triggering images go through, it will not let the written word porn go through. Okay. So the the the uh guide word is porn.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Okay, and I'll link that in the show notes for anybody that's the red skip here. I've got on. So I do a thing on this podcast where the last guest leaves something for the next guest, a statement, a question, something that I hit him with after the intro. And the last guest I had on was Renee. Renee was a psychotherapist that I studied with at uni a lot of years ago. So Renee left. What question would you most often ask yourself if your consideration was self-honouring?

SPEAKER_01 9:01

If my consideration was self-what?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Self-honouring. What happens when you hear that?

SPEAKER_01 9:10

When I hear that, I actually recoil a little. Because and I'll tell you that, I have a box in my garage that is full of awards that I've won. Best young entrepreneur, top ten in my state for young business people, the the main press association. I've won so many awards that I know part of what I did when I was young was chase positive attention from strangers. And the way that I could do that was to be good at something mine, something small, something minor, something in one area. So I got all kinds of writing awards. I got all kinds of magazine awards and other things for journalism that I did all the years that I was doing that. And I think that that was part of the problem. If you walked into my office five months before it all came falling down, you would have seen a wall full of plaques and certificates and other things. And I didn't have that. So when you walked in, you thought I was awesome.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

But what about now? What about for you now when you want in?

SPEAKER_01 10:32

I walked into that room because I needed to prove to myself I was awesome. And when it comes time, when it's now about looking at some kind of accolade, some kind of way to boost myself up, some kind, something that makes me stick out anymore. I I I run in the other direction. Yeah. I try, I literally try to think about it.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

I might repeat it again. It was what question would you most often ask yourself if your consideration was self-honouring? So honoring self.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Does anybody else need to know about this? If something good happens to me, if I do something well, I used to run around and tell everybody who would listen. And I used to love the trinkets, like I was saying, because it gave me self-worth. The trophy, the award gave me self-worth. So now I have to ask myself, what do you need? What really defines you? And I don't want to honor myself. I honor myself by staying in the background. I honor myself by making conversations about other people now. I honor myself by not trying to force everybody to uplift me. I asked myself, can I j what question would I ask myself? Can you just leave this alone? Do you need this? Do you need bells and whistles? Do you need the attention? Do you need the fireworks? Can't you just be happy with yourself? And the answer after all these years is yes, but honoring myself almost means ignoring myself to a degree or not playing into my basist ego and narcissistic qualities. Which we all have, right? This is the spectrum. Yeah, it's a spectrum. And and when you're as awesome as I, you understand how you can be this way. But I learned in my recovery that it was best for me to not seek out the validation of others.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Yeah, and that's I think a food for the black wolf. In my book, I give a parable of the black wolf and the white wolf, which definitely wasn't created by me, come from a long history of American Indian civilization that you know had nothing to do with Chad Taylor. And exactly that, but what I'm hearing in you is the black wolf, that egocentric part of us, that black wolf loves the accolades and seeks that comfort through outside things, and then now you're almost learning to listen to the white wolf or to feed the white wolf, which, like me, surprisingly, here we are on a podcast, trying to mindfully put this out to the world for other people, not so much for us.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Yeah, no, exactly. And this is why I still do this. When I first started in this industry or in this area eight years ago, I was a keynote speaker, I was a presenter, I went to colleges, universities, churches, libraries. And it wasn't until the pandemic hit and I had to change gears that I realized I still had some of that. I like to stand in front of a crowd and talk about porn addiction because all eyes are on me. And now I find the most pure thing in the world to help somebody one-on-one, or to just sit here with you. Who knows how many people are going to hear this on Spotify? Who knows how many people are going to watch this on YouTube? We don't know them, we don't know their lives, but we're here to educate, hopefully to entertain a little bit, and they will take something with them. And I love that life now. I love this simpler life devoted more towards helping. I'm not a church guy, I'm not a higher power guy. But if there is an afterlife, my standard of a successful life will be just seeing a scoreboard, like at any sporting event. And I want to see how many people I helped in my life, and I want to see how many people I hurt in my life. And the first half of my life, boy, was I good at hurting people. I had a doctorate in it. And this second half of my life has been devoted more towards helping people. And I find that I am so much more at peace with myself.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

And I love to do that. This is virtually the the basis of my book and the basis of his podcast and the basis of my life of this is what it was like spiritually, or how we how we felt in the world and how we acted. And when I say spiritually, I don't mean religiously for anyone out there. I mean, like when I was unconscious and egocentric, and I can still be that this day, but I try and move towards, as you just said, then move towards where can I help that person rather than harm them. And a good deed done and not spoken about is a lot stronger for me than a good deed done and then spoken about. Right. So I'm gonna go into now and ask you for my book. Somehow my book landed in your lap, and something that from my book that stood out, you might have already known it, it might have deepened it, it might have just stimulated something already in you. But what from my book, it's you, oh fuck, it's me, stood out for you.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

It's you, the idea of it's you. I love the title, I love how it goes back to the idea of as addicts or as ill people, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We are the stories we try to tell ourselves. And for so long, our stories are deflection. It's you, it's you, it's you, it's you. And when is the first time you take that first step towards getting better? It's not when you put down the drink, it's not when you put down the porn, it's not when you walk away from the casino, it's when you say, It's you. Oh fuck, it's me.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

I love to hear that. I love you, Americans. You guys are so, I love the way you say that. You guys are so passionate, and it is so true. It is exactly like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

And that's the thing, is that we, and this is one of the top things I tell my clients all the time, is that it's easy to quit an addiction. I mean, the physical quitting, you don't do it. I mean, that's you you decide not to do it. Yes, it's hard, but really, more importantly, at least I find in my work with clients, is to ask the question not how do you quit, but how did you get here in the first place? That's going to tell us so much more than how do you quit? I can give you so many tips and techniques to get your porn use down to 10% of what it is within a month. But the question is, how did you become the man you are today? Why, why, instead of having the proper coping techniques, did you need to lean into addiction to deal with things?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

And I'm gonna ask you a personal question. Do you still struggle? Is there any triggers for you that sort of come up here and there in your daily life now?

SPEAKER_01 18:26

With pornography, no. And I think part of that is because I talk about pornography five to ten hours a day, or I write about pornography five to ten hours a day. At the end of the day, I'm not interested in it at all. With the drinking, the only thing I find is when I am in a situation that used to be dictated with alcohol. And I'll give you a four instance is that my regular home life, I don't think about alcohol at all. My wife can even have a bottle of wine around, and I don't even that doesn't phase me in the least. If I go to an airport, every time I go to an airport, I desperately want to drink. Why? Because I was drunk from the age of 18 to 37 every time I went to an airport and every time I got on a plane. I don't like waiting around. So if I'm waiting around, I'll drink. Or that's what I would do because drinking was fun, made me feel good. Now, when I go to an airport and I sit there, it's like this is my drinking place. Or here in America, we just had our big American football game, the Super Bowl. I used to drink religiously on Sundays when it was football day. I'd go bar hopping with friends. Now I either watch by myself or I watch with my dad, who doesn't drink.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

What do you do? Let's go back to the airport or like what do you do in that moment? What do you do to deal with that trigger, all that craving, all that what do you do in that moment? How do you get through it?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

In that moment, when it's a critical moment, when I don't have time to do all the dialectical behavioral therapy techniques and I've got too much else going on, there's a very simple technique I was taught, which always works if you see it through to the end, which is called get up and go sit over there. If you're having an urge, if you're having a trigger, get up from where you are and go sit over there. And when you're sitting there, if you have an urge or a trigger, get up and find another place to go. Now, that seat may be in your car and you may need to drive somewhere else. That seat may be someone else's house. That seat may be outside if you're inside. Whatever it is, get up and go someplace else.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

What about for people that take themselves with themselves when they I'm just thinking about myself? Like well, again, this is also in the moment.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

This is not a this is an emergency break glass situation. And I, in that, the first time I did this, after I had got clean, I got to an airport and I was right across from a microbrew. And I was, oh, what the fuck? Who is conspiring to make me fail putting a bar right in front of my gate? So I ended up getting up and going two gates over and sitting down over there. But I could still see it. So what I did was I went to the newsstand, I bought a copy of Rolling Stone magazine, and then I found one of those banks of TVs that does all the arrivals and departures, and I sat there and watched. And when it finally said that my flight was boarding, that's when I got up and I walked over there. So for anyone. I removed myself from this. Yeah, I mean, and like I said, this is not a healing technique, but just getting up and getting out of the situation.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Perfect. Well, where's the best place to be when the punch is thrown? Not there, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Yeah, absolutely. And unlike before, I recognize you don't win by hitting back.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Exactly. Exactly. All right, Josh, one question, leave one line, one question, statement, sentence, anything for the next guest? What are you gonna leave him today?

SPEAKER_01 22:29

What does Frederick Nietzsche mean when he says that which is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil?

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Great. Thanks, Josh. It's been great having you on, and we're gonna leave it there.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

Thanks a lot, Chad. It was great meeting you, and thank you so much for letting me be on your show.